Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/798

798 of observation, and we are apt to drift into a state of mind where, as Professor James would say, inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. But even when we are aroused, we evoke a picture of our wants in which it is easy to mistake the values. My present purpose, however, is not to evaluate human qualities, but to seek out and emphasize those that are essential, separating them very rigidly from those that are secondary and unimportant. I restrict myself to the narrower task because from a monistic point of view these human qualities are so bound up with one another, are so thoroughly but different aspects of the same unit, that they can not be stated in squence.sequence [sic]. They do not follow one another. They coexist. It is a single panorama, human life, crowded with different elements, but making only one picture.

The advantage of thus defining what you want at eighteen is that no scheme of education will be tolerable which does not lead by direct and scientific methods to the desired results. It is possible, of course, to introduce various elements into the scheme of instruction, and allow the principle of natural selection to work, trusting that in the end there will be a survival of the fittest. But this is scarcely evolution made conscious. It is only consistent with an expediency system of morals, which makes life a daily, hourly experiment, and rests upon no underlying principles.

At eighteen, boys and girls stand on the verge of manhood and womanhood. Goethe says, "Be careful what you pray for in your youth lest you get too much of it in your old age." What these boys and girls pray for at eighteen is pretty well settled, and they will be pretty sure to get it. The best part of life is still ahead, but the tendencies are already there, and that is after all a large part of education. You have perhaps heard of the country girl who was asked what her brother was doing at the university. She replied naively that he was learning to be a student. He was a lucky fellow if his sister were right. I find life, myself, a tremendous experience, and very, very full of interests; but when I look at the natural history of these interests I can trace nearly all of them to some beginning, however faint, in the nebulous thought region of sixteen.

The ethical ideal that I have tried to place before you is that of a perfect human organism exercising its functions in the fullest possible measure. If I may use a biblical expression, it is the being perfect even as God is perfect. I believe, as I say, in this divine perfectness, not as a thing to be gained here and now, all at once, at an emotional revival meeting, but something to be grown toward and cherished as the ultimate ideal, something that is to come as the result of the operation of adequate causes. The special characteristic of this perfectness is its inwardness and its unconsciousness. As the flower