IDOLS1

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY

Ephraim is joined to idols. — Hosea, iv. 17

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THE world was never better worth preparing for. The panorama unrolled before the mind was never more gorgeous: new renaissance revealing reaches unimagined; prophesying splendor unimaginable; unveiling mysteries of time and space and natural law and human potency.

Archæology uncovers with a spade the world of Ariadne and of Minos, of Agamemnon and of Priam. Where Jason launched the Argo, paintings are unearthed that antedate Apelles. Mummied crocodiles disgorge their papyri; and we read the administrative record of the Ptolemies. Bacchylides breaks the silence of centuries; Menander himself mounts the stage, and in no borrowed Roman sock; and Aristotle reappears to shed fresh light upon the constitution of the Athenians.

History, availing herself of cognate sciences, deciphers documents and conditions anew; and the vision of the past is reinterpreted in terms of social and economic actuality. Emigrations and conquests become a modern tale of commerce and industrial stress. Cæsar and Agrippina, Cromwell and Marie Antoinette, are all to read again; and the Bard of Venusia acquires a new and startling modernity as the literary advance agent of a plutocratic wine firm. As in a "glass prospective" literature is viewed; and kaleidoscopic transformations of gest and ballad, epic and drama, cross-sections of the crypt of fiction, dazzle the eye of critic and philologist and poet.

1 Copyright. Reprinted from Idols of Education by permission of the author and of Doubleday, Page and Company. In part a commencement address delivered at the University of Michigan in 1909.

With golden keys of psychology, history, and philology the anthropologist unlocks the mind of primitive man. The student of the holier things invades the Temple itself; and from day to day the sacramental doors swing back on age-long galleries of worship.

Taking fresh heart of ethics, economics wears a new and most seductive smile. No longer the minimizing of material cost, but the maximizing of vital value, she regards. She seeks the psychic income, the margin of leisure for the soul, the margin of health for the body: the greatest of national assets - the true wealth of nations. To the modern problems of social and political theory and of jurisprudence, of municipal and national and colonial administration, a similar fascination of beneficent discovery attracts; and to that development of international politics which aims at constitutional law rather than the substantive private law of nations.

Geology multiplies her æons, and astronomy her glittering fields. "Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps" of new discovered cause "arise." "The idea of the electron has broken the framework of the old physics to pieces, has revived ancient atomistic hypotheses, and made of them principles," and radioactivity "has opened to the explorer a New America full of wealth yet unknown." The science of the law of celestial movements has given birth to the science of the substance of celestial bodies; and, with astrophysics, we study more narrowly than ever our one star and its outcasts, the planets. We wonderingly contemplate the transport of matter from star to star-and from planet to planet, maybe, of life.

Geology has given birth to physiography. We pass from inorganic to organic, and probe the interaction of physical environment and animate nature. In evolutionary science they are saying that new species leap into being at a wave of the wand of mutation; and the war between Mendelism and Darwinism wages. The knighthood of the Quest of Life enrolls in the order of psychic mystery or the order of mechanism,

and presses on. Though neither win to the Grail, each wins nearer to its law. By the delicate ministrations of surgery, life is prolonged. Immunization lifts ever higher her red cross.

Engineering advances, agriculture advances, commerce expands. We compass the earth, we swim the seas, we ride the air. Our voices pierce the intervals of space, and our thoughts the unplumbed waves of ether. And from her watch-tower scrutinizing all-science, pure and applied, history and art, mechanism and spirit, teleology, evolution - the science of sciences, Divine Philosophy rounds out her calm survey. Never more tempting, more vital, the problem than that which she faces now; the problem of the fundamental character of personality. "In the light of all this evolution or mutation, what is God?" she asks. "Is he, too, but a cosmic process in which we assist; or an eternal standard of perfection against which we measure ourselves and in terms of which we strive?”

The world of learning was never better worth preparing for. Why is it, then, that from every university in the land, and from every serious journal, there goes up the cry, "Our young people were never more indifferent."

How many nights a week does the student spend in pursuits nonacademic; how great a proportion of his days? What with so-called "college activities," by which he must prove his allegiance to the university, and social functions by which he must recreate his jaded soul, no margin is left for the one and only college activity which is study. Class meetings, business meetings, committee meetings, editorial meetings, football rallies, baseball rallies, pyjama rallies, vicarious athletics on the bleachers, garrulous athletics in the dining-room and parlor and on the porch, rehearsals of the glee club, rehearsals of the mandolin club and of the banjo, rehearsals for dramatics (a word to stand the hair on end), college dances and class banquets, fraternity dances and suppers, preparations for the dances and banquets, more committees for the preparations; a running up

and down the campus for ephemeral items for ephemeral articles in ephemeral papers, a soliciting of advertisements, a running up and down for subscriptions to the dances and the dinners, and the papers and the clubs; a running up and down in college politics, making tickets, pulling wires, adjusting combinations, canvassing for votes — canvassing the girls for votes, spending hours at sorority houses for votes - spending hours at sorority houses for sentiment; talking rubbish unceasingly, thinking rubbish, revamping rubbish — rubbish about high jinks, rubbish about low, rubbish about rallies, rubbish about pseudo-civic honor, rubbish about girls; what margin of leisure is left for the one activity of the college, which is study?

In Oxford and Cambridge, than which no universities have turned out finer, cleaner, more manly, more highly cultivated, and more practically trained scholars, statesmen, empire builders, or more generous enthusiasts for general athletics and clean sport in Oxford and Cambridge the purpose is study, and the honors are paid to the scholar. There are no undergraduate newspapers, no class meetings, no college politics, no football rallies, no business managers, no claques for organized applause, no yell leaders, no dances, no social functions of the mass. Social intercourse during term between the sexes is strictly forbidden; and it is a matter of college loyalty to live up to the rule. Of nonacademic activities there are but two - athletics and conversation. They are not a function but a recreation; nor are they limited to specialists whose reputation is professed. Young Oxonians, in general, lead a serene and indistracted, but rich and wholesome life. They cultivate athletics because each is an active devotee of some form of sport. And conversation in junior commons, in the informal clubs, in study or in tutor's room — it is an education, a passion, an art.

A foreigner attending, in an American university, an assembly of student speakers will be justified in concluding that the university exists for nothing but so-called "student activities."

The real purpose of the university will not be mentioned, for usually our undergraduates live two lives distinct; one utterly nonacademic. The nonacademic is for them the real; the scholarly an encroachment. The student who regards the scholarly as paramount is deficient in "allegiance to his university."

Athletics, meanwhile, which should play a necessary part in the physical, and therefore spiritual, development of all students, are relegated to ten per cent of the students. The rest assist on the bleachers. The ninety per cent are killing two birds with one stone. They are taking second-hand exercise; and, by their grotesque and infantile applause, they are displaying what they call their "loyalty."

Those noctes cœnæque deum of history and poetry and philosophical discourse, to the memory of which the older generation reverts with rapture, have faded in this light of common day. In the hurry of mundane pursuit the student rarely halts to read, rarely to consider; rarely to discuss the concerns of the large life.

President Schurman has recently said that there has been no decline of scholarship in the people's universities; but only in the older institutions of the East, to which rich parents send their sons with the view to the advantages of social position; and that in the people's universities the social standing of students has never cut so much figure as scholarship. The assurance is comfortable; but it obscures the issue. If by "social standing" the president of Cornell means position in the coteries of wealth, fashion, conviviality, it may be that "social standing" bulks larger in the older univeristy than in the university of the state. But the fact is that, in student esteem, East and West, social standing means no such thing: it means the position achieved by prominence in nonacademic or 'campus" activities. And in student esteem such prominence cuts a far more important figure than that of either wealth or scholarship. Such prominence has been gaining ground for