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of them should have a common aim: ‘through a study of human experience,
to perceive the errors of the past and to avoid errors in the future, in
order to increase the sum total of human happiness.

The esthetic approach adds to the rational contemplation of the world
and man a stimulus of the emotions and a quickening of the imagination.
Tt is concerned with a sense of beauty and is best exemplified in litera-
ture and the fine arts. It succeeds best by bringing students in direct
contact with great utterances of great minds, rather than through a second-
hand interpretation, It can enrich life and raise the mind at intervals
above the pedestrian, workaday world. It can invest factual material with
an intense and deeply felt personal meaning. One has only to think of
Shelley's The Cloud or W. He Carruth's Fach In His Own Tongue as exercises
in natural seience, or of Edwin Markham's The Man With The Hoe as a study
in social science, to realize how greatly poetic utterance can illuminate
and give significance to such material. Whatever has been nobly felt in
the world is the subject matter of the humanities, and to neglect it is to
breed a generation of earthbound, trivial minds incapable of sensing the
wonder of the creation with which they deal.

 

Finally, we come to those subjects which attempt to synthesize all
the materials just mentioned, to use the entire range of human knowledge
as a basis for the perception of ultimate truth, These are philosophy
and religion. They have been lately somewhat neglected in academic wor k,
partly because of doctrinal disputes, partly because of a feeling that
they have grown static, that nothing new is to be said about them. Yet
in every age they have represented the culmination of mants intellectual
effort. Certainly it is hard to think of any person as truly cultured
if he has not some knowledge of the history of philosophy and of compara-
tive religion. Philosophy surveys mankind and man's background of the
cosmos, then seeks to determine their ultimate cause and the eternal
principles which rule them. Religion accepts the conclusions of philoso=
phy and adds thereto the intense desire to orient oneself in the universe,
to govern one's span of earthly life in accordance with the eternal prin=
ciples, a desire which may or may not be accompanied by the expectation
of an eternal reward. Wo other incentive to noble effort is half so power-=
ful as the religious impulse or can inspire men to such enduring forti-
tude, It is true that religion develops a variety of opinions which some-
times result in acrimonious debate or open strife, yet most disputes are
on relatively minor points and not on central principles. In the Christian
religion, for example, men who think only of the validity of the miracles
or the preferred forms of baptism should not forget the Commandments, the
Beatitudes, the Golden Rule, and the supreme self-abnegation of the last
hours upon the crosse

In teaching material of any kind, we can freely commit ourselves to
one ideal, the search for truth, We can show that thinkers of the past
with whom we may disagree were also engaged in this search, but that to
them was vouchsafed only a partial revelation of the truth, as ours is also
partial though somewhat clearer than theirs. We can suggest that this