Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/526

512 food on the table at once, and the hungry rush in and help themselves to whatever is within their reach, and come away at least self-satisfied. The few minds that are synthetic either by nature or early training are those that reap the highest good; the rest have at most sharpened their wits or gained a pert self-esteem, while many are unfitted for a life of action.

Ingersoll's brilliant sentence in his Lincoln lecture has not a little truth in it: "Colleges are places where pebbles are polished but diamonds are dimmed." The truth that lies in this sentence will be true so long as colleges remain a series of parthenogenetic scholasticisms unfit to cope with the hard environment in which mankind must live.

Our higher schools have in the past had to deal with only a limited and favored portion of mankind, but with each succeeding generation of students they have had to go down deeper among the producing people, and at each succeeding stage they have more or less closely reflected the general average of those with whom they dealt. People, colleges, and civilization have all evolved together, pari passu. Just now all are in a state of transition. In the colleges even scholasticism is slowly giving way before the assaults of exact knowledge. One is encouraged at seeing the rapid increase of laboratories, and the lengthening courses in English and economics, and the diminishing proportion of time devoted to the classics. Would that one might say the same of speculative philosophy! Its value as now studied, save as an exercise in mental gymnastics, was aptly characterized by one of the best-known professors of philosophy in this country, when he said to me, "Philosophy is wind, and he that can sell his wind at the highest figure is the greatest philosopher."

The history of the growth of philosophic thought, studied as a branch of anthropology, is of value, as the history of the slow growth in any other department of human thought or effort is valuable—no more.

The real value of anthropology, then, as a university study is to take the place that philosophy occupied in the old scholastic system, save that synthetic philosophy, under whatever name, requires a broad basis of accurate knowledge. He that would teach must have a mind of largest grasp, capable of far-reaching generalizations, rigidly ruled by absolute fact. To this end preliminary training in exact investigation is indispensable, that he may be familiar with the road to truth and readily detect the verified from the speculative. On the other hand, he must not be a mere delver for facts. Men who are justly noted as investigators are constantly proving themselves unfit for generalized deductions even in their own departments. The teacher of anthropology must be accurately acquainted with results in