"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating.
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly.
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.
As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
