sure--otium
cum dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the
archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities have
insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges consumere nati.
This attitude should occasion no surprise in the case of schools which
are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class culture.

The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as might be,
to maintain the received standards and methods of culture intact
are likewise characteristic of the archaic temperament and of the
leisure-class theory of life. The enjoyment and the bent derived from
habitual contemplation of the life, ideals, speculations, and methods of
consuming time and goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical
antiquity, for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier",
than what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the
everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace humanity
in a modern community, that learning the content of which is an
unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is by comparison
"lower", "base", "ignoble"--one even hears the epithet "sub-human"
applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of mankind and of everyday
life.

This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the humanities
seems to be substantially sound. In point of substantial fact, the
gratification and the culture, or the spiritual attitude or habit of
mind, resulting from an habitual contemplation of the anthropomorphism,
clannishness, and leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an
early day, or from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions
and the exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is,
aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding results
derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a contemplation
of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency. There can be but little
question that the first-named habits have the advantage in respect of
aesthetic or honorific value, and therefore in respect of the "worth"
which is made the basis of award in the comparison. The content of the
canons of taste, and more particularly of the canons of honor, is in the
nature of things a resultant of the past life and circumstances of
the race, transmitted to the later generation by inheritance or by
tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of a predatory,
leisure-class scheme of life has pro