The sifting of human creations!--nothing less than this is what we ought
to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our
colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, not that of
politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts
and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this
way, we learn what type's of activity have stood the test of time; we
acquire standards of the excellent: and durable. All our arts and
sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the
part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be,
how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer
sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may signify in general. Our
critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. We
sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we
feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we
applaud what overcame them.

Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is
unmistakable. What the colleges--teaching humanities by examples which
may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant--should at least
try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises,
_superiority_ has always signified and may still signify. The feeling
for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable,
the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent--this is what
we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better
part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way
naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent
one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and
precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent
out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only