Dyke: "Every true
university should make room in its scheme for life out-of-doors. There is
much to be said for John Milton's plan of a school whose pupils should go
together each year on long horseback journeys and sailing cruises to see
the world. Walter Bagehot said of Shakespeare that he could not walk down
a street without knowing what was in it. John Burroughs has a college on a
little farm beside the Hudson; and John Muir has a university called
Yosemite. If such men cross a field or a thicket they see more than the
seven wonders of the world. That is culture. And without it, all
scholastic learning is arid, and all the academic degrees known to man are
but china oranges hang on a dry tree." And without imagination this type
of culture is impossible.

All reforms and, indeed, all progress depend upon imagination. We must be
able to picture the world as it ought to be before we can set on foot
plans for betterment. It is the high province of the imagination to enter
into the feelings and aspirations of others and so be able to lend a hand;
to build a better future out of the materials of the present; to soar
above the solemnities and conventions of tradition and to smile while
soaring; to see the invisible and touch the intangible; and to see the
things that are not and call them forth as realities. Seeing that the
business man, the fertile-brained essayist, and the gifted poet agree in
extolling the potential value of imagination, we have full warrant for
according to it an honored place in the curriculum of the school. Too long
has it been an incidental minor; it is now high time to advance it to the
rank of a major.

CHAPTER NINE

REVERENCE

At the basis of reverence is respect; and reverence is respect amplified
and sublimated. A boy must be either dull or heedless who can look at a
bird sailing in the air for five minutes and not become surcharged with
curiosity to know how it can do it. His curiosity must lead him to an
examination of the wing of a bird, and his scrutiny will reveal it as a
marvelous bit of mechanism. The adjustment and overlapping of the feathers
will convince him that it presents a wonderful design and a no less
wonderful adaptation of means to ends. He sees that when the bird is
poised in the air the wing is essentially air-tight and that when the bird
elects to ascend or descend the feathers open a free passage for the air.
Even a cursory examination of the bird's wing must p