Changes in College Life

THE last half of the nineteenth century was marked by exceedingly rapid social changes, especially in the United States. The more immediate causes of this movement were the discoveries and inventions which preceded and accompanied this period, and gave to men an entirely new mastery over material agents. This power was the occasion of a great increase in production, which, in turn, gave rise to a wholly unprecedented concentration of capital. Industrial processes have taken on immense magnitude, and events push forward with proportionate rapidity. Changes in social conditions which have been accustomed to creep slowly forward now begin to walk, and those which were wont to walk have fallen into a run. Good and evil overtake us before we are hardly aware of their presence. Snow which has been frozen immovably to the mountain side begins to loosen, and may at any moment precipitate itself into an avalanche.

Men are bewildered and excited by events which they only partially control — not less those who seem to lead them than those who are led by them. This rapid movement has made men giddy with the sense of power, and has seemed to open up new conditions and promises of prosperity. While the world is apparently bending to the service of men, men are, in fact, bending to the service of the world, and are hurried on by it to efforts of seeming value, but of fearful risk and frequent failure. They have neither time nor inclination to analyze action, and suit it to accepted principles and familiar ideals. New events have made all things new and discredited old philosophy.

This sudden giving way of the familiar relations of society, this taking on of a liquid form and an almost tempestuous movement, could not fail to modify education, and especially college education — peculiarly flexible and adjustable in method. There have been great gains in connection with these changes in college life, and not a few losses and threatened losses. A large amount of theory as to courses of study and as to elections in these courses has entered our higher institutions, broken up traditions, and swept away well-worn methods. It is, therefore, in order to examine this pulling down and building up, and see what waste is incident to it as well as what profit.

The most conspicuous gain is a greatly increased amount of instruction in science. The world of things, which gives footing to human labor and foundations to social interests, is coming to be known with a completeness and an accuracy of which the education of fifty years ago gave little promise. Associated with this gain came at once a pressure upon older forms of knowledge — language, philosophy, government — to which they were not only compelled to give ground, but to suffer somewhat the disparagement of neglect. A feeling found entrance that the new knowledge was the only knowledge substantial and serviceable in human life.

In connection with this pressure for time, distinct courses, with wide elections within those courses, came in vogue, and apparently relieved the difficulty. It is the fruit of this very fruitful change that we have occasion to consider. That some movement in this direction was inevitable would seem plain. The field of knowledge had become all at once too large for the student to cover it, even in the old superficial way. That this movement may easily become excessive is also plain; since knowledge may readily be so remote and restricted as to find its roots no longer spreading out in the soil of all truth. The very superficiality for which the early instruction was censured may be revived in another form. Little patches of bright color, like lichens on a rock, may make their appearance; some things may be minutely known and deftly handled, and yet there may be no free movement in the large territory of knowledge. Not only may intellectual ideas escape the ardent specialist, even closely allied physical facts may be beyond his horizon.

An immediate result of this narrowness of instruction is that the very notion of wisdom is abridged. It is no longer made up of the wide correlations of truth, — correlations which ultimately bind all things and events in a universe that takes on a spiritual as truly as a physical character,— but sinks into a close study of a limited range of phenomena which can be put to immediate uses. The mind attains these facts with little expansion of powers and no propulsion in the realm of truth. Convictions as narrow, and as much to one side the highways of experience, as are the facts with which they are associated take the place of sound judgments. Education is crippled in its essential idea of intellectual life.

Studies in which the vigorous minds of many centuries have been bred are discovered, all at once, to be of little worth; whose pursuit is not so much to be improved in method as to be reformed out of being. Or still worse, they are travestied by some relatively indifferent, physical facts associated with them. Thus in place of philosophy we have physiological psychology, and instead of the tension of the mind in grasping fundamental truth, the tension of the fingers in the deft performance of laboratory work. The one lesson which the world has been from the beginning beating into the minds of men is again lost, that the thing seen is of little moment except as it becomes the symbol of that which is not seen. We may educate the reflective powers without securing a firm, sensuous foothold for thought; therein we err. We may educate the senses with slight discipline of the reflective powers; and our failure becomes still more absolute. The central bud of our pyramidal life is aborted, and all goes amiss, as in a fir which has lost its leader. We may show much ingenuity in expressing our intellectual life “ in terms of matter and motion; ” but we only attain profound insight in translating physical facts into correlative ideas. There has been, on the whole, in this extended displacement of intellectual inquiry by physical inquiry, this sudden passage from the open fields of speculation to an observation of microscopic facts, a substitution of sensuous for spiritual apprehension, a taking of events at short range instead of contemplating them in those wide relations in which they make up a universe.

The inside conditions of college life have also been much modified by the new methods which have been put upon them. There has been a great increase in the size of institutions. The feeling has gained ground of the many things to be done in education, of the possible studies to be pursued, of the accomplishments to be acquired, and of the skill to be secured in execution. It is the collective power which occupies the mind rather than individual excellence. A great city stirs the imagination and overawes the judgment. We cease to remember what a cloak of failure and folly and vice its splendor of architecture may be. A large university confuses the neophyte and fills him with a vague sense of magnitude. In the one case as in the other, when the transplanted life tries to root itself, it finds that the impression of isolation and solitude has gained ground; that fellowship must be achieved under new and difficult circumstances. In the university, as in all great combinations, there is more vigor in breaking up old relations than in forming fresh ones; and the student, when at length he adjusts himself to his surroundings, discovers that he has substituted a narrow place in a wide field for a wider place in a more restricted one. Human fellowship is the truly educating force, and that fellowship rejects as certainly too much as too little. The body and the life which inhabits it must have the same circumference.

Great teachers are always rare, and instruction which gives impulse seeks close contact. It is a silent, continuous induction of life into life which is essential. The manifold departments of science tend to exclude each other almost as much as they exclude other forms of intellectual activity. There is no end to the details of knowledge in any physical inquiry. The circumference of the circle is constantly enlarging, and present methods do not so much contemplate a change of centre as the gathering of more and more material about the same centre. With this utterly insatiable demand for more facts, and more time in which to acquire them, the sciences lose fellowship with knowledge and with each other. Thoroughness means an increase in one dimension with a reduction in every other dimension. In a college, whose curriculum is necessarily short, a struggle for life is established which drives to the wall the less dominant claims. Even the great Darwin was compelled to confess that all but one set of faculties had suffered atrophy, and that the mind had become an instrument of inquiry rather than a medium of life.

The drill of the laboratory, while it is not strictly mechanical, is more so than that of the recitation room; and the discursive processes of thought are far less congenital to it. The intellectual manhood is less recognizable in the drill of doing than in that of thinking. The scientist has fortunately been often whiling to add some stroke of philosophy to his physical inquiries, but his theories of the world have had but one foot to rest upon, and so have been inadequate and insecure.

The specialist, even in his own department, is frequently unable to give a collective view of truth, and is a less apt demonstrator of knowledge than one who, with inferior information, has been accustomed to group facts broadly in systems. A specialist despairs of wisdom, and is content to add something to the already appalling accumulation of its data. Not only does he not rise to the height of all knowledge, he does not rise to the height of his own knowledge. He confines himself to his solitary eminence, and, grubbing away at its problems, neither sees the beauty of surrounding peaks, nor feels the glory which they fling back on his own position.

It matters little how numerous and varied the attendance in a large university may be, if the individual student has not the freedom of the university. It is the close contact of daily intercourse that is educative. The more narrow the course chosen, the more isolated the inquiry, the less become the force and variety of the influences which young men exert upon one another. A variety of topics as well as a variety of persons are requisite that the special endowments and affinities of young men may be disclosed. Different purposes divide and subdivide the members of a large institution, much as do diverse pursuits the citizens of a city. To catch the flavor of human thought is not only educative, but so supremely educative that, without it, simple information loses most of its value. Text-books that marshal facts, with little suggestion of the part they play in world building, become as dry as dust, and choke the life they were intended to nourish. The largest share of the stimulus of college life is found in the contact of young men with one another, working at the same tasks, approaching the same problems, and made aware of the many quarters from which the fitful light falls upon them. They thus escape the stolidity of knowing one thing exactly. The intercourse which promotes this dispersion and reflection of light acts like sunshine on opening buds. The seclusion of unvaried work, in remote lines of inquiry, is in arrest of this fellowship of thought. Extremes meet and baffle each other. We strove to escape the superficiality of a crowded curriculum by attention to a few topics, and we now encounter the superficiality of trying to know things separately. We sought to accumulate influences in large institutions, and our units drop apart as in no way annealed to one another.

The disintegration in a college course incident to extended electives is very marked. The faculty, having laid aside the function of guidance, leave it to be taken up by the student himself. In making his choices, he first encounters an extended chapter of accidents. A large list of electives means that many of them are in progress at the same hours. If eight are thus pursued, in choosing one of the eight he excludes seven, some of which at least may seem to him desirable. Hours are not arranged in reference to the wishes of any one man, and he finds, like a surveyor running a line in a forest, constant obstructions. The accidents and obstacles of a system of electives are innumerable and unavoidable.

This chapter disposed of, there comes the chapter of caprices. Pleasure in a given branch, personal likes and dislikes, the different degrees of work demanded in different departments, may one or all determine his election. Not the end to be gained, but the ease of immediate movement, defines his path.

Then comes the notion of practicality, so strong in immature and inexperienced minds. The choice of occupation, which may itself have been prematurely made, leads to a narrow adaptation of studies to its demands.

The inadequacy of the results reached under such a system is hidden for a variety of reasons. The catalogue is full and comprehensive, and this is accepted as an expression of the work done under it. How can such opportunities fail to be fruitful ? The bright pupil enjoys his liberty, and makes something of it. He is not aware of the fact of important omissions till much later. The dull student is indisposed to complain. Complaint will be a reflection on his dullness. Instructors escape general responsibility, and are left to follow their own bent and magnify their own work. An institution whose ostensible purpose is to teach a young man anything which he may wish to know may mean an institution a large per cent of whose members learn very little to any purpose.

The amusements of college life have undergone a change akin to this division of intellectual interests. They have become professional amusements, like those of the circus or theatre; something to be seen rather than to be shared, something labored for on the one side and paid for on the other. Crowded life, the life of cities, which is at once near and remote, inevitably tends to professional amusements. They call for no participation in the spectators, and no social sympathy between them. Those idly waiting to be amused become ever more critical and exacting, less resourceful in themselves and more dependent on others. They must be pleased, and the task becomes an increasingly difficult one. The commands of the amphitheatre lay as an absolute law on those whose lives were held cheap in ministering to popular pleasure. A scrub game of ball, no matter how recreative to the participants, gives no satisfaction as a spectacle. Football demands severe training, a sacrifice of every competing purpose, and incurs serious risk, simply that those who play may give sufficient excitement to those who do not play.

Young men have only about so much enthusiasm to spend, and if it is squandered in amusement, it is necessarily lost to productive labor. Enthusiasm ought to run in the channels of their own lives, and so buoy up and bear forward their own achievements, like wellfreighted vessels. If this enthusiasm makes claims on others, it leaves those who generate it, like the Roman youth who crowded the coliseum, an ignoble band. Professional amusements mean the breaking up of free, personal, communal effort, and putting in its place the strained efforts and strong passions which sway men backward and forward as mobs. The passion for sport which prevails in our universities is to be explained, in part, as an effort to regain that unity which has been lost in the dispersion of academic work.

The reduction of interest in debate — the natural intellectual arena of vigorous minds as they gain fresh views in a variety of directions — is another result of the limitation of knowledge and interest which attends on special courses. Differences of opinion in these narrow relations may be discussed between two or three students in conversation, they cannot be debated as fundamental principles of action. Science, moreover, tends to sharp empirical proof, lying in a narrow field of experiment, and does not admit of the changeable interpretation which comes to us in the general and diversified fields of experience.

Those of us who have lived long in the educational world will hardly have failed to observe how restricted its enthusiasms have become; how difficult they are to arouse, and how small a part they play in the mass of instruction. A large number of persons in transient intercourse always impart new vigor to conventional methods, and in the same degree restrain spontaneous expression. Courtesies prevent collision, but they at the same time restrain expression. Students are more easily controlled than in earlier days, but they are awakened with more difficulty to any genuine effort. College conventionalisms become a supreme consciousness.

Commencement exercises, as an exhibition of students, are more and more distasteful, and faculties are increasingly disposed to become august, if possible, by means of gowns and prizes and degrees. As the substance gives way, the form is made more conspicuous.

A considerable annual prize — prizes are bids for enthusiasm which does not otherwise exist — was recently given to a New England college for the best essay on the duties of Christian men to Government. The faculty found difficulty in securing a discussion of sufficient breadth and earnestness to justify the publicity of publication. An influential journal sharply criticised this result as involving a reflection on the instruction. It may have done so, but if that same journal had looked to its own columns, it would have seen that it devoted far more space to baseball games in colleges than to their educational work. This is doubtless good journalism, but it shows that the world from which students come, the world which gives color to their thought and direction to their ambitions, is one in which amusements are far more sensational facts than the opinions of young men on social and civic questions. No effort within a college can exclude or correct wholly this outside atmosphere.

President Andrews is credited with saying, “Our New England students know little and care less about social questions.” Having congratulated ourselves as a people beyond measure on physical prosperity, having directed our attention assiduously to physical pursuits, the loss of conviction on social questions ought not to surprise us. Our college literature has the daintiness of fastidious taste, and little of the virile quality of an immediate moral purpose.

Colleges have been passing into universities under the strong pressure of outside claims. The results of this pressure are plainly visible. The omnipotence of productive labor in the world has been felt, and the need of shaping all education to it. When one is thus being trained to a definite task, the mind is carried forward to its fulfillment; is impatient of any effort that obstructs or delays the movement, and thinks slightingly of knowledge which does not directly contribute to it. The argument gathers weight that so much time cannot be spared for study, that study means preparation, and must accept this subordinate relation ; that the business world is exacting, and that time lost to it cannot be recovered; that its opportunities are few and evasive, and that beyond its own gifts of shrewdness, experience, and a callous hand, all acquirements are of slight value. The predominant feeling that comes pushing in from the outside is, we must make haste, and in making haste a portion of college work is thrown backward into preparatory training, a portion is omitted, and a portion is carried forward as special or professional work. In these many and extreme changes the integrity of the college course is broken up and lost. The world of action, which rests on acquisition as a centre, becomes all in all, seizes the mind in advance, and draws it into a swirl of narrow pursuits from which it never again emerges. This certainly is a result inimical to education, to true mental poise, to being possessed of knowledge and by knowledge. Without the least abatement of the value of service, we cannot fail to see that service rendered under a dominant wealth-getting temper sinks into servitude, and loses much of its value for the man who renders it, and for the community which receives it. There is a reservation of purpose, a qualification of obedience, in high service, which wholly distinguish it from day-service. The professions and the arts are liable to become the thrall of commerce, and this servitude strikes back into education. The civil engineers, the mechanical engineers, or the electric engineers can spare no time for psychology or history, for these add nothing to their skill. The engineer is to be a master artisan. He is in training for that, not for citizenship, or manhood. The feeling is that manhood will come with power, but power may not come with manhood. The prize coveted is productive power, and that is accepted as covering intellectual wealth. There is a profound reversal of the divine principle, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” If these things are attained, it is thought, the Kingdom of Heaven can do no otherwise than come as the sequence of such success.

There is no other period and no other place so congenial to the ideal and the practical as college life. If we miss the uplift which comes to us as we enter this porch of the temple, we shall be slow to recover it at any later stage. The chilly atmosphere of conventionalism, the low temperature of our glacial age, will settle down on us in commerce, in society, in religion. College life is the one morning in which light and beauty and inspiration are inseparable.

It is astonishing what a change thirty years have wrought in the United States. In the middle of the last century the placid surface of democracy, girded about by constitutional barriers, seemed as little exposed to disturbing winds as a land-locked lake. Now, wealth in crested waves and poverty in yawning chasms are the most conspicuous features. The cyclone of prosperity which follows the sultry day is upon us, and threatens once more to sweep the world.

There has long been, and is increasingly in our Eastern institutions, a percentage of young men who take little interest in study, who are present in college for conventional reasons. Though these young men are the product of a social system that has already gone astray, and are not easily regenerated, this looking forward to business as the only real life is especially unfavorable for them. They therewith justify their present indifference, and make to themselves foolish promises of what they will do when the real crisis comes. In the mean time, they acquire a lazy, loitering gait under the impression that the march has not begun. These young men are the world’s servants, and the quicker they are put into its workshops the better for them. The most fatal mistake of the so-called kings of commerce is, that they are providing no heirs. The kings themselves have come from the severe school of democracy, and yet they expect to continue the breed under the relaxing conditions of wealth. Colleges can easily be made the dishonored instruments of this failure.

Training in the uses of physical things — a kind of knowledge which is disposed to adopt the designation of science as the synonym of substantial truth — is far more expensive than instruction in the humanities. The appliances are innumerable, changeable, and costly. Large endowments are necessary for this instruction. It makes for wealth and must be fed by wealth. The claims of our colleges have passed from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, from hundreds of thousands to millions. We have a right to take pride in this growth, but we have no less occasion to understand the changes which go with it. In all severe climbing, each new position has its own perils. The borrower is servant to the lender wherever they meet. Institutions which eagerly seek their resources from the commercial world must be lenient critics of its methods. Ethical, social, and economic truths cannot be urged in antagonism to the source of supply. The men are rare who quarrel with their bread and butter. This may seem an ignoble fact to apply to colleges, but if colleges make themselves hungry, caution and cunning will follow on. Of this we have already had experience. No matter how adroitly we may reason, and in how many ways we may cover our steps, here is a connection beyond the wit of man to break. Waters, though they be the waters of life and seem to come from Shiloh’s fountain and pour into Shiloh’s basins, cannot rise higher than their source. The men who feed these streams furnish the social faith of the world. The champions of truth must not be afraid of a mendicant’s habit.

Education must be brought to the world quite as much as brought out of the world. It is a growth within the mind of man for the guidance of men, not a coarse induction of experience wherewith the practical man strengthens himself in his folly. Our colleges must be saved for themselves in order that they may be saved for others; in order that they may withstand these headstrong, conflicting, and merciless forces that are asserting themselves in the passionate competition of the world. There is an aloofness from current events as well as a nearness to them which our education must maintain, if it is to have any spiritual power, any guidance upward of men and communities.

The growth of expenses, the increase of salaries, the magnitude of endowments, all tend to make educators pensioners of the money power, and so to place them on the wrong side in that struggle which is upon us to revivify the principles of democracy, and make the world our common inheritance. The true citadel of democracy is the college. It is here that the mind renews its hold on those principles which underlie economic and social life. If there is no clear light in these speculative regions, we shall search for it in vain where men are in the heat, confusion, and passion of labor. Though the attack of the commercial on the educational world is not made with bugle note, constant indications are given of its presence and immediate power. Presidents of colleges are sought who are men of affairs, furnished with business instincts and standards, rather than men of intellectual inspiration. Half-hearted servants of intellectual liberty are put in command of the gates. It is certainly not easy, under these conditions, to secure in our colleges a clear sense of the use of wealth, of its just methods of attainment, and of the subtle social dangers which attend upon it.

Preparatory as opposed to collegiate work, graduate as distinguished from undergraduate instruction, special and professional training in contrast with general discipline, call for a different temper, for different teachers and methods. They cannot be united advantageously in the same institution, unless the institution is so large as to become a group of distinct schools. Graduate work is undertaken in forecast of coming labor, and shapes itself unreservedly to it. Its methods are thorough and minute, and look to a complete and immediate command of the required resources. The instructor is equally practical in his bent of mind with the pupil, and comes from the ranks of those who have succeeded, or who are able to succeed, in commerce, or engineering, or in professional services. Teacher and pupil are narrowed down to their particular task, and manipulation, explanation, and application are the order of the day. Such methods cannot be united successfully with undergraduate work, nor does undergraduate instruction need to possess the resources which will enable it to run parallel with the applied work of the world. Its purposes are to awaken the mind, give it just impressions, and a synthetic hold on all forms of truth. It takes a preliminary survey of the vineyard, some portion of which is to be cultivated.

The physical knowledge which is now provided for us so liberally may well modify the New England college, but should not be the means of superseding it. There is no more fitting link between preparatory and professional work than college life. In the preparatory period, the associations of childhood, home discipline, and the strong sense of being cared for still rest on the mind. In professional study, the hand of the world begins to be felt. The forecast of service, competitive labor, the hope of success, the fear of failure, are ready to push, if not to oppress, the mind. Between these two, four years of free, rangeful, and joyous activity and unrestrained personal fellowship may well be placed. They constitute a strengthening node accustoming the thoughts to self-guidance and self-mastery, and binding them together with inherent affinities before the growth pushes forward into that long internode which must sustain the flower and fruitage of life. They help by many insights and anticipatory revelations to guard the too flexible mind against being beaten down by sudden temptation, or broken down by premature burdens. Life is already too hurried, too much crowded with work that ripens into nothing, too careful and anxious about many things, too much cumbered with the processes of living. Its pace is set by the machine. It is denied that breathing space so normal to the open, fresh hours of youth. What can be more unkind than to fling the boy at once into the gusty, buffeting winds of the world. This may often be necessary, yet it is one of those sore cases of compulsion, under narrow and severe conditions, which we ought to resist rather than accept. The morning hours that return no more are not to be dealt with in this heedless way under demands of commerce that give no sufficient account of themselves.

If we set any store by knowledge as knowledge, if we wish to secure that inner illumination which alone can interpret experience and treasure its wealth, we shall not let this opportunity pass of a wide outlook over life before we begin to thread its thickets. One of the most difficult things to escape is the superficiality of sagacity, the confidence which comes with money-making, the elation of knowledge which is accurate, effective, yet narrow. The things which have not been dreamed of in our philosophy, yet fill all spiritual spaces, are the things which will ultimately overwhelm our prosperity. The reverent temper is true wisdom ; the temper aware of what lies below the horizon as well as of what has come within it.

We are in no way disposed to underrate science. It is the chart of the field in which our labors are to be expended, unrolling before us in a wonderful way. And yet we are impressed with the superficiality of science as we actually attain it. We are so pleased with outlines, with full and delicate tracings, that we forget that they are but outlines, to be read thoughtfully, if their suggestions are to be made spiritually effective. It is not the colors on the retina that make the sunrise, but the brood of poetic sensibilities that wake up with them into activity.

Knowledge accumulates so rapidly that all acquisition seems to be and is very partial. This deepened sense of the infinity of truth is the highest possession to which we can attain. There are two forms of limitation which stand in very different relations to spiritual manhood, a limitation in general outlook, and a limitation in exact definition. If we must have superficiality, let it be the superficiality associated with wide surfaces, and not that of a minute knowledge of patches of territory of little worth till they are taken up in one comprehensive picture.

Art is not simply creative, it leads to creation. The painter relies on a few bold strokes which lack all resemblance, but which, seen at a fitting distance, indicate the true relations and give the constructive mind suitable suggestions. The normal eye is neither microscopic nor telescopic; it deals with wide yet intermediate spaces. It loses the minute, both near at hand and far off, but it sinks it in the landscape, a composite vision of all.

One is not prepared to work in the physical world till he has made some measurements in the spiritual world, nor to devote himself to spiritual truth till he has some apprehension of that fixed framework of things which give it distinction, definition, and permanence. We must have a base line in both worlds before we can make safe measurements in either. Especially is this true if our later work is to be directed chiefly to one of them. The sense of correlative truth which lies over against the truth of immediate observation must be with the mind as a constantly corrective term. We do not regret that physical science has wrought an immense change in instruction, but that in our eagerness we have made the new movement partial and one - sided like the old, and added to an opinion already extreme the momentum incident to change.

Science should be to us the occasion on which we come into possession of our bilateral life, and are made more fully aware of the right and the left, the upward and the downward, the inner and the outer, in our complex being, built up between two worlds, a synthesis of both. College gives the suitable period and place in which to achieve this selfpossession, the preliminary sense of what the world is, this planting of the feet, one upon the sea and one upon the land. Finding the world before we are found of it is the very substance of rational life.

Philosophy is as certainly the centre of the humanities — the things which pertain to man — as science of physical relations. Mastery means an evenhanded hold on both. College life is the period in which the mind awakens most readily to its own constructive power, accepts idealism as an inseparable element in a spiritual universe, and brings its own ideals out of the realm of hope to the stubborn, limping world in which it is inclosed. Vital forces take on direction early. If one’s energy goes to muscular activity, or to brain action, diversion soon becomes difficult.

The present determination of thought in education toward physical facts is weakening its hold on higher relations. The fundamental principles of freedom are losing power with us. The disposition to give a first position to physical force gains ground with us; in amusements as strength, in politics as war. We wage a faltering fight with that brutal temper, vivisection ; and we make our appeal to the ethical reason with increasing difficulty.

Our education should regain a balance which it has partially lost. Once in possession of the forecast of reason, we shall correct the drudgery of a special calling by systematic sallies into the region of correlative impressions. We shall neither allow things in their fixed sequence to rule our thoughts, nor our thoughts, in fantastic freedom, to escape the restraint of things. If it falls to us to unfold and enforce spiritual relations, we shall deepen the sense of causation by a recreative pursuit of some science; or if an art is our primary purpose, we shall unloosen the wings of thought in philosophy, poetry, and politics.

We may well cease to have patience with restricted thinking and one-sided development. It is time that we pruned our education into symmetry. The catholicity of the mind is to be won in college life, and is the true mastery of the world. It is there that we come to our first vision of things, and make ready for wise and well-proportioned pursuit.

College life is also the rallying point of friendship, the centre to which returning, we can see into how many forms of spiritual wealth different paths are diverging. Those who are near us in active life, with whom we are running the competitive race, meet us with our own restricted sentiments. Hustling events, we are hustled by them. It is wholesome to return to a point from which our well-known companions have scattered all over the world, and through them win their part in it as well as our own.

The catholic temper which a genuine college life begets, it nourishes in us all our life through. College life may thus stand for wider knowledge, for the ever renewed and redirected processes of thought, for a sympathy as comprehensive as the Kingdom of Heaven, — a Kingdom in which every phase of power is to be gathered, and every germ of truth to find reconciliation, inexhaustible parts taking position in an immeasurable whole. The changes in college life should not be allowed to drag us down from the mount of vision and fling us, mere waifs, into the turmoil of events, a stream that hushes its own roar by a final plunge into the gulf of oblivion.

John Bascom.