and this insight clearer or more obscure.  I trust that this point is plain, for it illustrates what I have just said regarding the danger of following a popular demand.  We need no experiment to prove that economic science is more useful in the narrow sense than is pure science.  What we wish to determine is whether a judicious mixture of the two sorts of teaching will or will not enable us to realize this rich cultural value much more effectively than a traditional purely cultural course.

Now that illustrates what I think is the real and important application of the scientific spirit to the solution of educational problems.  You will readily see that it does not do away necessarily with our ideals.  It is not necessarily materialistic.  It is not necessarily idealistic.  Either side may utilize it.  It is a quite impersonal factor.  But it does promise to take some of our educational problems out of the field of useless and wasteful controversy, and it does promise to get men of conflicting views together,—­for, in the case that I have just cited, if we prove that the right admixture of methods may enable us to realize both a cultural and a utilitarian value, there is no reason why the culturists and the utilitarians should not get together, cease their quarreling, take off their coats, and go to work.  Few people will deny that bread and butter is a rather essential thing in this life of ours; very few will deny that material prosperity in temperate amounts is good for all of us; and very few also will deny that far more fundamental than bread and butter—­far more important than material prosperity—­are the great fundamental and eternal truths which man has wrought out of his experience and which are most effectively crystallized in the creations of pure art, the masterpieces of pure literature, and the discoveries of pure science.

Certainly if we of the twentieth century can agree upon any one thing, it is this:  That life without toil is a crime, and that any one who enjoys leisure and comfort and the luxuries of living without paying the price of toil is a social parasite.  I believe that it is an important function of public education to impress upon each generation the highest ideals of living as well as the arts that are essential to the making of a livelihood, but I wish to protest against the doctrine that these two factors stand over against one another as the positive and negative poles of human existence.  In other words, I protest against the notion, that the study of the practical everyday problems of human life is without what we are pleased to call a culture value,—­that in the proper study of those problems one is not able to see the operation of fundamental and eternal principles.