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+Project Gutenberg's Every Man His Own University, by Russell H. Conwell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Every Man His Own University
+
+Author: Russell H. Conwell
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2011 [EBook #36955]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     Every Man His Own University
+
+                       _By_ RUSSELL H. CONWELL
+
+
+                        Every Man's University
+                    Animals and "The Least Things"
+                           The Bottom Rung
+                           Thoughtfulness
+                     Instincts and Individuality
+
+
+    VOLUME 4
+
+    NATIONAL
+    EXTENSION UNIVERSITY
+
+    597 Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+
+    OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
+
+    Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
+    Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+EVERY MAN'S UNIVERSITY
+
+
+A distinct university walks about under each man's hat. The only man who
+achieves success in the other universities of the world, and in the
+larger university of life, is the man who has first taken his graduate
+course and his post-graduate course in the university under his hat.
+There _observation_ furnishes a daily change in the curriculum. Books
+are not the original sources of power, but observation, which may bring
+to us all wide experience, deep thinking, fine feeling, and the power to
+act for oneself, is the very dynamo of power.
+
+Without observation, literature and meditation are shower and sunshine
+upon unbroken soil. Only those schools and colleges are true schools
+and colleges which regard it as the chief business of all their
+teaching to persuade those under their charge to see more perfectly what
+they are looking at, to find what they should have been unable to
+observe had it not been for their school instruction. You can't make a
+good arrow from a pig's tail, and you can seldom get a man worth while
+out of one who has gone through the early part of his life without
+having learned to be alert when things are to be seen or heard. John
+Stuart Blackie says that it is astonishing how much we all go about with
+our eyes wide open and see nothing, and Doctor Johnson says that some
+men shall see more while riding ten miles upon the top of an omnibus,
+than some others shall see in riding over the continent.
+
+_How to observe_ should be the motto, not only in the beginning of our
+life, but throughout our career. With the same intellectual gifts,
+interested in the same ideas, two men walk side by side through the same
+scenery and meet the same people. One man has had much inspiration from
+the country traversed, and has been intent upon all that he has seen and
+heard among the people. The other has caught no inspiration from beauty
+or bird or blossom, and only the trivialities of the people have amused
+him.[1]
+
+A traveler in Athens or Rome, Paris or London, may be shown these cities
+by a professional guide, and yet gain only a smattering of what these
+cities hold in store for him, and remember little of what he has seen.
+Another traveler, unattended by a guide, but observant of everything
+that comes to his eyes and ears, will carry away stores from his visit
+to those cities, which shall be of life-long interest and be
+serviceable to all who shall travel his way. The solitary but observant
+stranger in a country almost always profits most from his travels. He is
+compelled to notice boulevards and buildings, parks and people; and
+every day of his travels is a lesson in observation that accustoms him
+to remember all he has once seen. The newspaper correspondents of other
+days had no guide-books or guides, and they were entire strangers in the
+places they visited. They relied entirely upon themselves to find their
+way, and to discover everything that was valuable and interesting. They
+found much that the modern guide either overlooks or disregards, and
+wrote for the papers at home what would most interest and instruct their
+readers.
+
+When Henry M. Stanley first visited Jerusalem he insisted that the
+dragoman in charge of his party should keep all guides and guide-books
+out of his sight. In two days Stanley knew the streets and the location
+of the Temple and the Holy Sepulcher and all the notable places in that
+old city. If Stanley is to-day known as one of the most intelligent of
+travelers, it is mainly because he excelled in daily _observation_,
+which every one who thinks for himself recognizes as the supreme
+acquisition of a liberal education. He often said that he knew Rome,
+Naples, and Vienna far better than he knew New York, where he had lived
+many years of his life. In that he resembled the rest of humanity, who
+generally know less about what is notable in their home places, than
+observant visitors know who stay there only a short time during their
+travels. What we pay for in time and labor seems more valuable--nothing
+pay, nothing value.
+
+A great foreign correspondent of his day, Henry W. Chambers, remained
+only six hours at Baalbek, near Damascus; yet he wrote the clearest
+description that probably ever was written of the magnificent temples at
+Baalbek--and he wrote these descriptions, too, at Hong-Kong, after many
+and varied experiences while visiting other places of greater
+importance. Many archeologists and literary men before him had visited
+the moat of the great fortress at Baalbek. Still, they had never
+observed as Chambers observed, and so they missed seeing the arrow-heads
+and all the other warlike instruments used in those ancient days,
+which had lain unnoticed among those huge pillars and great
+foundation-stones.
+
+Although General Lew Wallace lived a long time at Jerusalem, he only
+imagined that there might have been an inner dungeon underneath the
+great prison; so when he wrote _Ben Hur_ he put his leprous heroine into
+this imaginary prison-house. A school-teacher from northern England,
+with her tourist-candle, afterward found the doorway of this prison
+which Wallace had only imagined to be there. On their way from Egypt and
+Palestine to the Euphrates, travelers had for centuries passed over the
+same path in the desert; but it was reserved for a cutter of marble
+inscriptions, after all these centuries, to _observe_ the Rosetta Stone,
+by the help of which archeologists can now read the inscriptions upon
+the tablets in the ancient palaces of Babylon and Ninevah.
+
+Millions and millions had seen the lid of a teakettle bobbing up and
+down over the boiling water before that Scotchman, Watt, observed it
+while making watches. But he was the first of all those millions whose
+close observation led him to investigate this force of boiling water in
+the teakettle. Then he applied this power to the steam-engine, which is
+still the great propelling force of the world. From the time of the
+Garden of Eden apples had fallen in the orchards of the world, through
+all the harvest-days. Of all the billions that had seen apples falling,
+only Sir Isaac Newton observed the law of gravitation that was involved
+in their falling.
+
+All the great discoverers began with nearly the same meager powers for
+observation that the rest of the world has, but early in life came to
+value above all other mental powers this incalculable power to closely
+notice; and each made his realm of observation much richer for his
+discoveries.
+
+Why do the majority of us go through life seeing nothing of the millions
+of marvelous truths and facts while only a few keep their eyes and ears
+wide open and every day are busy in piling up what they have observed!
+The loss of our instincts seems to be the price we pay to-day for the
+few minor acquisitions we get from school and college; we put out our
+brains to make room for our learning. The man who assiduously cultivates
+his powers of observation and thus gains daily from his experiences what
+helps him to see farther and clearer everything in life that is worth
+seeing, has given himself a discipline that is much more important than
+the discipline of all the schools and the colleges without it. The
+greatest text-books of the greatest universities are only the records of
+the observations of some close observer whose better powers of seeing
+things had been acquired mainly while he was taking his courses in that
+university under his hat.
+
+The intellect is both telescope and microscope; if it is rightly used,
+it shall observe thousands of things which are too minute and too
+distant for those who with eyes and ears neither see nor hear. The
+intellect can be made to look far beyond the range of what men and women
+ordinarily see; but not all the colleges in the world can alone confer
+this power--this is the reward of _self-culture_; each must acquire it
+for himself; and perhaps this is why the power of observing deeply and
+widely is so much oftener found in those men and those women who have
+never crossed the threshold of any college but the University of Hard
+Knocks.
+
+    The quickening power of science only he
+    Can know, from whose _own_ soul it gushes free.
+
+When we look back over our life and reflect how many things we might
+have seen and heard had we trained our powers of observation, we seem to
+have climbed little and to have spent most of our time upon plateaus,
+while our achievements seem little better than scratches upon black
+marble. Mankind has a greater esteem for the degrees conferred by the
+University of Observation and Experience than for all the other degrees
+of all other Universities in the world. The only thing that seems most
+to win the respect of real men and women for the degrees conferred by
+colleges is the fact that the graduates have first gained all that close
+observation and wide experience can confer.
+
+The lives of the men and the women who have been worth while keep
+reminding us how vastly more important is this education from ceaseless
+observation than all the mere learning from school courses. It takes ten
+pounds of the stuff gotten from observation and experience to carry one
+pound of school learning wisely. The thinking man will never ask you
+what college you have gone through, but what college has gone through
+you; and the ability and habit of observing deeply and broadly is the
+preparation we all need that the college may go through us. Confucius of
+China, Kito of Japan, Goethe of Germany, Arnold of England, Lincoln and
+Edison of America, stand where they stand to-day in thought and action
+solely because they had in a masterly way educated their power of minute
+attention. In building up a huge business or in amassing enormous
+riches, such men as Rothschild, Rockefeller, and Carnegie show us
+especially how vitally important to all material success is steadfast
+attendance at the school of attention.
+
+The colleges that to-day are advancing most rapidly in esteem are those
+which are recognizing more and more the importance of observation. They
+require their men to spend some portion of their college time in gaining
+experience in their various lines through observing the practical
+workings of their calling; medical students are in hospitals; students
+of law attend courts; theological students engage in mission work; and
+engineers are found in shops. Neither lectures nor speculations can take
+the place of these experiences; each is helpful to the other. When only
+one may be had, the experience from observing actual work is far more
+important. Opportunities for observation of practical matters, along
+with theory, is the modern idea toward which all the best modern
+institutions are tending in their efforts to fit men for the active
+business of life.
+
+Nor has greatness from careful observation and large experience
+distinguished men of action alone. Shakespeare, Goethe, Bunyan, Burns,
+Whittier, Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, and a host of the great men
+of philosophy, science, and literature are where they are to-day in the
+esteem of their fellow men, and in their service to humanity, because
+they were the keenest among the men acute in observation.
+
+[Footnote 1: The failure to observe is strikingly proved by practical
+experiment in the psychological laboratory. Reproductions of a familiar
+or unfamiliar scene are placed in the observers' hands and they are
+instructed to study the reproductions carefully and to remember what
+they see. After 5 minutes careful study, the reproductions are taken
+away and a series of questions concerning them are put to the observers.
+The contradictory answers to these questions is strikingly eloquent of
+the all-too-human inability to observe. Hugo Munsterberg, the famous
+psychologist, made a number of psychological experiments to determine
+the limits of error in observation as these limits affect the
+credibility of witnesses in the court room. Some of his findings are
+summarized in "On the Witness Stand."
+
+Your good newspaper reporter is a trained observer who describes exactly
+what he sees. Yet the manner in which even the trained observer fails to
+observe correctly is unfailingly demonstrated by the widely differing
+accounts of the same occurrence as reported in the various newspapers of
+a community.
+
+One of the best ways to learn to observe correctly and in detail is to
+take a hasty glance at the display in a store window, pass on and
+attempt to recall that which you have seen, the number of objects, what
+they were, etc., and then check your observing faculties by returning to
+the window and listing its contents. Continued practice of this sort
+will greatly increase your observing powers. Perhaps the most famous
+known exponent of this method for training the observing faculties was
+Houdini, the famous magician, who describes the method in detail and his
+experiences in applying it in his memoirs.]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ANIMALS AND "THE LEAST THINGS"
+
+
+The benefits brought to humanity through the study of lower animal life
+are incalculable, and could not be told in one book. With all that
+vivisection and post-mortem dissection have revealed to scientific
+examiners, contagious and infectious diseases have been nearly removed
+from the human family. We have been taught to live better from observing
+animal habits in searching for food, in building their habitats, in
+their mode of living, in their fear of man, and in the methods they
+adopt to preserve their health. All this knowledge has been gained for
+us, for the upbuilding of humanity, through the efforts of _close
+observers_. They have studied the cat by the hearth, the dog by the
+door, the horses in the pasture and stall, the pigs in their pens, and
+the sheep in their folds. Closely associated with the investigators of
+animal life are those who have observed the origin, habits, and
+influence of birds, insects, and creeping things.
+
+But what we have learned from animals in the past seems only a trifle in
+comparison with what they will teach when we go to them with more
+serious purpose and more carefully observe them. The leaders in all
+these investigations of animal life have all been distinguished for
+their power to discover in animals what has escaped other people.
+
+Professor Darwin's close observation of the doves he fed at his door
+opened up to him important suggestions and laid the foundation for his
+great treatise, "The Origin of Species." When Professor Niles of the
+Boston School of Technology was a boy he caught a minnow while returning
+from school. At his father's suggestion he put the fish into a simple
+aquarium and studied its movements. When it died he carefully examined
+its parts under a microscope--and this experience was the beginning of
+his vast knowledge of the animal realm.
+
+While a Philadelphia clergyman was visiting a farmer in northern New
+Jersey, the family became perturbed because their dog had "gone mad."
+They fastened it in the kitchen and sought somebody to kill it by
+shooting at it through the window. A neighbor observed the dog carefully
+and told them it was poisoned. He advised the family to loose it in
+order that it might get some antidote for itself in field or forest. He
+told them that cats, cattle, and horses are often compelled to find an
+antidote for some poisonous herb they have eaten, and that the animals
+know more about such things than any teacher in the medical schools. As
+soon as the dog was unfastened he hastened across the field to a brook,
+and ate a weed that was growing beside the water. The dog soon returned
+to the house, and ate heartily after a two weeks' fast.
+
+The clergyman had followed the dog and observed the plant which it had
+eaten. After the dog had returned to the house he uprooted the plant and
+took some of its leaves to a Philadelphia firm of chemists. Acting upon
+the firm's advice, he sent the leaves to the Smithsonian Institution at
+Washington, and they were found to be a valuable antidote for poison.
+Not only was humanity given a better medicine from this discovery, but
+the clergyman also derived a competency from it. This remedy for
+poisoning is often used in prescriptions; so even doctors sometimes "go
+to the dogs" for instructions.
+
+Like Professor Agassiz and Sir Oliver Lodge, many find their best
+instructors in domestic animals. The fowls around the house and the barn
+may be whole universities for developing the sciences. Through her
+dependence on nature the hen is a more efficient instructor than the
+majority of college professors. She knows by instinct so much of the
+laws of nature that wise men may sit at her feet or her bill and learn.
+Perhaps she may seem a little foolish in proclaiming her achievements in
+egg-laying by a cackle, but her knowledge of the necessities of life,
+her careful oversight of her brood, the way she uses her feet and her
+wings, her foreknowledge of approaching storms, her means of defending
+herself when attacked by hawks, her knowledge of the formation of the
+egg and of the proper time to break the shell for the release of her
+chick--all these are worthy of the attention of even the greatest
+scientists.
+
+In an address at a poultry-men's convention, Oliver Wendell Holmes said
+that chickens seem to have in them much more to study than did Darwin's
+doves. While Holmes was once summering at Kennebunkport, Maine, he
+trained five chickens to come at his call, to fly upon his head, and to
+leap with open bills to catch a kernel of corn. Before the season closed
+the chickens would come to his bedroom even after he had retired--making
+it necessary, as Doctor Holmes said, for the landlord to serve them up
+for dinner. Doctor Holmes's parody on Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"
+shows what a careful observer he was. While some of Longfellow's
+admirers resented the parody as a slight, Longfellow himself always
+treated it as complimentary. He once told James T. Fields that, in one
+couplet of the parody, Holmes had excelled the entire original poem:
+
+    Not like muffled drums be beating
+    On the inside of the shell.
+
+Longfellow told Fields that there are always millions of men standing
+like chickens in the shell, with wings they know not how to use, having
+calls to a larger life outside of which they can see nothing; that some
+peck away until dead on the inside of the shell, while others, assisted
+by a friend on the outside, step out into a life beautiful and complete.
+
+In the egg or molecule we get nearer to God than we do through the
+telescope or by encircling the earth. He who lived nearest the first
+cause gets the best inspiration for visions of all greater sights or
+events; so the cottage is a happier place than the palace for him who
+wishes to get better acquainted with what shall arouse finer thought and
+feeling. The cottage is the best preparatory school for the mansion,
+provided always that the cottage course has been thorough. He who has
+worn his cottage life with manly dignity shall be the man to wear his
+mansion life with composure. Emerson said "the entire system of things
+gets represented in every particle."
+
+Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and unfortunate is the man who
+gets a smattering of many things yet does not know even one small thing
+thoroughly. The power of little things to give instruction and happiness
+should be the first lesson in life, and it should be inculcated deeply.
+The chief need of this discontented and sinful world is to comprehend
+that in one blade of grass or the shading of an evening cloud there is
+sufficient reverence to fill the largest heart, and sufficient science
+to occupy the greatest passion.
+
+We saw a delicate blue flower in the grass this morning which I had
+never noticed before. It seemed a different flower from each angle and,
+when put under a magnifying-glass, had colors I had never noticed before
+in flower or art. The field where it was growing had been familiar to me
+for threescore years and ten, yet the flower was entirely new to me. It
+was so dainty and attractive and inspiring that I felt I had lost
+something important to my spiritual growth all these years--something
+like the experience of Virgil, Guizot, Carlyle, Grotius, or like
+Tennyson in the "Holy Grail," who declares that he had left a real and
+wonderful life behind to follow the unknown. This little flower in the
+morning sunlight awakes thoughts of years long past--of the faces of
+marshaled hosts of battle, of eyes deep and calm with the smile of a
+loving mother's welcome, of the great forgiveness in a father's
+affection.
+
+Had I found that flower seventy years before, I believe my appreciation
+of the Divine Power would have been greater, my heart would have been
+more satisfied, my soul more fully illuminated and pervaded by a holier
+peace. We lose ourselves in all attempts to grasp the cause of which
+this small flower is the result. It is impossible to find words to
+convey the strange emotions which this newly found flower aroused, and
+to tell of the distant realms my imagination visited while I meditated
+there. If we would free ourselves from the perplexing cares which our
+daily duties demand; if we would forget the worries of each day; if the
+losses and disappointments and the wrongs of many years did not press
+themselves upon us; if the demands of many duties and the demands upon
+our attention and the calls of friends did not interrupt--we could find
+in contemplating this wee flower of the field a fund of happiness which
+years of sorrow and misfortune could not destroy.
+
+Bacon and Burke and Niebuhr discovered how much of grandeur can come
+into a life from the little things about us, but they all discovered it
+when it was too late to go back and live the _ideal_ life of simplicity
+and individuality which was suggested to them by a drop of water and a
+humming-bird. The smallest things are the largest in importance, if they
+bring into our lives the largest thoughts and feelings and an incentive
+to largest actions for self and humanity. Why are we forever looking
+upon the horizon for what upon closer view lies at our feet? These
+little beauties of the field rebuke the wanderer and the eminent man
+when it says to all the world, with a sweet smile and a dainty pout,
+"You could have found more in my life than has ever been learned from
+the sages."
+
+While Zinzendorf was stranded nearly a year upon a tiny island, his
+vigorous mind was forced to occupy itself in observing the objects upon
+the shore; his examinations of the colors in the clam-shell led him to
+say later in life, at a meeting of philosophers, that a lifetime study
+of these colors should develop more of the beautiful than all the
+manufactured color combinations then known.
+
+Art has not yet been able to combine the shades shown in the shell of an
+oyster, and the wings of the June bug have been enlarged and copied by
+colored photography, and will greatly influence all art hereafter. Man's
+needs shall be best supplied by beginning at the source and following
+the Creator in developing them into things of beauty and service.
+
+Although the Agricultural Department at Washington spent eight million
+dollars in the study of seeds and their growth by sending experts to
+roam over the world for investigations, yet the observations of Luther
+Burbank and many like investigators in the agricultural colleges
+throughout the country have made many more important discoveries. Their
+observations have brought about a greater increase of production to the
+acre than all the results of those who roamed the earth for the
+Government, and no one would say that their work was not a fair
+investment for the nation.
+
+Observation convinces us that the sooner we get down to the simplicities
+of life, the longer and healthier and nobler shall life become. The
+healthiest are those with one loaf and a natural hunger along with it.
+The noblest lives are those who are anxious to become as divine as it
+is possible for them to be, are ever alert for little deeds of
+kindness. How much richer life the poet lives who can sympathize with
+the field-mouse, like Burns! Who is lifted heavenward by the fringed
+gentian, like Bryant? Who gets the messages of peace from the frosted
+pumpkin, like Riley? Like Shakespeare, we too may "find tongues in
+trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
+everything," if we will but use our eyes for seeing, our ears for
+hearing, our heads for understanding, and our hearts for feeling. The
+Poor Man's University gives its courses everywhere, and no entrance
+examination is requisite other than a mind willing to concentrate upon
+the sublime objects which, by the million, lie within our vision.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE BOTTOM RUNG
+
+
+Almost every day of his life an American is reminded that "necessity is
+the mother of invention." It needs only a little reflection and
+observation to realize how much American youth are blessed in the
+examples of their countrymen who have come from the humblest stations in
+life and have risen through sheer pluck and perseverance to honor and
+helpfulness.
+
+We are indebted mainly to the genius and the observation of poor men for
+the great inventions which have so much contributed to the comfort, the
+convenience, the cheerfulness, and the power of life. They have given us
+steam as a motive power, the locomotive, the telegraph, the typewriter,
+the telephone, the automobile, the victrola, the airship. The great
+advances that have been made in agriculture through mowers, reapers,
+planters, and special seeds and fruits are entirely the results of their
+steadfast perseverance. Nobody ever earnestly reaches out for a thing
+until he feels that he needs it, consequently, the sons and daughters
+of the rich are seldom the benefactors of humanity in the way so many
+poor men and women have been through the inventions which have lightened
+the drudgery of millions of homes, as well as increased marvelously the
+productions of the soil and of the factory. Had the talents of the rich
+been put to the test by hunger or cold or the many other incentives to
+vigorous thought and action which impel the poor, they also might have
+many inventions to their credit, for the longing of the normal soul
+furnishes the basis of all the worthy activities of life.
+
+The greatest drawback for rich men's sons and daughters is in having all
+their wants supplied from the bank-account of indulgent parents. They
+are taught neither industry, economy, nor self-control, which often
+makes them a social menace. They lack appreciation for so many of the
+things in life which help to brighten the path of the poor, solely
+because they have never needed them. A hungry boy who has stood on the
+outside of a bakery, clinging to a nickel and fighting a battle with
+himself whether to invest it in a bit of bread or to take it home to his
+mother, who has had neither breakfast nor dinner, fully understands the
+value of a dollar.
+
+The superintendent of the Patent Office at Washington has confirmed the
+official report of the French Patent Office--that there has been no
+invention of especial value which has not been either found or improved
+upon by some poor man. The best life-preserver was invented by a sailor
+who had fallen overboard and had been nearly drowned. An obscure native
+of a duchy bordered on three sides by powerful nations invented the
+quick-firing gun, which can fire six hundred shots while the ordinary
+gun is being loaded. It was a poor Cambridge machinist, whose family
+often suffered from lack of food, who invented the sewing-machine, which
+has changed the condition of home life throughout the world, and
+relieved women of one of their great household burdens. The ship's
+chronometer was made practical for navigation by a man who had been lost
+at sea and despaired of ever again reaching the shore. The locomotive,
+which has contributed more than any other one thing to the spread of our
+people over our vast country, was given to the world by an Englishman,
+Stephenson, who in early life had been so poor that he had little
+schooling.
+
+More than eight hundred agricultural inventions were patented in 1905
+and 1906, and every one of them is the invention of some poor man or
+woman.
+
+As inventors, women have in recent years become close competitors of
+men, and from kitchen utensils to floor covering have added much to home
+comfort and home furnishing. All the household articles exhibited lately
+in a large shop in Chicago were either invented or improved by women.
+They have invented many things for agriculture, for manufacturing, and
+for school furnishings--and not a few of the great patents which have
+been issued to men should have been issued to their wives. Women have
+often awaked an idea which men have wrought out for practical purposes.
+The majority of the benefactors of the world made their discoveries to
+relieve some necessity which oppressed them personally. This is
+especially true of stock-breeding, where the improvements of observant
+men have so greatly increased the value of domestic animals.
+
+The value of any study depends entirely upon what it has done for us and
+what we are doing with it. Lowell says that mere learning is as
+insignificant as the collection of old postage-stamps. Professor Virchow
+was obliged to try various foods in his experiments with his own cats,
+before he discovered what has ever since been of such benefit to all
+breeders of animals throughout the world. From the earliest days the bee
+has offered a store of the most useful information, but it would never
+have been known had it not been for such patient observers as Huber,
+who, although blind, discovered more about bees than the world had ever
+known before his day, through the patient service of his wife and valet.
+The mouse in the field, the squirrel in the tree, the eagle in her nest,
+the fish in the brook, all have taught us valuable lessons in conduct.
+They have doubtless given hints which have enabled observant men to give
+mankind many a useful invention.
+
+When we consider the many thousands of useful inventions which have
+added so much to the convenience and the happiness of life, and when we
+bring to mind how almost all of these have come from the humblest of the
+sons of men with none of the advantages of the so-called higher
+education, of which we hear so much to-day, we are forced to agree with
+Sir Walter Scott that the best part of every man's education is that
+which he gives himself independent of text-books other than the Book of
+Life. Every real man and woman attends a school or college, not to
+learn, but to learn how to learn. This is the best work that schools of
+any description can do. It lays a firm foundation upon which the man who
+has learned how to learn can build his own superstructure. The men who
+have achieved success in the march of the ages are those who have been
+the architects of their own life. Nobody cares a fig where we get our
+educational tools. The world is interested only in what we are doing
+with them. _We_ must be _self-made_ or _never-made_, whether we go to
+college or work in the fields. One teacher can be serviceable to a
+thousand of the sort who intend to make themselves, but a thousand
+teachers cannot help one of the other sort. Heredity and environment and
+will are the great deciding factors in every life.
+
+Investigations as to the food values of meats, grains, fruits,
+vegetables, and other foods are now being made by the Government, by
+colleges, and other investigators. This is the movement of _supreme_
+importance for the uplift of humanity. But the most of this kind of
+investigating has been done in household kitchens. It is probable that
+many of the greatest discoveries as to food will hereafter be made in
+the same places by those who are inclined to observe. The need of closer
+scientific knowledge of the chemistry of digestion and the chemistry of
+food is vital; it should call forth the most self-sacrificing
+investigation.
+
+It is said by those who have carefully studied the subject that
+ninety-one per cent. of all disease is attributable directly or
+indirectly to the stomach. Our ailments come mainly from our aliments.
+Nourishing food is an essential of a noble life. The stomach is the
+master of the house, and must be respected. A proper diet and a sound
+head are closely allied, and those who will rightly exercise their
+soul-powers must be watchful of the stomach.
+
+Those who would rule and lead must have chest and stomach as well as
+head and will.
+
+Nobody else has such opportunities for observing the effects of food,
+and for studying the happy results of nutritious food, as those have who
+prepare the meals in the kitchen. Proper nourishment is something which
+touches humanity on every side, and deserves the closest attention of
+the greatest minds. We can better afford to dispense with scientific
+experts in every other line which now engages them than to dispense with
+those who investigate the food question. The idea among the myriads of
+American housekeepers, that it is ignoble drudgery to spend some of
+their time in their kitchens ministering to the health of those who are
+nearest and dearest to them and removing diseases from them through
+well-selected and well-cooked food, is being gradually overcome by many
+schools and colleges. The sciences connected with food are now placed
+among the most important subjects in the curricula of these schools. It
+takes a master mind to handle the chemical combinations of the kitchen,
+which make hale and happy men and women, boys and girls.
+
+Health is symmetry; disease is deformity; both are mainly the result of
+what we eat.
+
+Food has killed more than the sword in every age, and is perhaps killing
+more to-day than ever before. Achievement in soul-growth and
+material-growth is involved in the question of proper food. If women
+forsake the throne that rightly belongs to the cook, men must assume it
+or Christian civilization shall cease. To-day nobody can become so
+supreme a benefactor of humanity as the man or the woman who devotes
+intellect and all other power to the study of scientific eating. When we
+come rightly to understand all the vital questions that are involved in
+nutrition, we shall feel that the kings among men and the queens among
+women are to be sought in no higher place than in kitchens.
+
+We are forever searching among the stars to discover kings, when they
+are far oftener found in cottages in the valley.
+
+If universities fail to make the knowledge of the right nutrition
+practical and fail to bring it down where humble men and women may get
+it and apply it, the fault is their own. Some day a people grateful for
+the health they enjoy may elect a man to the Presidency of our nation,
+or set him upon some throne, because he is the best scientific cook in
+the land. Doctor Agnew of Philadelphia said that he had gained his most
+important knowledge of hospital work as an adviser of the dietitians
+while feeding his dog and his cat.
+
+In speaking of the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, Professor
+Virchow said that he had often felt that our investigators had not taken
+sufficient notice of the force of animal electricity. The few
+experiments already made in applying to machinery electricity generated
+by the human body has opened up a field for observant scientists.
+
+In many ways both birds and beasts contribute to the welfare of
+humanity, and the observing thinker will still find many more ways in
+which he can aid us. All forms of life can be harnessed to the car of
+civilization, and far more effective work shall be done than is being
+done to-day. As teachers and as subjects of practical investigation,
+animals supply a great university which almost every man and woman can
+attend.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HOME READING
+
+
+Carlyle says that a collection of books is a true university in these
+days. It might be added that often the smaller the collection the larger
+shall be the university.
+
+Education derived from libraries is unsafe, for book-dissipation, as
+well as drunkenness, ends in debauchery. Toward the end of his long and
+wide-awake life Doctor Holmes advised a young correspondent to confine
+his reading to the Bible, Shakespeare, and a good dictionary. The list
+of men who have been lifted to higher regions of thought and feeling and
+action from reading any one of these three would be too long to be
+compressed within the covers of one book. Books are like two-edged
+swords--dangerous unless one knows how to use them; they either lead up
+or drag down, and we sink or rise to the level of the books we read.
+Every one reads, but how many read to advantage? Goethe, the greatest of
+all the very greatest Germans, said, "I have been learning how to read
+for the past fifty years, but have not yet succeeded."
+
+The majority of readers resemble hour-glasses--their reading runs in and
+out, and leaves no traces; and some others are like housewives'
+jelly-bags--they pass all that is good, and retain only the refuse. At
+best, only a small percentage of our life is spent in school; the
+greater part of the remainder each must pass in the University of Daily
+Life, where our education is derived from experience gained through
+_close observation_ in daily contact with our fellows, and from the
+fellowship of books. Fellowship fits the relation perfectly, for there
+must be intimate intercourse such as this word implies, or _nothing_. It
+is with books as with life--a man profits little from being merely
+_acquainted_ with ten thousand, and he may be incalculably injured from
+his intercourse with them; but a few _choice_ friends--often the _fewer_
+the better--bring a steady growth of higher spiritual power greater than
+can be had from all other influences combined.
+
+So it is with books. Acquaintance with a thousand often renders a
+capable man impotent. But a few _choice_ friends with whom he frequently
+and earnestly communes lift him in strength of intellect and will and
+tenderness and sweetness of feeling to be the peer of the worthiest.
+
+The beginning of New England was the golden age of scholarship in
+America, for many of the founders of these colonies had been reared in
+English universities. Such was the struggle in these bleak and barren
+colonies for existence during the first years, that in a few generations
+the majority of their posterity were strangers to almost all the books
+of _power_ and _knowledge_ with which their forefathers were acquainted,
+and were forced to glean all they harvested from the Bible and the
+almanac--especially the almanac. The almanac was eagerly perused by
+every member of the family from the dawn of the year to its setting. The
+reputed thrift of the plain people in this corner of the great world is
+largely attributable to the lessons of the almanac--mainly _Poor
+Richard's Almanac_, which the Bostonian, Franklin, annually edited in
+Philadelphia for over a quarter of a century. His chief purpose was to
+drive home forcibly many lessons which might encourage the colonists to
+get the most out of their hard and isolated lives.
+
+Peabody, the successful man of business and munificent philanthropist,
+said that an almanac and a jack-knife were the foundation of the
+education through which he ultimately did so much good for multitudes
+of his countrymen. It should be interesting and instructive to know how
+many more, during the "jack-knife epoch" in New England and the
+generations since that time, have been indebted to one book for the
+pluck and perseverance by which they have carved out a place of honor
+for themselves. Never were books so eagerly, so often, and so carefully
+read as these poor almanacs. Never, perhaps, has any other book except
+the Bible been so potent an influence in shaping the life of a nation
+and shaping it to a _high place among the nations_, whose beneficent
+influences have humanized the world. Many a writer has reminded us that
+the almanac was the text-book studied by our ancestry in beginning the
+enormous agricultural, commercial, mercantile, manufacturing, and
+financial interests which in four generations have placed us in front of
+the richest nations of the earth.
+
+Think of the many millions of dollars invested in library-buildings and
+the many millions more invested in the books they shelter! Think of the
+five hundred millions spent annually in public education, and the
+hundreds of millions that have been put into college buildings and
+college breeding! Still, from all this stupendous investment there will
+never come men and women who will make any more out of their learning
+than thousands of men and women of colonial days who knew the contents
+of no books other than the Bible and the almanac.
+
+The quality of the literary attainment of those reared in a library may
+be higher--and perhaps not; but wider and deeper self-knowledge,
+self-respect, self-confidence, self-culture, self-control, are the
+supreme objects of all life-struggle and educational struggle. Where a
+man gets the educational tools with which to accomplish all this is not
+at all important. If an almanac can help one man to get the same
+life-result as another man gets from the polishing of the greatest
+universities in the world, the almanac is the peer of the university.
+Whether materials as insignificant as the almanac have been used to
+attain just such results, the history of our country and of several
+other countries can readily prove. Three books made up the library of
+Lincoln, the rail-splitter, of Edison and Carnegie, the telegraph
+operators; but no three men of the nation were ever more successful in
+reaching the goals they set for themselves.
+
+Books are to-day the great universal means of _knowing_, and knowing
+them depends upon reading them rightly. It is not so important how
+_many_ books we read, but how we read them. A well-read fool is one of
+the most pestilential of blockheads. One book _read_ avails more than a
+thousand _skimmed_. Little reading and much thinking make a wise man;
+much reading and little thinking has bred the race which the _plain_
+people call "learned fools," and these are mainly responsible for any
+ridicule that is put upon the work of school and college.
+
+In these days when the printing-press has largely superseded the pulpit
+and the platform, it is vitally important that men shall be taught how
+to read rightly and shall be helped to habits of right reading; and no
+school or college that is decently interested in the welfare of the
+people can disregard this one duty of teachers _above all others_. Much
+of the best in thought and feeling and conduct shall depend hereafter
+upon the books which we read with careful observation. Every man who has
+read himself into higher realms is under bonds to make the source of so
+much bliss and blessedness as admirable and as desirable as possible to
+all who are strangers to the most pleasant and profitable paths of
+literature.
+
+It is not the quantity of our reading, but the quality that makes it and
+us an influence for good to our fellows. A man who has read ten pages
+with real accuracy, says John Ruskin, is forevermore in some measure an
+educated person. You might read all the books in the British Museum, yet
+be an utterly illiterate and uneducated person. Our reading without
+digestion and assimilation is as useless as our food without them. Bacon
+says that reading makes a _full_ man; but fullness without digestion is
+dyspepsia. The books whose reading impels us to live nobly and do noble
+service for others, are _the_ books, and it is a wicked waste of time to
+read what is a negative quantity. Whoever masters _one vital_ book can
+never become commonplace.
+
+_Thoroughness_ is the master-passion in reading, as in every other
+undertaking. Those who have accumulated wisdom, culture, power, riches,
+are always prominent for their indefatigable, painstaking thoroughness;
+nothing to them is a trifle, for "trifles make perfection, and
+perfection is no trifle." Those who have thought most and felt most and
+done most from their reading have brought this master passion to it.
+
+When we begin to become acquainted with all the worthy men and women who
+trace the beginning of their worth to the careful reading of one book,
+it seems almost a loss to the world to have the libraries of the world
+so large. If they were all respectable occupants of their shelves, it
+might be condoned; but the copyright of millions of books is the only
+right, human or divine, for their existing at all. Many a country boy at
+the fireside during the long winter evenings has received inspiration
+from repeatedly reading one or two worthy books; these have spurred him
+on to fight his way valiantly through college, and from there to the
+heights in some worthy life-work.
+
+If we are true to all that _manhood_ involves, there is no
+self-deception in the conviction that each one of us is born for
+kingship. Supreme kingship "consists in a stronger _moral_ state and a
+truer _thoughtful_ state than that of other men, which enables us to
+_guide_ and _raise_ the misguided and the illiterate." Every thoughtful
+man and woman ultimately discovers that "all _education_ and all
+_literature_ are useful only so far as they confirm this calm and
+beneficent kingly power." Emerson's "man-thinking" is the supreme among
+human beings.
+
+The best that can be known and experienced lies asleep in books, and one
+of the chief purposes for getting an education is to give us the
+_well-made_ head and the _finer_ feeling to awake this best knowledge
+and experience in these sleeping princes.
+
+De Quincey reminds us that all the greatest books may be divided into
+the literature of _knowledge_ and the literature of _power_. They have
+all been written in utmost sincerity by the _right_-minded and the
+_strong_-minded; they disclose boundless fields for soul-_refreshment_
+and soul-_expansion_. In the march of civilization, the men and the
+nations that have forged farthest ahead since Gutenberg invented
+printing are the men and the nations that have had most to do with the
+few books of _knowledge_ and _power_ of the greatest and the wisest.
+There can be no better test of a man's thought and feelings and actions
+than the books he reads and the books he keeps around him; and there is
+none so desolate as the poor _rich_ man who lives in a great bookless
+house, and "has never fed upon the dainties that are bred in books," as
+John Milton says.
+
+The very presence of books is refining, and the right kind of man would
+as soon think of building his house without windows as of furnishing it
+without books. In every well-regulated home of intelligent men and women
+the library is always one of the annual items of expenditure. When we
+have learned how to consult the books of _knowledge_ and _power_, they
+let us mingle with the best society of all ages; they make the
+_mightiest_ men and women of words and deeds our advisers; they bring
+us the gold of learning and the gems of thought; and they furnish us
+with the soul-_food_ which brings the proper kind of soul-_growth_. Such
+books are the safest of companions, for they protect us from vice and
+the inferior passions; more than ever they are to-day _indispensable_
+for all who are striving to do the higher work of civilization and
+_Christianity_.
+
+Every _real_ book we _really_ read gives us greater faith in the
+_goodness_ and the _nobility_ of life. As Lowell says, "Adds another
+block to the climbing spire of a great soul." The other sort which
+"swarm from the cozy marshes of immoral brains," the sort also who "rack
+their brains for lucre," do the devil's work for him, and are as baneful
+as the company of fools and vulgarians. Show an observant man your
+bookshelves, and he'll tell you what you are. The man who does not
+_love_ some great book is not worth the time we spend in his company; we
+are fortunate if we are not in some way contaminated by him. If we knew
+the road they have traveled, we should likely find that those of modern
+times who have merited the crown of kings and queens for their stronger
+_moral_ state and their _truer thoughtful_ state have had most to do
+with some literature of knowledge and power; that they especially
+oftenest consulted the books of the greatest and wisest in their
+difficulties, and had been spurred on by their messages to the thoughts
+and the deeds which made them worthy.
+
+It is fortunate that to-day the greatest of books are the common
+property of the printers of the world, for they are on this account the
+cheapest, and many of them can be had for the price of a poor man's
+dinner. It needs many a page to record even the names of the men and
+women who have become _somebody_ and have done _something_ just from
+reading some one worthy book which had fallen into their hands. Many
+believe that Franklin is the greatest American that has yet appeared,
+and he has said that "Cotton Mather's _essays to do good_ gave me a turn
+of thinking which, perhaps, had an influence on some of the principal
+future events of my life."
+
+As we become better acquainted with some of the _great_ books in all
+departments of literature, we are surprised to find how few of them have
+been written by college men. This by no means belittles the good that
+may come from a _true_ college course, but it does seem to emphasize
+that great books need some other environment for their growth than
+exclusive college courses. Perhaps the need is _solitude_, communion
+with nature, and frequent intercourse with the world's greatest and best
+in thought and feeling and action for the work. College-bred men are in
+a marked minority among the authors whose great books have been and are
+a potent force in shaping thought and conduct in the world. It is
+notable how few of these have anything commendatory to say about the
+influence which their college life had upon them and their
+accomplishments; many even of the text-books of schools and colleges
+have come from men whose powers were shaped by no school. How many
+text-books of medicine and law were prepared by physicians and lawyers
+whose knowledge was gleaned mainly from keen observation and long
+experience and deep thought!
+
+It was no mere college education, but the sharpest home observation and
+strictest adherence to their instincts and their individuality that made
+forceful writers of Mark Twain, the Mississippi pilot; Bret Harte and
+William Dean Howells, the typesetters; James Whitcomb Riley, the
+itinerant sign-painter; Joel Chandler Harris and Eugene Field, the
+newspaper reporters; and Walt Whitman, the carpenter.
+
+Of the four thousand and forty-three Americans with over twenty millions
+of dollars to their credit, only sixty-one had even a _high-school_
+course. Many among them, however, had high-class mentality and secured a
+comprehensive practical education. They have evidently been as alert to
+perceive the treasures hidden for them in the world of great books as
+they have been to perceive the treasuries hidden for them in their
+various enterprises. So we find that they have consulted the master
+spirits of books after their daily tasks were done, while myriads of
+those who scoff and sneer at them now because of their millions were
+feasting, frolicking, and dissipating. Among the highest types of
+American manhood to-day a large majority are the _new-rich_ men.
+Whatever else may be said about them, all the world acknowledges that it
+is the parvenus in every land who do the largest part of the greatest
+work.
+
+The larger our horizon becomes, the stronger is our conviction that the
+man himself is _mainly_ the architect of his own fate; others may give
+an occasional lift, but it is almost entirely his own work. The college
+can do something for the _head-piece_, and it should also give something
+for the _heart-side_ and the power to dare and to do; but all the
+external training in the world can never attain for the man what he can
+attain through his own individual efforts--provided he has lofty aims,
+firm resolutions, closely observes, and strictly adheres to all his best
+inborn powers. There was no college for David, Homer, Socrates, Plato,
+Confucius, Alexander, Cæsar, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
+Washington, Franklin, Goethe, Jesus, and tens of thousands of great or
+lesser men than these. They all marked out their own course, planned
+their own spiritual palaces; all the barbed-wire entanglements in the
+world did not retard their indomitable courage, self-reliance, and
+self-help.
+
+Perhaps the chief use of all learning establishments, except those which
+have to do with what the Germans call _bread studies_, is to awaken the
+pupil's self-respect, which is the basis of all virtue, and to cultivate
+the powers that shall fit the pupil to consult for himself the
+_knowledge_ and _power_ books of the greatest and the wisest. They also
+can in these days do yeoman's service in giving the _bread studies_
+through which men shall be better able to do the world's work and
+thereby earn better wages.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THOUGHTFULNESS
+
+
+President Wolsey, head of a great university, said that one of the chief
+purposes of the college is to cultivate the _power to think_. The
+college man who neglects to cultivate this valuable power until he
+enters upon his college career, instead of beginning it in the
+kindergarten and continuing it unremittingly throughout his entire
+preparatory course and daily living, will be liable to make sorry work
+of this part of his cultivation, or any other part, while he is in
+college.
+
+The specialists who teach in colleges, and who are generally more
+interested in their specialties than in the science and art of
+education, may not be conscious of this, and yet the many educational
+wrecks that have come from colleges should long ago have brought this
+point most forcibly to their attention. Indeed, the power to think and
+the practice of thinking until it has become second nature, are so
+essential for success in any _worthy_ career in life, that it is truer
+to say that one of the chief purposes of _life_ itself is to cultivate
+and exercise the power to think, and keep right on thinking until close
+thinking shall become a habit. The power to think clearly, broadly, and
+successfully is not necessarily the prerogative of those only who have
+lived in a college environment, as the biographies of our own four
+thousand multi-millionaires in this country so cogently prove, for few
+of them ever darkened the doors of a college. Some among them may have
+been bereft of all the nobler sentiments for which Christianity and
+America stand, but they never could have piled up their millions in
+every department of activity without having thought so long and so hard
+that they ultimately acquired a habit of thinking that should put to
+shame myriads in every land who have had all the advantages of
+universities. The power to think, and to think in a masterly way, need
+not be confined to the professor's chair.
+
+Any sphere of action which does not bring in to the worker an increase
+of thinking power is harmful, from university to street-sweeping. A
+machine is the only worker that can do its work well without thinking
+about it. All the successful men the world has ever known have been men
+who thought incessantly; they have been mainly self-educated in their
+extraordinary power to think; their success in all the various tasks
+which they set for themselves oftener resulted from their hard thought
+than from their hard work.
+
+Defeat and failure have never overtaken the man whose head and hands
+were partners.
+
+When we think without work or work without thought, we reach only half
+of what belong to us. A man should especially ween himself from this
+kind of halfness. We should be ashamed to find ourselves working without
+thought, as we should be ashamed to find ourselves idle in a world where
+there is always so much to be done and so little time allotted to each
+for accomplishing worthy work. The employees that are most valuable to
+their employers and are most valued by them are those always whose heads
+and hands are yoke-mates. When hands and head and heart are on the job,
+it is difficult to imagine what heights of success and service shall be
+attained. The farmer boy hoeing corn and digging potatoes will do better
+work in quantity and quality if he thinks about his work as hard as he
+hoes or digs.
+
+There can be little danger of failure for any young man who begins his
+life-work with the resolution that he will always give his best thought
+to even the most insignificant task that he assumes; and all the schools
+in the world cannot furnish him any advantage that can compare with this
+resolution steadily followed. Nor must the habit of thinking be
+exercised only upon work. We all have more leisure than work, and many a
+high-minded thinker has reminded us that a man is best to be judged, not
+by his profession, but by his leisure. Elihu Burritt acquired a
+knowledge of fifty languages during the years he earned his livelihood
+as a village blacksmith; he also found time for extensive reading as
+well as time for interest in social reforms, in the advancement of which
+he won the reputation of being one of the most powerful and persuasive
+orators of his day. All his stupendous acquirements were gained during
+the hours between his tasks which thousands of other village blacksmiths
+were accustomed to spend in gossip or in the tavern. Volumes could be
+filled with only _brief_ accounts of the men and women throughout the
+ages who have made the world better for their living, just because they
+wisely and thoughtfully employed the leisure hours which their
+contemporaries trifled away. The shortest life may be long in noble
+thought and action, if we lose no time; and little of it is ever lost by
+those who thoughtfully employ their leisure.
+
+Thoughtful men and women are always doubly valuable, no matter whether
+their work is what the world calls high-class or low-class. The streets
+are better swept by such a man, and the potatoes are better hoed; the
+floor is better scrubbed by such a woman, and the clothes are better
+washed. If our work does not afford us the chance to think while we are
+employed upon it, we owe it to ourselves and to humanity to toss it
+aside quickly. The lawyer, the physician, or any other professional man
+is no more a man in the sight of God and his country than the
+stone-mason who lays the foundations for their houses and raises the
+superstructures; and they are under no greater obligation to use their
+thinking powers than he is. The place we occupy in life is unimportant;
+the way we fill the place is everything; the stone-mason, Ben Jonson,
+built stone walls and houses by day, and at night built dramas and other
+poetry which have been surpassed only by his contemporary, Shakespeare.
+
+Many of the greatest achievements known to history have been the work of
+men and women whose life-tasks were entirely different from the lines
+in which they became eminent; Shakespeare was an actor and one of the
+most successful business men of London, but he is known as the greatest
+poet the world has yet produced; George Eliot had charge for several
+years of her father's farm home, as well as the poultry and dairy, and
+won prizes for these at the country fair, but this did not prevent her
+from laying, during these seven years, the foundation which helped her
+to build herself into one of the greatest women known to history.
+Herschel's being a musician and Mary Somerville's having charge of her
+home and her children did not prevent both of them from doing marvelous
+work in astronomy. Audubon became a final authority on birds solely
+because while on his hunting-trips he thought more than the other
+hunters who accompanied him. One of the greatest merchants and
+capitalists in Boston began life selling handkerchiefs through the
+country. He became expert in flax products, and through this grew rich;
+he so studied kindred fibrous plants that his partners boasted that he
+had succeeded in marketing handkerchiefs made of twenty different
+fibrous plants. The most successful piano manufacturer now living was
+originally an employee of a steel mill that manufactured wire for making
+piano-strings. An every-day man gave careful thought to corn, and wrote
+an article for a magazine upon its value and upon the way it should be
+prepared for food; and this article was so worthy that it won for him a
+degree from a university.
+
+Every waking moment of every man contains food for thought. If some live
+fuller lives every twenty-four hours than others live in a year, it is
+because they think faster and higher, wider and deeper, and because the
+discipline they get from this thought keeps them from wasting their time
+on trivial or worthless matter. A puddler in Youngstown, without
+education beyond the district school, began to think about the iron that
+was softened in the furnace before him, and asked questions of the older
+employees and the foreman; then he read upon the subject and became so
+capable in mining and iron manufacturing that when the Youngstown plant
+was sold to the great steel corporation he was the largest stockholder
+in forty-seven great companies manufacturing iron. Some men's hearts
+grow as hard as their gold while they are amassing riches; but his heart
+seems to have softened in proportion to the increase of his riches; his
+life is given to numberless good deeds, chief among which has been his
+endeavor to impress upon all workmen the necessity of letting both
+their heads and hearts assist their hands. Neither man nor boy, woman
+nor girl, need despair of doing great things and being great men and
+women, if they will constantly carry out this advice. He is really the
+best-educated man whose attention is primarily directed to his
+soul-growth, to his power of thinking, for feeling, and for noble
+action.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+INSTINCTS AND INDIVIDUALITY
+
+
+"God has given us a full kit of watchmaker's tools" and if, after all
+the centuries of civilization, "we are doing _thinker's_ work with
+them," something must be wrong with the educational methods. When God
+sent us here he packed us with all we need for high-class manhood--our
+_instincts_ and our _individuality_ especially well done up; but often
+in the unpacking by the schools we have been sadly marred; and these
+God-given endowments seem to have been frequently thrown upon the
+rubbish-pile. They seem to have dulled our instincts and to have
+despised our individuality, in order to make room for our acquirements.
+
+Like all that emanates from God, instincts and individuality have been
+bestowed for a wise purpose; they are _indispensable_ endowments if we
+shall become the kind of man God seems to have had in mind when he sent
+us here. What justification have the teachers of civilization for
+failing to perfect these powers? What right have the _little_ men of the
+schools to drive them entirely out of their scheme of education?
+
+John Ruskin complains in _Kings' Treasuries_ that "Modern education for
+the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on
+every conceivable subject of importance to them." If this is even partly
+true, there is no pursuit to-day that demands from the man who is
+working in it more _presence of mind_ and more _self-direction_, than
+the business of getting _real_ education. Those who are to-day
+conducting what we are foolish enough to permit them to call _education_
+are often both blind and deaf to all that efficient education implies.
+To seek direction from them is like asking the road from a blind man.
+Many are also connected with the schools apparently as others are
+connected with hod-carrying and street-sweeping--to procure a
+livelihood. Often their highest conception of the work is _edge_ucation,
+to make sharp blades of the intellects for what they call "getting along
+in the world." Then many of the instructors in schools and colleges are
+merely specialists, mainly interested in their specialties, and using
+the class-room as a stepping-stone to their own purposes. Extreme
+specializing is narrowing--it does to the specialist what blinkers do
+to the horse's eyes. Excessive pursuit of single objects of thought
+atrophies many faculties, but _education_ is the _complete_ development
+and discipline of all the faculties.
+
+Perhaps these are some of the causes why so many _original_ and
+_thinking_ men and women are so hostile to present-day schools, and
+accuse them of mainly being "places that polish pebbles and dim
+diamonds," and say so many other harsh and cutting things about them.
+Learning seems to be the _chief_ occupation of those who profess to
+educate. Learning for its _own_ sake plays a very _insignificant_ part
+in the spiritual equipment of God's children; to a _true_ education it
+seems at best only what the carpenter's kit is to the carpenter--a means
+to an end. Like all other lumber, its importance depends entirely upon
+what is built out of it. These original and thinking men and women have
+often said hard things of mere learning and of those who dole it out at
+so much a _unit_, because they believe that undue stress is laid upon
+it. They sometimes say that universities are not _educating_
+institutions, but merely _seats-of-learning_; and often they are very
+_narrow_ seats, difficult for self-respecting people to stiffen their
+backs enough to sit upon. But it's the _study_, not the studies, that
+educates; studies make _learned_ men, but not often _wise_ men, such as
+_real_ education always makes; not all learned heads are _sense_-boxes;
+the _very_ learned man may be a very learned fool. The learned
+frequently put out their reasoning powers to make room for their
+learning; it requires ten pounds of _sense_ to take care of one pound of
+learning.
+
+Solomon made a book of proverbs, but a book of proverbs never made
+Solomon. Sense without learning is a thousand times superior to learning
+without sense; and in the stately edifice of life, school and college
+are only the basement walls; wisdom and learning are not necessary
+companions. The great things that have conduced to the betterment of the
+world have been done by men who have been loyal to their individuality
+and true to their instincts--never by the merely learned. Too often do
+we find these little learned men "displaying themselves offensively and
+ridiculously in the haunts of bearded men," and making the angels weep
+by their strutting and their swelling.
+
+_Knowing_ is only a _small_ part of life; _doing_ is nearly _all_ of
+life; and the _best_ done is done through _education_--the education
+which is the product of what is _inborn_ as well as of what is
+_acquired_; the education which enables men and women to perceive and
+to cherish the _beautiful_ in art, in literature, in morals and in
+nature. While true education busies itself with acquirements, it is even
+more concerned that the instincts and the individuality God appears to
+regard of supreme importance shall attain all that it is possible for
+them to have. These original and thinking men and women who say so many
+things in condemnation of _make-believe_ education and mere learning
+boldly and lovingly acclaim the helps from true education--they remind
+us that it is soul-husbandry, spiritual perfection, torch and sword and
+shield, the _be-all_ and the _end-all_ of life, the fountain of all
+noble living, and the only real promoter of civilization. They claim
+that education of this sort simplifies life; facilitates self-conquest;
+intensifies individuality; unfolds and uplifts manhood; breeds habits of
+thinking, feeling, and doing; debestializes, emancipates, humbles, and
+civilizes; that it searches for truth, loves the beautiful, desires the
+good, and does the best.
+
+We have no quarrel with the education that accomplishes all these, for
+it fosters the instincts and the individuality for which we are
+pleading. We have always believed that just this kind of education is
+the heritage of every American, and that the loss of such an education
+is the greatest calamity that can befall any one. All our life have we
+yearned that all might have this boon, and the best of our manhood years
+have been ceaseless labor and struggle to give "the weak and friendless
+sons of men" all of its advantages.
+
+The test of any system of education is the kind of man it turns out. It
+is wisdom to measure the system by those it fails to educate rather than
+by those it does educate--by its tortoises rather than by its hares. The
+real educator is always vastly more concerned with the divinity than
+with the depravity of those intrusted to him; he believes firmly that
+the instincts and the individuality which God has given each of us are
+the priceless part of all our spiritual equipment--that anything we may
+acquire toward this end which fortifies these God-given treasures is
+cheap--even if bought by an entire life-service; that any acquirement
+that modifies these or destroys them is a triple curse and a dire menace
+to humanity, for individuality is the genius of Christianity and of
+America.
+
+The system of education which makes light of the cultivation of the
+instincts, which seems to be the sole dependence of all conditions of
+men except the over-civilized, the system of education which is blinded
+to all that is implied in an educated individuality--these are the only
+systems with which we have any quarrel. Well-made, rather than
+well-filled heads are what is needed and should be demanded, without
+which it is impossible for any one of us to have the right conception of
+life, or to attain all that we were intended to be or to do. To guard
+and develop the instincts of the child, to preserve and fortify his
+individuality, is to give him sword and shield for the battle of life.
+
+God intends each individual to be an individual, or this should not have
+been so deep-rooted in all; to be just like every one else is to be
+predestined for inferiority and failure. To do our duty consistently and
+steadfastly demands that all our God-like and God-given qualities shall
+first of all be educated. That best becomes a man which his
+individuality intended him to be, and those are always successful in
+making a life and a living who play the game of life with the cards
+their individuality gives them. God made a world for each separate man,
+and within that world he _must_ live, if he will live effectually; we
+must first of all be ourselves, must see to it that whatever else is
+neglected the plants God has put into the individual shall be
+cultivated--the crop may not be large, but we are accountable for the
+cultivation, not for the crop. We must be ourselves, and do our own
+work.
+
+There can be no greater wisdom and no greater service than that of
+helping another so that he may duly live in that special world which God
+has created for him. The most insignificant man can be complete if he is
+entirely true to his instincts and to his individual character. If we
+are incomplete, it is because we are living after some other method. We
+have all been stamped with individuality, but many seem to do their
+utmost to soak off the stamp. How different should the life of all the
+world be if each one only kept in his frame, and would not permit any
+one to try to make him part of, the picture for which his personality
+never intended him!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Every Man His Own University, by Russell H. Conwell
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+Project Gutenberg's Every Man His Own University, by Russell H. Conwell
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+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+Title: Every Man His Own University
+
+Author: Russell H. Conwell
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2011 [EBook #36955]
+
+Language: English
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY ***
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+
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+https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+<h1>Every Man His Own University</h1>
+
+<h2><i>By</i> RUSSELL H. CONWELL</h2>
+
+<p class="center">VOLUME 4</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">NATIONAL<br />
+EXTENSION UNIVERSITY</p>
+
+<p class="center">597 Fifth Avenue, New York</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Observation&mdash;Every Man His Own University</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1917, by Harper &amp; Brothers<br />
+Printed in the United States of America</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p class="center">
+<a href="#I">I. Every Man's University</a><br />
+<a href="#II">II. Animals and "The Least Things"</a><br />
+<a href="#III">III. The Bottom Rung</a><br />
+<a href="#IV">IV. Home Reading</a><br />
+<a href="#V">V. Thoughtfulness</a><br />
+<a href="#VI">VI. Instincts and Individuality</a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>EVERY MAN'S UNIVERSITY</h3>
+
+
+<p>A distinct university walks about under each man's hat. The only man who
+achieves success in the other universities of the world, and in the
+larger university of life, is the man who has first taken his graduate
+course and his post-graduate course in the university under his hat.
+There <i>observation</i> furnishes a daily change in the curriculum. Books
+are not the original sources of power, but observation, which may bring
+to us all wide experience, deep thinking, fine feeling, and the power to
+act for oneself, is the very dynamo of power.</p>
+
+<p>Without observation, literature and meditation are shower and sunshine
+upon unbroken soil. Only those schools and colleges are true schools
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>and colleges which regard it as the chief business of all their
+teaching to persuade those under their charge to see more perfectly what
+they are looking at, to find what they should have been unable to
+observe had it not been for their school instruction. You can't make a
+good arrow from a pig's tail, and you can seldom get a man worth while
+out of one who has gone through the early part of his life without
+having learned to be alert when things are to be seen or heard. John
+Stuart Blackie says that it is astonishing how much we all go about with
+our eyes wide open and see nothing, and Doctor Johnson says that some
+men shall see more while riding ten miles upon the top of an omnibus,
+than some others shall see in riding over the continent.</p>
+
+<p><i>How to observe</i> should be the motto, not only in the beginning of our
+life, but throughout our career. With the same intellectual gifts,
+interested in the same ideas, two men walk side by side through the same
+scenery and meet the same people. One man has had much inspiration from
+the country traversed, and has been intent upon all that he has seen and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>heard among the people. The other has caught no inspiration from beauty
+or bird or blossom, and only the trivialities of the people have amused
+him.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>A traveler in Athens or Rome, Paris or London, may be shown these cities
+by a professional guide, and yet gain only a smattering of what these
+cities hold in store for him, and remember little of what he has seen.
+Another traveler, unattended by a guide, but observant of everything
+that comes to his eyes and ears, will carry away stores from his visit
+to those cities, which shall be of life-long interest and be
+serviceable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> to all who shall travel his way. The solitary but observant
+stranger in a country almost always profits most from his travels. He is
+compelled to notice boulevards and buildings, parks and people; and
+every day of his travels is a lesson in observation that accustoms him
+to remember all he has once seen. The newspaper correspondents of other
+days had no guide-books or guides, and they were entire strangers in the
+places they visited. They relied entirely upon themselves to find their
+way, and to discover everything that was valuable and interesting. They
+found much that the modern guide either overlooks or disregards, and
+wrote for the papers at home what would most interest and instruct their
+readers.</p>
+
+<p>When Henry M. Stanley first visited Jerusalem he insisted that the
+dragoman in charge of his party should keep all guides and guide-books
+out of his sight. In two days Stanley knew the streets and the location
+of the Temple and the Holy Sepulcher and all the notable places in that
+old city. If Stanley is to-day known as one of the most intelligent of
+travelers, it is mainly because he excelled in daily <i>observation</i>,
+which every one who thinks for himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> recognizes as the supreme
+acquisition of a liberal education. He often said that he knew Rome,
+Naples, and Vienna far better than he knew New York, where he had lived
+many years of his life. In that he resembled the rest of humanity, who
+generally know less about what is notable in their home places, than
+observant visitors know who stay there only a short time during their
+travels. What we pay for in time and labor seems more valuable&mdash;nothing
+pay, nothing value.</p>
+
+<p>A great foreign correspondent of his day, Henry W. Chambers, remained
+only six hours at Baalbek, near Damascus; yet he wrote the clearest
+description that probably ever was written of the magnificent temples at
+Baalbek&mdash;and he wrote these descriptions, too, at Hong-Kong, after many
+and varied experiences while visiting other places of greater
+importance. Many archeologists and literary men before him had visited
+the moat of the great fortress at Baalbek. Still, they had never
+observed as Chambers observed, and so they missed seeing the arrow-heads
+and all the other warlike instruments used in those ancient days,
+which had lain unnoticed among those huge pillars and great
+foundation-stones.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Although General Lew Wallace lived a long time at Jerusalem, he only
+imagined that there might have been an inner dungeon underneath the
+great prison; so when he wrote <i>Ben Hur</i> he put his leprous heroine into
+this imaginary prison-house. A school-teacher from northern England,
+with her tourist-candle, afterward found the doorway of this prison
+which Wallace had only imagined to be there. On their way from Egypt and
+Palestine to the Euphrates, travelers had for centuries passed over the
+same path in the desert; but it was reserved for a cutter of marble
+inscriptions, after all these centuries, to <i>observe</i> the Rosetta Stone,
+by the help of which archeologists can now read the inscriptions upon
+the tablets in the ancient palaces of Babylon and Ninevah.</p>
+
+<p>Millions and millions had seen the lid of a teakettle bobbing up and
+down over the boiling water before that Scotchman, Watt, observed it
+while making watches. But he was the first of all those millions whose
+close observation led him to investigate this force of boiling water in
+the teakettle. Then he applied this power to the steam-engine, which is
+still the great propelling force of the world. From the time of the
+Garden<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> of Eden apples had fallen in the orchards of the world, through
+all the harvest-days. Of all the billions that had seen apples falling,
+only Sir Isaac Newton observed the law of gravitation that was involved
+in their falling.</p>
+
+<p>All the great discoverers began with nearly the same meager powers for
+observation that the rest of the world has, but early in life came to
+value above all other mental powers this incalculable power to closely
+notice; and each made his realm of observation much richer for his
+discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>Why do the majority of us go through life seeing nothing of the millions
+of marvelous truths and facts while only a few keep their eyes and ears
+wide open and every day are busy in piling up what they have observed!
+The loss of our instincts seems to be the price we pay to-day for the
+few minor acquisitions we get from school and college; we put out our
+brains to make room for our learning. The man who assiduously cultivates
+his powers of observation and thus gains daily from his experiences what
+helps him to see farther and clearer everything in life that is worth
+seeing, has given himself a discipline that is much more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> important than
+the discipline of all the schools and the colleges without it. The
+greatest text-books of the greatest universities are only the records of
+the observations of some close observer whose better powers of seeing
+things had been acquired mainly while he was taking his courses in that
+university under his hat.</p>
+
+<p>The intellect is both telescope and microscope; if it is rightly used,
+it shall observe thousands of things which are too minute and too
+distant for those who with eyes and ears neither see nor hear. The
+intellect can be made to look far beyond the range of what men and women
+ordinarily see; but not all the colleges in the world can alone confer
+this power&mdash;this is the reward of <i>self-culture</i>; each must acquire it
+for himself; and perhaps this is why the power of observing deeply and
+widely is so much oftener found in those men and those women who have
+never crossed the threshold of any college but the University of Hard
+Knocks.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The quickening power of science only he<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can know, from whose <i>own</i> soul it gushes free.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When we look back over our life and reflect how many things we might
+have seen and heard had we trained our powers of observation, we seem to
+have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> climbed little and to have spent most of our time upon plateaus,
+while our achievements seem little better than scratches upon black
+marble. Mankind has a greater esteem for the degrees conferred by the
+University of Observation and Experience than for all the other degrees
+of all other Universities in the world. The only thing that seems most
+to win the respect of real men and women for the degrees conferred by
+colleges is the fact that the graduates have first gained all that close
+observation and wide experience can confer.</p>
+
+<p>The lives of the men and the women who have been worth while keep
+reminding us how vastly more important is this education from ceaseless
+observation than all the mere learning from school courses. It takes ten
+pounds of the stuff gotten from observation and experience to carry one
+pound of school learning wisely. The thinking man will never ask you
+what college you have gone through, but what college has gone through
+you; and the ability and habit of observing deeply and broadly is the
+preparation we all need that the college may go through us. Confucius of
+China, Kito of Japan, Goethe of Germany, Arnold of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> England, Lincoln and
+Edison of America, stand where they stand to-day in thought and action
+solely because they had in a masterly way educated their power of minute
+attention. In building up a huge business or in amassing enormous
+riches, such men as Rothschild, Rockefeller, and Carnegie show us
+especially how vitally important to all material success is steadfast
+attendance at the school of attention.</p>
+
+<p>The colleges that to-day are advancing most rapidly in esteem are those
+which are recognizing more and more the importance of observation. They
+require their men to spend some portion of their college time in gaining
+experience in their various lines through observing the practical
+workings of their calling; medical students are in hospitals; students
+of law attend courts; theological students engage in mission work; and
+engineers are found in shops. Neither lectures nor speculations can take
+the place of these experiences; each is helpful to the other. When only
+one may be had, the experience from observing actual work is far more
+important. Opportunities for observation of practical matters, along
+with theory, is the modern idea toward which all the best modern
+institutions are tending<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> in their efforts to fit men for the active
+business of life.</p>
+
+<p>Nor has greatness from careful observation and large experience
+distinguished men of action alone. Shakespeare, Goethe, Bunyan, Burns,
+Whittier, Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, and a host of the great men
+of philosophy, science, and literature are where they are to-day in the
+esteem of their fellow men, and in their service to humanity, because
+they were the keenest among the men acute in observation.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The failure to observe is strikingly proved by practical
+experiment in the psychological laboratory. Reproductions of a familiar
+or unfamiliar scene are placed in the observers' hands and they are
+instructed to study the reproductions carefully and to remember what
+they see. After 5 minutes careful study, the reproductions are taken
+away and a series of questions concerning them are put to the observers.
+The contradictory answers to these questions is strikingly eloquent of
+the all-too-human inability to observe. Hugo Munsterberg, the famous
+psychologist, made a number of psychological experiments to determine
+the limits of error in observation as these limits affect the
+credibility of witnesses in the court room. Some of his findings are
+summarized in "On the Witness Stand."
+</p><p>
+Your good newspaper reporter is a trained observer who describes exactly
+what he sees. Yet the manner in which even the trained observer fails to
+observe correctly is unfailingly demonstrated by the widely differing
+accounts of the same occurrence as reported in the various newspapers of
+a community.
+</p><p>
+One of the best ways to learn to observe correctly and in detail is to
+take a hasty glance at the display in a store window, pass on and
+attempt to recall that which you have seen, the number of objects, what
+they were, etc., and then check your observing faculties by returning to
+the window and listing its contents. Continued practice of this sort
+will greatly increase your observing powers. Perhaps the most famous
+known exponent of this method for training the observing faculties was
+Houdini, the famous magician, who describes the method in detail and his
+experiences in applying it in his memoirs.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>ANIMALS AND "THE LEAST THINGS"</h3>
+
+
+<p>The benefits brought to humanity through the study of lower animal life
+are incalculable, and could not be told in one book. With all that
+vivisection and post-mortem dissection have revealed to scientific
+examiners, contagious and infectious diseases have been nearly removed
+from the human family. We have been taught to live better from observing
+animal habits in searching for food, in building their habitats, in
+their mode of living, in their fear of man, and in the methods they
+adopt to preserve their health. All this knowledge has been gained for
+us, for the upbuilding of humanity, through the efforts of <i>close
+observers</i>. They have studied the cat by the hearth, the dog by the
+door, the horses in the pasture and stall, the pigs in their pens, and
+the sheep in their folds. Closely associated with the investigators of
+animal life are those who have observed the origin, habits, and
+influence of birds, insects, and creeping things.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But what we have learned from animals in the past seems only a trifle in
+comparison with what they will teach when we go to them with more
+serious purpose and more carefully observe them. The leaders in all
+these investigations of animal life have all been distinguished for
+their power to discover in animals what has escaped other people.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Darwin's close observation of the doves he fed at his door
+opened up to him important suggestions and laid the foundation for his
+great treatise, "The Origin of Species." When Professor Niles of the
+Boston School of Technology was a boy he caught a minnow while returning
+from school. At his father's suggestion he put the fish into a simple
+aquarium and studied its movements. When it died he carefully examined
+its parts under a microscope&mdash;and this experience was the beginning of
+his vast knowledge of the animal realm.</p>
+
+<p>While a Philadelphia clergyman was visiting a farmer in northern New
+Jersey, the family became perturbed because their dog had "gone mad."
+They fastened it in the kitchen and sought somebody to kill it by
+shooting at it through the window. A neighbor observed the dog carefully
+and told them it was poisoned. He advised the family to loose it in
+order that it might get some antidote<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> for itself in field or forest. He
+told them that cats, cattle, and horses are often compelled to find an
+antidote for some poisonous herb they have eaten, and that the animals
+know more about such things than any teacher in the medical schools. As
+soon as the dog was unfastened he hastened across the field to a brook,
+and ate a weed that was growing beside the water. The dog soon returned
+to the house, and ate heartily after a two weeks' fast.</p>
+
+<p>The clergyman had followed the dog and observed the plant which it had
+eaten. After the dog had returned to the house he uprooted the plant and
+took some of its leaves to a Philadelphia firm of chemists. Acting upon
+the firm's advice, he sent the leaves to the Smithsonian Institution at
+Washington, and they were found to be a valuable antidote for poison.
+Not only was humanity given a better medicine from this discovery, but
+the clergyman also derived a competency from it. This remedy for
+poisoning is often used in prescriptions; so even doctors sometimes "go
+to the dogs" for instructions.</p>
+
+<p>Like Professor Agassiz and Sir Oliver Lodge, many find their best
+instructors in domestic animals. The fowls around the house and the barn
+may be whole universities for developing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> the sciences. Through her
+dependence on nature the hen is a more efficient instructor than the
+majority of college professors. She knows by instinct so much of the
+laws of nature that wise men may sit at her feet or her bill and learn.
+Perhaps she may seem a little foolish in proclaiming her achievements in
+egg-laying by a cackle, but her knowledge of the necessities of life,
+her careful oversight of her brood, the way she uses her feet and her
+wings, her foreknowledge of approaching storms, her means of defending
+herself when attacked by hawks, her knowledge of the formation of the
+egg and of the proper time to break the shell for the release of her
+chick&mdash;all these are worthy of the attention of even the greatest
+scientists.</p>
+
+<p>In an address at a poultry-men's convention, Oliver Wendell Holmes said
+that chickens seem to have in them much more to study than did Darwin's
+doves. While Holmes was once summering at Kennebunkport, Maine, he
+trained five chickens to come at his call, to fly upon his head, and to
+leap with open bills to catch a kernel of corn. Before the season closed
+the chickens would come to his bedroom even after he had retired&mdash;making
+it necessary, as Doctor Holmes said, for the landlord to serve them up
+for dinner. Doctor Holmes's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> parody on Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"
+shows what a careful observer he was. While some of Longfellow's
+admirers resented the parody as a slight, Longfellow himself always
+treated it as complimentary. He once told James T. Fields that, in one
+couplet of the parody, Holmes had excelled the entire original poem:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not like muffled drums be beating<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the inside of the shell.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Longfellow told Fields that there are always millions of men standing
+like chickens in the shell, with wings they know not how to use, having
+calls to a larger life outside of which they can see nothing; that some
+peck away until dead on the inside of the shell, while others, assisted
+by a friend on the outside, step out into a life beautiful and complete.</p>
+
+<p>In the egg or molecule we get nearer to God than we do through the
+telescope or by encircling the earth. He who lived nearest the first
+cause gets the best inspiration for visions of all greater sights or
+events; so the cottage is a happier place than the palace for him who
+wishes to get better acquainted with what shall arouse finer thought and
+feeling. The cottage is the best preparatory school for the mansion,
+provided always that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> cottage course has been thorough. He who has
+worn his cottage life with manly dignity shall be the man to wear his
+mansion life with composure. Emerson said "the entire system of things
+gets represented in every particle."</p>
+
+<p>Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and unfortunate is the man who
+gets a smattering of many things yet does not know even one small thing
+thoroughly. The power of little things to give instruction and happiness
+should be the first lesson in life, and it should be inculcated deeply.
+The chief need of this discontented and sinful world is to comprehend
+that in one blade of grass or the shading of an evening cloud there is
+sufficient reverence to fill the largest heart, and sufficient science
+to occupy the greatest passion.</p>
+
+<p>We saw a delicate blue flower in the grass this morning which I had
+never noticed before. It seemed a different flower from each angle and,
+when put under a magnifying-glass, had colors I had never noticed before
+in flower or art. The field where it was growing had been familiar to me
+for threescore years and ten, yet the flower was entirely new to me. It
+was so dainty and attractive and inspiring that I felt I had lost
+something important to my spiritual growth all these years&mdash;something
+like the experience of Virgil,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> Guizot, Carlyle, Grotius, or like
+Tennyson in the "Holy Grail," who declares that he had left a real and
+wonderful life behind to follow the unknown. This little flower in the
+morning sunlight awakes thoughts of years long past&mdash;of the faces of
+marshaled hosts of battle, of eyes deep and calm with the smile of a
+loving mother's welcome, of the great forgiveness in a father's
+affection.</p>
+
+<p>Had I found that flower seventy years before, I believe my appreciation
+of the Divine Power would have been greater, my heart would have been
+more satisfied, my soul more fully illuminated and pervaded by a holier
+peace. We lose ourselves in all attempts to grasp the cause of which
+this small flower is the result. It is impossible to find words to
+convey the strange emotions which this newly found flower aroused, and
+to tell of the distant realms my imagination visited while I meditated
+there. If we would free ourselves from the perplexing cares which our
+daily duties demand; if we would forget the worries of each day; if the
+losses and disappointments and the wrongs of many years did not press
+themselves upon us; if the demands of many duties and the demands upon
+our attention and the calls of friends did not interrupt&mdash;we could find
+in contemplating this wee flower of the field a fund of happiness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> which
+years of sorrow and misfortune could not destroy.</p>
+
+<p>Bacon and Burke and Niebuhr discovered how much of grandeur can come
+into a life from the little things about us, but they all discovered it
+when it was too late to go back and live the <i>ideal</i> life of simplicity
+and individuality which was suggested to them by a drop of water and a
+humming-bird. The smallest things are the largest in importance, if they
+bring into our lives the largest thoughts and feelings and an incentive
+to largest actions for self and humanity. Why are we forever looking
+upon the horizon for what upon closer view lies at our feet? These
+little beauties of the field rebuke the wanderer and the eminent man
+when it says to all the world, with a sweet smile and a dainty pout,
+"You could have found more in my life than has ever been learned from
+the sages."</p>
+
+<p>While Zinzendorf was stranded nearly a year upon a tiny island, his
+vigorous mind was forced to occupy itself in observing the objects upon
+the shore; his examinations of the colors in the clam-shell led him to
+say later in life, at a meeting of philosophers, that a lifetime study
+of these colors should develop more of the beautiful than all the
+manufactured color combinations then known.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Art has not yet been able to combine the shades shown in the shell of an
+oyster, and the wings of the June bug have been enlarged and copied by
+colored photography, and will greatly influence all art hereafter. Man's
+needs shall be best supplied by beginning at the source and following
+the Creator in developing them into things of beauty and service.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Agricultural Department at Washington spent eight million
+dollars in the study of seeds and their growth by sending experts to
+roam over the world for investigations, yet the observations of Luther
+Burbank and many like investigators in the agricultural colleges
+throughout the country have made many more important discoveries. Their
+observations have brought about a greater increase of production to the
+acre than all the results of those who roamed the earth for the
+Government, and no one would say that their work was not a fair
+investment for the nation.</p>
+
+<p>Observation convinces us that the sooner we get down to the simplicities
+of life, the longer and healthier and nobler shall life become. The
+healthiest are those with one loaf and a natural hunger along with it.
+The noblest lives are those who are anxious to become as divine as it
+is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> possible for them to be, are ever alert for little deeds of
+kindness. How much richer life the poet lives who can sympathize with
+the field-mouse, like Burns! Who is lifted heavenward by the fringed
+gentian, like Bryant? Who gets the messages of peace from the frosted
+pumpkin, like Riley? Like Shakespeare, we too may "find tongues in
+trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
+everything," if we will but use our eyes for seeing, our ears for
+hearing, our heads for understanding, and our hearts for feeling. The
+Poor Man's University gives its courses everywhere, and no entrance
+examination is requisite other than a mind willing to concentrate upon
+the sublime objects which, by the million, lie within our vision.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BOTTOM RUNG</h3>
+
+
+<p>Almost every day of his life an American is reminded that "necessity is
+the mother of invention." It needs only a little reflection and
+observation to realize how much American youth are blessed in the
+examples of their countrymen who have come from the humblest stations in
+life and have risen through sheer pluck and perseverance to honor and
+helpfulness.</p>
+
+<p>We are indebted mainly to the genius and the observation of poor men for
+the great inventions which have so much contributed to the comfort, the
+convenience, the cheerfulness, and the power of life. They have given us
+steam as a motive power, the locomotive, the telegraph, the typewriter,
+the telephone, the automobile, the victrola, the airship. The great
+advances that have been made in agriculture through mowers, reapers,
+planters, and special seeds and fruits are entirely the results of their
+steadfast perseverance. Nobody ever earnestly reaches out for a thing
+until<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> he feels that he needs it, consequently, the sons and daughters
+of the rich are seldom the benefactors of humanity in the way so many
+poor men and women have been through the inventions which have lightened
+the drudgery of millions of homes, as well as increased marvelously the
+productions of the soil and of the factory. Had the talents of the rich
+been put to the test by hunger or cold or the many other incentives to
+vigorous thought and action which impel the poor, they also might have
+many inventions to their credit, for the longing of the normal soul
+furnishes the basis of all the worthy activities of life.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest drawback for rich men's sons and daughters is in having all
+their wants supplied from the bank-account of indulgent parents. They
+are taught neither industry, economy, nor self-control, which often
+makes them a social menace. They lack appreciation for so many of the
+things in life which help to brighten the path of the poor, solely
+because they have never needed them. A hungry boy who has stood on the
+outside of a bakery, clinging to a nickel and fighting a battle with
+himself whether to invest it in a bit of bread or to take it home to his
+mother, who has had neither breakfast nor dinner, fully understands the
+value of a dollar.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The superintendent of the Patent Office at Washington has confirmed the
+official report of the French Patent Office&mdash;that there has been no
+invention of especial value which has not been either found or improved
+upon by some poor man. The best life-preserver was invented by a sailor
+who had fallen overboard and had been nearly drowned. An obscure native
+of a duchy bordered on three sides by powerful nations invented the
+quick-firing gun, which can fire six hundred shots while the ordinary
+gun is being loaded. It was a poor Cambridge machinist, whose family
+often suffered from lack of food, who invented the sewing-machine, which
+has changed the condition of home life throughout the world, and
+relieved women of one of their great household burdens. The ship's
+chronometer was made practical for navigation by a man who had been lost
+at sea and despaired of ever again reaching the shore. The locomotive,
+which has contributed more than any other one thing to the spread of our
+people over our vast country, was given to the world by an Englishman,
+Stephenson, who in early life had been so poor that he had little
+schooling.</p>
+
+<p>More than eight hundred agricultural inventions were patented in 1905
+and 1906, and every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> one of them is the invention of some poor man or
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>As inventors, women have in recent years become close competitors of
+men, and from kitchen utensils to floor covering have added much to home
+comfort and home furnishing. All the household articles exhibited lately
+in a large shop in Chicago were either invented or improved by women.
+They have invented many things for agriculture, for manufacturing, and
+for school furnishings&mdash;and not a few of the great patents which have
+been issued to men should have been issued to their wives. Women have
+often awaked an idea which men have wrought out for practical purposes.
+The majority of the benefactors of the world made their discoveries to
+relieve some necessity which oppressed them personally. This is
+especially true of stock-breeding, where the improvements of observant
+men have so greatly increased the value of domestic animals.</p>
+
+<p>The value of any study depends entirely upon what it has done for us and
+what we are doing with it. Lowell says that mere learning is as
+insignificant as the collection of old postage-stamps. Professor Virchow
+was obliged to try various foods in his experiments with his own cats,
+before he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> discovered what has ever since been of such benefit to all
+breeders of animals throughout the world. From the earliest days the bee
+has offered a store of the most useful information, but it would never
+have been known had it not been for such patient observers as Huber,
+who, although blind, discovered more about bees than the world had ever
+known before his day, through the patient service of his wife and valet.
+The mouse in the field, the squirrel in the tree, the eagle in her nest,
+the fish in the brook, all have taught us valuable lessons in conduct.
+They have doubtless given hints which have enabled observant men to give
+mankind many a useful invention.</p>
+
+<p>When we consider the many thousands of useful inventions which have
+added so much to the convenience and the happiness of life, and when we
+bring to mind how almost all of these have come from the humblest of the
+sons of men with none of the advantages of the so-called higher
+education, of which we hear so much to-day, we are forced to agree with
+Sir Walter Scott that the best part of every man's education is that
+which he gives himself independent of text-books other than the Book of
+Life. Every real man and woman attends a school or college, not to
+learn, but to learn how to learn. This is the best work that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> schools of
+any description can do. It lays a firm foundation upon which the man who
+has learned how to learn can build his own superstructure. The men who
+have achieved success in the march of the ages are those who have been
+the architects of their own life. Nobody cares a fig where we get our
+educational tools. The world is interested only in what we are doing
+with them. <i>We</i> must be <i>self-made</i> or <i>never-made</i>, whether we go to
+college or work in the fields. One teacher can be serviceable to a
+thousand of the sort who intend to make themselves, but a thousand
+teachers cannot help one of the other sort. Heredity and environment and
+will are the great deciding factors in every life.</p>
+
+<p>Investigations as to the food values of meats, grains, fruits,
+vegetables, and other foods are now being made by the Government, by
+colleges, and other investigators. This is the movement of <i>supreme</i>
+importance for the uplift of humanity. But the most of this kind of
+investigating has been done in household kitchens. It is probable that
+many of the greatest discoveries as to food will hereafter be made in
+the same places by those who are inclined to observe. The need of closer
+scientific knowledge of the chemistry of digestion and the chemistry of
+food<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> is vital; it should call forth the most self-sacrificing
+investigation.</p>
+
+<p>It is said by those who have carefully studied the subject that
+ninety-one per cent. of all disease is attributable directly or
+indirectly to the stomach. Our ailments come mainly from our aliments.
+Nourishing food is an essential of a noble life. The stomach is the
+master of the house, and must be respected. A proper diet and a sound
+head are closely allied, and those who will rightly exercise their
+soul-powers must be watchful of the stomach.</p>
+
+<p>Those who would rule and lead must have chest and stomach as well as
+head and will.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody else has such opportunities for observing the effects of food,
+and for studying the happy results of nutritious food, as those have who
+prepare the meals in the kitchen. Proper nourishment is something which
+touches humanity on every side, and deserves the closest attention of
+the greatest minds. We can better afford to dispense with scientific
+experts in every other line which now engages them than to dispense with
+those who investigate the food question. The idea among the myriads of
+American housekeepers, that it is ignoble drudgery to spend some of
+their time in their kitchens ministering to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> health of those who are
+nearest and dearest to them and removing diseases from them through
+well-selected and well-cooked food, is being gradually overcome by many
+schools and colleges. The sciences connected with food are now placed
+among the most important subjects in the curricula of these schools. It
+takes a master mind to handle the chemical combinations of the kitchen,
+which make hale and happy men and women, boys and girls.</p>
+
+<p>Health is symmetry; disease is deformity; both are mainly the result of
+what we eat.</p>
+
+<p>Food has killed more than the sword in every age, and is perhaps killing
+more to-day than ever before. Achievement in soul-growth and
+material-growth is involved in the question of proper food. If women
+forsake the throne that rightly belongs to the cook, men must assume it
+or Christian civilization shall cease. To-day nobody can become so
+supreme a benefactor of humanity as the man or the woman who devotes
+intellect and all other power to the study of scientific eating. When we
+come rightly to understand all the vital questions that are involved in
+nutrition, we shall feel that the kings among men and the queens among
+women are to be sought in no higher place than in kitchens.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We are forever searching among the stars to discover kings, when they
+are far oftener found in cottages in the valley.</p>
+
+<p>If universities fail to make the knowledge of the right nutrition
+practical and fail to bring it down where humble men and women may get
+it and apply it, the fault is their own. Some day a people grateful for
+the health they enjoy may elect a man to the Presidency of our nation,
+or set him upon some throne, because he is the best scientific cook in
+the land. Doctor Agnew of Philadelphia said that he had gained his most
+important knowledge of hospital work as an adviser of the dietitians
+while feeding his dog and his cat.</p>
+
+<p>In speaking of the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, Professor
+Virchow said that he had often felt that our investigators had not taken
+sufficient notice of the force of animal electricity. The few
+experiments already made in applying to machinery electricity generated
+by the human body has opened up a field for observant scientists.</p>
+
+<p>In many ways both birds and beasts contribute to the welfare of
+humanity, and the observing thinker will still find many more ways in
+which he can aid us. All forms of life can be harnessed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> the car of
+civilization, and far more effective work shall be done than is being
+done to-day. As teachers and as subjects of practical investigation,
+animals supply a great university which almost every man and woman can
+attend.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>HOME READING</h3>
+
+
+<p>Carlyle says that a collection of books is a true university in these
+days. It might be added that often the smaller the collection the larger
+shall be the university.</p>
+
+<p>Education derived from libraries is unsafe, for book-dissipation, as
+well as drunkenness, ends in debauchery. Toward the end of his long and
+wide-awake life Doctor Holmes advised a young correspondent to confine
+his reading to the Bible, Shakespeare, and a good dictionary. The list
+of men who have been lifted to higher regions of thought and feeling and
+action from reading any one of these three would be too long to be
+compressed within the covers of one book. Books are like two-edged
+swords&mdash;dangerous unless one knows how to use them; they either lead up
+or drag down, and we sink or rise to the level of the books we read.
+Every one reads, but how many read to advantage? Goethe, the greatest of
+all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> the very greatest Germans, said, "I have been learning how to read
+for the past fifty years, but have not yet succeeded."</p>
+
+<p>The majority of readers resemble hour-glasses&mdash;their reading runs in and
+out, and leaves no traces; and some others are like housewives'
+jelly-bags&mdash;they pass all that is good, and retain only the refuse. At
+best, only a small percentage of our life is spent in school; the
+greater part of the remainder each must pass in the University of Daily
+Life, where our education is derived from experience gained through
+<i>close observation</i> in daily contact with our fellows, and from the
+fellowship of books. Fellowship fits the relation perfectly, for there
+must be intimate intercourse such as this word implies, or <i>nothing</i>. It
+is with books as with life&mdash;a man profits little from being merely
+<i>acquainted</i> with ten thousand, and he may be incalculably injured from
+his intercourse with them; but a few <i>choice</i> friends&mdash;often the <i>fewer</i>
+the better&mdash;bring a steady growth of higher spiritual power greater than
+can be had from all other influences combined.</p>
+
+<p>So it is with books. Acquaintance with a thousand often renders a
+capable man impotent. But a few <i>choice</i> friends with whom he frequently
+and earnestly communes lift him in strength of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> intellect and will and
+tenderness and sweetness of feeling to be the peer of the worthiest.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning of New England was the golden age of scholarship in
+America, for many of the founders of these colonies had been reared in
+English universities. Such was the struggle in these bleak and barren
+colonies for existence during the first years, that in a few generations
+the majority of their posterity were strangers to almost all the books
+of <i>power</i> and <i>knowledge</i> with which their forefathers were acquainted,
+and were forced to glean all they harvested from the Bible and the
+almanac&mdash;especially the almanac. The almanac was eagerly perused by
+every member of the family from the dawn of the year to its setting. The
+reputed thrift of the plain people in this corner of the great world is
+largely attributable to the lessons of the almanac&mdash;mainly <i>Poor
+Richard's Almanac</i>, which the Bostonian, Franklin, annually edited in
+Philadelphia for over a quarter of a century. His chief purpose was to
+drive home forcibly many lessons which might encourage the colonists to
+get the most out of their hard and isolated lives.</p>
+
+<p>Peabody, the successful man of business and munificent philanthropist,
+said that an almanac and a jack-knife were the foundation of the
+education<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> through which he ultimately did so much good for multitudes
+of his countrymen. It should be interesting and instructive to know how
+many more, during the "jack-knife epoch" in New England and the
+generations since that time, have been indebted to one book for the
+pluck and perseverance by which they have carved out a place of honor
+for themselves. Never were books so eagerly, so often, and so carefully
+read as these poor almanacs. Never, perhaps, has any other book except
+the Bible been so potent an influence in shaping the life of a nation
+and shaping it to a <i>high place among the nations</i>, whose beneficent
+influences have humanized the world. Many a writer has reminded us that
+the almanac was the text-book studied by our ancestry in beginning the
+enormous agricultural, commercial, mercantile, manufacturing, and
+financial interests which in four generations have placed us in front of
+the richest nations of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Think of the many millions of dollars invested in library-buildings and
+the many millions more invested in the books they shelter! Think of the
+five hundred millions spent annually in public education, and the
+hundreds of millions that have been put into college buildings and
+college breeding! Still, from all this stupendous investment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> there will
+never come men and women who will make any more out of their learning
+than thousands of men and women of colonial days who knew the contents
+of no books other than the Bible and the almanac.</p>
+
+<p>The quality of the literary attainment of those reared in a library may
+be higher&mdash;and perhaps not; but wider and deeper self-knowledge,
+self-respect, self-confidence, self-culture, self-control, are the
+supreme objects of all life-struggle and educational struggle. Where a
+man gets the educational tools with which to accomplish all this is not
+at all important. If an almanac can help one man to get the same
+life-result as another man gets from the polishing of the greatest
+universities in the world, the almanac is the peer of the university.
+Whether materials as insignificant as the almanac have been used to
+attain just such results, the history of our country and of several
+other countries can readily prove. Three books made up the library of
+Lincoln, the rail-splitter, of Edison and Carnegie, the telegraph
+operators; but no three men of the nation were ever more successful in
+reaching the goals they set for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Books are to-day the great universal means of <i>knowing</i>, and knowing
+them depends upon reading them rightly. It is not so important how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+<i>many</i> books we read, but how we read them. A well-read fool is one of
+the most pestilential of blockheads. One book <i>read</i> avails more than a
+thousand <i>skimmed</i>. Little reading and much thinking make a wise man;
+much reading and little thinking has bred the race which the <i>plain</i>
+people call "learned fools," and these are mainly responsible for any
+ridicule that is put upon the work of school and college.</p>
+
+<p>In these days when the printing-press has largely superseded the pulpit
+and the platform, it is vitally important that men shall be taught how
+to read rightly and shall be helped to habits of right reading; and no
+school or college that is decently interested in the welfare of the
+people can disregard this one duty of teachers <i>above all others</i>. Much
+of the best in thought and feeling and conduct shall depend hereafter
+upon the books which we read with careful observation. Every man who has
+read himself into higher realms is under bonds to make the source of so
+much bliss and blessedness as admirable and as desirable as possible to
+all who are strangers to the most pleasant and profitable paths of
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the quantity of our reading, but the quality that makes it and
+us an influence for good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> to our fellows. A man who has read ten pages
+with real accuracy, says John Ruskin, is forevermore in some measure an
+educated person. You might read all the books in the British Museum, yet
+be an utterly illiterate and uneducated person. Our reading without
+digestion and assimilation is as useless as our food without them. Bacon
+says that reading makes a <i>full</i> man; but fullness without digestion is
+dyspepsia. The books whose reading impels us to live nobly and do noble
+service for others, are <i>the</i> books, and it is a wicked waste of time to
+read what is a negative quantity. Whoever masters <i>one vital</i> book can
+never become commonplace.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thoroughness</i> is the master-passion in reading, as in every other
+undertaking. Those who have accumulated wisdom, culture, power, riches,
+are always prominent for their indefatigable, painstaking thoroughness;
+nothing to them is a trifle, for "trifles make perfection, and
+perfection is no trifle." Those who have thought most and felt most and
+done most from their reading have brought this master passion to it.</p>
+
+<p>When we begin to become acquainted with all the worthy men and women who
+trace the beginning of their worth to the careful reading of one book,
+it seems almost a loss to the world to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> have the libraries of the world
+so large. If they were all respectable occupants of their shelves, it
+might be condoned; but the copyright of millions of books is the only
+right, human or divine, for their existing at all. Many a country boy at
+the fireside during the long winter evenings has received inspiration
+from repeatedly reading one or two worthy books; these have spurred him
+on to fight his way valiantly through college, and from there to the
+heights in some worthy life-work.</p>
+
+<p>If we are true to all that <i>manhood</i> involves, there is no
+self-deception in the conviction that each one of us is born for
+kingship. Supreme kingship "consists in a stronger <i>moral</i> state and a
+truer <i>thoughtful</i> state than that of other men, which enables us to
+<i>guide</i> and <i>raise</i> the misguided and the illiterate." Every thoughtful
+man and woman ultimately discovers that "all <i>education</i> and all
+<i>literature</i> are useful only so far as they confirm this calm and
+beneficent kingly power." Emerson's "man-thinking" is the supreme among
+human beings.</p>
+
+<p>The best that can be known and experienced lies asleep in books, and one
+of the chief purposes for getting an education is to give us the
+<i>well-made</i> head and the <i>finer</i> feeling to awake this best knowledge
+and experience in these sleeping princes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>De Quincey reminds us that all the greatest books may be divided into
+the literature of <i>knowledge</i> and the literature of <i>power</i>. They have
+all been written in utmost sincerity by the <i>right</i>-minded and the
+<i>strong</i>-minded; they disclose boundless fields for soul-<i>refreshment</i>
+and soul-<i>expansion</i>. In the march of civilization, the men and the
+nations that have forged farthest ahead since Gutenberg invented
+printing are the men and the nations that have had most to do with the
+few books of <i>knowledge</i> and <i>power</i> of the greatest and the wisest.
+There can be no better test of a man's thought and feelings and actions
+than the books he reads and the books he keeps around him; and there is
+none so desolate as the poor <i>rich</i> man who lives in a great bookless
+house, and "has never fed upon the dainties that are bred in books," as
+John Milton says.</p>
+
+<p>The very presence of books is refining, and the right kind of man would
+as soon think of building his house without windows as of furnishing it
+without books. In every well-regulated home of intelligent men and women
+the library is always one of the annual items of expenditure. When we
+have learned how to consult the books of <i>knowledge</i> and <i>power</i>, they
+let us mingle with the best society of all ages; they make the
+<i>mightiest</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> men and women of words and deeds our advisers; they bring
+us the gold of learning and the gems of thought; and they furnish us
+with the soul-<i>food</i> which brings the proper kind of soul-<i>growth</i>. Such
+books are the safest of companions, for they protect us from vice and
+the inferior passions; more than ever they are to-day <i>indispensable</i>
+for all who are striving to do the higher work of civilization and
+<i>Christianity</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Every <i>real</i> book we <i>really</i> read gives us greater faith in the
+<i>goodness</i> and the <i>nobility</i> of life. As Lowell says, "Adds another
+block to the climbing spire of a great soul." The other sort which
+"swarm from the cozy marshes of immoral brains," the sort also who "rack
+their brains for lucre," do the devil's work for him, and are as baneful
+as the company of fools and vulgarians. Show an observant man your
+bookshelves, and he'll tell you what you are. The man who does not
+<i>love</i> some great book is not worth the time we spend in his company; we
+are fortunate if we are not in some way contaminated by him. If we knew
+the road they have traveled, we should likely find that those of modern
+times who have merited the crown of kings and queens for their stronger
+<i>moral</i> state and their <i>truer thoughtful</i> state have had most to do
+with some literature<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> of knowledge and power; that they especially
+oftenest consulted the books of the greatest and wisest in their
+difficulties, and had been spurred on by their messages to the thoughts
+and the deeds which made them worthy.</p>
+
+<p>It is fortunate that to-day the greatest of books are the common
+property of the printers of the world, for they are on this account the
+cheapest, and many of them can be had for the price of a poor man's
+dinner. It needs many a page to record even the names of the men and
+women who have become <i>somebody</i> and have done <i>something</i> just from
+reading some one worthy book which had fallen into their hands. Many
+believe that Franklin is the greatest American that has yet appeared,
+and he has said that "Cotton Mather's <i>essays to do good</i> gave me a turn
+of thinking which, perhaps, had an influence on some of the principal
+future events of my life."</p>
+
+<p>As we become better acquainted with some of the <i>great</i> books in all
+departments of literature, we are surprised to find how few of them have
+been written by college men. This by no means belittles the good that
+may come from a <i>true</i> college course, but it does seem to emphasize
+that great books need some other environment for their growth than
+exclusive college courses. Perhaps<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> the need is <i>solitude</i>, communion
+with nature, and frequent intercourse with the world's greatest and best
+in thought and feeling and action for the work. College-bred men are in
+a marked minority among the authors whose great books have been and are
+a potent force in shaping thought and conduct in the world. It is
+notable how few of these have anything commendatory to say about the
+influence which their college life had upon them and their
+accomplishments; many even of the text-books of schools and colleges
+have come from men whose powers were shaped by no school. How many
+text-books of medicine and law were prepared by physicians and lawyers
+whose knowledge was gleaned mainly from keen observation and long
+experience and deep thought!</p>
+
+<p>It was no mere college education, but the sharpest home observation and
+strictest adherence to their instincts and their individuality that made
+forceful writers of Mark Twain, the Mississippi pilot; Bret Harte and
+William Dean Howells, the typesetters; James Whitcomb Riley, the
+itinerant sign-painter; Joel Chandler Harris and Eugene Field, the
+newspaper reporters; and Walt Whitman, the carpenter.</p>
+
+<p>Of the four thousand and forty-three Americans with over twenty millions
+of dollars to their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> credit, only sixty-one had even a <i>high-school</i>
+course. Many among them, however, had high-class mentality and secured a
+comprehensive practical education. They have evidently been as alert to
+perceive the treasures hidden for them in the world of great books as
+they have been to perceive the treasuries hidden for them in their
+various enterprises. So we find that they have consulted the master
+spirits of books after their daily tasks were done, while myriads of
+those who scoff and sneer at them now because of their millions were
+feasting, frolicking, and dissipating. Among the highest types of
+American manhood to-day a large majority are the <i>new-rich</i> men.
+Whatever else may be said about them, all the world acknowledges that it
+is the parvenus in every land who do the largest part of the greatest
+work.</p>
+
+<p>The larger our horizon becomes, the stronger is our conviction that the
+man himself is <i>mainly</i> the architect of his own fate; others may give
+an occasional lift, but it is almost entirely his own work. The college
+can do something for the <i>head-piece</i>, and it should also give something
+for the <i>heart-side</i> and the power to dare and to do; but all the
+external training in the world can never attain for the man what he can
+attain through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> his own individual efforts&mdash;provided he has lofty aims,
+firm resolutions, closely observes, and strictly adheres to all his best
+inborn powers. There was no college for David, Homer, Socrates, Plato,
+Confucius, Alexander, Cæsar, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
+Washington, Franklin, Goethe, Jesus, and tens of thousands of great or
+lesser men than these. They all marked out their own course, planned
+their own spiritual palaces; all the barbed-wire entanglements in the
+world did not retard their indomitable courage, self-reliance, and
+self-help.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the chief use of all learning establishments, except those which
+have to do with what the Germans call <i>bread studies</i>, is to awaken the
+pupil's self-respect, which is the basis of all virtue, and to cultivate
+the powers that shall fit the pupil to consult for himself the
+<i>knowledge</i> and <i>power</i> books of the greatest and the wisest. They also
+can in these days do yeoman's service in giving the <i>bread studies</i>
+through which men shall be better able to do the world's work and
+thereby earn better wages.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>THOUGHTFULNESS</h3>
+
+
+<p>President Wolsey, head of a great university, said that one of the chief
+purposes of the college is to cultivate the <i>power to think</i>. The
+college man who neglects to cultivate this valuable power until he
+enters upon his college career, instead of beginning it in the
+kindergarten and continuing it unremittingly throughout his entire
+preparatory course and daily living, will be liable to make sorry work
+of this part of his cultivation, or any other part, while he is in
+college.</p>
+
+<p>The specialists who teach in colleges, and who are generally more
+interested in their specialties than in the science and art of
+education, may not be conscious of this, and yet the many educational
+wrecks that have come from colleges should long ago have brought this
+point most forcibly to their attention. Indeed, the power to think and
+the practice of thinking until it has become<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> second nature, are so
+essential for success in any <i>worthy</i> career in life, that it is truer
+to say that one of the chief purposes of <i>life</i> itself is to cultivate
+and exercise the power to think, and keep right on thinking until close
+thinking shall become a habit. The power to think clearly, broadly, and
+successfully is not necessarily the prerogative of those only who have
+lived in a college environment, as the biographies of our own four
+thousand multi-millionaires in this country so cogently prove, for few
+of them ever darkened the doors of a college. Some among them may have
+been bereft of all the nobler sentiments for which Christianity and
+America stand, but they never could have piled up their millions in
+every department of activity without having thought so long and so hard
+that they ultimately acquired a habit of thinking that should put to
+shame myriads in every land who have had all the advantages of
+universities. The power to think, and to think in a masterly way, need
+not be confined to the professor's chair.</p>
+
+<p>Any sphere of action which does not bring in to the worker an increase
+of thinking power is harmful, from university to street-sweeping. A
+machine is the only worker that can do its work well without thinking
+about it. All the successful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> men the world has ever known have been men
+who thought incessantly; they have been mainly self-educated in their
+extraordinary power to think; their success in all the various tasks
+which they set for themselves oftener resulted from their hard thought
+than from their hard work.</p>
+
+<p>Defeat and failure have never overtaken the man whose head and hands
+were partners.</p>
+
+<p>When we think without work or work without thought, we reach only half
+of what belong to us. A man should especially ween himself from this
+kind of halfness. We should be ashamed to find ourselves working without
+thought, as we should be ashamed to find ourselves idle in a world where
+there is always so much to be done and so little time allotted to each
+for accomplishing worthy work. The employees that are most valuable to
+their employers and are most valued by them are those always whose heads
+and hands are yoke-mates. When hands and head and heart are on the job,
+it is difficult to imagine what heights of success and service shall be
+attained. The farmer boy hoeing corn and digging potatoes will do better
+work in quantity and quality if he thinks about his work as hard as he
+hoes or digs.</p>
+
+<p>There can be little danger of failure for any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> young man who begins his
+life-work with the resolution that he will always give his best thought
+to even the most insignificant task that he assumes; and all the schools
+in the world cannot furnish him any advantage that can compare with this
+resolution steadily followed. Nor must the habit of thinking be
+exercised only upon work. We all have more leisure than work, and many a
+high-minded thinker has reminded us that a man is best to be judged, not
+by his profession, but by his leisure. Elihu Burritt acquired a
+knowledge of fifty languages during the years he earned his livelihood
+as a village blacksmith; he also found time for extensive reading as
+well as time for interest in social reforms, in the advancement of which
+he won the reputation of being one of the most powerful and persuasive
+orators of his day. All his stupendous acquirements were gained during
+the hours between his tasks which thousands of other village blacksmiths
+were accustomed to spend in gossip or in the tavern. Volumes could be
+filled with only <i>brief</i> accounts of the men and women throughout the
+ages who have made the world better for their living, just because they
+wisely and thoughtfully employed the leisure hours which their
+contemporaries trifled away. The shortest life may be long in noble<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+thought and action, if we lose no time; and little of it is ever lost by
+those who thoughtfully employ their leisure.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughtful men and women are always doubly valuable, no matter whether
+their work is what the world calls high-class or low-class. The streets
+are better swept by such a man, and the potatoes are better hoed; the
+floor is better scrubbed by such a woman, and the clothes are better
+washed. If our work does not afford us the chance to think while we are
+employed upon it, we owe it to ourselves and to humanity to toss it
+aside quickly. The lawyer, the physician, or any other professional man
+is no more a man in the sight of God and his country than the
+stone-mason who lays the foundations for their houses and raises the
+superstructures; and they are under no greater obligation to use their
+thinking powers than he is. The place we occupy in life is unimportant;
+the way we fill the place is everything; the stone-mason, Ben Jonson,
+built stone walls and houses by day, and at night built dramas and other
+poetry which have been surpassed only by his contemporary, Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the greatest achievements known to history have been the work of
+men and women whose life-tasks were entirely different from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> lines
+in which they became eminent; Shakespeare was an actor and one of the
+most successful business men of London, but he is known as the greatest
+poet the world has yet produced; George Eliot had charge for several
+years of her father's farm home, as well as the poultry and dairy, and
+won prizes for these at the country fair, but this did not prevent her
+from laying, during these seven years, the foundation which helped her
+to build herself into one of the greatest women known to history.
+Herschel's being a musician and Mary Somerville's having charge of her
+home and her children did not prevent both of them from doing marvelous
+work in astronomy. Audubon became a final authority on birds solely
+because while on his hunting-trips he thought more than the other
+hunters who accompanied him. One of the greatest merchants and
+capitalists in Boston began life selling handkerchiefs through the
+country. He became expert in flax products, and through this grew rich;
+he so studied kindred fibrous plants that his partners boasted that he
+had succeeded in marketing handkerchiefs made of twenty different
+fibrous plants. The most successful piano manufacturer now living was
+originally an employee of a steel mill that manufactured wire for making
+piano-strings. An every-day man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> gave careful thought to corn, and wrote
+an article for a magazine upon its value and upon the way it should be
+prepared for food; and this article was so worthy that it won for him a
+degree from a university.</p>
+
+<p>Every waking moment of every man contains food for thought. If some live
+fuller lives every twenty-four hours than others live in a year, it is
+because they think faster and higher, wider and deeper, and because the
+discipline they get from this thought keeps them from wasting their time
+on trivial or worthless matter. A puddler in Youngstown, without
+education beyond the district school, began to think about the iron that
+was softened in the furnace before him, and asked questions of the older
+employees and the foreman; then he read upon the subject and became so
+capable in mining and iron manufacturing that when the Youngstown plant
+was sold to the great steel corporation he was the largest stockholder
+in forty-seven great companies manufacturing iron. Some men's hearts
+grow as hard as their gold while they are amassing riches; but his heart
+seems to have softened in proportion to the increase of his riches; his
+life is given to numberless good deeds, chief among which has been his
+endeavor to impress upon all workmen the necessity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> of letting both
+their heads and hearts assist their hands. Neither man nor boy, woman
+nor girl, need despair of doing great things and being great men and
+women, if they will constantly carry out this advice. He is really the
+best-educated man whose attention is primarily directed to his
+soul-growth, to his power of thinking, for feeling, and for noble
+action.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>INSTINCTS AND INDIVIDUALITY</h3>
+
+
+<p>"God has given us a full kit of watchmaker's tools" and if, after all
+the centuries of civilization, "we are doing <i>thinker's</i> work with
+them," something must be wrong with the educational methods. When God
+sent us here he packed us with all we need for high-class manhood&mdash;our
+<i>instincts</i> and our <i>individuality</i> especially well done up; but often
+in the unpacking by the schools we have been sadly marred; and these
+God-given endowments seem to have been frequently thrown upon the
+rubbish-pile. They seem to have dulled our instincts and to have
+despised our individuality, in order to make room for our acquirements.</p>
+
+<p>Like all that emanates from God, instincts and individuality have been
+bestowed for a wise purpose; they are <i>indispensable</i> endowments if we
+shall become the kind of man God seems to have had in mind when he sent
+us here. What<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> justification have the teachers of civilization for
+failing to perfect these powers? What right have the <i>little</i> men of the
+schools to drive them entirely out of their scheme of education?</p>
+
+<p>John Ruskin complains in <i>Kings' Treasuries</i> that "Modern education for
+the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on
+every conceivable subject of importance to them." If this is even partly
+true, there is no pursuit to-day that demands from the man who is
+working in it more <i>presence of mind</i> and more <i>self-direction</i>, than
+the business of getting <i>real</i> education. Those who are to-day
+conducting what we are foolish enough to permit them to call <i>education</i>
+are often both blind and deaf to all that efficient education implies.
+To seek direction from them is like asking the road from a blind man.
+Many are also connected with the schools apparently as others are
+connected with hod-carrying and street-sweeping&mdash;to procure a
+livelihood. Often their highest conception of the work is <i>edge</i>ucation,
+to make sharp blades of the intellects for what they call "getting along
+in the world." Then many of the instructors in schools and colleges are
+merely specialists, mainly interested in their specialties, and using
+the class-room as a stepping-stone to their own purposes. Extreme
+specializing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> is narrowing&mdash;it does to the specialist what blinkers do
+to the horse's eyes. Excessive pursuit of single objects of thought
+atrophies many faculties, but <i>education</i> is the <i>complete</i> development
+and discipline of all the faculties.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps these are some of the causes why so many <i>original</i> and
+<i>thinking</i> men and women are so hostile to present-day schools, and
+accuse them of mainly being "places that polish pebbles and dim
+diamonds," and say so many other harsh and cutting things about them.
+Learning seems to be the <i>chief</i> occupation of those who profess to
+educate. Learning for its <i>own</i> sake plays a very <i>insignificant</i> part
+in the spiritual equipment of God's children; to a <i>true</i> education it
+seems at best only what the carpenter's kit is to the carpenter&mdash;a means
+to an end. Like all other lumber, its importance depends entirely upon
+what is built out of it. These original and thinking men and women have
+often said hard things of mere learning and of those who dole it out at
+so much a <i>unit</i>, because they believe that undue stress is laid upon
+it. They sometimes say that universities are not <i>educating</i>
+institutions, but merely <i>seats-of-learning</i>; and often they are very
+<i>narrow</i> seats, difficult for self-respecting people to stiffen their
+backs enough to sit upon. But it's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> the <i>study</i>, not the studies, that
+educates; studies make <i>learned</i> men, but not often <i>wise</i> men, such as
+<i>real</i> education always makes; not all learned heads are <i>sense</i>-boxes;
+the <i>very</i> learned man may be a very learned fool. The learned
+frequently put out their reasoning powers to make room for their
+learning; it requires ten pounds of <i>sense</i> to take care of one pound of
+learning.</p>
+
+<p>Solomon made a book of proverbs, but a book of proverbs never made
+Solomon. Sense without learning is a thousand times superior to learning
+without sense; and in the stately edifice of life, school and college
+are only the basement walls; wisdom and learning are not necessary
+companions. The great things that have conduced to the betterment of the
+world have been done by men who have been loyal to their individuality
+and true to their instincts&mdash;never by the merely learned. Too often do
+we find these little learned men "displaying themselves offensively and
+ridiculously in the haunts of bearded men," and making the angels weep
+by their strutting and their swelling.</p>
+
+<p><i>Knowing</i> is only a <i>small</i> part of life; <i>doing</i> is nearly <i>all</i> of
+life; and the <i>best</i> done is done through <i>education</i>&mdash;the education
+which is the product of what is <i>inborn</i> as well as of what is
+<i>acquired</i>; the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> education which enables men and women to perceive and
+to cherish the <i>beautiful</i> in art, in literature, in morals and in
+nature. While true education busies itself with acquirements, it is even
+more concerned that the instincts and the individuality God appears to
+regard of supreme importance shall attain all that it is possible for
+them to have. These original and thinking men and women who say so many
+things in condemnation of <i>make-believe</i> education and mere learning
+boldly and lovingly acclaim the helps from true education&mdash;they remind
+us that it is soul-husbandry, spiritual perfection, torch and sword and
+shield, the <i>be-all</i> and the <i>end-all</i> of life, the fountain of all
+noble living, and the only real promoter of civilization. They claim
+that education of this sort simplifies life; facilitates self-conquest;
+intensifies individuality; unfolds and uplifts manhood; breeds habits of
+thinking, feeling, and doing; debestializes, emancipates, humbles, and
+civilizes; that it searches for truth, loves the beautiful, desires the
+good, and does the best.</p>
+
+<p>We have no quarrel with the education that accomplishes all these, for
+it fosters the instincts and the individuality for which we are
+pleading. We have always believed that just this kind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> education is
+the heritage of every American, and that the loss of such an education
+is the greatest calamity that can befall any one. All our life have we
+yearned that all might have this boon, and the best of our manhood years
+have been ceaseless labor and struggle to give "the weak and friendless
+sons of men" all of its advantages.</p>
+
+<p>The test of any system of education is the kind of man it turns out. It
+is wisdom to measure the system by those it fails to educate rather than
+by those it does educate&mdash;by its tortoises rather than by its hares. The
+real educator is always vastly more concerned with the divinity than
+with the depravity of those intrusted to him; he believes firmly that
+the instincts and the individuality which God has given each of us are
+the priceless part of all our spiritual equipment&mdash;that anything we may
+acquire toward this end which fortifies these God-given treasures is
+cheap&mdash;even if bought by an entire life-service; that any acquirement
+that modifies these or destroys them is a triple curse and a dire menace
+to humanity, for individuality is the genius of Christianity and of
+America.</p>
+
+<p>The system of education which makes light of the cultivation of the
+instincts, which seems to be the sole dependence of all conditions of
+men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> except the over-civilized, the system of education which is blinded
+to all that is implied in an educated individuality&mdash;these are the only
+systems with which we have any quarrel. Well-made, rather than
+well-filled heads are what is needed and should be demanded, without
+which it is impossible for any one of us to have the right conception of
+life, or to attain all that we were intended to be or to do. To guard
+and develop the instincts of the child, to preserve and fortify his
+individuality, is to give him sword and shield for the battle of life.</p>
+
+<p>God intends each individual to be an individual, or this should not have
+been so deep-rooted in all; to be just like every one else is to be
+predestined for inferiority and failure. To do our duty consistently and
+steadfastly demands that all our God-like and God-given qualities shall
+first of all be educated. That best becomes a man which his
+individuality intended him to be, and those are always successful in
+making a life and a living who play the game of life with the cards
+their individuality gives them. God made a world for each separate man,
+and within that world he <i>must</i> live, if he will live effectually; we
+must first of all be ourselves, must see to it that whatever else is
+neglected the plants God has put into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> the individual shall be
+cultivated&mdash;the crop may not be large, but we are accountable for the
+cultivation, not for the crop. We must be ourselves, and do our own
+work.</p>
+
+<p>There can be no greater wisdom and no greater service than that of
+helping another so that he may duly live in that special world which God
+has created for him. The most insignificant man can be complete if he is
+entirely true to his instincts and to his individual character. If we
+are incomplete, it is because we are living after some other method. We
+have all been stamped with individuality, but many seem to do their
+utmost to soak off the stamp. How different should the life of all the
+world be if each one only kept in his frame, and would not permit any
+one to try to make him part of, the picture for which his personality
+never intended him!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<img src="images/endpaper1.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright">
+<img src="images/endpaper2.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Every Man His Own University, by Russell H. Conwell
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+Project Gutenberg's Every Man His Own University, by Russell H. Conwell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Every Man His Own University
+
+Author: Russell H. Conwell
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2011 [EBook #36955]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     Every Man His Own University
+
+                       _By_ RUSSELL H. CONWELL
+
+
+                        Every Man's University
+                    Animals and "The Least Things"
+                           The Bottom Rung
+                           Thoughtfulness
+                     Instincts and Individuality
+
+
+    VOLUME 4
+
+    NATIONAL
+    EXTENSION UNIVERSITY
+
+    597 Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+
+    OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
+
+    Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
+    Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+EVERY MAN'S UNIVERSITY
+
+
+A distinct university walks about under each man's hat. The only man who
+achieves success in the other universities of the world, and in the
+larger university of life, is the man who has first taken his graduate
+course and his post-graduate course in the university under his hat.
+There _observation_ furnishes a daily change in the curriculum. Books
+are not the original sources of power, but observation, which may bring
+to us all wide experience, deep thinking, fine feeling, and the power to
+act for oneself, is the very dynamo of power.
+
+Without observation, literature and meditation are shower and sunshine
+upon unbroken soil. Only those schools and colleges are true schools
+and colleges which regard it as the chief business of all their
+teaching to persuade those under their charge to see more perfectly what
+they are looking at, to find what they should have been unable to
+observe had it not been for their school instruction. You can't make a
+good arrow from a pig's tail, and you can seldom get a man worth while
+out of one who has gone through the early part of his life without
+having learned to be alert when things are to be seen or heard. John
+Stuart Blackie says that it is astonishing how much we all go about with
+our eyes wide open and see nothing, and Doctor Johnson says that some
+men shall see more while riding ten miles upon the top of an omnibus,
+than some others shall see in riding over the continent.
+
+_How to observe_ should be the motto, not only in the beginning of our
+life, but throughout our career. With the same intellectual gifts,
+interested in the same ideas, two men walk side by side through the same
+scenery and meet the same people. One man has had much inspiration from
+the country traversed, and has been intent upon all that he has seen and
+heard among the people. The other has caught no inspiration from beauty
+or bird or blossom, and only the trivialities of the people have amused
+him.[1]
+
+A traveler in Athens or Rome, Paris or London, may be shown these cities
+by a professional guide, and yet gain only a smattering of what these
+cities hold in store for him, and remember little of what he has seen.
+Another traveler, unattended by a guide, but observant of everything
+that comes to his eyes and ears, will carry away stores from his visit
+to those cities, which shall be of life-long interest and be
+serviceable to all who shall travel his way. The solitary but observant
+stranger in a country almost always profits most from his travels. He is
+compelled to notice boulevards and buildings, parks and people; and
+every day of his travels is a lesson in observation that accustoms him
+to remember all he has once seen. The newspaper correspondents of other
+days had no guide-books or guides, and they were entire strangers in the
+places they visited. They relied entirely upon themselves to find their
+way, and to discover everything that was valuable and interesting. They
+found much that the modern guide either overlooks or disregards, and
+wrote for the papers at home what would most interest and instruct their
+readers.
+
+When Henry M. Stanley first visited Jerusalem he insisted that the
+dragoman in charge of his party should keep all guides and guide-books
+out of his sight. In two days Stanley knew the streets and the location
+of the Temple and the Holy Sepulcher and all the notable places in that
+old city. If Stanley is to-day known as one of the most intelligent of
+travelers, it is mainly because he excelled in daily _observation_,
+which every one who thinks for himself recognizes as the supreme
+acquisition of a liberal education. He often said that he knew Rome,
+Naples, and Vienna far better than he knew New York, where he had lived
+many years of his life. In that he resembled the rest of humanity, who
+generally know less about what is notable in their home places, than
+observant visitors know who stay there only a short time during their
+travels. What we pay for in time and labor seems more valuable--nothing
+pay, nothing value.
+
+A great foreign correspondent of his day, Henry W. Chambers, remained
+only six hours at Baalbek, near Damascus; yet he wrote the clearest
+description that probably ever was written of the magnificent temples at
+Baalbek--and he wrote these descriptions, too, at Hong-Kong, after many
+and varied experiences while visiting other places of greater
+importance. Many archeologists and literary men before him had visited
+the moat of the great fortress at Baalbek. Still, they had never
+observed as Chambers observed, and so they missed seeing the arrow-heads
+and all the other warlike instruments used in those ancient days,
+which had lain unnoticed among those huge pillars and great
+foundation-stones.
+
+Although General Lew Wallace lived a long time at Jerusalem, he only
+imagined that there might have been an inner dungeon underneath the
+great prison; so when he wrote _Ben Hur_ he put his leprous heroine into
+this imaginary prison-house. A school-teacher from northern England,
+with her tourist-candle, afterward found the doorway of this prison
+which Wallace had only imagined to be there. On their way from Egypt and
+Palestine to the Euphrates, travelers had for centuries passed over the
+same path in the desert; but it was reserved for a cutter of marble
+inscriptions, after all these centuries, to _observe_ the Rosetta Stone,
+by the help of which archeologists can now read the inscriptions upon
+the tablets in the ancient palaces of Babylon and Ninevah.
+
+Millions and millions had seen the lid of a teakettle bobbing up and
+down over the boiling water before that Scotchman, Watt, observed it
+while making watches. But he was the first of all those millions whose
+close observation led him to investigate this force of boiling water in
+the teakettle. Then he applied this power to the steam-engine, which is
+still the great propelling force of the world. From the time of the
+Garden of Eden apples had fallen in the orchards of the world, through
+all the harvest-days. Of all the billions that had seen apples falling,
+only Sir Isaac Newton observed the law of gravitation that was involved
+in their falling.
+
+All the great discoverers began with nearly the same meager powers for
+observation that the rest of the world has, but early in life came to
+value above all other mental powers this incalculable power to closely
+notice; and each made his realm of observation much richer for his
+discoveries.
+
+Why do the majority of us go through life seeing nothing of the millions
+of marvelous truths and facts while only a few keep their eyes and ears
+wide open and every day are busy in piling up what they have observed!
+The loss of our instincts seems to be the price we pay to-day for the
+few minor acquisitions we get from school and college; we put out our
+brains to make room for our learning. The man who assiduously cultivates
+his powers of observation and thus gains daily from his experiences what
+helps him to see farther and clearer everything in life that is worth
+seeing, has given himself a discipline that is much more important than
+the discipline of all the schools and the colleges without it. The
+greatest text-books of the greatest universities are only the records of
+the observations of some close observer whose better powers of seeing
+things had been acquired mainly while he was taking his courses in that
+university under his hat.
+
+The intellect is both telescope and microscope; if it is rightly used,
+it shall observe thousands of things which are too minute and too
+distant for those who with eyes and ears neither see nor hear. The
+intellect can be made to look far beyond the range of what men and women
+ordinarily see; but not all the colleges in the world can alone confer
+this power--this is the reward of _self-culture_; each must acquire it
+for himself; and perhaps this is why the power of observing deeply and
+widely is so much oftener found in those men and those women who have
+never crossed the threshold of any college but the University of Hard
+Knocks.
+
+    The quickening power of science only he
+    Can know, from whose _own_ soul it gushes free.
+
+When we look back over our life and reflect how many things we might
+have seen and heard had we trained our powers of observation, we seem to
+have climbed little and to have spent most of our time upon plateaus,
+while our achievements seem little better than scratches upon black
+marble. Mankind has a greater esteem for the degrees conferred by the
+University of Observation and Experience than for all the other degrees
+of all other Universities in the world. The only thing that seems most
+to win the respect of real men and women for the degrees conferred by
+colleges is the fact that the graduates have first gained all that close
+observation and wide experience can confer.
+
+The lives of the men and the women who have been worth while keep
+reminding us how vastly more important is this education from ceaseless
+observation than all the mere learning from school courses. It takes ten
+pounds of the stuff gotten from observation and experience to carry one
+pound of school learning wisely. The thinking man will never ask you
+what college you have gone through, but what college has gone through
+you; and the ability and habit of observing deeply and broadly is the
+preparation we all need that the college may go through us. Confucius of
+China, Kito of Japan, Goethe of Germany, Arnold of England, Lincoln and
+Edison of America, stand where they stand to-day in thought and action
+solely because they had in a masterly way educated their power of minute
+attention. In building up a huge business or in amassing enormous
+riches, such men as Rothschild, Rockefeller, and Carnegie show us
+especially how vitally important to all material success is steadfast
+attendance at the school of attention.
+
+The colleges that to-day are advancing most rapidly in esteem are those
+which are recognizing more and more the importance of observation. They
+require their men to spend some portion of their college time in gaining
+experience in their various lines through observing the practical
+workings of their calling; medical students are in hospitals; students
+of law attend courts; theological students engage in mission work; and
+engineers are found in shops. Neither lectures nor speculations can take
+the place of these experiences; each is helpful to the other. When only
+one may be had, the experience from observing actual work is far more
+important. Opportunities for observation of practical matters, along
+with theory, is the modern idea toward which all the best modern
+institutions are tending in their efforts to fit men for the active
+business of life.
+
+Nor has greatness from careful observation and large experience
+distinguished men of action alone. Shakespeare, Goethe, Bunyan, Burns,
+Whittier, Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, and a host of the great men
+of philosophy, science, and literature are where they are to-day in the
+esteem of their fellow men, and in their service to humanity, because
+they were the keenest among the men acute in observation.
+
+[Footnote 1: The failure to observe is strikingly proved by practical
+experiment in the psychological laboratory. Reproductions of a familiar
+or unfamiliar scene are placed in the observers' hands and they are
+instructed to study the reproductions carefully and to remember what
+they see. After 5 minutes careful study, the reproductions are taken
+away and a series of questions concerning them are put to the observers.
+The contradictory answers to these questions is strikingly eloquent of
+the all-too-human inability to observe. Hugo Munsterberg, the famous
+psychologist, made a number of psychological experiments to determine
+the limits of error in observation as these limits affect the
+credibility of witnesses in the court room. Some of his findings are
+summarized in "On the Witness Stand."
+
+Your good newspaper reporter is a trained observer who describes exactly
+what he sees. Yet the manner in which even the trained observer fails to
+observe correctly is unfailingly demonstrated by the widely differing
+accounts of the same occurrence as reported in the various newspapers of
+a community.
+
+One of the best ways to learn to observe correctly and in detail is to
+take a hasty glance at the display in a store window, pass on and
+attempt to recall that which you have seen, the number of objects, what
+they were, etc., and then check your observing faculties by returning to
+the window and listing its contents. Continued practice of this sort
+will greatly increase your observing powers. Perhaps the most famous
+known exponent of this method for training the observing faculties was
+Houdini, the famous magician, who describes the method in detail and his
+experiences in applying it in his memoirs.]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ANIMALS AND "THE LEAST THINGS"
+
+
+The benefits brought to humanity through the study of lower animal life
+are incalculable, and could not be told in one book. With all that
+vivisection and post-mortem dissection have revealed to scientific
+examiners, contagious and infectious diseases have been nearly removed
+from the human family. We have been taught to live better from observing
+animal habits in searching for food, in building their habitats, in
+their mode of living, in their fear of man, and in the methods they
+adopt to preserve their health. All this knowledge has been gained for
+us, for the upbuilding of humanity, through the efforts of _close
+observers_. They have studied the cat by the hearth, the dog by the
+door, the horses in the pasture and stall, the pigs in their pens, and
+the sheep in their folds. Closely associated with the investigators of
+animal life are those who have observed the origin, habits, and
+influence of birds, insects, and creeping things.
+
+But what we have learned from animals in the past seems only a trifle in
+comparison with what they will teach when we go to them with more
+serious purpose and more carefully observe them. The leaders in all
+these investigations of animal life have all been distinguished for
+their power to discover in animals what has escaped other people.
+
+Professor Darwin's close observation of the doves he fed at his door
+opened up to him important suggestions and laid the foundation for his
+great treatise, "The Origin of Species." When Professor Niles of the
+Boston School of Technology was a boy he caught a minnow while returning
+from school. At his father's suggestion he put the fish into a simple
+aquarium and studied its movements. When it died he carefully examined
+its parts under a microscope--and this experience was the beginning of
+his vast knowledge of the animal realm.
+
+While a Philadelphia clergyman was visiting a farmer in northern New
+Jersey, the family became perturbed because their dog had "gone mad."
+They fastened it in the kitchen and sought somebody to kill it by
+shooting at it through the window. A neighbor observed the dog carefully
+and told them it was poisoned. He advised the family to loose it in
+order that it might get some antidote for itself in field or forest. He
+told them that cats, cattle, and horses are often compelled to find an
+antidote for some poisonous herb they have eaten, and that the animals
+know more about such things than any teacher in the medical schools. As
+soon as the dog was unfastened he hastened across the field to a brook,
+and ate a weed that was growing beside the water. The dog soon returned
+to the house, and ate heartily after a two weeks' fast.
+
+The clergyman had followed the dog and observed the plant which it had
+eaten. After the dog had returned to the house he uprooted the plant and
+took some of its leaves to a Philadelphia firm of chemists. Acting upon
+the firm's advice, he sent the leaves to the Smithsonian Institution at
+Washington, and they were found to be a valuable antidote for poison.
+Not only was humanity given a better medicine from this discovery, but
+the clergyman also derived a competency from it. This remedy for
+poisoning is often used in prescriptions; so even doctors sometimes "go
+to the dogs" for instructions.
+
+Like Professor Agassiz and Sir Oliver Lodge, many find their best
+instructors in domestic animals. The fowls around the house and the barn
+may be whole universities for developing the sciences. Through her
+dependence on nature the hen is a more efficient instructor than the
+majority of college professors. She knows by instinct so much of the
+laws of nature that wise men may sit at her feet or her bill and learn.
+Perhaps she may seem a little foolish in proclaiming her achievements in
+egg-laying by a cackle, but her knowledge of the necessities of life,
+her careful oversight of her brood, the way she uses her feet and her
+wings, her foreknowledge of approaching storms, her means of defending
+herself when attacked by hawks, her knowledge of the formation of the
+egg and of the proper time to break the shell for the release of her
+chick--all these are worthy of the attention of even the greatest
+scientists.
+
+In an address at a poultry-men's convention, Oliver Wendell Holmes said
+that chickens seem to have in them much more to study than did Darwin's
+doves. While Holmes was once summering at Kennebunkport, Maine, he
+trained five chickens to come at his call, to fly upon his head, and to
+leap with open bills to catch a kernel of corn. Before the season closed
+the chickens would come to his bedroom even after he had retired--making
+it necessary, as Doctor Holmes said, for the landlord to serve them up
+for dinner. Doctor Holmes's parody on Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life"
+shows what a careful observer he was. While some of Longfellow's
+admirers resented the parody as a slight, Longfellow himself always
+treated it as complimentary. He once told James T. Fields that, in one
+couplet of the parody, Holmes had excelled the entire original poem:
+
+    Not like muffled drums be beating
+    On the inside of the shell.
+
+Longfellow told Fields that there are always millions of men standing
+like chickens in the shell, with wings they know not how to use, having
+calls to a larger life outside of which they can see nothing; that some
+peck away until dead on the inside of the shell, while others, assisted
+by a friend on the outside, step out into a life beautiful and complete.
+
+In the egg or molecule we get nearer to God than we do through the
+telescope or by encircling the earth. He who lived nearest the first
+cause gets the best inspiration for visions of all greater sights or
+events; so the cottage is a happier place than the palace for him who
+wishes to get better acquainted with what shall arouse finer thought and
+feeling. The cottage is the best preparatory school for the mansion,
+provided always that the cottage course has been thorough. He who has
+worn his cottage life with manly dignity shall be the man to wear his
+mansion life with composure. Emerson said "the entire system of things
+gets represented in every particle."
+
+Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and unfortunate is the man who
+gets a smattering of many things yet does not know even one small thing
+thoroughly. The power of little things to give instruction and happiness
+should be the first lesson in life, and it should be inculcated deeply.
+The chief need of this discontented and sinful world is to comprehend
+that in one blade of grass or the shading of an evening cloud there is
+sufficient reverence to fill the largest heart, and sufficient science
+to occupy the greatest passion.
+
+We saw a delicate blue flower in the grass this morning which I had
+never noticed before. It seemed a different flower from each angle and,
+when put under a magnifying-glass, had colors I had never noticed before
+in flower or art. The field where it was growing had been familiar to me
+for threescore years and ten, yet the flower was entirely new to me. It
+was so dainty and attractive and inspiring that I felt I had lost
+something important to my spiritual growth all these years--something
+like the experience of Virgil, Guizot, Carlyle, Grotius, or like
+Tennyson in the "Holy Grail," who declares that he had left a real and
+wonderful life behind to follow the unknown. This little flower in the
+morning sunlight awakes thoughts of years long past--of the faces of
+marshaled hosts of battle, of eyes deep and calm with the smile of a
+loving mother's welcome, of the great forgiveness in a father's
+affection.
+
+Had I found that flower seventy years before, I believe my appreciation
+of the Divine Power would have been greater, my heart would have been
+more satisfied, my soul more fully illuminated and pervaded by a holier
+peace. We lose ourselves in all attempts to grasp the cause of which
+this small flower is the result. It is impossible to find words to
+convey the strange emotions which this newly found flower aroused, and
+to tell of the distant realms my imagination visited while I meditated
+there. If we would free ourselves from the perplexing cares which our
+daily duties demand; if we would forget the worries of each day; if the
+losses and disappointments and the wrongs of many years did not press
+themselves upon us; if the demands of many duties and the demands upon
+our attention and the calls of friends did not interrupt--we could find
+in contemplating this wee flower of the field a fund of happiness which
+years of sorrow and misfortune could not destroy.
+
+Bacon and Burke and Niebuhr discovered how much of grandeur can come
+into a life from the little things about us, but they all discovered it
+when it was too late to go back and live the _ideal_ life of simplicity
+and individuality which was suggested to them by a drop of water and a
+humming-bird. The smallest things are the largest in importance, if they
+bring into our lives the largest thoughts and feelings and an incentive
+to largest actions for self and humanity. Why are we forever looking
+upon the horizon for what upon closer view lies at our feet? These
+little beauties of the field rebuke the wanderer and the eminent man
+when it says to all the world, with a sweet smile and a dainty pout,
+"You could have found more in my life than has ever been learned from
+the sages."
+
+While Zinzendorf was stranded nearly a year upon a tiny island, his
+vigorous mind was forced to occupy itself in observing the objects upon
+the shore; his examinations of the colors in the clam-shell led him to
+say later in life, at a meeting of philosophers, that a lifetime study
+of these colors should develop more of the beautiful than all the
+manufactured color combinations then known.
+
+Art has not yet been able to combine the shades shown in the shell of an
+oyster, and the wings of the June bug have been enlarged and copied by
+colored photography, and will greatly influence all art hereafter. Man's
+needs shall be best supplied by beginning at the source and following
+the Creator in developing them into things of beauty and service.
+
+Although the Agricultural Department at Washington spent eight million
+dollars in the study of seeds and their growth by sending experts to
+roam over the world for investigations, yet the observations of Luther
+Burbank and many like investigators in the agricultural colleges
+throughout the country have made many more important discoveries. Their
+observations have brought about a greater increase of production to the
+acre than all the results of those who roamed the earth for the
+Government, and no one would say that their work was not a fair
+investment for the nation.
+
+Observation convinces us that the sooner we get down to the simplicities
+of life, the longer and healthier and nobler shall life become. The
+healthiest are those with one loaf and a natural hunger along with it.
+The noblest lives are those who are anxious to become as divine as it
+is possible for them to be, are ever alert for little deeds of
+kindness. How much richer life the poet lives who can sympathize with
+the field-mouse, like Burns! Who is lifted heavenward by the fringed
+gentian, like Bryant? Who gets the messages of peace from the frosted
+pumpkin, like Riley? Like Shakespeare, we too may "find tongues in
+trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in
+everything," if we will but use our eyes for seeing, our ears for
+hearing, our heads for understanding, and our hearts for feeling. The
+Poor Man's University gives its courses everywhere, and no entrance
+examination is requisite other than a mind willing to concentrate upon
+the sublime objects which, by the million, lie within our vision.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE BOTTOM RUNG
+
+
+Almost every day of his life an American is reminded that "necessity is
+the mother of invention." It needs only a little reflection and
+observation to realize how much American youth are blessed in the
+examples of their countrymen who have come from the humblest stations in
+life and have risen through sheer pluck and perseverance to honor and
+helpfulness.
+
+We are indebted mainly to the genius and the observation of poor men for
+the great inventions which have so much contributed to the comfort, the
+convenience, the cheerfulness, and the power of life. They have given us
+steam as a motive power, the locomotive, the telegraph, the typewriter,
+the telephone, the automobile, the victrola, the airship. The great
+advances that have been made in agriculture through mowers, reapers,
+planters, and special seeds and fruits are entirely the results of their
+steadfast perseverance. Nobody ever earnestly reaches out for a thing
+until he feels that he needs it, consequently, the sons and daughters
+of the rich are seldom the benefactors of humanity in the way so many
+poor men and women have been through the inventions which have lightened
+the drudgery of millions of homes, as well as increased marvelously the
+productions of the soil and of the factory. Had the talents of the rich
+been put to the test by hunger or cold or the many other incentives to
+vigorous thought and action which impel the poor, they also might have
+many inventions to their credit, for the longing of the normal soul
+furnishes the basis of all the worthy activities of life.
+
+The greatest drawback for rich men's sons and daughters is in having all
+their wants supplied from the bank-account of indulgent parents. They
+are taught neither industry, economy, nor self-control, which often
+makes them a social menace. They lack appreciation for so many of the
+things in life which help to brighten the path of the poor, solely
+because they have never needed them. A hungry boy who has stood on the
+outside of a bakery, clinging to a nickel and fighting a battle with
+himself whether to invest it in a bit of bread or to take it home to his
+mother, who has had neither breakfast nor dinner, fully understands the
+value of a dollar.
+
+The superintendent of the Patent Office at Washington has confirmed the
+official report of the French Patent Office--that there has been no
+invention of especial value which has not been either found or improved
+upon by some poor man. The best life-preserver was invented by a sailor
+who had fallen overboard and had been nearly drowned. An obscure native
+of a duchy bordered on three sides by powerful nations invented the
+quick-firing gun, which can fire six hundred shots while the ordinary
+gun is being loaded. It was a poor Cambridge machinist, whose family
+often suffered from lack of food, who invented the sewing-machine, which
+has changed the condition of home life throughout the world, and
+relieved women of one of their great household burdens. The ship's
+chronometer was made practical for navigation by a man who had been lost
+at sea and despaired of ever again reaching the shore. The locomotive,
+which has contributed more than any other one thing to the spread of our
+people over our vast country, was given to the world by an Englishman,
+Stephenson, who in early life had been so poor that he had little
+schooling.
+
+More than eight hundred agricultural inventions were patented in 1905
+and 1906, and every one of them is the invention of some poor man or
+woman.
+
+As inventors, women have in recent years become close competitors of
+men, and from kitchen utensils to floor covering have added much to home
+comfort and home furnishing. All the household articles exhibited lately
+in a large shop in Chicago were either invented or improved by women.
+They have invented many things for agriculture, for manufacturing, and
+for school furnishings--and not a few of the great patents which have
+been issued to men should have been issued to their wives. Women have
+often awaked an idea which men have wrought out for practical purposes.
+The majority of the benefactors of the world made their discoveries to
+relieve some necessity which oppressed them personally. This is
+especially true of stock-breeding, where the improvements of observant
+men have so greatly increased the value of domestic animals.
+
+The value of any study depends entirely upon what it has done for us and
+what we are doing with it. Lowell says that mere learning is as
+insignificant as the collection of old postage-stamps. Professor Virchow
+was obliged to try various foods in his experiments with his own cats,
+before he discovered what has ever since been of such benefit to all
+breeders of animals throughout the world. From the earliest days the bee
+has offered a store of the most useful information, but it would never
+have been known had it not been for such patient observers as Huber,
+who, although blind, discovered more about bees than the world had ever
+known before his day, through the patient service of his wife and valet.
+The mouse in the field, the squirrel in the tree, the eagle in her nest,
+the fish in the brook, all have taught us valuable lessons in conduct.
+They have doubtless given hints which have enabled observant men to give
+mankind many a useful invention.
+
+When we consider the many thousands of useful inventions which have
+added so much to the convenience and the happiness of life, and when we
+bring to mind how almost all of these have come from the humblest of the
+sons of men with none of the advantages of the so-called higher
+education, of which we hear so much to-day, we are forced to agree with
+Sir Walter Scott that the best part of every man's education is that
+which he gives himself independent of text-books other than the Book of
+Life. Every real man and woman attends a school or college, not to
+learn, but to learn how to learn. This is the best work that schools of
+any description can do. It lays a firm foundation upon which the man who
+has learned how to learn can build his own superstructure. The men who
+have achieved success in the march of the ages are those who have been
+the architects of their own life. Nobody cares a fig where we get our
+educational tools. The world is interested only in what we are doing
+with them. _We_ must be _self-made_ or _never-made_, whether we go to
+college or work in the fields. One teacher can be serviceable to a
+thousand of the sort who intend to make themselves, but a thousand
+teachers cannot help one of the other sort. Heredity and environment and
+will are the great deciding factors in every life.
+
+Investigations as to the food values of meats, grains, fruits,
+vegetables, and other foods are now being made by the Government, by
+colleges, and other investigators. This is the movement of _supreme_
+importance for the uplift of humanity. But the most of this kind of
+investigating has been done in household kitchens. It is probable that
+many of the greatest discoveries as to food will hereafter be made in
+the same places by those who are inclined to observe. The need of closer
+scientific knowledge of the chemistry of digestion and the chemistry of
+food is vital; it should call forth the most self-sacrificing
+investigation.
+
+It is said by those who have carefully studied the subject that
+ninety-one per cent. of all disease is attributable directly or
+indirectly to the stomach. Our ailments come mainly from our aliments.
+Nourishing food is an essential of a noble life. The stomach is the
+master of the house, and must be respected. A proper diet and a sound
+head are closely allied, and those who will rightly exercise their
+soul-powers must be watchful of the stomach.
+
+Those who would rule and lead must have chest and stomach as well as
+head and will.
+
+Nobody else has such opportunities for observing the effects of food,
+and for studying the happy results of nutritious food, as those have who
+prepare the meals in the kitchen. Proper nourishment is something which
+touches humanity on every side, and deserves the closest attention of
+the greatest minds. We can better afford to dispense with scientific
+experts in every other line which now engages them than to dispense with
+those who investigate the food question. The idea among the myriads of
+American housekeepers, that it is ignoble drudgery to spend some of
+their time in their kitchens ministering to the health of those who are
+nearest and dearest to them and removing diseases from them through
+well-selected and well-cooked food, is being gradually overcome by many
+schools and colleges. The sciences connected with food are now placed
+among the most important subjects in the curricula of these schools. It
+takes a master mind to handle the chemical combinations of the kitchen,
+which make hale and happy men and women, boys and girls.
+
+Health is symmetry; disease is deformity; both are mainly the result of
+what we eat.
+
+Food has killed more than the sword in every age, and is perhaps killing
+more to-day than ever before. Achievement in soul-growth and
+material-growth is involved in the question of proper food. If women
+forsake the throne that rightly belongs to the cook, men must assume it
+or Christian civilization shall cease. To-day nobody can become so
+supreme a benefactor of humanity as the man or the woman who devotes
+intellect and all other power to the study of scientific eating. When we
+come rightly to understand all the vital questions that are involved in
+nutrition, we shall feel that the kings among men and the queens among
+women are to be sought in no higher place than in kitchens.
+
+We are forever searching among the stars to discover kings, when they
+are far oftener found in cottages in the valley.
+
+If universities fail to make the knowledge of the right nutrition
+practical and fail to bring it down where humble men and women may get
+it and apply it, the fault is their own. Some day a people grateful for
+the health they enjoy may elect a man to the Presidency of our nation,
+or set him upon some throne, because he is the best scientific cook in
+the land. Doctor Agnew of Philadelphia said that he had gained his most
+important knowledge of hospital work as an adviser of the dietitians
+while feeding his dog and his cat.
+
+In speaking of the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, Professor
+Virchow said that he had often felt that our investigators had not taken
+sufficient notice of the force of animal electricity. The few
+experiments already made in applying to machinery electricity generated
+by the human body has opened up a field for observant scientists.
+
+In many ways both birds and beasts contribute to the welfare of
+humanity, and the observing thinker will still find many more ways in
+which he can aid us. All forms of life can be harnessed to the car of
+civilization, and far more effective work shall be done than is being
+done to-day. As teachers and as subjects of practical investigation,
+animals supply a great university which almost every man and woman can
+attend.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HOME READING
+
+
+Carlyle says that a collection of books is a true university in these
+days. It might be added that often the smaller the collection the larger
+shall be the university.
+
+Education derived from libraries is unsafe, for book-dissipation, as
+well as drunkenness, ends in debauchery. Toward the end of his long and
+wide-awake life Doctor Holmes advised a young correspondent to confine
+his reading to the Bible, Shakespeare, and a good dictionary. The list
+of men who have been lifted to higher regions of thought and feeling and
+action from reading any one of these three would be too long to be
+compressed within the covers of one book. Books are like two-edged
+swords--dangerous unless one knows how to use them; they either lead up
+or drag down, and we sink or rise to the level of the books we read.
+Every one reads, but how many read to advantage? Goethe, the greatest of
+all the very greatest Germans, said, "I have been learning how to read
+for the past fifty years, but have not yet succeeded."
+
+The majority of readers resemble hour-glasses--their reading runs in and
+out, and leaves no traces; and some others are like housewives'
+jelly-bags--they pass all that is good, and retain only the refuse. At
+best, only a small percentage of our life is spent in school; the
+greater part of the remainder each must pass in the University of Daily
+Life, where our education is derived from experience gained through
+_close observation_ in daily contact with our fellows, and from the
+fellowship of books. Fellowship fits the relation perfectly, for there
+must be intimate intercourse such as this word implies, or _nothing_. It
+is with books as with life--a man profits little from being merely
+_acquainted_ with ten thousand, and he may be incalculably injured from
+his intercourse with them; but a few _choice_ friends--often the _fewer_
+the better--bring a steady growth of higher spiritual power greater than
+can be had from all other influences combined.
+
+So it is with books. Acquaintance with a thousand often renders a
+capable man impotent. But a few _choice_ friends with whom he frequently
+and earnestly communes lift him in strength of intellect and will and
+tenderness and sweetness of feeling to be the peer of the worthiest.
+
+The beginning of New England was the golden age of scholarship in
+America, for many of the founders of these colonies had been reared in
+English universities. Such was the struggle in these bleak and barren
+colonies for existence during the first years, that in a few generations
+the majority of their posterity were strangers to almost all the books
+of _power_ and _knowledge_ with which their forefathers were acquainted,
+and were forced to glean all they harvested from the Bible and the
+almanac--especially the almanac. The almanac was eagerly perused by
+every member of the family from the dawn of the year to its setting. The
+reputed thrift of the plain people in this corner of the great world is
+largely attributable to the lessons of the almanac--mainly _Poor
+Richard's Almanac_, which the Bostonian, Franklin, annually edited in
+Philadelphia for over a quarter of a century. His chief purpose was to
+drive home forcibly many lessons which might encourage the colonists to
+get the most out of their hard and isolated lives.
+
+Peabody, the successful man of business and munificent philanthropist,
+said that an almanac and a jack-knife were the foundation of the
+education through which he ultimately did so much good for multitudes
+of his countrymen. It should be interesting and instructive to know how
+many more, during the "jack-knife epoch" in New England and the
+generations since that time, have been indebted to one book for the
+pluck and perseverance by which they have carved out a place of honor
+for themselves. Never were books so eagerly, so often, and so carefully
+read as these poor almanacs. Never, perhaps, has any other book except
+the Bible been so potent an influence in shaping the life of a nation
+and shaping it to a _high place among the nations_, whose beneficent
+influences have humanized the world. Many a writer has reminded us that
+the almanac was the text-book studied by our ancestry in beginning the
+enormous agricultural, commercial, mercantile, manufacturing, and
+financial interests which in four generations have placed us in front of
+the richest nations of the earth.
+
+Think of the many millions of dollars invested in library-buildings and
+the many millions more invested in the books they shelter! Think of the
+five hundred millions spent annually in public education, and the
+hundreds of millions that have been put into college buildings and
+college breeding! Still, from all this stupendous investment there will
+never come men and women who will make any more out of their learning
+than thousands of men and women of colonial days who knew the contents
+of no books other than the Bible and the almanac.
+
+The quality of the literary attainment of those reared in a library may
+be higher--and perhaps not; but wider and deeper self-knowledge,
+self-respect, self-confidence, self-culture, self-control, are the
+supreme objects of all life-struggle and educational struggle. Where a
+man gets the educational tools with which to accomplish all this is not
+at all important. If an almanac can help one man to get the same
+life-result as another man gets from the polishing of the greatest
+universities in the world, the almanac is the peer of the university.
+Whether materials as insignificant as the almanac have been used to
+attain just such results, the history of our country and of several
+other countries can readily prove. Three books made up the library of
+Lincoln, the rail-splitter, of Edison and Carnegie, the telegraph
+operators; but no three men of the nation were ever more successful in
+reaching the goals they set for themselves.
+
+Books are to-day the great universal means of _knowing_, and knowing
+them depends upon reading them rightly. It is not so important how
+_many_ books we read, but how we read them. A well-read fool is one of
+the most pestilential of blockheads. One book _read_ avails more than a
+thousand _skimmed_. Little reading and much thinking make a wise man;
+much reading and little thinking has bred the race which the _plain_
+people call "learned fools," and these are mainly responsible for any
+ridicule that is put upon the work of school and college.
+
+In these days when the printing-press has largely superseded the pulpit
+and the platform, it is vitally important that men shall be taught how
+to read rightly and shall be helped to habits of right reading; and no
+school or college that is decently interested in the welfare of the
+people can disregard this one duty of teachers _above all others_. Much
+of the best in thought and feeling and conduct shall depend hereafter
+upon the books which we read with careful observation. Every man who has
+read himself into higher realms is under bonds to make the source of so
+much bliss and blessedness as admirable and as desirable as possible to
+all who are strangers to the most pleasant and profitable paths of
+literature.
+
+It is not the quantity of our reading, but the quality that makes it and
+us an influence for good to our fellows. A man who has read ten pages
+with real accuracy, says John Ruskin, is forevermore in some measure an
+educated person. You might read all the books in the British Museum, yet
+be an utterly illiterate and uneducated person. Our reading without
+digestion and assimilation is as useless as our food without them. Bacon
+says that reading makes a _full_ man; but fullness without digestion is
+dyspepsia. The books whose reading impels us to live nobly and do noble
+service for others, are _the_ books, and it is a wicked waste of time to
+read what is a negative quantity. Whoever masters _one vital_ book can
+never become commonplace.
+
+_Thoroughness_ is the master-passion in reading, as in every other
+undertaking. Those who have accumulated wisdom, culture, power, riches,
+are always prominent for their indefatigable, painstaking thoroughness;
+nothing to them is a trifle, for "trifles make perfection, and
+perfection is no trifle." Those who have thought most and felt most and
+done most from their reading have brought this master passion to it.
+
+When we begin to become acquainted with all the worthy men and women who
+trace the beginning of their worth to the careful reading of one book,
+it seems almost a loss to the world to have the libraries of the world
+so large. If they were all respectable occupants of their shelves, it
+might be condoned; but the copyright of millions of books is the only
+right, human or divine, for their existing at all. Many a country boy at
+the fireside during the long winter evenings has received inspiration
+from repeatedly reading one or two worthy books; these have spurred him
+on to fight his way valiantly through college, and from there to the
+heights in some worthy life-work.
+
+If we are true to all that _manhood_ involves, there is no
+self-deception in the conviction that each one of us is born for
+kingship. Supreme kingship "consists in a stronger _moral_ state and a
+truer _thoughtful_ state than that of other men, which enables us to
+_guide_ and _raise_ the misguided and the illiterate." Every thoughtful
+man and woman ultimately discovers that "all _education_ and all
+_literature_ are useful only so far as they confirm this calm and
+beneficent kingly power." Emerson's "man-thinking" is the supreme among
+human beings.
+
+The best that can be known and experienced lies asleep in books, and one
+of the chief purposes for getting an education is to give us the
+_well-made_ head and the _finer_ feeling to awake this best knowledge
+and experience in these sleeping princes.
+
+De Quincey reminds us that all the greatest books may be divided into
+the literature of _knowledge_ and the literature of _power_. They have
+all been written in utmost sincerity by the _right_-minded and the
+_strong_-minded; they disclose boundless fields for soul-_refreshment_
+and soul-_expansion_. In the march of civilization, the men and the
+nations that have forged farthest ahead since Gutenberg invented
+printing are the men and the nations that have had most to do with the
+few books of _knowledge_ and _power_ of the greatest and the wisest.
+There can be no better test of a man's thought and feelings and actions
+than the books he reads and the books he keeps around him; and there is
+none so desolate as the poor _rich_ man who lives in a great bookless
+house, and "has never fed upon the dainties that are bred in books," as
+John Milton says.
+
+The very presence of books is refining, and the right kind of man would
+as soon think of building his house without windows as of furnishing it
+without books. In every well-regulated home of intelligent men and women
+the library is always one of the annual items of expenditure. When we
+have learned how to consult the books of _knowledge_ and _power_, they
+let us mingle with the best society of all ages; they make the
+_mightiest_ men and women of words and deeds our advisers; they bring
+us the gold of learning and the gems of thought; and they furnish us
+with the soul-_food_ which brings the proper kind of soul-_growth_. Such
+books are the safest of companions, for they protect us from vice and
+the inferior passions; more than ever they are to-day _indispensable_
+for all who are striving to do the higher work of civilization and
+_Christianity_.
+
+Every _real_ book we _really_ read gives us greater faith in the
+_goodness_ and the _nobility_ of life. As Lowell says, "Adds another
+block to the climbing spire of a great soul." The other sort which
+"swarm from the cozy marshes of immoral brains," the sort also who "rack
+their brains for lucre," do the devil's work for him, and are as baneful
+as the company of fools and vulgarians. Show an observant man your
+bookshelves, and he'll tell you what you are. The man who does not
+_love_ some great book is not worth the time we spend in his company; we
+are fortunate if we are not in some way contaminated by him. If we knew
+the road they have traveled, we should likely find that those of modern
+times who have merited the crown of kings and queens for their stronger
+_moral_ state and their _truer thoughtful_ state have had most to do
+with some literature of knowledge and power; that they especially
+oftenest consulted the books of the greatest and wisest in their
+difficulties, and had been spurred on by their messages to the thoughts
+and the deeds which made them worthy.
+
+It is fortunate that to-day the greatest of books are the common
+property of the printers of the world, for they are on this account the
+cheapest, and many of them can be had for the price of a poor man's
+dinner. It needs many a page to record even the names of the men and
+women who have become _somebody_ and have done _something_ just from
+reading some one worthy book which had fallen into their hands. Many
+believe that Franklin is the greatest American that has yet appeared,
+and he has said that "Cotton Mather's _essays to do good_ gave me a turn
+of thinking which, perhaps, had an influence on some of the principal
+future events of my life."
+
+As we become better acquainted with some of the _great_ books in all
+departments of literature, we are surprised to find how few of them have
+been written by college men. This by no means belittles the good that
+may come from a _true_ college course, but it does seem to emphasize
+that great books need some other environment for their growth than
+exclusive college courses. Perhaps the need is _solitude_, communion
+with nature, and frequent intercourse with the world's greatest and best
+in thought and feeling and action for the work. College-bred men are in
+a marked minority among the authors whose great books have been and are
+a potent force in shaping thought and conduct in the world. It is
+notable how few of these have anything commendatory to say about the
+influence which their college life had upon them and their
+accomplishments; many even of the text-books of schools and colleges
+have come from men whose powers were shaped by no school. How many
+text-books of medicine and law were prepared by physicians and lawyers
+whose knowledge was gleaned mainly from keen observation and long
+experience and deep thought!
+
+It was no mere college education, but the sharpest home observation and
+strictest adherence to their instincts and their individuality that made
+forceful writers of Mark Twain, the Mississippi pilot; Bret Harte and
+William Dean Howells, the typesetters; James Whitcomb Riley, the
+itinerant sign-painter; Joel Chandler Harris and Eugene Field, the
+newspaper reporters; and Walt Whitman, the carpenter.
+
+Of the four thousand and forty-three Americans with over twenty millions
+of dollars to their credit, only sixty-one had even a _high-school_
+course. Many among them, however, had high-class mentality and secured a
+comprehensive practical education. They have evidently been as alert to
+perceive the treasures hidden for them in the world of great books as
+they have been to perceive the treasuries hidden for them in their
+various enterprises. So we find that they have consulted the master
+spirits of books after their daily tasks were done, while myriads of
+those who scoff and sneer at them now because of their millions were
+feasting, frolicking, and dissipating. Among the highest types of
+American manhood to-day a large majority are the _new-rich_ men.
+Whatever else may be said about them, all the world acknowledges that it
+is the parvenus in every land who do the largest part of the greatest
+work.
+
+The larger our horizon becomes, the stronger is our conviction that the
+man himself is _mainly_ the architect of his own fate; others may give
+an occasional lift, but it is almost entirely his own work. The college
+can do something for the _head-piece_, and it should also give something
+for the _heart-side_ and the power to dare and to do; but all the
+external training in the world can never attain for the man what he can
+attain through his own individual efforts--provided he has lofty aims,
+firm resolutions, closely observes, and strictly adheres to all his best
+inborn powers. There was no college for David, Homer, Socrates, Plato,
+Confucius, Alexander, Caesar, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
+Washington, Franklin, Goethe, Jesus, and tens of thousands of great or
+lesser men than these. They all marked out their own course, planned
+their own spiritual palaces; all the barbed-wire entanglements in the
+world did not retard their indomitable courage, self-reliance, and
+self-help.
+
+Perhaps the chief use of all learning establishments, except those which
+have to do with what the Germans call _bread studies_, is to awaken the
+pupil's self-respect, which is the basis of all virtue, and to cultivate
+the powers that shall fit the pupil to consult for himself the
+_knowledge_ and _power_ books of the greatest and the wisest. They also
+can in these days do yeoman's service in giving the _bread studies_
+through which men shall be better able to do the world's work and
+thereby earn better wages.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THOUGHTFULNESS
+
+
+President Wolsey, head of a great university, said that one of the chief
+purposes of the college is to cultivate the _power to think_. The
+college man who neglects to cultivate this valuable power until he
+enters upon his college career, instead of beginning it in the
+kindergarten and continuing it unremittingly throughout his entire
+preparatory course and daily living, will be liable to make sorry work
+of this part of his cultivation, or any other part, while he is in
+college.
+
+The specialists who teach in colleges, and who are generally more
+interested in their specialties than in the science and art of
+education, may not be conscious of this, and yet the many educational
+wrecks that have come from colleges should long ago have brought this
+point most forcibly to their attention. Indeed, the power to think and
+the practice of thinking until it has become second nature, are so
+essential for success in any _worthy_ career in life, that it is truer
+to say that one of the chief purposes of _life_ itself is to cultivate
+and exercise the power to think, and keep right on thinking until close
+thinking shall become a habit. The power to think clearly, broadly, and
+successfully is not necessarily the prerogative of those only who have
+lived in a college environment, as the biographies of our own four
+thousand multi-millionaires in this country so cogently prove, for few
+of them ever darkened the doors of a college. Some among them may have
+been bereft of all the nobler sentiments for which Christianity and
+America stand, but they never could have piled up their millions in
+every department of activity without having thought so long and so hard
+that they ultimately acquired a habit of thinking that should put to
+shame myriads in every land who have had all the advantages of
+universities. The power to think, and to think in a masterly way, need
+not be confined to the professor's chair.
+
+Any sphere of action which does not bring in to the worker an increase
+of thinking power is harmful, from university to street-sweeping. A
+machine is the only worker that can do its work well without thinking
+about it. All the successful men the world has ever known have been men
+who thought incessantly; they have been mainly self-educated in their
+extraordinary power to think; their success in all the various tasks
+which they set for themselves oftener resulted from their hard thought
+than from their hard work.
+
+Defeat and failure have never overtaken the man whose head and hands
+were partners.
+
+When we think without work or work without thought, we reach only half
+of what belong to us. A man should especially ween himself from this
+kind of halfness. We should be ashamed to find ourselves working without
+thought, as we should be ashamed to find ourselves idle in a world where
+there is always so much to be done and so little time allotted to each
+for accomplishing worthy work. The employees that are most valuable to
+their employers and are most valued by them are those always whose heads
+and hands are yoke-mates. When hands and head and heart are on the job,
+it is difficult to imagine what heights of success and service shall be
+attained. The farmer boy hoeing corn and digging potatoes will do better
+work in quantity and quality if he thinks about his work as hard as he
+hoes or digs.
+
+There can be little danger of failure for any young man who begins his
+life-work with the resolution that he will always give his best thought
+to even the most insignificant task that he assumes; and all the schools
+in the world cannot furnish him any advantage that can compare with this
+resolution steadily followed. Nor must the habit of thinking be
+exercised only upon work. We all have more leisure than work, and many a
+high-minded thinker has reminded us that a man is best to be judged, not
+by his profession, but by his leisure. Elihu Burritt acquired a
+knowledge of fifty languages during the years he earned his livelihood
+as a village blacksmith; he also found time for extensive reading as
+well as time for interest in social reforms, in the advancement of which
+he won the reputation of being one of the most powerful and persuasive
+orators of his day. All his stupendous acquirements were gained during
+the hours between his tasks which thousands of other village blacksmiths
+were accustomed to spend in gossip or in the tavern. Volumes could be
+filled with only _brief_ accounts of the men and women throughout the
+ages who have made the world better for their living, just because they
+wisely and thoughtfully employed the leisure hours which their
+contemporaries trifled away. The shortest life may be long in noble
+thought and action, if we lose no time; and little of it is ever lost by
+those who thoughtfully employ their leisure.
+
+Thoughtful men and women are always doubly valuable, no matter whether
+their work is what the world calls high-class or low-class. The streets
+are better swept by such a man, and the potatoes are better hoed; the
+floor is better scrubbed by such a woman, and the clothes are better
+washed. If our work does not afford us the chance to think while we are
+employed upon it, we owe it to ourselves and to humanity to toss it
+aside quickly. The lawyer, the physician, or any other professional man
+is no more a man in the sight of God and his country than the
+stone-mason who lays the foundations for their houses and raises the
+superstructures; and they are under no greater obligation to use their
+thinking powers than he is. The place we occupy in life is unimportant;
+the way we fill the place is everything; the stone-mason, Ben Jonson,
+built stone walls and houses by day, and at night built dramas and other
+poetry which have been surpassed only by his contemporary, Shakespeare.
+
+Many of the greatest achievements known to history have been the work of
+men and women whose life-tasks were entirely different from the lines
+in which they became eminent; Shakespeare was an actor and one of the
+most successful business men of London, but he is known as the greatest
+poet the world has yet produced; George Eliot had charge for several
+years of her father's farm home, as well as the poultry and dairy, and
+won prizes for these at the country fair, but this did not prevent her
+from laying, during these seven years, the foundation which helped her
+to build herself into one of the greatest women known to history.
+Herschel's being a musician and Mary Somerville's having charge of her
+home and her children did not prevent both of them from doing marvelous
+work in astronomy. Audubon became a final authority on birds solely
+because while on his hunting-trips he thought more than the other
+hunters who accompanied him. One of the greatest merchants and
+capitalists in Boston began life selling handkerchiefs through the
+country. He became expert in flax products, and through this grew rich;
+he so studied kindred fibrous plants that his partners boasted that he
+had succeeded in marketing handkerchiefs made of twenty different
+fibrous plants. The most successful piano manufacturer now living was
+originally an employee of a steel mill that manufactured wire for making
+piano-strings. An every-day man gave careful thought to corn, and wrote
+an article for a magazine upon its value and upon the way it should be
+prepared for food; and this article was so worthy that it won for him a
+degree from a university.
+
+Every waking moment of every man contains food for thought. If some live
+fuller lives every twenty-four hours than others live in a year, it is
+because they think faster and higher, wider and deeper, and because the
+discipline they get from this thought keeps them from wasting their time
+on trivial or worthless matter. A puddler in Youngstown, without
+education beyond the district school, began to think about the iron that
+was softened in the furnace before him, and asked questions of the older
+employees and the foreman; then he read upon the subject and became so
+capable in mining and iron manufacturing that when the Youngstown plant
+was sold to the great steel corporation he was the largest stockholder
+in forty-seven great companies manufacturing iron. Some men's hearts
+grow as hard as their gold while they are amassing riches; but his heart
+seems to have softened in proportion to the increase of his riches; his
+life is given to numberless good deeds, chief among which has been his
+endeavor to impress upon all workmen the necessity of letting both
+their heads and hearts assist their hands. Neither man nor boy, woman
+nor girl, need despair of doing great things and being great men and
+women, if they will constantly carry out this advice. He is really the
+best-educated man whose attention is primarily directed to his
+soul-growth, to his power of thinking, for feeling, and for noble
+action.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+INSTINCTS AND INDIVIDUALITY
+
+
+"God has given us a full kit of watchmaker's tools" and if, after all
+the centuries of civilization, "we are doing _thinker's_ work with
+them," something must be wrong with the educational methods. When God
+sent us here he packed us with all we need for high-class manhood--our
+_instincts_ and our _individuality_ especially well done up; but often
+in the unpacking by the schools we have been sadly marred; and these
+God-given endowments seem to have been frequently thrown upon the
+rubbish-pile. They seem to have dulled our instincts and to have
+despised our individuality, in order to make room for our acquirements.
+
+Like all that emanates from God, instincts and individuality have been
+bestowed for a wise purpose; they are _indispensable_ endowments if we
+shall become the kind of man God seems to have had in mind when he sent
+us here. What justification have the teachers of civilization for
+failing to perfect these powers? What right have the _little_ men of the
+schools to drive them entirely out of their scheme of education?
+
+John Ruskin complains in _Kings' Treasuries_ that "Modern education for
+the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on
+every conceivable subject of importance to them." If this is even partly
+true, there is no pursuit to-day that demands from the man who is
+working in it more _presence of mind_ and more _self-direction_, than
+the business of getting _real_ education. Those who are to-day
+conducting what we are foolish enough to permit them to call _education_
+are often both blind and deaf to all that efficient education implies.
+To seek direction from them is like asking the road from a blind man.
+Many are also connected with the schools apparently as others are
+connected with hod-carrying and street-sweeping--to procure a
+livelihood. Often their highest conception of the work is _edge_ucation,
+to make sharp blades of the intellects for what they call "getting along
+in the world." Then many of the instructors in schools and colleges are
+merely specialists, mainly interested in their specialties, and using
+the class-room as a stepping-stone to their own purposes. Extreme
+specializing is narrowing--it does to the specialist what blinkers do
+to the horse's eyes. Excessive pursuit of single objects of thought
+atrophies many faculties, but _education_ is the _complete_ development
+and discipline of all the faculties.
+
+Perhaps these are some of the causes why so many _original_ and
+_thinking_ men and women are so hostile to present-day schools, and
+accuse them of mainly being "places that polish pebbles and dim
+diamonds," and say so many other harsh and cutting things about them.
+Learning seems to be the _chief_ occupation of those who profess to
+educate. Learning for its _own_ sake plays a very _insignificant_ part
+in the spiritual equipment of God's children; to a _true_ education it
+seems at best only what the carpenter's kit is to the carpenter--a means
+to an end. Like all other lumber, its importance depends entirely upon
+what is built out of it. These original and thinking men and women have
+often said hard things of mere learning and of those who dole it out at
+so much a _unit_, because they believe that undue stress is laid upon
+it. They sometimes say that universities are not _educating_
+institutions, but merely _seats-of-learning_; and often they are very
+_narrow_ seats, difficult for self-respecting people to stiffen their
+backs enough to sit upon. But it's the _study_, not the studies, that
+educates; studies make _learned_ men, but not often _wise_ men, such as
+_real_ education always makes; not all learned heads are _sense_-boxes;
+the _very_ learned man may be a very learned fool. The learned
+frequently put out their reasoning powers to make room for their
+learning; it requires ten pounds of _sense_ to take care of one pound of
+learning.
+
+Solomon made a book of proverbs, but a book of proverbs never made
+Solomon. Sense without learning is a thousand times superior to learning
+without sense; and in the stately edifice of life, school and college
+are only the basement walls; wisdom and learning are not necessary
+companions. The great things that have conduced to the betterment of the
+world have been done by men who have been loyal to their individuality
+and true to their instincts--never by the merely learned. Too often do
+we find these little learned men "displaying themselves offensively and
+ridiculously in the haunts of bearded men," and making the angels weep
+by their strutting and their swelling.
+
+_Knowing_ is only a _small_ part of life; _doing_ is nearly _all_ of
+life; and the _best_ done is done through _education_--the education
+which is the product of what is _inborn_ as well as of what is
+_acquired_; the education which enables men and women to perceive and
+to cherish the _beautiful_ in art, in literature, in morals and in
+nature. While true education busies itself with acquirements, it is even
+more concerned that the instincts and the individuality God appears to
+regard of supreme importance shall attain all that it is possible for
+them to have. These original and thinking men and women who say so many
+things in condemnation of _make-believe_ education and mere learning
+boldly and lovingly acclaim the helps from true education--they remind
+us that it is soul-husbandry, spiritual perfection, torch and sword and
+shield, the _be-all_ and the _end-all_ of life, the fountain of all
+noble living, and the only real promoter of civilization. They claim
+that education of this sort simplifies life; facilitates self-conquest;
+intensifies individuality; unfolds and uplifts manhood; breeds habits of
+thinking, feeling, and doing; debestializes, emancipates, humbles, and
+civilizes; that it searches for truth, loves the beautiful, desires the
+good, and does the best.
+
+We have no quarrel with the education that accomplishes all these, for
+it fosters the instincts and the individuality for which we are
+pleading. We have always believed that just this kind of education is
+the heritage of every American, and that the loss of such an education
+is the greatest calamity that can befall any one. All our life have we
+yearned that all might have this boon, and the best of our manhood years
+have been ceaseless labor and struggle to give "the weak and friendless
+sons of men" all of its advantages.
+
+The test of any system of education is the kind of man it turns out. It
+is wisdom to measure the system by those it fails to educate rather than
+by those it does educate--by its tortoises rather than by its hares. The
+real educator is always vastly more concerned with the divinity than
+with the depravity of those intrusted to him; he believes firmly that
+the instincts and the individuality which God has given each of us are
+the priceless part of all our spiritual equipment--that anything we may
+acquire toward this end which fortifies these God-given treasures is
+cheap--even if bought by an entire life-service; that any acquirement
+that modifies these or destroys them is a triple curse and a dire menace
+to humanity, for individuality is the genius of Christianity and of
+America.
+
+The system of education which makes light of the cultivation of the
+instincts, which seems to be the sole dependence of all conditions of
+men except the over-civilized, the system of education which is blinded
+to all that is implied in an educated individuality--these are the only
+systems with which we have any quarrel. Well-made, rather than
+well-filled heads are what is needed and should be demanded, without
+which it is impossible for any one of us to have the right conception of
+life, or to attain all that we were intended to be or to do. To guard
+and develop the instincts of the child, to preserve and fortify his
+individuality, is to give him sword and shield for the battle of life.
+
+God intends each individual to be an individual, or this should not have
+been so deep-rooted in all; to be just like every one else is to be
+predestined for inferiority and failure. To do our duty consistently and
+steadfastly demands that all our God-like and God-given qualities shall
+first of all be educated. That best becomes a man which his
+individuality intended him to be, and those are always successful in
+making a life and a living who play the game of life with the cards
+their individuality gives them. God made a world for each separate man,
+and within that world he _must_ live, if he will live effectually; we
+must first of all be ourselves, must see to it that whatever else is
+neglected the plants God has put into the individual shall be
+cultivated--the crop may not be large, but we are accountable for the
+cultivation, not for the crop. We must be ourselves, and do our own
+work.
+
+There can be no greater wisdom and no greater service than that of
+helping another so that he may duly live in that special world which God
+has created for him. The most insignificant man can be complete if he is
+entirely true to his instincts and to his individual character. If we
+are incomplete, it is because we are living after some other method. We
+have all been stamped with individuality, but many seem to do their
+utmost to soak off the stamp. How different should the life of all the
+world be if each one only kept in his frame, and would not permit any
+one to try to make him part of, the picture for which his personality
+never intended him!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Every Man His Own University, by Russell H. Conwell
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