Building eras in religion

Front matter

NEW REVISED EDITION OE DR. BUSHNEII/S WORKS

The Spirit in Man : Sermons and Selections.

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Contents

PAGB

I. Building Eras in Religion 9

II. The New Education 35

II. The New Education."

We agree, in common speech, to call educated men, " men of letters" understanding by the term such as have been trained in the classics and the literatures of the Greek and Latin peoples. For the time was, at the revival of learning so-called, when there was nothing else to begin at and learn from. Plato, Aristotle, Greek and Latin poems, histories and orations, were the general stock of the world's mental furniture. It was letters then or nothing. And a glorious quickening of mind began thus at the study of letters, whence alone it could. So by a kind of scholarly prescription, we fell into the opinion, for a time, that letters are and must be the staple matter of all high education.

But there was a day of things to come, as of letters ; for when things arrive at knowledge in the discoveries of science, they too will claim the right to be educators, taking the place, or sharing the place, of letters. And as letters are the mind-stock furnished by men, so things will be the stock of endowment

* Delivered at New Haven before the Sheffield Scientific School, at Commencement, 1870.

6b THE NEW EDUCATION.

bodied in God's own works. Their revelations, so long hidden from discovery, will come out now as in fresh glory, setting mind aglow with new intelligence. And they will uncover such new ranges of thought, and such worlds-full of meaning, in a method so exactly, gloriously, conformed to mind, that if the great human teachers, such as Plato and Aristotle, had but caught the sense of them, it is even doubtful whether they would have been able to think of anything else. Who of us indeed will not be set on fire himself, if once it occurs to him to ask how it must have gone with either of these two, — Plato, for example, — had he been allowed to spread his great soul suddenly out on things and grasp their science as we do to-day ? His name would have been Plato still, and might possibly have come down to us ; but the man, the character that filled that name, must have been wholly another, glorious enough doubtless, but yet with another sort of glory. Finding how, in that strangely gifted moment, to untwist the threads and score the angles and velocities of light ; flashing in telescopic vision across the abysses, and formulating the forces and times of the sky ; questioning and getting answer from the clouds, whence they rise, and how they carry their loads of thunder and rain ; unyoking analytically the atoms of the world, and beholding the rush of their attractions, moving all in regimental count and squadrons of formulae ; findinghow color is magically hid in the colorless white beam of the day ; and having opened to his inspection the miraculous gcometrizings of the crystal growths ; distinguishing the layers and times of the rocks below, and reading, so to speak, in their tables of stone, the autograph record of innumerable populations, dead and gone before the stone itself was made ; able also, canvassing mere upper surface, where agriculture digs and delves for bread, to hear exactly what the soils ask for to put them in fertility, and set their deserts blooming in fresh growths ; and yet, once more, and what is more than all, if he could have gotten full note of the forces unheard, trooping through the masses and affinities of substance, — light, heat, attraction, magnetism, — conceiving the innumerable engines and machineries that will sometime put them in harness for the draught, to plough through even wide oceans against the tides and storms, to whirl across whole continents in journeys that are races, to leap even thousands of miles through gulfs miles deep, and come out in swift couriership and dry, with messages rushed through the paths of the sea ; — if, I say, great Plato could have sent his thought through these and other such-like stupendous revelations of science, in some brief time, and come out with any breath left in him, what would have been his first word to the young men of his Academy, and what would he have bid them study but these new, fresh-born, allwondrous things !

" Here, behold ! is true high argument for you, such as neither I, nor Socrates, nor all sages and poets could ever think before."

And what now of the Dialogues, what of the Ita public, what of all the fine papers he was going to write for us ? Ah, I fear he would -have dropped them incontinently out of mind, made a full end of them ! And glad enough truly we have a right to be, that no such stunning revelation befell him ; for the loss of these would have been even the more irreparable that we could never have known it.

Now any one of us who has barely swept over the field of modern science, in this rapid way of mental excursion, must clearly see, I think, that in such new arrival of things, a new education, in some good sense of the terms, must also have arrived. The world itself is now become God's classic, a book that is perfect in the method, grand in the subject, and full of all deepest insight; having more language for mind in it, more idea, meaning, music, logical endowment, interpenetration of beauty and force, many times more to raise intelligence, and be the ensouling both of order and flame, than there is or possibly can be in all the contributions of letters or of classic genius in all the past ages ; — dwarfed, of course, by man's infantile quantities, and flawed by mortal blemish. Sorry match enough all books of man, for God's book written in things.

Since the world then, set forth by science, is become, as it were, a new intelligible congener at all points to mind, something like a new education, it is plain beforehand, must result ; and a large debate is now going on as to what the change shall be. Some will only modernize the academic courses in the manner of

THE NEW EDUCATION. 8 ( J

our American colleges, adding new studies as new sciences arrive. Some will vote the classics dead and lei them go. Others will only include them in a list of optionals, made up in no unity of reason, but heterogenic as the caprices of choice may be, making thus no proper university, but a proper omnibus rather on a four years' trip, with any such inside as will take the passage. I cannot undertake to discuss this very heavy matter here, and happily I need not, because it is already decided. Enough that on this ground there are to be two organizations : first, the old Academic College, working for all ages by essentially the same gymnastic plan ; and secondly, a new College of Practical Science that belongs more particularly to the present age and its wants. I only suggest, with a certain feeling of satisfaction that there is a distribution of nature which very nearly corresponds, a distribution, that is, of studies for what is inherent and for what is in use, of the pure mathematics and the applied, of theoretic science and practical science, of skill in the classic tongues and of skill in this or that spoken language. If it should be our opinion that as good classics are written now in our modern languages as are brought us in the ancient, still our tongue itself dates from their dead motherhood, and to that we must go, alivays and forever, to master it. That is the distinctively elegant learning, because it is the only kind of learning that takes us back to the word of our mother, and the first principles of our own tongue.

What I propose then, at the present time, is to have such debate as we may, on the office and place of the scientific school ; providing a shorter course of study for such as have only shorter means ; a course better adapted, apart from all consideration of means, for the best advance of a certain class of minds ; and especially a course that will prepare a new great age of business faculty, such as notoriously the college training does not. The school of practical science, added to the fixed courses of the college plan, proposes, in fact, a universalizing of the university idea ; that as we have schools of theology and law and medicine, with military schools outside, to serve the military uses, so we are to have as many schools of applied science as there are kinds of arts to be scientifically shaped and helped.

All along, in our scientific gestation period, we have been moving on this issue, unawares to ourselves, and now at last the day of birth is come. For here, exactly, is the place and office which our Connecticut Scientific School, the Sheffield, is engaged to fill, wherein it is entitled to a degree of consideration, which it has by no means received as yet from our people. Most of them have heard that such a school exists, and is somehow engaged to give scientific help to agriculture, mining, metallurgy, engineering, and the right application of the mechanical forces : but by what strides of progress, almost transcending belief, it is moving forward on a great future they do not know. Having only such endownient as sufficed for the stale of infancy, it has already outgrown both the endowment and the infancy, gathering in a large corps of teachers, resolute men, gifted with all highest qualifications, and above all, able to find much bread in their enthusiasm. By the unwonted force of that, backed by their formerly single benefactor, who is now being joined by others ; having also a small agricultural fund in the public lands, they have gotten their halls and laboratories and cabinets and all best kinds of apparatus, and have gathered in. by their successes in teaching, a larger and larger following of pupils, till now, at last, they count as many on the ground as one hundred and forty, putting their institution far in advance of all other like institutions in the country, unless West Point be taken as an exception. Having won for it such precedence, almost gratis, they have certainly won a right also to live and have their endowment solidly made up to them ; for they, plainly enough, cannot live on their enthusiasm always. And this, exactly, is getting to be the opinion of many, as we see by the growing additions made to their funds ; for since they bear the flag so well, we are learning to have it as the point of honor to send them bravely on with cheers.

But I am not here to speak as their advocate, partly because they do not ask it, and partly because they can do it for themselves much better than I can do it for them. What I am going to say. therefore, will not be for this particular school, but for the general subject.

It does not appear to have been observed, as it very well might be, that the progress of natural science must finally bring on just the crisis which has now arrived ; placing every people or nation that expects to have a forward position in the world, under a fixed necessity of culture in the uses of science. What immense strides have been made in all works of enterprise and arts of production, under the new-discovered laws and principles, is sufficiently observed and is even a stale kind of story. But the end is not yet ; the story is only begun.

The one single science of chemistry, for example, what has it not done ? See the old dead-matter world, dead and impotent all through, even as omnipotent steam is dead in the quiet inefficiency of water, quickened, so to speak, in every dullest atom, and leaping out in fiery potency to stir whatever stirs for it ; gases innumerable, new creatures altogether, getting free, to be known as the ghost-world of matter ; new metals, new salts, solvents, colors, oils, pigments ; old quantities inert made thunders of ; navigation re-created and oceans reduced to ponds ; whole months of old-fashioned time condensed into single days ; freights, bulletins, populations, thoughts, put whirling as in mazes of new celerity ; fires, forges, wheels, laboratories innumerable, and shops that are populous towns, — where shall we stop recounting only what this single science has done ?

And yet all this we seem to think, because the science new-born has so far applied itself. What need

T ii E NEW EDUCATION. 43

then have we of schools to conduct such applications ? All the greater need, I answer, that so many wider, vaster applications are not made, but are only ready to be. See how it goes with iron and steel. What have Ave better known, since even Tubal-cain's day, than how to make them, work them and get a great part of our civilization out of them ? And yet our processes have been so changed within a very few years that we seem to have known just nothing about chem. Our chemists showed us first how steel is differed from iron by the union of carbon. We enjoyed the really important discovery for a long time, when by and by the further discovery followed that pig-iron only contained too much carbon. Whereupon Bessemer puts himself to burning out a part of the carbon, so as to leave what before was pig-iron, steel, instead of roasting carbon into iron already decarbonized. He succeeded, but found on trial that he could not stop the burning-out process accurately enough to make the new method work evenly, as it must to be available. Not to be defeated so, he took his lesson at first principles again, and began once more, proposing now to burn out all the carbon in his principal retort, having another slung by its side, with just enough in it, by weight, of the supercarbonized pig not burned but only melted, to give the needed stock of carbon for all. Thus at every step of his invention he was feeling after steel in pig-iron by strict laws of chemistry, till finally he came down square upon it. His problem was triumphantly and heroically finished.

So that now, by one of the grandest strides ever made in the arts, he is girdling the world with cast-steel in a way that makes it only a little more expensive kind of iron.

The same story exactly is just now ready in respect to coal. Did Ave not know all about it, and how to get the heat of it, a long time ago ? But the new Siemens furnace, utilizing it by first turning it into gas and burning that in a blast of hot air, abstracting also the heat as it is used, and storing it in bricks to be used a dozen times over, saving a whole four-fifths of the expense, — what is this profoundly cunning fetch of economy but au application, yesterday, of principles of science well known long ago, and waiting to be thus applied ?

So of all the other sciences ; our application of them is yet scant and imperfect. Of the $2,000,000,000 already expended for railroads in our country, what do they tell us but that 20 per cent, at least, — $400,- 000,000, — has been thrown away by bad engineering, such as more and better science would have avoided. And what do we hear, but that our own young school of science has already saved money enough to the State, by simply exposing the worthlessness of worthless manures, to endow it ten times over more sufficiently than it can ever hope to be endowed ?

It could not be more plain, in short, that as a people we have interests of growth and production depending on a more scientific equipment in our processes, than many of us are vet able to conceive. We are a proverbially sharp-witted people, and we make a great many lucky hits of invention, because our wits are nimbled for almost anything by our ambitious but rather light and thin education. But thriving thus by our wits and by lucky accidents and conditions will not hold us long. Solid endowments are indispensable in the long run. And how much does it signify that we probably have not any two men, in all our shops and superintendencies, who, without more science, could ever have discovered the cast-steeling process of Bessemer or the heating process of Siemen ! Down to the time of the Great Exhibition of London, the British people, having such advantages in their supplies of coal and iron, felt sure of an easy precedence in all the arts depending on these two staples. Meantime the great French iron-mongering, machinebuilding establishments of Creusot, every day enlarging, are becoming schools of monitorial instruction, so to speak, where their designers and workmen are being trained in eye and hand, in scientific adjustments and the propagations of forces, in the study of forms and the sciences and graces of mechanical movement, and behold it comes out, in the Great Exposition at Paris, that the shops of British art are ignominiously beaten at every point ! Their designs are coarse and clumsy ; their engines are so badly constructed, as respects the saving of heat and of iron and also of friction, as to virtually put them out of the market. And it has actually resulted since, that the English railroads are importing locomotive engines largely from

France. It would even be amusing, if it were a little less sad, to hear the four great committees of Englishmen, comprising the aristocracy of the realm at one end, and the skilled workmen at the other, returning from the French Exposition, testifying in reports that have the minor key and the sound almost of a cry, that England must have schools of applied science, or else go down utterly in the arts of production.

Shortly after, so great is the concern excited by this discomfiture, that J. Scott Russell, of " Great Eastern " celebrity, a man of the highest capacity and a thoroughly trained scholar, hastens or is hastened off to the Continent to re-examine the schools of technical science, with which he was already acquainted, and make his report of them. He comes back, telling his people very frankly that they are the worst educated nation of Europe. He spreads out the grand scheme of technical training in Prussia. He describes the magnificent Polytechnicum of little Switzerland, at Zurich, showing how it is already drawing off some of the finest, daintiest kinds of manufacture both from England and France, giving to this poor little people, having neither coal nor iron, a fair large part of the world's most productive industries. He spreads out in particular the art education map of the little duchy of Wiirtemberg, comprising 1,700,000 people, showinghow everything is taught scientifically, as respects the principal arts of life, even down to the shoeing of horses, and tells his countrymen that if they were to provide instruction according to the same ratio of supply, they would have 11 universities of applied science, with 49 professors each, and more than 5,000 students ; 11 subordinate trade schools or colleges, with 26 professors each, and 6,500 students ; and subordinate to these, in towns and villages, 1,180 schools, having 425 masters and more than 8,000 pupils; whereas, in place of all these, they have now almost nothing to show but a high university education, which rises to its summit in classical and logical studies, — dead the first by time, and dead the second by nature, because it is too dry to be alive ; both having only the least relation possible to uses in life's productive works.

The point, then, at which we arrive in this economic exposition, is briefly this : that a new crisis now is pending for the nations, pending for us as truly as for any ; for whatever nations or peoples get most forward practically in science, we now begin to see, must bring all others under. And this is just as true for the most isolated and separate nations as for any. We ourselves are in the battle and cannot escape it, and nothing is left us but to strip to it and go in for the completest and best scientific education possible.

At this point we encounter too a new issue, made up for culture itself, that has possibly a greater significance than any mere culture in letters can ever be supposed to have. In these applications of science, the problem is to inaugurate in fact a new creatorship ; and creatorship is a type of advancement that reaches far. Hitherto we have been occupied mainly with the promise made of economic benefits. But these are only rude beginnings ; better and higher things are to come after. What else do we now see in some of the facts just referred to, but that we are come already to a point where beauty of design, elegance of form, felicity and grace of composition, are more and more distinctly proved to be the sine qua non of success ? And here it is that the true creative ability is to meet the final test ; a test that is rigidly mental, requiring the sharpest and most subtle perceptions, tastes the most delicate, adjustments in the nicest skill and a piercing insight of nature's laws and properties, such as no mind, which has not somehow come into the eternal beauty, can ever hope to attain. And whether this kind of culture is not going some time even to exceed the classic refinement, is certainly no absurd question. The German people are a people admitted to be not surpassed in the accomplishments of letters and elegant scholarship ; but there is a clear possibility that their new creatorship, begun in the applications of science, will sometime bring them to the flower in a more variously, multifariously creative beauty ; even as God's own beauty flowered in the colors, the shapes, the articulated functions and the wondrously composed interplay of parts in the constitutive order of his work. Besides, there is a robustness of quality in this matter of creatorship that far exceeds the thin, second-hand way of classic imitation. It goes out among things, down into their subtleties, up along their heights, and reads them through and through, as by some force of personal co-attainment. And then, as it is given to man for his highest distinction to be the new creator of the world, any people farthest advanced in creatorship will have the highest consciousness and know their fit honor as being in the completest form of life. Having nature, so to speak, in dominion, they will have the genuine exaltation of power ; great sentiments too, that are not born of scholarship, and are only the better enunciated without classic quotations. And yet, being in affinity with all ornament, they will have the classics also ; asking for more dead languages, not fewer, willing even to go back on the Sanscrit, if they may but know more perfectly the timbers and articulations of their own living tongue.

We come upon a question thus which is difficult, viz., what the schools or colleges of practical science are going to do for the training of mind ?

And here I willingly yield, at the outset, the immense distinction between equipment and education, between the outfit of a worker among causes, and the education of a mind for power over mind. Education is confessedly what educes or draws out mind ; hence the word. The colleges undertake to do it gymnastically ; that is by a training in the ancient classics and the pure mathematics ; adding a few branches of experimental science just to make a beginning of general intelligence. Study for study's sake is their law, and this kind of education they call liberal, I suppose, because the pupil is not haruessed iu it to any of life's labors. Having no thought as yet of ends or destinations, he is to be separated thus from the vulgar prejudices of the shop and the market and allowed to have his growth in a way more close to his own nature. And so, educated for no particular ends, he will be the better educated for all ends. Thus only, it is claimed, will the great scholars and elegant writers and the men most able to discuss learned questions be trained. All the universalized minds must have, it is said, this universalizing motherhood. No full round man can be educated in particular to this or that, and full round men we do amazingly want in all the walks of life.

But granting, as we may, the argument, it does not follow that if we propose something short of this we propose anything contrary to it. If we seem to propose an equipment and not an education, that equipment will be education, just according to the strain of mind-labor it has cost ; and the imagining, thinking, combining power of the man may be drawn out even more energetically and effectually, than it would be by twice as many years of routine study. What gymnast, whether of body or mind, ever wrestles in such fierce application, as he that is in throes of labor to make out his great invention ?

After all there is no patent way of making a mind, or preparing the out-birth of a great soul's power. It will grow by a pine-knot candle as well as by the classic lamp of a college. If it cannot be born out of the highest advantages, then it will be out of such as it can have. We propose, in fact, a less complete and so far inferior course, in the school of practical science, because it will carry some really superior effects, begetting more precise ideas of things, giving the manege of nature's causes more perfectly, and. letting the •pupil farther in among them. As the term is to be shorter and. more sharply set, we expect to work faster, and we have no doubt that a vast number oi minds will be sprung for a great and grand history, that would otherwise never break fetter at all. It would not be strange if some of the very best professors of Latin and Greek should be darted forth out of these limited studies into just those improved methods of study which their own necessities have compelled, and for which all these ages have been waiting. We can never tell what a soul is going to break into, when it is once really started into action. It may even break into theology, asking leave of nobody !

But there is a way of speaking, on the part of certain adhesionists of the college method and the college ideas, that does not allow us even the modified indulgence here claimed. They speak, oftener than we like to hear them, even slightingly or contemptuously of studies that are for uses, as if these were the going after knowledge as a trade or to get a living by it. They do not consider how very close upon exactly this are the studies of the learned professions. Arc they therefore sordid studies ? Or are they culminations rather, where the young man, trained by lessons, goes above them or beyond them, to find the uses in which their value lies ? Besides, if it is a matter in point to make studies look contemptible, what is easier than to put the stupidest possible face on the college method by just calling it the dumb-bell method ? For, what are we told, but that education is to make the mind's arms supple before the battle of life begins, by training them gymnastically, that is by studies for the study's sake, and what is that but the dumb-bell method ?

Now all such arts of derogation are only tricks of speech and not arguments. At any rate, I undertake, in simple disregard of the first, to make downright assertion of the honors of practical science. Which in fact is nobler, grander to thought, and more godlike, science that beholds a use, or science that is only science ? What in fact is the true honor of science itself, if it is not in the power it has to multiply good ; to create wealth, to arm, and re-endow, and recompose, and re-create the world, making gods of men ? And where has the world made heroes of a nobler kind, more bloodless, higher in achievement, conquerors in a grander key ? Just the thing, indeed, to be admired in practical science, is that it is practical. And we want even great institutions endowed for it, simply because they will come bringing uses, even God's intended uses, when he put things into their laws, and laws into things.

In statements like these it will be seen that, while I give in readily to the superior advantages of the old education as related to certain modes of culture, I am not afraid to claim for the new certain other advantages that, looking only to culture itself, weigh heavily in the scale. Let me take my liberty in tracing a little way some of these comparisons. And if I seem to speak one-sidedly, as an advocate, it will only be that I am righting up an equilibrium not yet adjusted.