Diversities of American Life | Page 8

of the humanities
and of science. If I were writing of education generally, I might have
something to say of the measurable disappointment of the results of the
common schools as at present conducted, both as to the diffusion of
information and as to the discipline of the mind and the inculcation of
ethical principles; which simply means that they need improvement.
But the higher education has been transformed, and mainly by the
application of scientific methods, and of the philosophic spirit, to the
study of history, economics, and the classics. When we are called to
defend the pursuit of metaphysics or the study of the classics, either as
indispensable to the discipline or to the enlargement of the mind, we
are not called on to defend the methods of a generation ago. The study
of Greek is no longer an exercise in the study of linguistics or the
inspection of specimens of an obsolete literature, but the acquaintance
with historic thought, habits, and polity, with a portion of the
continuous history of the human mind, which has a vital relation to our
own life.
However much or little there may be of permanent value in the vast
production of northern literature, judged by continental or even English
standards, the time has came when American scholarship in science, in
language, in occidental or oriental letters, in philosophic and historical
methods, can court comparison with any other. In some branches of
research the peers of our scholars must be sought not in England but in

Germany. So that in one of the best fruits of a period of intellectual
agitation, scholarship, the restless movement has thoroughly vindicated
itself.
I have called your attention to this movement in order to say that it was
neither accidental nor isolated. It was in the historic line, it was fed and
stimulated by all that had gone before, and by all contemporary activity
everywhere. New England, for instance, was alert and progressive
because it kept its doors and windows open. It was hospitable in its
intellectual freedom, both of trial and debate, to new ideas. It was in
touch with the universal movement of humanity and of human thought
and speculation. You lose some quiet by this attitude, some repose that
is pleasant and even desirable perhaps, you entertain many errors, you
may try many useless experiments, but you gain life and are in the way
of better things. New England, whatever else we may say about it, was
in the world. There was no stir of thought, of investigation, of research,
of the recasting of old ideas into new forms of life, in Germany, in
France, in Italy, in England, anywhere, that did not touch it and to
which it did not respond with the sympathy that common humanity has
in the universal progress. It kept this touch not only in the evolution
and expression of thought and emotion which we call literature
(whether original or imitative), but in the application of philosophic
methods to education, in the attempted regeneration of society and the
amelioration of its conditions by schemes of reform and discipline,
relating to the institutions of benevolence and to the control of the
vicious and criminal. With all these efforts go along always much false
sentimentality and pseudo-philanthropy, but little by little gain is made
that could not be made in a state of isolation and stagnation.
In fact there is one historic stream of human thought, aspiration, and
progress; it is practically continuous, and with all its diversity of local
color and movement it is a unit. If you are in it, you move; if you are
out of it, you are in an eddy. The eddy may have a provincial current,
but it is not in the great stream, and when it has gone round and round
for a century, it is still an eddy, and will not carry you anywhere in
particular. The value of the modern method of teaching and study is
that it teaches the solidarity of human history, the continuance of
human thought, in literature, government, philosophy, the unity of the
divine purpose, and that nothing that has anywhere befallen the human

race is alien to us.
I am not undervaluing the part, the important part, played by
conservatism, the conservatism that holds on to what has been gained if
it is good, that insists on discipline and heed to the plain teaching of
experience, that refuses to go into hysterics of enthusiasm over every
flighty suggestion, or to follow every leader simply because he
proposes something new and strange--I do not mean the conservatism
that refuses to try anything simply because it is new, and prefers to
energetic life the stagnation that inevitably leads to decay. Isolation
from the great historic stream of thought and agitation