--nothing less than this is what we
ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography;
what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history,
that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as
human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part.
Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the
test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All
our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of
perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of
excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations,
we gain a richer sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may
signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute
and less fanatical. We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act
of penetrating them; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided
epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.

Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning
is unmistakable. What the colleges--teaching humanities by examples
which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant--should at
least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various
disguises, _superiority_ has always signified and may still signify.
The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really
admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and
impermanent,--this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for
ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some
of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never
become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with
the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or
vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid
its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on
us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and
shipwreck of a higher education.

The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line,
as boring subways is the engineer's line and the surgeon's is
appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish
for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a
disgust for cheap jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference
of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of