possibilities. So far scientists have not been able to unlock the atomic energy except by the employment of greater energy from another source." This summary indicates our present situation and future prospects. The lesson is that we should curtail wastes and begin a systematic research to develop new means of obtaining power. The word "systematic" holds the secret of method for the control of progress in the safest, most logical way. As it is essential for all of mankind to understand the conditions for survival, the burden of showing the world the secret falls upon instruction by persons who have come to a realization of the situation. In other words a coöperation is required in which the teacher should hold an important power. Comprehensive analysis of the entire human situation proves that this imperium of the educator has an intimate relation to the imperium of political government. Economic control of the sources of energy on which life exists depends to a great extent on political ownership of the productive regions of the earth. "Where the sun strikes straightest and the rain falls heaviest there is the greatest wealth produced. A square mile of tropical land receives more energy from the sun than can be got from all the coal mined in the Rhine Valley, and this perpetually and inexhaustibly. When a tropical island sends off a shipload of sugar or cocoanut oil, it is losing nothing but what comes to it again freely. When a northern country sends off a shipload of coal or petroleum, it is losing something that it can never replace." German economists frankly stated that the Great War was a fight for raw materials, tropical territory, "a place in the sun," and began not in 1914 but in 1884, when Germany set forth upon a definite policy of aggression. Fortunately the combined imperium of other nations prevented loss. In Apia Harbor, Samoa, in 1889, three American warships confronted three German warships with British warship in reserve, and only the intervention of a hurricane prevented a naval battle. In Manila Bay in 1898 again 'Chats on Science by Edwin E. Slosson.

a

the American fleet was threatened by a superior German fleet, and again the British fleet stood by our side. The united political power of England, France, and Italy prevented German extension in North Africa, and an alliance of England and Russia thwarted the German attempt to seize Mesopotamia and Persia. A far-sighted policy of government sees that the human energy of the future, collective and individual, will come from the land that must produce the food and fuel of the future. Systematic teaching of this truth must come from a source that recognizes the necessity of universal coöperation for the common welfare of mankind. In brief, conservation and development require the teacher to be an imperium in imperio, the imperio at this point being political government.

This seemingly materialistic description of economic and political power in which the teacher becomes a conscious agent will cause some discomfort to people who uphold freedom of the spirit. This is a good reason for centering the discussion around energy. Energy is spirit, elan, capacity for acting, inherent power, and is beloved by the individual as his own particular treasure, whether he is a materialist or a non-materialist. On the relation between the energy of the individual and the harmonious state, Plato, the idealist, says that every individual is a cosmos or a chaos of desires, emotions, and ideas; let these fall into harmony, and the individual survives and succeeds; let them lose their proper place and function, and failure advances like the inevitable night. The chief condition of happiness, according to Aristotle, the realist, is the life of reason, in which excellence will depend on clear judgment, self-control, symmetry of desire, artistry of means, all involved in choosing the environment that shall mold us. It follows from this that between Hamlet's indecisiveness and Quixote's impulsiveness there is a middle way, self-control, that which works correctly toward the best result. The golden mean, however, is "not like the mathematical mean, an exact average of two precise ex

tremes; it is different with the circumstances of each situation, and discovers itself only to mature and flexible reason.' In this broad ethical basis of Aristotle's the teacher has a wide range of action within the limits put upon him by harmonious government.

Within these limits it is possible, going further with Aristotle, to develop the noblest of the aids to happiness: friendship, which is the means of multiplying happiness. Then, too, the ideal man is of a disposition to do men service. In this philosophy we find the educator's basis for our modern principle of diagnosis and direction of the individual pupil. It is true that the result may turn into an idealism like Hegel's, with the Prussian fanatical belief in the absolute moral authority of the state over the educational process; but it should be observed that "individuality is by no means the same thing as eccentricity. Teachers are not called upon to manufacture individuality deliberately, but to let it grow unimpeded out of the materials of each child's nature, fashioned by whatever forces, strong or weak, that nature may include. Freedom is the one possible foundation for a brotherhood of nations." To allow individuality To allow individuality to grow unimpeded requires a delicate adjustment of the imperium of the teacher over the pupil.

He

From his longer experience with life the educator should have a mental content, ideally speaking, that embraces a knowledge of the energies of the world, a philosophical view of totality in which he sees the relation between the conservation and development of energy and the survival of the race. must be aware that any spontaneous generation of thought from his own inherent power must act within the limits of coöperative enterprise with mankind in general. This content must be passed on to the pupil in so far as the pupil can grasp it. It is wrong to imply from this relation between teacher and pupil an inferiority of the pupil, because the potential energy of the child may be superior. Age gives the educator a temporary advantage in content that fur

T. Percival Nunn.

nishes a means of procedure in the educational scheme. This advantage is not the same in all teachers, but differs in degree according to the ability of the man to impart his influence directly and indirectly. The aim should be a constructive education; but educators and the teaching process being what they are, much sifting of content goes on before the pupil graduates with his final personal content. If the most is to be made of the pupil's individual energy, the teacher must avoid the mistake of recreating in his work an impression of himself. Imitation sometimes has the disadvantages of reproducing attractive qualities of little basic importance, and of stirring in the educand contrary suggestion. What the teacher must think of primarily is the discovery of individual energies in each pupil and the nurture of these powers in the best way to make the powers contribute their greatest good to the world. The purpose is to make the individual an active agent in a coöperative totality that recognizes fully the benefits of personal talent and genius. From the nature of things the imperium of the teacher involves an application of his own personality and knowledge to the pupil, but from the nature of things again there is an imperium in the pupil needing development through the use of knowledge, including that of innate energies. In the broadest practical sense the knowledge of energies includes an understanding of, not only the personal energy termed urge, but the energies of nature outside man on which he depends for food and fuel, the imperium of

outer nature.

The world contains much concrete proof of the imperium in imperio, the individual realizing his best powers within the boundaries of another government. Our great philosophers developed new concepts although they underwent the rigors of masters, sometimes it would seem with the active help of their educators. Today, the prolific contributions of science come within a highly organized system of instruction which takes a special interest in encouraging originality. Then there is a further fact

we must observe; energy has a certain spontaneity that generates things of its own accord.

One of the most explicit examples of personal inspiration is the account given by the German chemist, Kekulé, of how he came to hit upon the ring formula for the benzene molecule. "I was writing at my text-book, but the work did not progress. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, all twining in snake-like motion. But look! One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes." Sir William Rowan Hamilton says that the new form of calculus called quaternions "started into life, full grown, on Monday the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking with Lady Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to Brougham Bridge. That is to say, then and there, I felt the galvanic circuit of thought close, and the sparks which fell from it were the fundamental equations between i, j, k." The condition of a period of intense thought existing before the revelation does not make it any the less spontaneous. It is worth while to hear Dr. E. J. Allen's explanation of how the primal cell in organic life got going. His theory is that the first organism was of the animal sort and spherical shape but that it gradually grew a tail, or whip, that enabled it to rise to the sunny surface of the sea whenever it sank, and that it there acquired the chlorophyl by which it could make its own food out of the air and water. Another important instruction of science is that some scientists are coming to look upon the origin of life, not as

a unique event in history, but as something which might occur or may be occurring today, in spite of the imperium over it.

I am convinced that a liberal imperium, based upon logical development, does not prevent personal energy from evolving new ideas. The writing of this paper seems to me a proof. Last night when I had become weary from working I put down my pen and sat back in an armchair to smoke and relax. My mind had been occupied with the problem of universal coöperation and the solution seemed far from clear. How is it possible to get men to agree to an imperium in imperio in the broad sense of international unity for the purpose of logical progress while men's minds are conscious of political connotations of restraint and tyranny? Suddenly, while I was making no deliberate effort at thought, the idea came that governments are a form of energy. True government is a manifestation of energy used for preserving and fostering the inherent gifts, or energies, of individual man, in large part through a care for the physical stores in outer nature on which man subsists. Instead of being an imposition from assumed superiority, it is really the energy of the human race occupied with the manipulation of total energy. This concept gives education a new means for advance. With men thinking of coöperation as a property of their own which they have evolved in order to cherish the great total of their inner creative urge, the human conception of the situation reaches fundamental truth that provides men with an inducement to universal action. A greater stimulation to development will occur when the mass of humanity conceives imperium in imperio as basically Energia in Energiae.

K

INDLY presidents of colleges know that to be "kicked out" annoys an undergraduate. They suspect that his parents are pained. They have been told that a young collegian who comes home in mid-winter and stays at home is permanently branded as a shameful failure. The sympathetic administrators feel for the drone who is "dropped for poor scholarship." And they would gladly spare him the pain incidental to his share in the ancient academic custom of driving away as promptly and unceremoniously as possible all those pseudo-students whose presence in the classroom seems to retard the processes of higher education.

Several educators, including the president of one of the Gargantuan state universities, have recently suggested that the really broad-minded thing to do is to harbor the loafers and weaklings and pleasure-seekers for a year or two and then to send them forth with a degree and a blessing. This proposal must not be confused with the dream of another group of professors who would telescope the diffuse and cultural four-year course into two solid years of hard work with an authentic A. B. as its goal. Rather, the western scheme is to keep the four-year curriculum substantially as it now is, but to set up at the end of the second year a general examination as a formidable barrier that must be surmounted by all successful candidates for admission to the junior class. Sophomores who could not get over the fence-presumably fifty or seventy-five per cent. of the students who had been in college for two years-would then be "graduated" with a "degree."

The understanding of serious thinkers is

that people thus graduated could go smiling home with their diplomas, quite unabashed. Their parents, rich or poor, would clearly see the difference between compulsory graduation and "getting kicked out." No indignant benefactor would refuse to endow chairs because his nephew had received walking papers. No old ladies would whisper over their teacups that Homer Bumpkin's son and Peter Pan's daughter were through college because "they wouldn't let 'em hang around no longer."

The reader who accepts these assertions as reliable prophecy should test his sense of humor on the problem of what degree to give to the sophomores who do not pass the general examinations for junior classification. Some colleges already award a title of Associate to students completing the equivalent of about one half of a college course. "Associate," then, will be an appropriate label for our new second-quality brand of the college-bred.

But “Associate in" or "of" what?

Consider the causes for granting the degree. It is obvious that while failures of a few of the candidacies ("flunks," in the vulgar tongue) will be due to mental defects, most will be due to an effort to learn a little about many things rather than much about a few things, to acquire the very kind of education a college of liberal arts pretends to give. Certainly much of the enforced graduation will be attributable, in part at least, to overemphasis on the social side of college life-applied sociology, shall we say? Then what degree could be fairer than A. S. S., Associate in Social Science?

Readers who are not college officers may agree that the slow and lazy students ought

not to be expelled, and yet may doubt the wisdom of the A. S. S. plan. They may suspect that the common sense of a Babbitt father will penetrate the disguise of the new degree. They may even perceive that the poor student has a nuisance value which should be taken into consideration. One billiard expert who goes to sleep in the lecture room and falls over backward may electrify a physics class hitherto lethargic in the presence of not too dynamic Ph. D. eloquence. A heckling smart aleck among the freshmen keeps the laziest "rhet prof." on his toes.

Perhaps, neither summary eviction nor gentle graduation is the best way of dealing with the loafer in academic cloisters. Possibly it would be profitable to permit his remaining in college as long as he will pay roundly for the privilege. All the difficulties of the situation might be met by charging tuition fees that vary inversely as the excellence of the students' academic achieve

ments.

Such a system would alienate no possible donors of millions. It would prevent unpleasant gossip in the old home town. It would make hard study unnecessary for the hard-headed scions of wealthy trustees, while it would spur on the ambitious who work their way. Best of all, it need not lower scholastic standards by one-half of

one per cent.

That it is a practicable system can be quickly demonstrated. By way of illus tration consider a college where the typical student is enrolled for fifteen "semester hours" or academic units, and where "C" is the mean passing grade, "A" represents excellent work, "B" good, "D" poor work but passable, and "F" failure. The college will set a standard rate of tuition. (e.g., $150 for each semester) and will collect that amount from every entering freshman. At the end of the semester, each student's bill for the new term will be determined by his grades; he will pay comparatively little if

his grades were high-very much if they were low. Of, if he does not like the assessment, he may go away.

For each semester hour "C" grade, he is asked to pay ten dollars; for each hour of "B," five; for each hour of "A,"-nothing. For "D's" he is charged twenty dollars per semester hour, and for "F's" thirty dollars. Let us suppose that Tim Hogan's grades in June were:

Mathematics, 2, three hours, F
Physics, 2, four hours, D
English, 2, three hours, C
Psychology, three hours, F
Military Training, two hours, B

Physical Training, one hour, A

His tuition bill for next semester will be $240, and he will probably withdraw from college. "Financial difficulties" will explain matters to the neighbors, and he would not have been eligible for football anyhow.

Contrast the case of Bishop Link's boy, a great-grandson of a Founder. If he "flunks" twelve hours, the president and faculty will not have to send the lad home and then spend years trying to live down the disgrace. (It is the college, not the home, that is disgraced in such an instance.) No, the boy will pay his four hundred dollars of tuition and continue to behave like a gentleman. Ultimately-in five, six, or seven years he may attain the baccalaureate. His degree is designated as “B. S. (Graduat de luxe)." And nobody is injured. Can you not visualize, at the end of the procession of black-robed seniors, a small but select and refined group of Graduats de luxe, each with a golden tassel pendant from his mortar-board?

Even the faculty might be benefited by the additional funds which this selectively democratic plan would bring into the college coffers. And the least sensitive reader must see that the G. de l. program improves upon the A. S. S. policy in the matter of avoiding trouble and pain for all concerned.