generously embellished us all, as it did Jean Jacques, thinking,
as most religious minds are apt to do, that the Eternal Father
himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his
eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.

As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent
guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature offers
scarcely one working model for high education. The student must
go back, beyond Jean Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a
model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of
the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education
has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and
what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.

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.

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