Charles Franklin Thwing

“ They keep their brains where their brains ought to be—inside their skulls. They keep their hearts where their hearts ought to be—inside their chests. They keep their appetites where their appetites ought to be. Too many men keep their brains inside their chests: the emotions absorb the intellect. ”

“ The scholar seldom emerges. If one out of each thousand students, entering the American college this year, should prove to be a scholar, the proportion is as large as one can hope for. For up to one in a thousand is as big a proportion as the world is prepared to accept. Yet it is to be hoped that you and that most men should have appreciation and sympathy with scholarship. You should know what scholarship [Pg 30] means: in work as toilsomeness, in method as wisdom, in atmosphere as thoroughness and patience, in result as an addition to the stock of human knowledge. ”

“ They are remote from crankiness, eccentricity. They may or may not have fads; but they are not faddists. Not one of them is a genius in either the good or the evil side of conspicuous native power. They see and weigh evidence. They are a happy union of wit and wisdom, of jest and precept, of work and play, of companionship and solitude, of thinking and resting, of receptivity and creativeness, of the ideal and the practical, of individualism [Pg 75] and of sympathy. They are living in the day, but they are not living for the day. ”

“ You will soon learn, my son, that college men are, as a rule, sound in body, sane in mind, in heart pure, in will vigorous, keen in conscience, and filled with noble aspirations. Such men usually interpret life, both academic and general, in sanity and in justice. ”

“ The first principle of college life is the principle of doing one's duty. In your appreciation of scholarship, your first duty is to learn your lessons. I have known many college men who learned their lessons, who yet failed to get from the college all that they ought to get. But I [Pg 32] have never known a man who failed to get his lessons, whatever else he may have got, to receive the full advantage of the course. The curriculum of every good college is the resultant of scores or of hundreds of years of reflection and of trial. ”

“ The student also is to believe that the human brotherhood is capable of indefinite progress. The law of evolution makes the belief in human perfectibility easy; the principles of religion make the belief glorious. Slow is the progress. One generation turns the jack-screw of uplifting one thread ”

“ A misconception which is more or less common among students you will soon have occasion to see relates to the failure to distinguish, [Pg 54] on the one side, knowledge from efficiency, and on the other, knowledge from cultivation. In the former time, the worth of knowledge, as knowledge, was emphasized in the college. The man who knew was regarded as the great man. To make each student an encyclopedia of information was a not uncommon aim. It is certainly well to know. Scholarship is seldom in peril of receiving too high encomium. Yet, knowledge is not power. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The student is also too prone to distinguish between academic morals and human morals. As a student, [Pg 62] he may crib in examination without compunction. As a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive his teacher. Students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign or the pole of your barber. In such college outlawry he loses no sense of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students. Let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals there is usually no sense of malice. ”

“ The duty of learning one's lessons is, in these times, opposed by at least two elements of college life. One is self-indulgence and the other is athletics. Self-indulgence is a general cause and constant. Athletics have in the last thirty years come to be a force more or less dominant. Athletics represent a mighty force for collegiate and human betterment. Football, which [Pg 39] is par excellence the college game, is an admirable method of training the man physical, the man intellectual and the man ethical. But football is not a college purpose; it is a college means. ”

“ 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 [Pg 16] 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. ”

“ The college man is to follow the wisest leadership, to obey the highest principles, to give himself to the contemplation of the sublimest; but [Pg 93] his following, his obedience, his self-surrender are to bring him to and keep him with the Being Supreme. Religion thus broadly interpreted makes a keen and mighty appeal to the college man. Let the college man be religious; let not the college man have a religion. Let religion be a fundamental element of his character, and not a quality of his changing self. His religion, like that of every other man, should first be human, not scholastic ”

“ Whether the college is wise in allowing such loafing, it is not for me now to say, but I can trust you to be the proper kind of loafer as well as of worker.
Indeed, I want you to have good habits of working. In such habits the valuation of time is of special significance. For time is not an agent. It does nothing. As a power, time is absolutely worthless. As a condition, time is of infinite worth. Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln [Pg 48] College, said: "Time seems infinite to the freshman in his first term." ”

“ Keeping themselves at their one work these men embody a sense of duty. I find they have a conscience. Their conscience is not worn outside, but inside, their bosom. They [Pg 87] make no show of doing what they ought. They simply do what they are called upon to do—and that is all there is to it. It was said of a first scholar in an historic college that he was never caught working. These same men may, or may not be caught working, but they do work, and their work is a normal and moral part of their being. ”

“ Humanity does rise. Linked with this love for man and the assurance of his progress the college man is to determine himself to advance this progress. Whatever his [Pg 90] condition, whatever his ability, he is to do his part. As is said in that noble epitaph to Wordsworth, placed in the little church at Grasmere, each is to be "a minister of high and sacred truth."
I want you to come out from the college with a determination to do something worth while. It is rather singular how political ambitions have ceased among graduates. Some say all ambition has ceased among college men. ”

“ Humility means greatness. Cockiness is a token of narrowness. The Socratic spirit of modesty is as true a manner of wisdom as it is an effective method of increasing wisdom. The man who has an opinion on all things, has no right to an opinion on any one.
This intellectual sympathy and appreciation should take on esthetic relations. You should be a lover of beauty as well as of wisdom. Good books, good pictures, good music, good architecture, should be among your avocations. Read a piece of good literature every day. ”

“ Another misconception made by the student is also common. It is a misconception attaching to any weakness of his character. The student is inclined to believe that there may be weaknesses which are not structural. He may think that there may be some weakness in one part of his whole being which shall not affect his whole being. He may believe that he can skimp his intellectual labor without making his moral nature thin, or that he can break the laws of his moral nature without breaking his intellectual integrity. ”

“ And see a piece of good architecture every day. Some of the college buildings can give it. Alas! many do not. Such visions and hearings will soak into your manhood.
All this is only saying lead the life intellectual. You should not only be a thinker, you should be thoughtful. You should be a man of large thoughtfulness. You should be prepared to interpret life and all phenomena in terms of the intellect. Many of our countrymen are intelligent. They know a great deal. ”

“ The college man is in peril of forgetting the worth of cultivation. Knowledge should lead to cultivation, [Pg 61] but, as in the case of securing efficiency, the mind of the student may be so fixed upon processes as to fail to recognize the importance of the result as manifest in the cultivation of his whole being.
In the case of both efficiency and cultivation, the student is to remember there is no substitute. Intellectual power cannot be counterfeited. Any attempt, also, to secure a sham cultivation is foreordained to failure. ”

“ In the creation of the gentleman as well as of the thinker, the personal equation counts. In fact, it counts for more in the making of the gentleman. For in this making truth is less important than the personality. In the gentleman intellectual altruism and moral appreciativeness are large elements. ”

“ Too many men put their hearts inside their skull: the emotions are dried [Pg 73] up in the clear air of thought. Too many put both brains and heart where the appetites are: both judgment and action are swallowed up in the animal. ”

“ But for the student to receive worthy advantage from these forces he is obliged to relate himself to them by hard intellectual attention and application. Sir Leslie Stephen [Pg 33] says that the Cambridge teachers of his time were not given to enthusiasms, but preached common-sense, and common-sense said: "Stick to your triposes, grind at your mill, and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your bachelor's degree." The duty of the American college student is no less evident. He is to stick to his triposes. His triposes are his lessons. ”

“ The worth is so great that very slight may be the paragraph I write you. In the "Egoist," George Meredith says, "Health, [Pg 26] wealth and beauty are three considerations to be sought for in a woman, who is to become the wife of Sir Willoughby." Wealth and beauty are quite as much out of ordinary results of the education of the American college as health should be among those results.
One may be sick, and through sickness become a saint; one may be sick and through sickness become a sinner. But one cannot be sick and at the same time be as good a worker as he would be if he were not sick. ”

“ Others would affirm that the cultivated person is the person who appreciates the best which life offers. Appreciation is intellectual, emotional, volitional. It is discrimination plus sympathy. It contains a dash of admiration. It [Pg 59] recognizes and adopts the best in every achievement, in the arts of literature, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture. The cultivated person seeks out the least unworthy in the unworthy, and the most worthy in that which is at all worthy. The person of cultivation knows, compares, relates, judges. ”

“ In order to open the eyes of the heart, in order to create an intellectual conscientiousness, the study of great literatures must be assigned a high place. Constant and complex needs to be such study. ”

“ 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 X2 but a form of the mind? Mathematics demands clearness of thinking and of statement. Without clearness mathematics is naught. It also represents comprehensiveness. ”

“ As a gentleman you will be a friend and will have friends. In this relation of friendship in its earlier stages there is no part of life in which it is more important for you to exercise the virtue and grace of reserve. Be in no haste to make friends. Friendships are growths, not manufactures. ”

“ The irreverence which characterizes all American life is prone to become insolence, when, in the student, it is raised to the second or third power. The able man and true—student or not a student—of course presently adjusts himself to orderly conditions. ”

“ If you be a laborer in one field, you should not seek, and I know you will not seek, to discount the existence of other fields, or despise the laborers in those fields. If you become an engineer, you will not condemn the classicist as useless. ”

“ I also want you to go from the college a good combination of a good worker and a good loafer. To [Pg 44] be able to loaf well is not a bad purpose of an education. The loafing that carries along with itself the freedom from selfishness, appreciation of others' conditions, and gentlemanliness, is worth commending. Loafing that follows hard work and prepares for hard work is one of the best equipments of a man. Loafing that has no object, loafing as a vocation, is to be despised. ”