No sagacity is universal, but the love of sagacity may be.  The man who starts out to implant a new way of education has a noble task before him, but is it a final one, or even a more than tolerably practical one?  Is there such a thing as a place for Truth at wholesale, even in an academy or college?  Can a man receive an education outside of himself?  He may be played upon by grammars and by loci-paper, by electrical machines, and parsing tables and Grecian accents, by the names of noted authors and statesmen, and the thrill of historic battles and decisions.  He may be placed under a rain of ethical and philosophic ideas, and may be forced to put on a System of Thought, as men put on a mackintosh.  But his true education is what he makes of these things.  If he hears of Theodoric with a yawn, we say—­the college-folk—­He must be imbecile.  No, not imbecile! he may become a successful toreador, or snake-charmer, which things are out of our line!  And a man may be an upright citizen, a good husband, and a sincerely religious man, who has never heard of Francesca, nor Fra Angelico, nor named the name of Botticelli!

The moment we set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something out.  Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul.  We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it.  Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides.

Education is the taking to one’s self, so far as one may in a lifetime, all that the race has learned through these six thousand years.  Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of intellectual assimilation of what is about us, or what we put about ourselves.  At every step we have a choice.  This is the real difference between students at the same school or university.  One puts away Greek, and the other lays up football and college societies.  A third gets all three, being a little more swift and alert.  One stows away insubordination—­another, order and obedience.  One does quiet, original work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting through recitations and examinations.  No two students ever come out of the same school, college, or shop with the same education.  Their training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably unlike.  Education, in the last analysis, is getting the highest intellectual value out of one’s environment and opportunities.  There is a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a philosopher of the academic halls.