The Forgotten Man, and Other EssaysSumner, William Graham
Science
The Forgotten Man, and Other Essays
Sumner, William Graham
Economics; Social sciences
can change its direction and application when occasion requires.
This brings me then to speak of the real scope and advantage of a
disciplinary education. A man who has enjoyed such an education has
simply had his natural powers developed and reduced to rule, and he
has gained for himself an intelligent control of them. Before an
academical audience it is not necessary for me to stop to clear away
the popular notions about untutored powers and self-made men. It is
enough to say that the “self-made” man is, by the definition, the first
bungling essay of a bad workman. An undeveloped human mind is simply
a bundle of possibilities. It may come to much or little. If it is
highly trained by years of patient exercise, judiciously imposed, it
becomes capable of strict and methodical action. It may be turned to
any one of a hundred tasks which offer themselves to us men here on
earth. It may have gained this discipline in one particular science
or another, and it may have special technical acquaintance with one
more than another. Such will almost surely be the case, but there
is not a more mistaken, one-sided, and mischievous controversy than
that about _the_ science which should be made the basis of education.
Every science has, for disciplinary purposes, its advantages and its
limitations. The man who is trained on chemistry will become a strict
analyst and will break up heterogeneous compounds of all kinds, but he
will be likely also to rest content with this destructive work and to
leave the positive work of construction or synthesis to others. The
man who is trained on history will be quick to discern continuity of
force or law under different phases, but he will be content with broad
phases and heterogeneous combinations such as history offers, and will
not be a strict analyst. The man who is trained on mathematics will
have great power of grasping purely conceptional relations, or abstract
ideas, which are, however, most sharply defined; but he will be likely
to fasten upon a subordinate factor in some other kind of problem,
especially if that factor admits of more complete abstraction than
any of the others. The man who is trained on the science of language
approaches the continuity and development of history with a guiding
thread in his hand, and his comparisons, furnishing stepping-stones
now on the right and now on the left, lead him on in a course where
induction and deduction go so close together that they can hardly
be separated; but the study of language again always threatens to
degenerate into a cram of grammatical niceties and a fastidiousness
about expression, under which the contents are forgotten. Now, in
individual affairs, family, social, and political affairs, all these
powers of mind find occasion for exercise. They are needed in business,
in professions, in technical pursuits; and the man best fitted for the
demands of life would be the man whose powers of mind of all these
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