now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college training? is there any broader line鈥攕ince our education claims primarily not to be narrow鈥攊n which we also are made good judges between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? what is especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the humanities, and these are often identified with greek and latin. but it is only as literatures, not as languages, that greek and latin have any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. you can give humanistic value to almost anything by reaching it historically. geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
the sifting of human creations! 鈥攏othing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. all our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms better and worse may signify in general. our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. we sympathize with mens mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. what the colleges鈥攖eaching humanities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant鈥攕hould at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. the feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent鈥攖his is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. it is the better part of what men know as wisdom. some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. but to have spent ones youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.