The Forgotten Man, and Other EssaysSumner, William Graham
Science
The Forgotten Man, and Other Essays
Sumner, William Graham
Economics; Social sciences
diverse orders and kinds had all been harmoniously developed. How
shallow then is the idea that education is meant to give or can give
a mass of monopolized information, and how important it is that the
student should understand what he may expect and what he may not expect
from his education. As your education goes on, you ought to gain in
your power of observation. Natural incidents, political occurrences,
social events, ought to present to you new illustrations of general
principles with which your studies have made you familiar. You ought to
gain in power to analyze and compare, so that all the fallacies which
consist in presenting things as like, which are not like, should not be
able to befog your reason. You ought to become able to recognize and
test a generalization, and to distinguish between true generalizations
and dogmas on the one hand, or commonplaces on another, or whimsical
speculations on another. You ought to know when you are dealing with a
true law which you may follow to the uttermost; when you have only a
general truth; when you have an hypothetical theory; when you have a
possible conjecture; and when you have only an ingenious assumption.
These are most important distinctions on either side. Some people are
affected by a notion, fashionable just now, that it belongs to culture
never to go too far. Mr. Brook, in “Middlemarch,” you remember, is
a type of that culture. He believed in things up to a certain point
and was always afraid of going too far. We have a good many aspirants
after culture nowadays whose capital consists in a superficial literary
tradition and the same kind of terror of going too far. They would put
a saving clause in the multiplication table, and make reservations
in the rule of three. On the other hand, we have those who can never
express anything to which they are inclined to assent without gushing.
A simple opinion must be set forth in a torrent fit to enforce a great
scientific truth. One is just as much the sign of an imperfect training
as the other, and you meet with both, as my description shows, in
persons who pride themselves on their culture. I will not deny that
they are cultivated; I only say that they are not well disciplined,
that is, not well educated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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