=Life in literature.=--Back of these sights and sounds we discover
men--Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. We
trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. And in
literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life.
Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw
and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they
wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and
saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature.
This panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they
could not but portray. And so literature and life are identical and not
coördinates, as some would have us think.

=Life as subject matter in teaching.=--In teaching school, therefore,
the subject matter with which we have to do is life--nothing more and
nothing less. We may call it history, or mathematics, or literature, or
psychology,--but it still remains true that life is the real objective
of all our activities. And, as has been already said, we are teaching
life by the laboratory method. We are striving to interpret the thing in
which we are immersed. We feel, and think, and aspire, and love, and
enjoy. All these are life; and from this life we are striving to extract
strength that our feeling may be deeper, our thinking higher, our
aspirations wider and more lofty, our love purer and nobler, and our own
enjoyment greater. By absorbing the life that is all about us we strive
to have more abundant and abounding life.

=The teacher's province.=--Such is the province of one who essays the
task of teaching school. School is life, as we have been told; but, at
the same time, it is a place and an occasion for teaching life. If we
could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. If
literature is not life, it is not literature; and so with the sciences.