hear among college-trained people when they compare their education
with every other sort. Now, exactly how much does this signify?

It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional
training does something more for a man than to make a skilful practical
tool of him--it makes him also a judge of other men's skill. Whether
his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing,
it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He
understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in
his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own
line as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line,
he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if
circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work,
clean work, finished work: feeble work, slack work, sham work--these
words express an identical contrast in many different departments of
activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may
beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work
generally.

Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college
training? Is there any broader line--since our education claims
primarily not to be "narrow"--in which we also are made good judges
between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is
especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of
the "humanities," and these are often identified with Greek and Latin.
But it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin
have any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the
humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the
study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor.
Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only _consists_ of
masterpieces, but is largely _about_ masterpieces, being little more
than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it
takes the form of criticism and history. You can give humanistic value
to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics,
mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive
achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being.
Not taught thus literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a
list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and
measures.

The sifting of human creations!