Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE REQUISITE SPIRIT IN COLLEGE EDUCATION And when one turns to characterize the spirit of the true college he must parallel, as we have seen, the great means of a complex life, of expressive activity, and of personal association, with the demand for a spirit— heartily but discriminatingly catholic, thoroughly objective, and marked by the great convictions of the social consciousness. In the discussion of the means, the spirit needed has been in no small part implied. I certainly need not say more concerning the catholicity that must unmistakably mark the true college. But it does deserve to be emphasized that, if psychology's insistence upon the importance of action is at all justified, then our normal mood, the mood of the best work, of the best associations, and of happiness itself, is the objective mood. The great means in education, of using one's powers in an interesting and complex environment, even for the very sake of the ideal, itself demands the mood of work. And this needs to be particularly remembered in moral and religious training. The student life, in any case, is quite too prone to be self-centered, and therefore needs all the more the objective emphasis. But aside from this peculiar need of the student life, the introspective mood itself has a smaller contribution to make to the moral and religious life than has been commonly assumed. Just so much introspection is needed as to make sure that one has put himself in the presence of the great objective forces that lead to character and to God. When this is determined, the work of introspection is practically done. The dominant mood should be objective through and through. And one chief and good cause of reaction, no doubt, from some of the older methods of moral and religious training in college, has b...