foremost historians, or to the most eloquent orators, we seem to find ourselves at every link of this literary chain still in the magic circle of the fine arts. To this impression corresponds the remark of Mr. Ruskin: "Every art being properly called 'fine' which demands the exercise of the full faculties of heart and intellect." Philosopher, historian, orator, had subordinate ends; but alike they had the divine gift of insight and prophecy. They sought to enforce the truth in human life, and to idealize that life also, and so to move it one step forward toward the perfect ideal. They would rectify wrongs, protecting

the innocent, contributing to the safety of a noble people or the triumph of a worthy cause. They had the dower of imagination, distinct from the poet's, but as truly great. They had a genuine creative power. They reached forth ever toward the unrealized perfection, the future golden age of which no era has quite lost the dream. The sum-total of human life, real and ideal, is a grander poem than any finite mind could compass. This was the orator's end, the historian's, the philosopher's; and this it is which brings them into comradeship with those who wear the poet's unfading crown.1 Martin Kellogg

WHAT is the mental attitude of a young man as he emerges from the walls of his college, and presents himself for participation in the active business of life? I mean one of the better class of students, for what is true of such is true of all young men, only in a lesser and modified degree. I merely wish to call attention to the width of his mental vision, and a certain power of thought which he possesses. Ten fruitful years of study lie behind him. During this period his mind has partaken of the exuberance characteristic of youth, and of the freshness which attends the spring of life, and they have been to him years of leaping thought and of thrilling emotion. He has looked into, or thinks he has looked into, all fields of human knowledge. The past has hovered around him. Before his mental eye, men have issued from primitive barbarism, scattered themselves over the globe, and united again, fought, suffered, and sung; and out of the confusing din he has watched the fabric of modern civilization majestically arise. The great world he longs to enter has presented itself to him in many guises. He has seen it like a grotesque dreamland in the

Third of series of papers read before the Long

fellow Association at Berkeley. See the OVERLAND MONTHLY for April and May.

pages of Carlyle, weird and phantasmal; or regular and rational in the clear light of Mill or Spencer. At times, life has seemed a hard struggle, as he read the thoughts and lives of the workers who have been the sinew of the world; and again, the brilliant pictures of some modern novel have excited him with the thought of joy and beauty and love in store for him. Great stretches of thought have not been wanting, and he has been able to perceive the laws of life and matter which have shaped the past, carrying their operations into the distant future.

But it was almost a fairyland, not the real world that he saw; for he flooded all with the light of his inexperience and youth. Here, then, we get an idea of the intellectual atmosphere, so to speak, which hovers around the young man as he enters the working-day world, assumes the duties and burdens of manhood, and becomes harnessed in the drudgery of life. It is needless to trace the process of disillusion that takes place within him. His airy fancies will recede farther and farther back as he advances. Sooner or later, he will awake to the realization that the world and life are in no wise as he thought them to be. It is not so much that experience will give the direct lie to his theories, as that it will gradually necessitate

a total reconstruction of them. chantment from early hopes and dreams has so often been experienced that it has many times been described and written upon. It is a trying period, indeed-sad and disheartening.

Now, during this state of mental fermentation and unquiet, one of two processes may be going on. There may be a growing absorption in the particular business pursuit chosen, and a drifting from early thoughts and feelings; or there may be an endeavor to hold fast to what is good in the early mental experience, to enlarge and perfect the ideas resulting from early speculation, to recast them in more real and enduring material.

men.

see.

The former course is followed by most The mind becomes narrower and clearer. The ideas which arise from the particular circumstances in life of the individual habitually and constantly occupy the Great facility is thus acquired in dealing with this limited fund of thought. But thought continually flowing along certain lines gives rise to ruts in the mind, so to speak, which will more and more retard the free movement of ideas. How completely the perpetual occupation of the mind upon special circumstances and personal surroundings will incapacitate it for other and broader feelings and thoughts, we can everywhere Perhaps one-half of the prosperous business men in the world would find it impossible to create in themselves a sufficiently full and vivid feeling of the magnitude and mystery of nature, and the relation of individual man to his surroundings, to appall them, or at least to give rise temporarily to a flood of new ideas and feelings entirely apart from their every day thoughts. How many such men, if questioned about their religious belief, will be unable to state what they do believe, or answer that for many years they have not devoted much thought to the matter. Such a state of mental apathy is incredible to men who have accustomed their minds to the formation of large conceptions, and to whom doubt and uncertain

Most men, as I have said, when they become engrossed in the complexities of practical life, drift into this limited groove. It may be called the narrow path through life. Now, this fact will, I think, be found in a very large degree to be caused by the general overturning of preconceived ideas, which results from bringing early training to the test of practical life. Early hopes and aspirations seeming impossible of fulfillment, early conceptions being in no way helpful, perhaps obstructive, to the matter in hand, and, especially, the reasons for the collapse of early ideas being but vaguely, if at all, understood, they come to be regarded as mere romantic fancies incident to youth, to be discarded with other appurtenances of boyhood. Thus, young men who at college gave promise of being capable of sustaining themselves in the high current of thought which moves among the world's best intellects, sink to the level of drudges-mere slaving day laborers in the onward movement of society.

The feelings, ideas, and aspirations that early education imparts must be continued and perfected if this end would be avoided. Let us now inquire as to these results of education, and see whether they are to be rejected as idle, boyish dreams, or to be retained and cultivated as seed from which much may spring.

The key to the whole matter is found in the distinction between complete ideas and symbolic conceptions. At the bottom of all processes of thought are ideas. In the formation of these ideas we proceed gradually from very simple to highly complex ones. But as we advance from the simple to the complex, a very significant change occurs in the process. We experience little difficulty in reproducing a tolerably compléte picture of such simple objects as a book, a chair. Whenever we recall these ideas in consciousness, they correspond almost completely with the idea resulting from the immediate presence of the object itself. But

as the subject matter of the idea becomes more complex, this correspondence between the mental picture and the object becomes less and less accurate. A faithful mental representation of an extended territory or of a complex class, such as an army, a religious sect, cannot by any effort be attained. Spencer, in his "First Principles," very clearly exhibits this distinction, and I cannot do better than briefly quote from him. He says (page 26):

"A large portion of our conceptions, including all those of much generality, are of this order (i. e., symbolic conceptions); great magnitudes, great duration, great number, are none of them actually conceived, but are all of them conceived more or less symbolically. And so, too. are all those classes of objeets of which we predict some common fact.

"When mention is made of any individual man, a tolerably complete idea of him is formed. If the family he belongs to be spoken of, probably but a part of it will be represented in thought. Under the necessity of attending to that which is said about the family, we realize in imagination only its most important or familiar members, and pass over the rest with a nascent consciousness which we know could, if required, be made complete. Should something be remarked of the class, say farmers, to which this family belonged, we neither enumerate in thought all the individuals contained in the class, nor believe that we could do so if required; but we are content with taking some few samples of it, and remembering that these could be indefinitely multiplied. Suppose the subject of which something is predicted be Englishmen, the answering state of consciousness is a still more inadequate representation of the reality.

"Yet more remote is the likeness of the thought to the thing, if reference be made to Europeans, or to human beings. And when we come to propositions concerning the whole of the vertebrata, or concerning animals in general, or concerning all organic beings, the unlikeness of conception to the objects named reaches its extreme.

"Throughout which series of instances, we see that, as the number of objects grouped together in thought increases, the concept, formed of a few typical samples joined with the notion of multiplicity, becomes more and more a mere symbol; not only because it gradually ceases to represent the size of the group, but also because, as the group grows more heterogeneous, the typical samples thought of are less like the average objects which the group contains."

After remarking upon the necessity of forming symbolic conceptions, he continues (page 26):

"We habitually mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones, and so are betrayed into countless false inferences. Not only is it that in proportion as the concept we form of any thing, or class of things, misrepresents the reality, we are apt to be wrong in any assertion we make respecting the reality; but it is that we are led to suppose we have truly conceived a great variety of things, which we have conceived only in this fictitious way."

Now, what we call education is nothing more than the formation of symbolic conceptions, as, indeed, is all intellectual culture and advancement. Our earlier, or student period of life, is most prolific in the formation of these ideas. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five we skim the whole surface of human knowledge. Our system of educational institutions is a skillful gradation of training, by which the mind is exercised in the formation of ideas, symbolic and other, reaching from the simplest objects of sensation to the uttermost generalizations of human knowledge, in the order of its increasing capacity.

very far outrun any help that experience could afford. It would be ruinous to wait on personal experience. The student must resort to other aids. Accordingly, with books, maps, the laboratory, and other educational appliances, and such glimpses of the world as he can catch around him, he forms, as best he can, his symbolic conceptions of things. Of very necessity, these conceptions are crude. The larger part of the ideas he has dealt with are such that a full and true appreciation of them is possible only to one who has lived in the midst of life for many years. What, for instance, is the student's conception of the complex idea we call the United States? No doubt his state of consciousness answering to that word is highly complex and interesting. He forms more or less correct notions of its geography, its history and government, and some idea of its future tendencies; but the contempt he will exhibit at some proposed measure of government, perhaps, or his impatience at the apathetic attitude of our statesmen towards the advanced speculation of the age, it may be, will disclose the airy texture of his ideas.

His education has given him a view of life; but education is a process by which the picture of the world is to be traced in the mind, and from the rapidity of that process a picture of the merest and vaguest outline only is possible. The mental condition of a student on the verge of active life, compared with that of a mind seasoned by experience, may be aptly illustrated by the comparison of a trained and powerful athlete, and a tyro in the gymnasium. Let us suppose the former engaged in an exhibition of strength with ponderous balls of iron. He throws them about, and they spin and gyrate above his head in many whirls and convolutions. The muscles, as they start out over the well-developed body, tell of the strength expended by the effort. Let him retire, and the tyro present himself with balls equal in size, and proceed to display his strength and expertness. He goes through the same maneuvers. The play of the balls is equally varied, and apparently equally difficult. But

we see no evidences of power-no strength trembles over the lithe body. We are astonished. We stand perplexed, as we do when we see a youth triumphantly engaged in debate with one whom we know to be a man of ripe mind, developed by years of experience and reflection, and hear the young man handle, with equal ease and skill, the thoughts and ideas which his opponent employs. But let us approach and examine the balls which our tyro has been so surprisingly handling. The difficulty is solved. of balls of iron, these are only of wood. They resemble the balls of iron no more than the ideas with which the young man glibly confronts the man of enlarged experience resemble the ideas with which the lat ter carries on his argument.

Let us carry our comparison a step farther. Suppose our gymnastic tyro should be permitted to handle the iron balls of the athlete with whom he thinks himself so successfully competing, and upon discovering their weight should cast them down in disgust, become moody and disconsolate, or declare himself the victim of deception and fraud; we should regard such a display as pitiable indeed. And yet, how like is the course pursued by many young men when they awake to the actualities of life. Young men, when they declare that life is not worth living, that the time has gone when virtue and ability were acknowledged among men, who inveigh against the venality of the times, and the prevailing corruption which enables shrewd and tricky men to occupy those positions to which men fresh from the very seats of learning aspire in vain, are troubled with a difficulty very similar to that which overcame the tyro when he realized the weight of the iron balls.

We have now, I think, seen the defect in the mental constitution with which young men enter the world. To appreciate this defect, to perceive that the aspirations and transporting thoughts of youth are, on the one hand, no illusions, but the vague outlines of truth, and, on the other hand, but the incipient indications of a capacity to figure with prominence in the world's affairs, not