lar
should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days,
research, or the search for new truth. He says: "The soul active ...
utters truth, or creates.... In its essence it is progressive. The book,
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward.
But genius looks forward. Man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents
may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame." And more
explicitly still, he says: "Colleges have their indispensable
office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they
aim not to drill, but to create." When Emerson wrote this passage, the
spirit of research, or discovery, or creation had not yet breathed life
into the higher institutions of learning in our country; and to-day they
have much to do and to acquire before they will conform to Emerson's
ideal.

There are innumerable details in which Emerson anticipated the
educational experiences of later generations. I can cite but two of
them. He taught that each age must write its own books; "or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
not fit this." How true that is in our own day when eighty thousand new
books come from the press of the civilized world in a single year!
Witness the incessant remaking or re-casting of the books of the
preceding generation! Emerson himself has gone into thousands of books
in which his name is never mentioned. Even history has to be re-written
every few years, the long-surviving histories being rather monuments of
style and method than accepted treasuries of facts. Again, contrary to
the prevailing impression that the press has, in large measure, stripped
eloquence of its former influence, Emerson taught that "if there ever
was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the United States." He
included under eloquence the useful speech, all sorts of political
persuasion in the great arena of the Republic, and the lessons of
science, art, and religion which should be "brought home to the instant
practice of thirty millions of people," now become eighty. The colleges
and universities have now answered in the affirmative Emerson's
question, "Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to
train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method,
of grace, and of char