Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/720

702 and warmth, but with far less regard to any advantage to be reaped for the cause of truth and of humanity than to the satisfaction of rival vanities.

In this country we are laboring with great zeal and vast pecuniary resources to promote the cause of culture. We educate, educate, educate, as somebody once said we ought to do; but whether the result is to produce much that can be called culture in any high sense is an open question. A criterion may, perhaps, be found in a comparison of the rising with the now adult generation. Are our young people showing graces of mind and character in more abundant measure than their parents? Are their aims higher? Is their language better? Are their intellectual occupations more serious? Are their manners gentler and more refined? We do not propose to answer these questions dogmatically; but this we say, that, unless there has been an improvement in these several respects, a vast amount of educational effort has not met its full reward. Speaking broadly, it seems to us that the culture of our educated classes, or of the classes supposed to be educated, leaves much to be desired, and we are disposed to think that one reason of this is that we have conceived of education in too purely an intellectual sense. We have thought more of sharpening the thinking faculties than of liberalizing the sentiments or softening the manners. We have introduced too much of rivalry into education, and represented education too much as a preparation for further rivalry in after-life. We have imparted knowledge, but have only to a very moderate extent succeeded in inculcating wisdom; and knowledge without wisdom seems poor, thin, and sometimes even meaningless. We need, as it seems to us, to devote more consideration than we have hitherto done to the question, What is the true ideal of human life? If we can fix upon the true ideal, so can proceed to educate toward that, and our work will then be directed toward something that is an end in itself. The knowledge we impart will be held by a different tenure, and applied in a different spirit. What each one knows will be his or her equipment toward a worthier fulfillment of social duties, a worthier realization of what is best in himself or herself, and not a mere stock-in-trade for the procuring of personal gratifications. What we would chiefly insist upon at present, however, is that, were knowledge pursued in a right spirit, the intellectual gain would be very great. Minds would become more receptive, owing both to the superiority of the motive set before them, and the higher degree of rationality that the whole system of human life and thought would assume. Civilized speech would not show a constant tendency to degenerate into a jargon of slang, if people recognized in speech a social function, not merely a mode and means of self-assertion. It is impossible to find one's self in any fortuitous assemblage of average human beings without being led to reflect how much human intercourse might be improved and beautified if, by some means, we could implant in the mind of each individual a true respect for the rights and feelings of others, and a general sense of what is due to society, considered as the source of unnumbered advantages to all its members. At present it often seems to be a distinct aim with many persons—and these not in any sense social outlaws, but, on the contrary, what would be called "respectable people"—to show how little they care for anything beyond their own pleasure and convenience. The popular idea of "independence," indeed, is largely made up of swagger and aggressiveness; whereas the most primary notion of independence should embrace the making of an honest return for all good received. Thus viewed, the man who wished to be "independent" would see that society got back