Word: generalizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contestants. Still the time was in some cases too slow, and the number of contestants too few. That out of more than seven hundred men only twenty-seven should enter for such contests is absurd, and shows a great lack of interest on the part of the students in general...
...discussion in student circles about that characteristic of Harvard undergraduates which we choose to call "indifference," - a term which is often used for laziness in very much the same way as, in the circles of outer darkness, "financial irregularity" is used for fraud. This indifference - to keep the more general term - is usually supposed to result from a precocious and unerring insight into the realities of things, and a moral and intellectual nature of too high a "tone" to take any interest in the vulgar and short-sighted struggles of the external world. The Harvard student is popularly supposed...
...development is from a homogeneous simplicity of construction to a heterogeneous complexity. Applying this to the evolution of an intellectual society, it is evident that, with the march of enlightenment, thinkers must both become more trained in mind and more specially and diversely educated. The place of the general lawyer is now filled by the marine lawyer, the criminal lawyer, the trust lawyer, and many others. But the growth of Harvard within the last few years has been rather to discourage special attention to any one study, and to tempt the student to rapidly glance over a large portion...
...this indifference is the necessary, though temporary evil - if it be an evil - which attends the growth of our old College into a modern University; and is both the evanescent result and the prerequisite of modern modes of thought. From this general and comparative view of history, philosophy, science, and language, springs that broad, dynamic method, which considers things both in their past, their future, and their relations with coexistent things; a method which narrow-minded specialists have so often and so falsely termed atheistic or utilitarian, but which embodies and necessitates the highest possible conception...
...involves laziness, or represses independent thought, it is reprehensible. But these faults conquered, - and experience shows that, as soon as our students go into actual special study, this is the case, - our methods of thought and study are precisely right for an academic course. Superficiality in one study becomes general culture when extended to all, general culture gives the only sound data for induction, generalization, abstraction, - the highest processes of thought. The object of a college is not that of a machine-shop; it does not fit a man directly for active life, but for broad and right modes...