Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/268

262 What is there in this comparatively immense expenditure of time and energy upon Latin that will develop organs and functions continuously available for the boy's mental efficiency and usefulness in the world? How does a nervous mechanism, with its infinitely complex system of neurones and connecting fibers, fashioned through and for the study of the Latin language, become adapted for all other mental processes? In short, it is time to read a new and compelling significance into the old query of instinctive common sense as to what is the value of the so-called culture that is doled out to our children in the secondary schools and colleges.

Having thus answered the first question involved in our proposition, it remains to consider the further question of what becomes of useless organs of culture. What is the effect upon the girl's life of having to support an elaborate nervous mechanism for dealing with mathematical symbols and concepts which she never has occasion to use? What is the effect upon the boy's life of having to support a nervous mechanism for declining Latin nouns and adjectives, conjugating Latin verbs, and construing Latin sentences, which he never has occasion to use? May not these unused nervous organs become parasitic upon the nervous vitality, just as the unused muscles of the athlete become parasitic upon the general organic vitality? It may seem to some little less than fantastic to suggest such a result. And yet, if we believe that life is a biological unit, and that the laws controlling it are identical in nature and operation, there is no escaping this conclusion. Moreover, there are many peculiarities in the nervous and psychic constitutions of a considerable number of educated men and women that await a plausible theory to account for them. The suspicion is harbored in many minds that academic communities are apt to become over-cultured. They are apt to lose that balance between perceptual and conceptual experience which is the supreme test of healthy-mindedness. At the very best, they suffer from an hypertrophy of the critical faculties, which reveals itself in philosophical and linguistic hair-splitting. At the worst, it may amount to a nervous tension and general intellectual straining after precision in scholarship and propriety in conduct that creates an atmosphere blighting to spontaneity of work and life in the students. This is frequently illustrated in schools and colleges for girls, where an excess of women teachers, with hypertrophied intellects and atrophied human interests, make education a process of mental arrest and disease instead of growth.

Outside of academic communities, there are to be found everywhere a cultured flotsam and jetsam. Europe has long had its proletariat of culture, and America is rapidly developing one. In the more intense nervous life of America, moreover, there are appearing numerous types of nervous instability among educated men and women. This is illustrated not only in the frequent neurasthenia of the cultured classes. It