To this necessity educators will some
day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform;
meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work. Knowledge,
discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on
every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these
in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal
effort. The richest and most accessible material for this highest
education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of
every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book. To
these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men
may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the
imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, and
enriching it in the highest degree. For the genuine reader, who sees
in a book what the writer has put there, repeats in a way the process
through which the maker of the book passed. The man who reads the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" with his heart as well as his intelligence
must measurably enter into the life which these poems describe and
interpret; he must identify himself for the time with the race whose
soul and historic character are revealed in epic form as in a great
mirror; he must see life from the Greek point of view, and feel life
as the Greek felt it.
Pages:
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103