Probably, however, few men who have had experience in education will deny the value of discipline to the classics, even though they hold that other studies, less costly from the utilitarian point of view, are equally educative in this respect.  But it is further of prime importance, even if such an equality, or approach to equality, were granted, that we should select one group of studies, and unite in making it the core of the curriculum for the great mass of undergraduates.  It is true in education as in other matters that strength comes from union, and weakness from division, and if educated men are to work together for a common end, they must have a common range of ideas, with a certain solidarity in their way of looking at things.  As matters actually are, the educated man feels terribly his isolation under the scattering of intellectual pursuits, yet too often lacks the courage to deny the strange popular fallacy that there is virtue in sheer variety, and that somehow well-being is to be struck out from the clashing of miscellaneous interests rather than from concentration.  In one of his annual reports some years ago President Eliot, of Harvard, observed from the figures of registration that the majority of students still at that time believed the best form of education for them was in the old humanistic courses, and therefore, he argued, the other courses should be fostered.  There was never perhaps a more extraordinary syllogism since the argal of Shakespeare’s gravedigger.  I quote from memory, and may slightly misrepresent the actual statement of the influential “educationalist,” but the spirit of his words, as indeed of his practice, is surely as I give it.  And the working of this spirit is one of the main causes of the curious fact that scarcely any other class of men in social intercourse feel themselves, in their deeper concerns, more severed one from another than those very college professors who ought to be united in the battle for educational leadership.  This estrangement is sometimes carried to an extreme almost ludicrous.  I remember once, in a small but advanced college, the consternation that was awakened when an instructor in philosophy went to a colleague—­both of them now associates in a large university—­for information in a question of biology.  “What business has he with such matters,” said the irate biologist; “let him stick to his last, and teach philosophy—­if he can!” That was a polite jest, you will say.  Perhaps; but not entirely.  Philosophy is indeed taught in one lecture hall, and biology in another, but of conscious effort to make of education an harmonious driving force there is next to nothing.  And as the teachers, so are the taught.

Such criticism does not imply that advanced work in any of the branches of human knowledge should be curtailed; but it does demand that, as a background to the professional pursuits, there should be a common intellectual training through which all students should pass, acquiring thus a single body of ideas and images in which they could always meet as brother initiates.