ing since 1882; and it is hard to dignify with the names influence or instruction the wretchedly formal religious exercises that are gone through with in American public schools.

The result of this condition of affairs is that religious teaching is rapidly passing out of education entirely; and the familiarity with the English Bible as the greatest classic of our tongue, that every cultivated man owes it to himself to possess, is becoming a thing of the past. Two solutions of the difficulty are proposed. One is that the state shall tolerate all existing forms of religious teaching in its own schools, time being set apart for the purpose. The other is that the state shall aid, by money grants, schools maintained by religious or other corporations. Neither suggestion is likely to be received favorably by the American people at present, because of the bitterness of the war between the denominational theologies. Yet the religious element may not be permitted to pass wholly out of education unless we are to cripple it and render it hopelessly incomplete. It must devolve upon the family and the church, then, to give this instruction to the child and to preserve the religious insight from loss. Both family and church must become much more efficient, educationally speaking, than

Infancy and education

they are now, if they are to bear this burden successfully. This opens a series of questions that may not be entered upon here. It is enough to point out that the religious element of human culture is essential; and that, by some effective agency, it must be presented to every child whose education aims at completeness or proportion.1

The period of infancy is to be used by civilized men for adaptation along these five lines, in order to introduce the child to his intellectual and spiritual inheritance, just as the shorter period of infancy in the lower animals is used to develop, to adjust, and to co-ordinate those physical actions which constitute the higher instincts, and which require the larger, the more deeply furrowed, and the more complex brain. With this adaptation to the intellectual and spiritual inheritance of the child there must go, of course, such physical training and such systematic care for his health as will serve to provide a sufficient and satisfactory physical foundation for a happy and useful intellectual and spiritual life.

That, as it seems to me, is the lesson of biology, of physiology, and of psychology, on the basis of the theory of evolution, regarding the 1 See pp. 179-200.

meaning and the place of education in modern life. It gives us a conception of education which must, I am quite sure, raise it above the mechanical, the routine, the purely artificial. We see that this period of preparation is not a period of haphazard action, a period of possible neglect, or a period when time may be frittered away and lost, but that every moment of adjustment is precious and that every new adaptation and correlation is an enrichment not only of the life of the individual but of the life of the race. For now we all understand perfectly well that this long period of infancy and adaptation, this period of plasticity and education, is that which makes progress possible. That is why it is entirely correct to say that each generation is the trustee of civilization. Each generation owes it to itself and to its posterity to protect its culture, to enrich it, and to transmit it. The institution that mankind has worked out for that purpose is the institution known as education. When a child has entered into this inheritance, first physical, then scientific, literary, æsthetic, institutional, and religious, then we may use the word culture1 to signify the state that has been attained.

1 In the German language the word Kultur is given a quite different meaning. The nearest German equivalent to culture as here used is Bildung.

The meaning

of culture

The word culture is very modern. It is used in its present sense only during the latter portion of the eighteenth century and during our own. It owes its present significance largely to Goethe and to Herder, the two men who did most to make it familiar in its modern sense. But while the word may be new, the conception itself is old. It is the Taidela of the Greeks, the humanitas of the Romans; and after all it expresses pretty much what the patrician Roman, dwelling in his country house, had in mind when he sent his boy, after giving him some instruction in agriculture, in law, and in military duty, to the great city of Rome itself in order to obtain urbanitas, cityWe have softened that word down until it means merely polished manner, but when the Romans first used it they meant by it pretty much what we mean by culture. The conception of culture is old, therefore; it has always been before the idealists of the human race from the earliest times. We have given to this new word rich, full, and diversified meaning, based, as I say, upon the knowledge of the child and upon the knowledge of the historic past. When we use it in that sense, we are using it, as we may properly, to indicate the ideal of our modern education.

ness.

Adaptation to the intellectual and spiritual environment, the attainment of true culture, is not an end in itself, but a necessary preparation for the realization of one's own personality, and for rendering the highest and best type of service to mankind. The intellectual and spiritual environment is not to be conceived of as something fixed and complete, but rather as something growing and alive, to which it is in the power of every human being to make some addition, however trifling. These additions are the material of true progress. The purpose of education is to provide the largest possible number of human beings with that genuine culture which will enable them to understand the meaning of progress and to contribute to it. This progress may take any one of a myriad forms. It may be faithfulness in inconspicuous labor, it may be a new and striking product of handiwork, it may be human service to one's fellows in any one of a thousand ways. Progress based upon culture is surely progress; without culture and all that the word is here held to signify, progress is only an empty word.