President Schurman Would Like to See
Here a Little More of "The Glory
That Was Greece."
Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cornell University, has taken to heart
the contrast between American culture of to-day and the culture of the
ancient Greeks. In an address before an association of teachers last
February, he charged that while our people "knows something of
everything," its knowledge is "superficial, inaccurate, chaotic, and
ill-digested." Furthermore, he says that we are indifferent to esthetic
culture and suspicious of theory, of principles, and of reason.
These are serious, fundamental charges. But let us hear President
Schurman's fuller statement of his case:
If the American mind is to be raised to its highest potency,
a remedy must be found for these evils. The first condition
of any improvement is the perception and recognition of the
defects themselves.
I repeat, then, that while as a people we are wonderfully
energetic, industrious, inventive, and well-informed, we
are, in comparison with the ancient Athenians, little more
than half developed on the side of our highest rational and
artistic capabilities.
The problem is to develop these potencies in an environment
which has hitherto been little favorable--and to develop
them in the American people, and not merely in the isolated
thinker, scholar, and artist.
If no American city is an Athens, if no American poet is a
Homer or Sophocles, if no American thinker is a Plato or
Aristotle, it is not merely because Americans possess only a
rudimentary reason and imagination and sensibility, but
because, owing to causes which are part of our national
being--causes which are connected with our task of subduing
a continent--the capacities with which nature has generously
endowed us have not been developed and exercised to the
fulness of their pitch and potency.
Our work in the nineteenth century was largely of the
utilitarian order; in the twentieth century we are summoned
to conquer and make our own the ideal realms of truth and
beauty and excellence which far more than material victories
constitute the true greatness of nations.
Pedagogic methods might be employed to stimulate American culture.
President Schurman suggests that in the common schools greater emphasis be
laid upon art and literature. There remains, however, as he points out,
something greater than the intellectuality of the Greeks, and that is the
ethical consciousness of the Hebrews.
Noble and exalted and priceless as reason and culture are,
there is a still higher end of life both for individuals and
nations. That end, indeed, was very inadequately conceived
by the Greeks. In the creative play of reason and
imagination, in their marvelous productions of speculation,
science, and art, in their exaltation of mind above sense
and of spirit above matter, in their conception of a
harmonious development of all the rich and varied powers of
man--in all these the Greeks have left to mankind a legacy
as priceless as it is to-day vital and forever imperishable.
But the Greeks, even the Greek philosophers, even the
"divine Plato," have not given us enough to live by. It was
the Jews, the outcast, oppressed, and much-suffering Jews,
who first sounded the depths of human life, discovered that
the essential being of a man resides in his moral
personality, and rose to the conception of a just and
merciful Providence who rules in righteousness the affairs
of nations and the hearts and wills of men.
If even our literary men now tell us that conduct is
three-fourths of life, it is because Hebraism and the
Christianity which sprang from Hebraism have stamped this
idea ineffaceably upon the conscience of mankind. The
selfishness and sensuality in us may revolt against the Ten
Commandments and the Golden Rule, but the still small voice
of conscience in us recognizes their authority and
acknowledges that if they had might as they have right, they
would absolutely govern the world. The most, the best, of
greatness is goodness. The greatest man on earth is the man
of pure heart and of clean hands.