HONORS FOR SCHOLARSHIP

One of the great problems which universities are now trying to solve is how to make scholarship attractive. At the present moment, when the Phi Beta Kappa Society has drawn attention to itself by its recent election and its newly announced plans for a Sesquicentennial Celebration it may not be amiss to inquire into one of the reasons why scholarship is not more attractive to students than it actually is.

Almost a hundred years ago Emerson tried to answer this question in an address delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In spite of the lapse of years his criticism is as true now as then.

"Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all," said Emerson. "Man is priest and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier..... The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, a good finger, a neck, a stomach an elbow (he might have added a head), but never a man. Man is this metamorphosed into a thing, into many things . . . . In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

In view of this analysis one cannot but ask whether even yet, with the innovations employed this year in the election of new members. Phi Beta Kappa has taken adequate measures to distinguish between "Man Thinking" and "the parrot of other men's thinking."