A Prophet In His Own Country

in possessing a Prophet of the first class: Mr. Henry Clifford Stuart. Imagine to yourself a big man, a really big man, six foot three in height, broad and well- proportioned. The entire impression is of bigness. And as should always be the case with homo sapiens, the most important part of the impression is given by the head. Such a brow is only seen in the world’s greatest thinkers. Mr. Stuart was born in 1864 in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, John Stuart, was a Captain of the 51st and Lieutenant Colonel of the 63rd New York Volunteers. His is the perfect and ideal type, fast disappearing, of the aristocratic American. Mr. Stuart was educated in San Francisco, California; but it is one of his favorite claims that he is not educated. Rather, he would say, he is beginning to educate himself. And this is one of the secrets of his immense power of brain. By education in the ordinary sense we mean that an old fool bullies a young fool into agreeing with him. In order to obtain a university degree it is necessary to stultify oneself by agreeing with the particular clique of fifth rate minds who, having been totally unable to carve out any way in the world, have become sodden in the backwater of a university; and taken up teaching as a profession, because they are incapable of learning. One has only to think of a subject like history to see how lop-sided conventional education always is. Even in more truly scientific subjects there is the same parochialism. Consider Sir William Hamilton and his doctrine of the quantification of the predicate,