yourself to find yourself, and you have found yourself to lose yourself.




V

And the final vow that I would have these graduates take is the vow of
idealism,--the pledge of fidelity and devotion to certain fundamental
principles of life which it is the business of education carefully to
cherish and nourish and transmit untarnished to each succeeding
generation. These but formulate in another way what the vows that I have
already discussed mean by implication. One is the ideal of social
service, upon which education must, in the last analysis, rest its case.
The second is the ideal of science,--the pledge of devotion to that
persistent unwearying search after truth, of loyalty to the great
principles of unbiased observation and unprejudiced experiment, of
willingness to accept the truth and be governed by it, no matter how
disagreeable it may be, no matter how roughly it may trample down our
pet doctrines and our preconceived theories. The nineteenth century left
us a glorious heritage in the great discoveries and inventions that
science has established. These must not be lost to posterity; but far
better lose them than lose the spirit of free inquiry, the spirit of
untrammeled investigation, the noble devotion to truth for its own sake
that made these discoveries and inventions possible.

It is these ideals that education must perpetuate, and if education is
successfully to perpetuate them, the teacher must himself be filled with
a spirit of devotion to the things that they represent. Science has
triumphed over superstition and fraud and error. It is the teacher's