Excerpt from What Constitutes a Finished Education: Delivered on Commencement Day at Mills College, Cal;, May 27, 1896

Or, in science what awaits us? Not only must we master the'old laws and principles which our fathers knew, but on whirling, steam-driven wheels, and along the line of winged wires, mustwe fly, to keep abreast of the latest in Roentgen's rays or Tesla's lights, the new surgery and pathology, telescopic and microscopic achieve ments of each flitting hour.

If knowledge of facts were an essential edu cation, the scientist must be ever in pursuit of the newest, lest he become a fossil, foraging over ancient and forgotten fields. For we tread to-day the highway of discovery, and we tread it fast. Edison and his compeers keep us out of breath in the chase, and make earnest haste themselves; for life is short, and the far fringe only of the fertile forest is yet explored. Secrets of matter and of mind, and the universe of heavenly being, lie all about us, and only just now have we lifted a lower corner of the enshrouding veil. We cannot even inventory the facts and phenomena of the universe we can only sample them, and much that we learn we soon forget.

How, then, is education possible? It is possi ble, since education lies not in the secure posses sion of facts, but in that quality of mind which can comprehend, classify and compare events and principles as they develop. Disciplined mind is educated mind, though multitudes of facts taught in the college curriculum may have been forgotten or never mastered. Education is mental quality.

The educated mind sees a bone bleaching on the prairie, and builds the extinct animal that owned it; watches an eclipse, and knows that laws of planetary motion produce it finds a bitof quartz, scents a La France rose, sees the flying cloud, and from each deducts the proximity of gold, the evolution of the flower, the law of the dew-point and air current. Education is never surprised into superstition, never loses balance, for it apprehends the controlling law. While there is much that the educated man knows not, the key to all knowledge dangles from his wrist, and he can discourse more wisely about the new est discovery than he who never learned to think can upon familiar themes. This educated quality is attainable. It is the power to think. And that is truest education which teaches power of thought rather than that which cram's the mind with masses of slippery things called facts. A mind may become encyclopedic in its possessions, but be neither resourceful nor efficient in shap ing the course of human progress.

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