| OCR Text |
Show and classifying them has been disciplinary-mere intellectual "setting-up" exercises. You have toiled over the thoughts and achievements of others that you, yourself, may learn to think and to achieve. You have striven to master what the experience of others has taught them, that you, in turn, may achieve the citadel of education-may learn to think. The striving has left a more or less rich deposit of culture in your mind that will be a rock upon which you may safely rear the structure of your intellectual house. But that is an involuntary process. The slow accretion of culture comes so gradually that your senses can not detect the thickening of the deposit. It is your business to keep the current of culture-laden thought ever flowing through intellectual channels. Your task is to think; the facts and the culture will take care of themselves.You do not expect society, ten years hence, to hold you responsible for an exact statement of Boyle's Law or for the date of Luther's birth. But you must expect society to demand of you that you bring to the solution of civic, church, and even family problems, the power to think, which should be the fruitage of your education. Facts, of themselves, to all but the technical and professional student, are nothing. You study the meagre events in the life of Shakespeare that you may the better understand the work of this prince among geniuses. You toil painstakingly over the archaic words and obscure allusions in his plays that you may understand what it is that he means to say. And why all this pother over facts? That you may know and appreciate the heritage of worldly wisdom which is his who will enter and take possession of it. And so it is with all of the subjects which seem to you to be ends in themselves. In reality you study the sciences to perfect your powers of observation, mathematics to strengthen and develop your logical faculties, literature to sharpen your innate love of the beautiful and to satisfy your God-given curiosity as to how other men live and think. Always you are using facts as a lever to move the rock of principle. Continually they are but the steps whereby you enter into your heritage of the162 |
