tal self-confidence. We shall no longer be condemned to shameful, speechless silence. We can converse about the rise of Buddhism or the vortices of electrons with any other stray explorer whom we may meet. § 3 There remains, however, the uncomfortable suspicion that our problem is not finally and satisfactorily solved by this "find." Who shall say that the outline of history has set things in a true perspective? Who shall say that the outline of science is more than a snack by the roadside? One of the world's leading physicists was asked by a university librarian to weed out the overcrowded shelves of books on physics. His answer was curt: "Throw away every book that is over ten years old." One cannot afford to carry food that will go stale in the pack. Moreover, what appears to-day in two volumes for ten dollars, or in four volumes for twenty dollars, may be further condensed and issued in six months in one volume for five dollars, or in two volumes for ten dollars. It is a serious matter to use up our capital of gray matter for wanton luxuries of knowledge. There is, in short, no present available canon of criticism and selection that will determine beyond all doubt what a man can afford to know and what he must be content to leave unknown. Sir J. Arthur Thomson himself being witness, for example, the whole doctrine of evolution comes down in the end to "just two main processes (1) testing all things, and (2) holding fast that which is good." Who shall say how much more than this single sentence the plain man can afford to know about organic evolution? The selective critic and authority may exercise a vicarious judgment for the rank and file in preparing a minimum of portable wisdom; but, obviously, such information must be acquired at second hand, and therefore is not to be confused with knowledge. Moreover, until we breed a race of infallible editors this up-to-the-minute, lunch-counter method of getting an education must be a risky business. Ten men love what I hate. Who shall decide where truth abides? The reediting and refining of information will certainly go on, but "To such a process I discern no end. . . I cut and cut again!" There remains, however, an alternative and radically different idea of education. Our metaphor of the polar explorer still serves us. A certain resourceful gentleman named Stefansson has recently revised the whole method of solving the problem of maintaining life in the frozen North. He has demonstrated "The Friendly Arctic." His story is something like this. He felt that at its best the gospel of pemmican was a false gospel just because it was still a menace to mobility. He believed that there was abundance of food everywhere on the face of this earth, if only one knew where to look for it and how to get it. He ventured the unheard of heresy that there was food on the polar ice, and that it could be got. He therefore set out for a long solitary expedition on the frozen polar sea, having not a day's rations in his pack, but only a rifle over his shoulder and a well filled cartridge-belt about his waist. He was gone for a long time, and was at last given up for a hair-brained fool; but he walked back into camp one bright day in perfect health, heavier and stronger than when he left. He proved beyond all question of a doubt that his theory would work, that there was food there, and that it could be had. He kept his eye open for seal-holes in the ice, and these seal-holes were always to be found. Sometimes he had to wait a long time for the seal to appear, but when it did appear, he greeted it down the barrel of his rifle. From the day he left to the day he returned he had had fresh meat to eat and blubber for his fire. Often he had been hundreds of pounds of seal on the sunny side of hunger and cold. He had worked the miracle in the arctic region of "living off the land." As a result of his experiment, pemmican quotations have been steadily declining, while the stock in smallarms plants will presumably go up. Portable pemmican has given place to mobile wits. What was once the measured ration for life in the "Unfriendly Arctic" now bids fair to become a reliable method for living in the "Friendly Arctic." There are, heaven be praised, certain rebel Stefanssons appearing in our educational world. They are convinced that the conception of a college as a place where each oncoming generation is to be equipped with a manageable minimum of selected information is not tenable. They aim not to supply knowledge, but to stimulate thought. Knowledge, in the sense of remembered information, is a very dubious equivalent for a real education. No memory is without its final limits, and all memories are fallible. There was for many years on one of the desks in the Examination Hall at Oxford an amusing witness to this truth. It took the form of a little tombstone delicately chiseled in the hard oak with what must have been a very keen penknife. And on this somber symbol an epitaph, "human, all-too-human," "Sacred to My Memory-Which Departed from Me-This Fourth Day of June, 1897." June, 1897." Before how many such headstones have all of us shed penitential tears for our lost learning! If an education is simply a matter of remembering those facts which the pedants are agreed ought to be remembered, then the chalice of learning passes into the hands of the authors of these modern mnemonic systems. They are our academic pundits and high priests. But, obviously, for the purposes of every-day life it is a good deal simpler to know where the information is to be had if it is needed, and to be able to get it and use it at first hand when occasion demands, than to stagger constantly and ponderously about with it in mind. One enters, for example, that library in question. The opus of Isidore is really an interesting relic of an almost prehistoric period of human learning. It has absolutely nothing in common with the genius of our best modern education. It bears about the same relation to the right sort of college course in these days that the skeleton of a dinosaur, with its reconstructed armor-plates, bears to the world of mobile creatures who hit upon the high road of ascending evolution. Isidore, and all for which he stands, represents a blind alley down which the human mind blunders to frustration and confusion. What is important, on entering that library, is to know that Isidore is a snare and a delusion, and that, after all, those two million volumes are there to be used and enjoyed. It is not necessary that one should remember all that is in any of these volumes, only that one should be at home in the card-catalogue room and know how to get what he wants for the day's need. The first half of an education is learning where to find the mind's daily bread. 84 The second half of an education consists in learning how to think for oneself. The whole gospel of a liberal education might be put in the homely phrase, "Every man his own thinker," and once a man has learned that witching and potent secret, he has in his hand the power which is traditionally associated with knowledge. There are the classics, for example. What good is a training in the classics? The answer was given by an Oxford don some time ago, who said that during the war a man two or three years out of the university, in the blue togs of the navy, walked into his room. He said to the don: chart with an 'X.' We go on dredg- What that boy had learned in that class was not information about Greek epitaphs. What he had learned all unwittingly was how to think, how to use his own mind at first hand when emergency demanded. He came up "You never would guess the use I against a day when there was no refer am making of the classics now." The puzzled wise man said: "No, I can't guess." "Well," said the man, "you remember that I did a course with you on Greek inscriptions. We never had a whole inscription to translate. We had a line here and a word there, and from the fragments we had we reconstructed a probable text and made a shot at its meaning. Our success depended upon our skill at conjecture. For the last six months I have been out in the North Sea on a trawler dredging German mine-fields. We drag about at random until we hook on to a mine, then we pull it up and explode it. I mark the place where we got it on the ence library at hand, no professor to be consulted and leaned upon, no lecture notes to be crammed once more, no furtive annotations even on a sly cuff. He had to be his own thinker on a serious day. Happy for him, happy for his country, that was really an educated man. Education to-day is becoming more and more a matter of how a man thinks and less and less a matter of what he thinks. What he will have to think before he is done with life no one can safely prophesy. All we can say is, that if he lives another fifty years, he certainly will have to think a great many thoughts which the shrewdest prognostication cannot forecast. It is no use to fit youth for the tasks and adventures which are patently before this time with Isidore reëdited and brought down to date. The hope of the world rests with men who can do at first hand creative thinking. It is no good to meet an age which says, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion," by putting a worn-out record on a talking-machine. The mechanical reproduction of other men's thoughts and songs and arts with which our world is cluttered serves the gospel of a portable culture; but these devices do not make for education. They do not throw the burden and opportunity of life where they really belong, upon the thinker, the singer, the prophet. We know enough about human life at the present moment to say how the mind of an educated man works, and what its characteristics are. Such a mind must, before all else, observe accurately; then it must proceed logically. After that it must achieve a power of discrimination. To accurate observation, logical reasoning, discriminating judgment, it must then add imagination. These are the essential characteristics of a first-hand mind, educated to think freely for itself. It does not matter very much by what disciplines a man masters these methods of thinking. One course in college may be as good as another. Some courses may be better than others for a particular purpose, but all together should be intended to develop an exact and creative habit of mind. What tends toward education in a zoological laboratory is not information as to infusoria, but the ability to observe life correctly. What matters in a course in English literature is not a memorized anthology, but the winning of the ability to understand at once why Francis Thompson is a better poet than Coventry Patmore. What matters in the study of American history is not the dates and battles of the Civil War, but the ability to discriminate between the characters of William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown on the one hand and the characters of Douglas and Webster on the other hand. And what it all means in the end is the ability to tackle a German mine-field or a problem in business or the professions or public life at first hand, when the occasion arises, and to deal with them as a really educated man. It An English novelist once said: "Religion is not something without any connection with a man's life. It is the answer to the problems that life puts to him, not to some one else." So also an education is not something without any connection with the problems that life in this world breeds. is a man's power to answer, with his own critical and creative thought, the problems which his own experience and his time put to him. Secondhand answers never solve first-hand riddles. It is not, therefore, what other men have thought that helps, but rather the true method and wit of all thinking. The gospel of pemmican, then, gives place. The gospel of the quick eye, the steady hand, the light rifle, and the lean cartridge supplants it. An unfriendly world which measures and menaces our meager stock of information gives place to a friendly world which challenges and invites our resourceful thinking. What modern education seeks is not portable wisdom, but mobile brains. Through Germany in a Rowboat By C. E. BECHHOFER I N 1911, a youth just out of an English school, I had gone to Berlin to study. I almost forget what it was that I went to study. Certainly my year there was spent almost entirely in the pleasant atmosphere of the university rowing-club. We were very proud of ourselves in this club, for, unlike most students' corporations, we combined our boating with the conventional eating, drinking, and fencing that were the staples of German student life. We had an estabWe had an establishment for each side of our life: there was the club-house in Charlottenburg, in a shady street lined with students' clubs, from which at all hours of the day and night there emerged the sounds of songs, sabers, and revelry, and the forms of somewhat uncertainly stepping young gentlemen with colored caps and scarred cheeks; while three or four miles away, in the midst of the beautiful verdure of the Grünewald, the flag of our club fluttered from a mast high over the boat-house in which we housed twenty or thirty boats, from racing eights to effeminate canoes. I thought of those days as I descended from the train at Berlin at the end of August, 1922, and drove in a taxi along the park toward the clubhouse. I remembered the eleven years that separated me from the past, eight of them spent in the bitter and unceasing struggle of the war and its aftermath. I wondered whether I should be allowed to enter the clubhouse again, or whether a haughty servant would drive me out with the rebuke that no Englishmen were any longer permitted to cross its threshhold. If this was to happen, I hoped that none of my former friends would be there at the time, and then I |