Every Man His Own University Part 2

It is fortunate that to-day the greatest of books are the common property of the printers of the world, for they are on this account the cheapest, and many of them can be had for the price of a poor man's dinner. It needs many a page to record even the names of the men and women who have become _somebody_ and have done _something_ just from reading some one worthy book which had fallen into their hands. Many believe that Franklin is the greatest American that has yet appeared, and he has said that "Cotton Mather's _essays to do good_ gave me a turn of thinking which, perhaps, had an influence on some of the princ.i.p.al future events of my life."

As we become better acquainted with some of the _great_ books in all departments of literature, we are surprised to find how few of them have been written by college men. This by no means belittles the good that may come from a _true_ college course, but it does seem to emphasize that great books need some other environment for their growth than exclusive college courses. Perhaps the need is _solitude_, communion with nature, and frequent intercourse with the world's greatest and best in thought and feeling and action for the work. College-bred men are in a marked minority among the authors whose great books have been and are a potent force in shaping thought and conduct in the world. It is notable how few of these have anything commendatory to say about the influence which their college life had upon them and their accomplishments; many even of the text-books of schools and colleges have come from men whose powers were shaped by no school. How many text-books of medicine and law were prepared by physicians and lawyers whose knowledge was gleaned mainly from keen observation and long experience and deep thought!

It was no mere college education, but the sharpest home observation and strictest adherence to their instincts and their individuality that made forceful writers of Mark Twain, the Mississippi pilot; Bret Harte and William Dean Howells, the typesetters; James Whitcomb Riley, the itinerant sign-painter; Joel Chandler Harris and Eugene Field, the newspaper reporters; and Walt Whitman, the carpenter.

Of the four thousand and forty-three Americans with over twenty millions of dollars to their credit, only sixty-one had even a _high-school_ course. Many among them, however, had high-cla.s.s mentality and secured a comprehensive practical education. They have evidently been as alert to perceive the treasures hidden for them in the world of great books as they have been to perceive the treasuries hidden for them in their various enterprises. So we find that they have consulted the master spirits of books after their daily tasks were done, while myriads of those who scoff and sneer at them now because of their millions were feasting, frolicking, and dissipating. Among the highest types of American manhood to-day a large majority are the _new-rich_ men.

Whatever else may be said about them, all the world acknowledges that it is the parvenus in every land who do the largest part of the greatest work.

The larger our horizon becomes, the stronger is our conviction that the man himself is _mainly_ the architect of his own fate; others may give an occasional lift, but it is almost entirely his own work. The college can do something for the _head-piece_, and it should also give something for the _heart-side_ and the power to dare and to do; but all the external training in the world can never attain for the man what he can attain through his own individual efforts--provided he has lofty aims, firm resolutions, closely observes, and strictly adheres to all his best inborn powers. There was no college for David, Homer, Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Alexander, Caesar, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Was.h.i.+ngton, Franklin, Goethe, Jesus, and tens of thousands of great or lesser men than these. They all marked out their own course, planned their own spiritual palaces; all the barbed-wire entanglements in the world did not r.e.t.a.r.d their indomitable courage, self-reliance, and self-help.

Perhaps the chief use of all learning establishments, except those which have to do with what the Germans call _bread studies_, is to awaken the pupil's self-respect, which is the basis of all virtue, and to cultivate the powers that shall fit the pupil to consult for himself the _knowledge_ and _power_ books of the greatest and the wisest. They also can in these days do yeoman's service in giving the _bread studies_ through which men shall be better able to do the world's work and thereby earn better wages.

V

THOUGHTFULNESS

President Wolsey, head of a great university, said that one of the chief purposes of the college is to cultivate the _power to think_. The college man who neglects to cultivate this valuable power until he enters upon his college career, instead of beginning it in the kindergarten and continuing it unremittingly throughout his entire preparatory course and daily living, will be liable to make sorry work of this part of his cultivation, or any other part, while he is in college.

The specialists who teach in colleges, and who are generally more interested in their specialties than in the science and art of education, may not be conscious of this, and yet the many educational wrecks that have come from colleges should long ago have brought this point most forcibly to their attention. Indeed, the power to think and the practice of thinking until it has become second nature, are so essential for success in any _worthy_ career in life, that it is truer to say that one of the chief purposes of _life_ itself is to cultivate and exercise the power to think, and keep right on thinking until close thinking shall become a habit. The power to think clearly, broadly, and successfully is not necessarily the prerogative of those only who have lived in a college environment, as the biographies of our own four thousand multi-millionaires in this country so cogently prove, for few of them ever darkened the doors of a college. Some among them may have been bereft of all the n.o.bler sentiments for which Christianity and America stand, but they never could have piled up their millions in every department of activity without having thought so long and so hard that they ultimately acquired a habit of thinking that should put to shame myriads in every land who have had all the advantages of universities. The power to think, and to think in a masterly way, need not be confined to the professor's chair.

Any sphere of action which does not bring in to the worker an increase of thinking power is harmful, from university to street-sweeping. A machine is the only worker that can do its work well without thinking about it. All the successful men the world has ever known have been men who thought incessantly; they have been mainly self-educated in their extraordinary power to think; their success in all the various tasks which they set for themselves oftener resulted from their hard thought than from their hard work.

Defeat and failure have never overtaken the man whose head and hands were partners.

When we think without work or work without thought, we reach only half of what belong to us. A man should especially ween himself from this kind of halfness. We should be ashamed to find ourselves working without thought, as we should be ashamed to find ourselves idle in a world where there is always so much to be done and so little time allotted to each for accomplis.h.i.+ng worthy work. The employees that are most valuable to their employers and are most valued by them are those always whose heads and hands are yoke-mates. When hands and head and heart are on the job, it is difficult to imagine what heights of success and service shall be attained. The farmer boy hoeing corn and digging potatoes will do better work in quant.i.ty and quality if he thinks about his work as hard as he hoes or digs.

There can be little danger of failure for any young man who begins his life-work with the resolution that he will always give his best thought to even the most insignificant task that he a.s.sumes; and all the schools in the world cannot furnish him any advantage that can compare with this resolution steadily followed. Nor must the habit of thinking be exercised only upon work. We all have more leisure than work, and many a high-minded thinker has reminded us that a man is best to be judged, not by his profession, but by his leisure. Elihu Burritt acquired a knowledge of fifty languages during the years he earned his livelihood as a village blacksmith; he also found time for extensive reading as well as time for interest in social reforms, in the advancement of which he won the reputation of being one of the most powerful and persuasive orators of his day. All his stupendous acquirements were gained during the hours between his tasks which thousands of other village blacksmiths were accustomed to spend in gossip or in the tavern. Volumes could be filled with only _brief_ accounts of the men and women throughout the ages who have made the world better for their living, just because they wisely and thoughtfully employed the leisure hours which their contemporaries trifled away. The shortest life may be long in n.o.ble thought and action, if we lose no time; and little of it is ever lost by those who thoughtfully employ their leisure.

Thoughtful men and women are always doubly valuable, no matter whether their work is what the world calls high-cla.s.s or low-cla.s.s. The streets are better swept by such a man, and the potatoes are better hoed; the floor is better scrubbed by such a woman, and the clothes are better washed. If our work does not afford us the chance to think while we are employed upon it, we owe it to ourselves and to humanity to toss it aside quickly. The lawyer, the physician, or any other professional man is no more a man in the sight of G.o.d and his country than the stone-mason who lays the foundations for their houses and raises the superstructures; and they are under no greater obligation to use their thinking powers than he is. The place we occupy in life is unimportant; the way we fill the place is everything; the stone-mason, Ben Jonson, built stone walls and houses by day, and at night built dramas and other poetry which have been surpa.s.sed only by his contemporary, Shakespeare.

Many of the greatest achievements known to history have been the work of men and women whose life-tasks were entirely different from the lines in which they became eminent; Shakespeare was an actor and one of the most successful business men of London, but he is known as the greatest poet the world has yet produced; George Eliot had charge for several years of her father's farm home, as well as the poultry and dairy, and won prizes for these at the country fair, but this did not prevent her from laying, during these seven years, the foundation which helped her to build herself into one of the greatest women known to history.

Herschel's being a musician and Mary Somerville's having charge of her home and her children did not prevent both of them from doing marvelous work in astronomy. Audubon became a final authority on birds solely because while on his hunting-trips he thought more than the other hunters who accompanied him. One of the greatest merchants and capitalists in Boston began life selling handkerchiefs through the country. He became expert in flax products, and through this grew rich; he so studied kindred fibrous plants that his partners boasted that he had succeeded in marketing handkerchiefs made of twenty different fibrous plants. The most successful piano manufacturer now living was originally an employee of a steel mill that manufactured wire for making piano-strings. An every-day man gave careful thought to corn, and wrote an article for a magazine upon its value and upon the way it should be prepared for food; and this article was so worthy that it won for him a degree from a university.

Every waking moment of every man contains food for thought. If some live fuller lives every twenty-four hours than others live in a year, it is because they think faster and higher, wider and deeper, and because the discipline they get from this thought keeps them from wasting their time on trivial or worthless matter. A puddler in Youngstown, without education beyond the district school, began to think about the iron that was softened in the furnace before him, and asked questions of the older employees and the foreman; then he read upon the subject and became so capable in mining and iron manufacturing that when the Youngstown plant was sold to the great steel corporation he was the largest stockholder in forty-seven great companies manufacturing iron. Some men's hearts grow as hard as their gold while they are ama.s.sing riches; but his heart seems to have softened in proportion to the increase of his riches; his life is given to numberless good deeds, chief among which has been his endeavor to impress upon all workmen the necessity of letting both their heads and hearts a.s.sist their hands. Neither man nor boy, woman nor girl, need despair of doing great things and being great men and women, if they will constantly carry out this advice. He is really the best-educated man whose attention is primarily directed to his soul-growth, to his power of thinking, for feeling, and for n.o.ble action.

VI

INSTINCTS AND INDIVIDUALITY

"G.o.d has given us a full kit of watchmaker's tools" and if, after all the centuries of civilization, "we are doing _thinker's_ work with them," something must be wrong with the educational methods. When G.o.d sent us here he packed us with all we need for high-cla.s.s manhood--our _instincts_ and our _individuality_ especially well done up; but often in the unpacking by the schools we have been sadly marred; and these G.o.d-given endowments seem to have been frequently thrown upon the rubbish-pile. They seem to have dulled our instincts and to have despised our individuality, in order to make room for our acquirements.

Like all that emanates from G.o.d, instincts and individuality have been bestowed for a wise purpose; they are _indispensable_ endowments if we shall become the kind of man G.o.d seems to have had in mind when he sent us here. What justification have the teachers of civilization for failing to perfect these powers? What right have the _little_ men of the schools to drive them entirely out of their scheme of education?

John Ruskin complains in _Kings' Treasuries_ that "Modern education for the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them." If this is even partly true, there is no pursuit to-day that demands from the man who is working in it more _presence of mind_ and more _self-direction_, than the business of getting _real_ education. Those who are to-day conducting what we are foolish enough to permit them to call _education_ are often both blind and deaf to all that efficient education implies.

To seek direction from them is like asking the road from a blind man.

Many are also connected with the schools apparently as others are connected with hod-carrying and street-sweeping--to procure a livelihood. Often their highest conception of the work is _edge_ucation, to make sharp blades of the intellects for what they call "getting along in the world." Then many of the instructors in schools and colleges are merely specialists, mainly interested in their specialties, and using the cla.s.s-room as a stepping-stone to their own purposes. Extreme specializing is narrowing--it does to the specialist what blinkers do to the horse's eyes. Excessive pursuit of single objects of thought atrophies many faculties, but _education_ is the _complete_ development and discipline of all the faculties.

Perhaps these are some of the causes why so many _original_ and _thinking_ men and women are so hostile to present-day schools, and accuse them of mainly being "places that polish pebbles and dim diamonds," and say so many other harsh and cutting things about them.

Learning seems to be the _chief_ occupation of those who profess to educate. Learning for its _own_ sake plays a very _insignificant_ part in the spiritual equipment of G.o.d's children; to a _true_ education it seems at best only what the carpenter's kit is to the carpenter--a means to an end. Like all other lumber, its importance depends entirely upon what is built out of it. These original and thinking men and women have often said hard things of mere learning and of those who dole it out at so much a _unit_, because they believe that undue stress is laid upon it. They sometimes say that universities are not _educating_ inst.i.tutions, but merely _seats-of-learning_; and often they are very _narrow_ seats, difficult for self-respecting people to stiffen their backs enough to sit upon. But it's the _study_, not the studies, that educates; studies make _learned_ men, but not often _wise_ men, such as _real_ education always makes; not all learned heads are _sense_-boxes; the _very_ learned man may be a very learned fool. The learned frequently put out their reasoning powers to make room for their learning; it requires ten pounds of _sense_ to take care of one pound of learning.

Solomon made a book of proverbs, but a book of proverbs never made Solomon. Sense without learning is a thousand times superior to learning without sense; and in the stately edifice of life, school and college are only the bas.e.m.e.nt walls; wisdom and learning are not necessary companions. The great things that have conduced to the betterment of the world have been done by men who have been loyal to their individuality and true to their instincts--never by the merely learned. Too often do we find these little learned men "displaying themselves offensively and ridiculously in the haunts of bearded men," and making the angels weep by their strutting and their swelling.

_Knowing_ is only a _small_ part of life; _doing_ is nearly _all_ of life; and the _best_ done is done through _education_--the education which is the product of what is _inborn_ as well as of what is _acquired_; the education which enables men and women to perceive and to cherish the _beautiful_ in art, in literature, in morals and in nature. While true education busies itself with acquirements, it is even more concerned that the instincts and the individuality G.o.d appears to regard of supreme importance shall attain all that it is possible for them to have. These original and thinking men and women who say so many things in condemnation of _make-believe_ education and mere learning boldly and lovingly acclaim the helps from true education--they remind us that it is soul-husbandry, spiritual perfection, torch and sword and s.h.i.+eld, the _be-all_ and the _end-all_ of life, the fountain of all n.o.ble living, and the only real promoter of civilization. They claim that education of this sort simplifies life; facilitates self-conquest; intensifies individuality; unfolds and uplifts manhood; breeds habits of thinking, feeling, and doing; deb.e.s.t.i.a.lizes, emanc.i.p.ates, humbles, and civilizes; that it searches for truth, loves the beautiful, desires the good, and does the best.

We have no quarrel with the education that accomplishes all these, for it fosters the instincts and the individuality for which we are pleading. We have always believed that just this kind of education is the heritage of every American, and that the loss of such an education is the greatest calamity that can befall any one. All our life have we yearned that all might have this boon, and the best of our manhood years have been ceaseless labor and struggle to give "the weak and friendless sons of men" all of its advantages.

The test of any system of education is the kind of man it turns out. It is wisdom to measure the system by those it fails to educate rather than by those it does educate--by its tortoises rather than by its hares. The real educator is always vastly more concerned with the divinity than with the depravity of those intrusted to him; he believes firmly that the instincts and the individuality which G.o.d has given each of us are the priceless part of all our spiritual equipment--that anything we may acquire toward this end which fortifies these G.o.d-given treasures is cheap--even if bought by an entire life-service; that any acquirement that modifies these or destroys them is a triple curse and a dire menace to humanity, for individuality is the genius of Christianity and of America.

The system of education which makes light of the cultivation of the instincts, which seems to be the sole dependence of all conditions of men except the over-civilized, the system of education which is blinded to all that is implied in an educated individuality--these are the only systems with which we have any quarrel. Well-made, rather than well-filled heads are what is needed and should be demanded, without which it is impossible for any one of us to have the right conception of life, or to attain all that we were intended to be or to do. To guard and develop the instincts of the child, to preserve and fortify his individuality, is to give him sword and s.h.i.+eld for the battle of life.

G.o.d intends each individual to be an individual, or this should not have been so deep-rooted in all; to be just like every one else is to be predestined for inferiority and failure. To do our duty consistently and steadfastly demands that all our G.o.d-like and G.o.d-given qualities shall first of all be educated. That best becomes a man which his individuality intended him to be, and those are always successful in making a life and a living who play the game of life with the cards their individuality gives them. G.o.d made a world for each separate man, and within that world he _must_ live, if he will live effectually; we must first of all be ourselves, must see to it that whatever else is neglected the plants G.o.d has put into the individual shall be cultivated--the crop may not be large, but we are accountable for the cultivation, not for the crop. We must be ourselves, and do our own work.

There can be no greater wisdom and no greater service than that of helping another so that he may duly live in that special world which G.o.d has created for him. The most insignificant man can be complete if he is entirely true to his instincts and to his individual character. If we are incomplete, it is because we are living after some other method. We have all been stamped with individuality, but many seem to do their utmost to soak off the stamp. How different should the life of all the world be if each one only kept in his frame, and would not permit any one to try to make him part of, the picture for which his personality never intended him!