LATER YEARS OF THE SATURDAY CLUB IN CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT 1834-1926 N 1870, in his thirty-sixth year, Charles William Eliot was elected a member of the Saturday Club. He was then much younger than most of the members who elected him, and nearly a generation the junior of Charles Francis Adams, Sr., who was chosen at the same time. Although Eliot was the first chemist to be enrolled on the list of membership, he probably owed his election only indirectly to his scientific attainments. Every one knows that in the preceding year he had been made President of Harvard University. Of course this office by no means carried with it ex-officio membership in the Club; nevertheless, Eliot's remarkable qualities must have been brought to the attention of the members by his new high position. He remained for fifty-six years (longer than any one else) an ardent upholder of the Club, was its president from January, 1906, to April, 1925, and always interested himself greatly in its meetings and prospects. No one was more regular in attendance at its informal gatherings; he came, indeed, several times even during his ninety-first year. Without his dignified, courteous presence the company seemed incomplete. In the meetings he sometimes brought questions of public import before the members for discussion. Needless to say, his own clearly expressed opinions were awaited with keen interest; as a rule he took an active part in conversation. Greatness, like genius, is difficult to appraise. Nevertheless, there is general agreement that during the last part of his life Eliot was one of the most influential of contemporary Americans; and many acute appraisers of character have proclaimed that he was for years not only the greatest of university presidents, but also the greatest of all our living private citizens. Even in a brief essay such as this the basis of his undisputed preeminence and usefulness is worth setting forth. It will be seen that his power was developed from the reaction of experience on a receptive, sane, wise, wellbalanced, and constructive mind. The biography of his early years brings evidence in plenty of the progressive nature of his mental growth. Going back to the beginning of his presidential career, one finds in his Inaugural Address (1869) passages which really formed the leit-motif of his endeavors: "This University recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best. To observe keenly, to reason soundly, and to imagine vividly are operations as essential as that of clear and forcible expression; and to develop one of these faculties, it is not necessary to repress and dwarf the others.... "The only conceivable aim of a college government in our day is to broaden, deepen and invigorate American teaching in all branches of learning.. 'In education, the individual traits of different minds have not been sufficiently attended to. Through all the periods of boyhood the school studies should be representative; all the main fields of knowledge should be entered upon. But the young man of nineteen or twenty ought to know what he likes best and is most fit for. If his previous training has been sufficiently wide, he will know by that time whether he is most apt at language or philosophy or natural science or mathematics. If he feels no loves, he will at least have his hates. . . . When the revelation of his own peculiar taste and capacity comes to a young man, let him reverently give it welcome, thank God, and take courage. Thereafter he knows his way to happy, enthusiastic work. . . . "The elective system fosters scholarship because it gives free play to natural preferences and inborn aptitudes, makes possible enthusiasm for chosen work, relieves the professor and the ardent disciple of the presence of a body of students who are compelled to an unwelcome task, and enlarges instruction.... These wise pronouncements were not unconsidered dogmas of superficial thought, but rather represented profound conviction based upon his own individual experience as student and teacher, as well as upon a more intimate knowledge of European methods than was possessed by other American educators. He had himself pursued, as a member of the Harvard Class of 1853, the rigid curriculum of the Harvard of that day. Josiah P. Cooke's elementary course on chemistry (which all undergraduates were obliged to take) had inspired the young man with an intense interest in the subject, but he found that no opportunity for pursuing it through personal experience was regularly offered by the College. Most of his leisure was, however, by special dispensation spent in Cooke's little laboratory in University Hall; he was, I suppose, the first Harvard undergraduate to be allowed the privilege of laboratory work. Thus at first hand he had opportunity to perceive vividly the value of the experience denied to others. Doubtless even then the feeling must have been aroused in him that the College should have made provision for an intellectual taste and aptitude of this kind. Eminent scientific men - Agassiz, Cooke, Gray, and Wyman already there; but they could not expand their usefulness, because the College Faculty failed to recognize the opportunities afforded by their presence. were After holding a preliminary tutorship, at the age of twenty-four Eliot was made Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School, and during his incumbency must have thought deeply on educational values; for after five years of service (a rival candidate having been appointed to the Rumford Professorship) he went to Europe in order to study methods of academic training there (1863-65). In Germany and France he found a much deeper and wider conception of education than existed in the typical (and at that time, provincial) American college; and on returning to Boston he put into practice (as Professor of Analytical Chemistry in the Institute of Technology, 1865-69) some of the knowledge gained. At the same time, in conjunction with his colleague, Frank H. Storer, he wrote a textbook upon elementary chemistry (which soon, in an abridged edition, became the standard of that day), as well as a Manual of Qualitative Analysis. He spent the winter of 1867-68 in renewed educational studies in France, and came home more and more convinced that chemistry is especially useful as part of a liberal education - partly because, as he said long afterward, 'its successful pursuit involves so much exercise of the imagination.' Such varied educational experience as student and teacher was the foundation on which, shortly after his return from Europe, he based the conclusions expressed in his Inaugural Address. Not only in formulating the educational doctrine, but also in carrying its premises to a logical conclusion, did Eliot show himself to possess a highly constructive mind. The reform of American education was applied not only to the college, his first concern, but also to the professional schools, and later was extended to the elementary and preparatory schools allied with Harvard University. Of course the inevitable antagonism on the part of the conservatives was not lacking. The resulting battles were always fair and above-board on his part; he always fought as a gentleman, but he was a very persistent gentleman. Not only did he convince the Corporation and Faculty of Harvard College that a broader scheme of study than that hitherto existing was wise, but also, even before this end was fully accomplished, he reformed the professional schools and established the beginning of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. At the time of his resignation in 1909, all the members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had received their permanent appointments under his administration, and only one, Charles Loring Jackson, had held even an assistantship which antedated his inauguration. During the forty years of his presidency the dominating influence in the leading American university was Charles William Eliot. Christopher Columbus Langdell was appointed to a professorship of law in 1870. Even the laity knows well the profound change in legal instruction wrought by this unusual mind whose power the new head of the University had perceived. Langdell's famous 'Case System' - an inductive system of legal study added to the already great renown (due largely to Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf) of the Harvard Law School. Soon afterwards the instruction there was richly amplified by John Chipman Gray, James Barr |