Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/147

 connecting newly observed natural objects with groups of similar objects known before." I find myself disinclined more and more, on the other hand, to consider liberally educated, in accordance with the spirit and the needs of the age, any man who knows nothing certain of the fundamental things in physics, or who cannot turn a trained eye on at least one group of natural objects—be this group stars or stones, trees, flowers, ferns, or the human body, birds, beetles, the animals in the zoölogical garden, or those domesticated in the city house or back-yard.

I am also quite as firmly persuaded that a somewhat prolonged study of the human soul—of logic, psychology, ethics, and of those problems which have formed the themes of reflective thinking since man first began really to think at all, of philosophy, that is to say—is a necessary part of a truly liberal education. I find it difficult to understand how any man can attain the genuine scholar's liberal mind, who takes no interest in the processes and laws of his own mental and moral life, and in the progress and laws of the mental and moral lives of other men. If I were to argue in detail for a portion of these studies in the required work of every college curriculum, I think I could show how close is the relation they sustain to the most successful pursuit of every other kind of studies. Modern psychology is certainly making