The topic that I wish to treat is this, “The Ideal Teacher.”  And I may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination.  This is the essential feature of any ideal.  The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics.  We take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination a paragon, the counterpart of which could never exist on earth.  He would have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their defects and all their inadequacies.  He would have the manners of a Chesterfield, the courage of a Winkelried, the imagination of a Dante, the eloquence of a Cicero, the wit of a Voltaire, the intuitions of a Shakespeare, the magnetism of a Napoleon, the patriotism of a Washington, the loyalty of a Bismarck, the humanity of a Lincoln, and a hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of some superlative quality, drawn from the historic figure that represented that quality in richest measure.

And so it is with the ideal teacher:  he would combine, in the right proportion, all of the good qualities of all of the good teachers that we have ever known or heard of.  The ideal teacher is and always must be a creature, not of flesh and blood, but of the imagination, a child of the brain.  And perhaps it is well that this is true; for, if he existed in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us out of business.  The relentless law of compensation, which rules that unusual growth in one direction must always be counterbalanced by deficient growth in another direction, is the saving principle of human society.  That a man should be superlatively good in one single line of effort is the demand of modern life.  It is a platitude to say that this is the age of the specialist.  But specialism, while it always means a gain to society, also always means a loss to the individual.  Darwin, at the age of forty, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one idea.  Twenty years before, he had been a youth of the most varied and diverse interests.  He had enjoyed music, he had found delight in the masterpieces of imaginative literature, he had felt a keen interest in the drama, in poetry, in the fine arts.  But at forty Darwin quite by accident discovered that these things had not attracted him for years,—­that every increment of his time and energy was concentrated in a constantly increasing measure upon the unraveling of that great problem to which he had set himself.  And he lamented bitterly the loss of these other interests; he wondered why he had been so thoughtless as to let them slip from his grasp.  It was the same old story of human progress; the sacrifice of the individual to the race.  For Darwin’s loss was the world’s gain, and if he had not limited himself to one line of effort, and given himself up to that work to the exclusion of everything else, the world might still be waiting