Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/103

 *partments. Men of power and skill are in demand everywhere, and not enough can be found for responsible positions. One half the fault is insufficient education.

There is another phase of power that must not be neglected, the power to enjoy, to be rich in emotional life. Knowledge, properly pursued, is a source of rich and refined intellectual emotions. There is joy in discovery, joy in the freedom and grasp of thought.

Æsthetic power, based upon fine discrimination, finds a perpetual joy in sky and sea, and mountain and forest, in music and poetry, in sentiment and song. Our Teutonic ancestors were better seers than we. The morning sun and the midnight darkness were perpetually to them a new birth. The leaves whispered to them divine messages; the storms and the seasons, the fruitful earth, were full of wonder and sacred mysteries. They were poets. This matter-of-fact age will yet return to the primitive regard for nature, a regard enlightened and refined by science. Men will yet find in the most commonplace fact of nature mystery, poetry, ground for reverence, and faith in a God.

The power of enjoyment alone does not give a fruitful life. It is in the moment of action that we gain the habit that makes power for action. As a philosopher recently expressed it: Do not allow your finer emotions to evaporate without finding expression in some useful act, if it is nothing but speaking kindly to your grandmother, or giving up your seat in a horse car.

There has been a weak and harmful philosophy in