Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/158

146 people is Mr. W. T. Harris, a distinguished educator of St. Louis, and one of the most acceptable of the lecturers, if not the most acceptable, in Mr. Alcott's Summer School of Philosophy at Concord. "Mr. Harris," writes one describing this New England reproduction of the Academy of Plato, "is the star of the school, it would appear, since every one agrees that he is extremely interesting to hear, though few pretend to understand him, and those who do find their profession treated with incredulity." I confess myself a little surprised to learn that he proves unintelligible to any of the men and maidens of the new Academy, especially the maidens, for it is an article of faith in the "provinces" that the average maiden of New England, whatever may be the limitations of her father and big brothers, can understand anything, from the calculus of quaternions to the metaphysics of transcendentalism. Rufus Choate, it is told, once met Jeremiah Mason, with a daughter on each arm, returning from a lecture of Emerson's. "Well, Mr. Mason," said Choate, "you have been to hear Mr. Emerson!" "Yes!" sighed the venerable jurist. "And did you understand him?" continued Choate. "No," he replied, arching his eyebrows, and dropping a glance on either damsel, "but my daughters did!" I sincerely hope that the average maiden of New England has suffered no decline in these latter days. And yet a horrible suspicion intrudes itself. Can it be that much Greek has made her soft at last? However this may be, it can hardly excite surprise that Mr. Harris, teaching in the grove of Alcott, as Plato taught in that of Academus, and teaching, it would seem, with quite as many bees in his bonnet, if not on his lips, differs with President Eliot as to the special whereabout of the classics, or, what comes to the same thing, the essential part of a liberal education. It is not to be expected that one who comes forward to revive the Academy would go back on the Greeks. Yet he is none the less entitled to a fair hearing.

"The settlement of this old dispute," Mr. Harris says in a recent lecture, "lies involved in the question, What are insight-giving studies?" And the general principle that determines what are insight giving studies, he insists, is this: "They must be of such a character that they lead the individual out of his immediate and familiar surroundings, and cause him to breathe the atmosphere and become familiar with the accessory conditions of an earlier historical stage of the people from whom he derives his culture and forms of civilization." This general principle he afterward compresses into the following paradox: "Self-alienation is necessary to self-knowledge." Under this principle he in conclusion thus sums up his position concerning the classics: "Not only for English-speaking nations, but for all modern Europeans, for the reason that they have derived their culture from Greece and Rome, the special culture-studies are Latin and Greek. The embryology of modern civilization is to be found in the literature and institutions of these wonderful peoples." "Mathematics," he