uous effort in putting together elements which go together for
no particular reason. When a thing can not be reasoned out, it may
just as well be guessed out. The guess is always easier than the
dictionary, and, if successful, it answers just as well. Moreover, the
teacher has no way of distinguishing the pupil's replies which are due
to the guess from those due to honest work. I venture to say, from
personal experience, that no one who has been through the usual
classical course in college and before it has not more than once
staked his all upon the happy guess at the stubborn author's meaning.
This shallow device becomes a substitute for honest struggle. And it
is more than shallow; to guess is dishonest. It is a servant to
unworthy inertia; and worse, it is a cloak to mental unreadiness and
to conscious moral cowardice. The guess is a bluff to fortune when the
honest gauntlet of ignorance should be thrown down to the issue.

The effects of this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in
persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that
demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary
impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the guessing habit.

Yet why guess? Why be content with an impression? Why hint of a
"certain this and a certain that" when the "certain," if it mean
anything, commonly means the uncertain? Things worth writing about
should be formulated clearly enough to be understood. Why let the
personal reaction of the individual's feeling suffice? Our youth need
to be told that the guess is immoral, that hypothesis is the servant
of research, that the private impression instructs nobody, that
presentiment is usually wrong, that science is the best antidote to
the fear of ghosts, and that the reply "I guess so" betrays itself,
whether it arise from bravado, from cowardice, or from literary
finesse! I think that the great need of our life is honesty, that the
bulwark of honesty in education is exact knowledge with the scientific
habit of mind, and, furthermore, that the greatest hindrance to these
things is the training which does not, with all the sanctions at its
command, distinguish the real, with its infallible tests, from the
shadowy and vague, but which contents itself with the throw of the
intellectual dice box. Any study which tends to make the difference
between truth and error pass with the throwing of a die, and which
leads the student to be content with a resu