Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/348

344 men, who shall really develop that boy's mind and character. We must then persuade the college authorities not to turn callow undergraduates into a jungle of courses taught by specialists, but to lay out for those boys really developing and strengthening coherent work which shall make them acquainted, as far as they can learn at that time of life, with men, society, philosophy and genuine wisdom. As to professional training, the physicians are getting most nearly at the heart of the problem by means of their clinics, their hospital and "externe" training, through which the embryo physician studies not simply medicine, but human nature and human life.

Supposing a youth to be really educated in school and college and to be genuinely trained in his professional school, he ought not to specialize until he shall have had a number of years of wide experience in his work, until, if possible, he shall have traveled, until he shall have taken a thorough, graduate course in the university of the world. Then he will have breadth and wisdom and true learning; then he will know real scholarship from false; then he will be humble, reverent and eager to know the truth; and only when a man arrives at this mental and spiritual condition is he fit to be a specialist. Even then, as has already been said, no man except a genius or a "grubber" is justified in being an out-and-out specialist. All others must have at least one avocation with which to temper and to put in proper perspective their chosen specialties.