ime,
all that the race has learned through these six thousand years.
Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of
intellectual assimilation of what is about us, or what we put about
ourselves. At every step we have a choice. This is the real difference
between students at the same school or university. One puts away Greek,
and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all
three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away
insubordination--another, order and obedience. One does quiet, original
work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting
through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out of
the same school, college, or shop with the same education. Their
training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably
unlike. Education, in the last analysis, is getting the highest
intellectual value out of one's environment and opportunities. There is
a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a
philosopher of the academic halls.

Conduct is the _pons asinorum_ of life. Wise men somehow cross it,
though stumblingly, and with tears. Fools, usurers, oppressors, and
spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the hellward side.
Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look
over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men
climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not
get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not
necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some
intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly
forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So
with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really
removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing
events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his
thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell,
we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry. His necktie rides up!
He goes out into the street without a hat! Let him alone till he proves
the worth of what he is about. The practical man, who hears the
dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds
far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man's ear, and that may
sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better