educator,
after giving with equal positiveness the subjects that his boy must
have and must not have included in his course of study, added by way
of concession, "The boy might, if he has time, take English
literature."

=Cultural and utilitarian standards harmonized=

Now in answer to this second class of objectors, it may be frankly
admitted that the study of English literature is primarily, if not
entirely, cultural. A boy may not make a better engineer or practical
chemist for having studied in college the plays of Shakespeare or the
prose of Ruskin. And to the older objectors, who urge that literary
study can ever give that severe intellectual discipline afforded by
the older, narrower college course, we reply that it is not merely the
intellectual powers that need culture and discipline. The ideal
college training will surely not neglect the imagination and emotions,
the faculties which so largely determine the conduct of life. And at
no period in the educational process is the need of wide moral
training so urgent as in those years when the young man is forming
independent judgments and his tastes are taking their final set. The
study of English literature finds its warrant for a place in the
college curriculum principally because, better than any other subject,
it is fitted to cultivate both the emotional and the intellectual
sides of our nature. For in all genuine literature those two elements,
the intellectual and the emotional, are united; you cannot get either
one fully without getting the other. In some forms of literature, as
in poetry, the emotional appeal is the main purpose of the writing;
but even here no really profound or sublime emotion is possible
without a solid basis of thought.

=Appreciation the ultimate aim in the teaching of literature=

This, then, let us understand, is the primary object of all college
teaching in this department. It affords the student opportunity and
incitement to read, during his four years, a considerable number of
our best classics, representative of different periods and different
forms of literature, and to read them with such intelligence and
appreciation as to receive from them that discipline of thought and
feeling which literature better than anything else is fitted to
impart. If the student would or could do this reading by himself,
without formal requirement or assistance, there might be little need
of undergraduate teaching of literature; but every one w