THE FULLER WISDOM

It is a striking fact but easily explainable that the college man with all his large wisdom of the part, the future and the universe, shows on the whole a fundamental ignorance of men.

After knowledge of self, knowledge of others is the first necessity of wisdom. Theories of life on Mars, knowledge of the eighty elements, an ability to quote extensively from Hamlet, or to write free verse, will in no way make up for this most fundamental sort of wisdom.

Books are barren things without breadth. The little urchin on the street selling papers to a thousand passing people is more deeply versed in human psychology than the college man of twice his years specializing in abstruse philosophy. He knows that all men are not selfish, as your embryo pessimist would believe, and that all men are not prosperous and well-fed, as the young college optimist would like to hope.

We study history, psychology, above all literature, that we may know men, and the motives that lie behind their actions. If we do not formulate some philosophy of life in all our studying, then our learning is nothing, and we have failed.

You who classify all men by their money, or their birth--how are you going to meet men in the world?

Two men are never identical and one man is never twice the same. No man is so shallow as easily to be passed in contempt. Every individual represents a bundle of ambitions, of abilities and weaknesses, that you, as trained college men, must know.

Learn this, and although failing in all manner of bookish wisdom, your college education will not have been in vain, for you will have learned to rub elbows with the broad, infinitely varied outside world.