My Dear Boy:—I am glad you want to go to college. Possibly I might send you even if you did not want to go, yet I doubt it. One may send a boy through college and the boy is sent through. None of the college is sent through him. But if you go, I am sure a good deal of the college will somehow get lodged in you.
You will find a thousand and one things in college which are worth while. I wish you could have each of them, but you can not. You have to use the elective system, even in the Freshman year. The trouble is not that so few boys do not seem to know how to distinguish the good from the bad, but that so many boys do not know the better from the good and the best from the better. I have known thousands of college boys, and they do not seem to distinguish, or, if they do, they do not seem to be able to apply the gospel of difference.
You won't think me imposing on you—will you?—if before entering college I tell you of some things which seem to me to be most worthy of your having and being on the day you get your A. B.
The first thing I wish to say to you is that I want you to come out of the college a thinker. But how to make yourself a thinker is both hard to do and hard to tell. Yet, the one great way of making yourself a thinker is to think. Thinking is a practical art. It cannot be taught. It is learned by doing. Yet there are some subjects in the course which seem to me to be better fitted than others to teach you this art. I've been trying to find out what are some of the marks or characteristics of these subjects. They are, I believe, subjects which require concentration of thought; subjects which have clearness in their elements, yet which are comprehensive, which are complex, which are consecutive in their arrangements of parts, each part being closely, rigorously related to every other, which represent continuity, of which the different elements or parts may be prolonged unto far reaching consequences. Concentration in the thinker, clearness, comprehensiveness, complexedness, consecutiveness, continuity—there are the six big C's, which are marks of the subjects which tend to create the thinker.
To attempt to apply each of these marks to many different subjects of the curriculum represents a long and unduly stupefying labor. Apply them for yourself. Different subjects have different worths for the students, but there are certain recognized values attached to each coin of the intellectual realm.
Mathematics and pure physics eminently represent the larger part of these six elements which I have named. Mathematics demands concentration. Mathematics is, in a sense, the mind giving itself to certain abstract truths. What is X 2 but a form of the mind? Mathematics demands clearness of thinking and of statement. Without clearness mathematics is naught. It also represents comprehensiveness. The large field of its truth is pressed into its greater relationships. Mathematical truth is complex. Part is involved with part. It is consecutive. Part follows part in necessary order. It is also continuous. It represents a graded progress.
It is, however, to be remembered that the reasoning of mathematics is unlike most reasoning which we usually employ. Mathematical reasoning is necessary. Most reasoning is not necessary. That two plus two equal four is a truth about which people do not differ usually. But reasoning in economics, such as the protective tariff; reasoning in philosophy, such as the presence or absence of innate ideas; reasoning in history; is not absolute. I have even wondered how far Cambridge, standing for mathematics and the physical sciences, has helped to make men great. Oxford is said to be the mother of great movements, and it is. Here the Wesleyan movement, and the Tractarian movement and the Social movement, as seen in Toynbee Hall, had their origins. Cambridge is called the mother of great men. Is there any relation of cause and effect, at Cambridge, between its emphasis upon mathematics and the sciences and the great men whom she has helped to make?
Logic is the subject of a course which embodies the six marks I have laid down. It demands these great elements in almost the same ways in which mathematics demands them. Logic, in a sense, might be called applied or incarnate mathematics. The man who wishes to be a thinker should be and is the master of logic.
Language, too, represents almost one half of the course of the modern college, and it represented more than one half of the course of the older college. What merits has the study of language for making the thinker? The study of languages makes no special demand on the quality of concentration, but the study does demand and creates comprehensiveness and clearness. The study represents a complex process and requires analysis. The time-spirit has worked and still works in languages unto diverse and manifold forms. Languages are developed with a singular union of orderliness and disorderliness. The parts of a language are in some cases closely related. The Greek verb is the most highly developed linguistic product. It is built up with the delicacy and poise of a child's house of blocks, yet with the orderliness of a Greek temple. Each letter represents a different meaning. Augment, prefix, ending has its own significance. I asked a former Chinese minister to this country what taught him to think. His succinct answer was "Greek."
In creating the thinker, the historical and social sciences have chief value in their complex relationships. Select any period of history pregnant with great results. For instance, select the efflorescence of the Greek people after the Persian wars. What were the causes of this vast advance? Take, for instance, the political and social condition prevalent for thirty years in America before the Civil War. What were the causes of this war? Or, take economic affairs—what are the reasons for and against a protective tariff? What are the limitations of such a tariff? Such conditions require comprehensive knowledge of complex matters. From such mastery the thinker results,—the thinker of consideration and considerateness. He can perceive a series of facts and the relation of each to each.
The law of values of these different subjects in making the thinker, is that the subjects which demand hard thinking are most creative. Easy subjects, or hard subjects easily worked out, have little place in the making of a thinker. One must think hard to become a hard thinker. Subjects and methods which are hard create the inevitable result.
Subjects which demand thinking only, however, sometimes are rather barren in result. One likes a certain content or concreteness in the thinking process. Abstract thinking sometimes seems like a balloon which has no connection with the earth. If a balloon is to be guided, it must be held down to terra firma. The ricksha men in Japan can run better if the carriage has a load. The bullet must have weight to go. A subject, therefore, which has content may quicken thinking and stimulate thoughtfulness.
The thinker is not made, however, only by the subjects he studies. In this condition the teacher has his place, and especially the methods of teaching and the inspiring qualities of teaching which he represents, have value. The dead lift of the discipline of the mind is liable to be a deadening process. Every subject needs a man to vitalize it for the ordinary student. Every graduate recalls teachers of such strength. He holds them in unfading gratitude and often in deathless affection.