Of history as I may have been taught it, I can remember nothing. So far as I can now discern, all my historical knowledge, moderate as it is, has been acquired by reading, long years subsequent to the ending of my formal “education.” That I do not remember facts from my years spent on “American,” “Ancient,” and “European” history may be due to a poor memory, but apparently history was taught merely as facts. The rudiments of spelling and mathematics have undoubtedly been useful. As far as my institutional education was concerned, the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and music were simply nonexistent. I never heard a word about the world of delight to be found in them or of their possible influence on the life of the spirit. Of my struggles with grammar there remains nothing, not a single rule, so laboriously studied. I came of a cultured family and learned at home to use my mother tongue with a moderate[Pg 149] degree of correctness. On the other hand, from my experience with country people in a village where I was on the Board of Education, I could not see that if they did not speak correctly by home training, they ever learned to do so in school. Of my physics and chemistry I have only hazy recollections. From mineralogy, geology, physiology, psychology, and zoology much less remained to me than from botany which I taught myself, learning, without forgetting, to name the trees and wildflowers and something of the general science. I have always been greatly interested in philosophy, and I well recall with what anticipations I went from my small college to Yale to get what I thought would be a genuine initiation into the subject under the late Professor Ladd. Never were a student’s hopes doomed to more swift and complete annihilation. As I recall it, in his course he lectured to over three hundred students. During the lectures some of his audience read novels, some newspapers, while a few “grinds” like myself ruined their handwriting trying to keep up with the lecturer in their note-taking. After another hour’s work in my study rewriting the notes, I had a lecture written in longhand that was far inferior in exactness and proper expression to any chapter in a textbook that Ladd might have written, and after two hours’ waste of time I had merely reached the point of having an imperfect text to study.