They also complain of a lack of public interest in their operations. They are dumped in one museum and certain learned men rejoice in the treasure. Much very dull `literature' is treated in like manner. There are many fine things discovered, edited, and buried. In my own departmerit of scholarship I sh should say the operations are rather of this complexion. If he shipped all the mud and uncut stones northward and dumped them in one heap on the shore of Iceland, in some inaccessible spot, we should not consider him commercially sound. If a man owned mines in South Africa he would know that his labourers dug up a good deal of mud and an occsional jewel, looking rather like the mud about it. This refers chiefly to education in what are still called the `humanities`', to processes by which, upon being examined, one becomes 'bachelor' or 'master' of the 'liberal arts' or even `one learned in philosophy' In matters of technical and practical education where the object is to make a man more efficiently useful to the community, things are better managed: there is here some obvious gauge of the result. The result of education, in the present and usual sense, is usually to rear between the `product of education' and the unproduced, a barrier, a chevaux de frise of books and of mutual misunderstanding. The aim of right education is to lead a man out into more varied, more intimate contact with his fellows. These things pertain not only to education - always a painful and unpleasant process, but to an art not always the reverse. The former may not amuse you, but, in tolerance await, I ask you, for the irritation of the latter. The letter is too inexact and the former too cumbersome to be of much use to the normal man wishing to live mentally active.Īxioms are the necessary platitudes of any science, and, as all sciences must start from axioms, most serious beginnings are affairs sententious, and pedagogical, bear with me a little let me write a few pages of commonplace, of things which we all know and upon which we for the most part agree, and if you endure to the end of them you will know upon what section of our common knowledge I am to build the airy fabric of my heresies. I mean, merely, a method not of common practice, a method not yet clearly or consciously formulated, a method which has been intermittently used by all good scholars since the beginning of scholarship, the method of Luminous Detail, a method most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of today - that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalisation. When I bring into play what my late pastors and masters would term, in classic sweetness, my `unmitigated gall', and by virtue of it venture to speak of a `New Method in Scholarship', I do not imagine that I am speaking of a method by me discovered.
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