To make all this more direct we may look to the various sources from
which enthusiasm may be derived. What does the school give us in this
direction? Intellectual drill, broadening of mental horizon,
professional training, all this we expect from school, college, and
university and in every phase of this there is room for a thousand
enthusiasms. Moreover, the school gives us comradeship, the outlook on
the hopes and aspirations of our fellows. It opens to us the resources
of young life, the luminous visions of the boys that are to be men. We
come to know "the wonderful fellow to dream and plan, with the great
thing always to come, who knows?" His dream may be our inspiration as it
passes, as its realization may be the inspiration of future generations.
In the school is life in the making, and with the rest we are making our
own lives with the richest materials ever at our hand. Life is
contagious, and in the fact lies the meaning of Comradeship.
"Gemeingeist unter freien Geistern," comradery among free spirits: this
is the definition of College Spirit given us by Hutten at Greifeswald,
four centuries ago. This definition serves for us today. Life is the
same in every age. All days are one for all good things. They are all
holy-days; to the freshman of today, all joys of comradery, all delights
of free enthusiasm are just as open, just as fresh as ever they were.
From the teacher like influences should proceed. Plodding and prodding
is not the teacher's work. It is inspiration, on-leading, the flashing
of enthusiasms. A teacher in any field should be one who has chosen his
work because he loves it, who makes no repine because he takes with it
the vow of poverty, who finds his reward in the joy of knowing and in
the joy of making known. It requires the master's touch to develop the
germs of the naturalist, the philosopher, the artist, or the poet. Our
teacher is the man who has succeeded along the line in which we hope to
succeed, whose success is measured as we hope to measure our own. Each
leader of science and of intellectual life is in some degree the
disciple of one who has planned and led before him. There is a heredity
of intellect, a heredity of action, as subtle and as real as the
heredity of the continuous germ-plasm. Ask the teacher who has helped
mould your life, who in turn was his own master. In a very few
generations you trace back your lineage to one of the great teachers the
world knows and loves. Who was your teacher in Natural History in
America? Was he a pupil of Agassiz, or was he a student of one of
Agassiz's pupils? Or, again, are there three generations back from you
to the grand master of enthusiasms?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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