It might be expected that at least in form these old-time maxims would be rude and crude, expressed with an old man's loquaciousness and with many personal foibles. Fortunately for us, while to his son Ptah Hotep was very probably an old man, he was not what most of us would call old. In Egypt they married comparatively young. This boy was probably the oldest son. It is usually for the oldest that such advice is treasured up and written out. The father then, giving his advice just as his son was leaving the paternal household when he had married a wife and was about to set up a home of his own, was probably not more than forty. To seventeen or eighteen, forty is quite ancient. To most of the rest of us it is entirely too young to be trusted absolutely in serious matters. Aristotle declared that a man's body reaches physical perfection at thirty-five and his mind reaches intellectual maturity at forty-nine. His students were inclined to think that this age was entirely too old, his philosophic contemporaries of his own generation and the members of national academies and learned societies of most of the generations since, have been quite sure that the term set was entirely too young.

Ptah Hotep's son, then, very probably looked on his father as most sons under twenty are prone to do, as a dear old-fashioned gentleman (he does not like to use the word old fogy for his father, reserving it for the fathers of others), who would be quite tolerable if he only had a little more sympathy with the wonderful advance that is in the world in this new generation. The real young man of the time, however, was the father who wrote his maxims, the condensed wisdom of his experience of life, with a directness, an absolute clarity, an occasional appeal to figures of speech and a variety of expression so striking as to make his work literature. As such it has come down to us. It is eminently human in every way, and while there is here and there an unfortunate tendency to repeat words of similar sound and different meaning, after the fashion of what we call punning, this is pardonable enough since so many of our friends indulge in it and give us practice in pardoning, while, on the whole, the old man wrote as wisely as Polonius, and in a style not quite as artificial as that which Shakespeare has invented as suitable to the old Danish Prime Minister, whom the ancient vizier of Egypt recalls so vividly in many ways.

No idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the Pyramid of Progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the generations that have preceded us. As the Poet Laureate put it at the close of the nineteenth century, "we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time"; and because we have the advantage of our predecessors' progress in their time, we are, of course, in all that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of those gone before us. The farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world's history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours.

Apparently, there are very few people who do not share in the opinions thus expressed. The nineteenth century has been proclaimed the century of evolution; and the idea of evolution has become so much a part of the thought of our time that man also is assumed to be in the midst of it, and history is presumed to show distinctly the wonderful advance that humanity has made. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to point out definitely where progress in humanity may be observed. Ambassador Bryce was asked, two years ago, to deliver an address before Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and took for his subject "What is Progress?" Phi Beta Kappa is the fraternity that admits into its classes only the best students,–men who have proved their ability by success. Mr. Bryce, speaking to the most intelligent university graduates, might be expected to make much of our wonderful recent progress. The address subsequently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1907. Far from any glorification of progress, the historian of the American Commonwealth, who has demonstrated his breadth of view and his notable lack of British insularity by the large way he has written about us, so that we have adopted his work as a text-book of information about ourselves, is very dubious as to whether there is any progress in the world. There is certainly no progress in man's highest expressions of his intelligence. As Mr. Bryce says: "The poetry of the early Hebrews and of the early Greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever equalled. Neither has the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero." No one pretends that there is any progress in art. The masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred years back.

As has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own generation, and not very much about that. In nearly every important phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far behind the great predecessors. In our generation, we are confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. In painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and sometimes many centuries ago. Whence, then, comes the idea of progress? It has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of evidence with regard to progress in humanity. There is complete absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to human achievement in the really great things of human life is examined. Indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little substantiation. To many this will doubtless seem a surprising declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great minds of the nineteenth century. What evolution means, however, is summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a single form. The only other phase of interest in evolution is what concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many people to have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. It may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in biology, a professor at Leland Stanford University, where under the influence of President Jordan biology is thoroughly yet conservatively cultivated, has to say with regard to these theories and the objective evidence for them. Professor Vernon L. Kellogg in his "Darwinism To-day,"² p. 18, though himself an evolutionist and a Darwinian, says: "What may for the moment detain us, however, is a reference to the curiously almost completely subjective character of the evidence for both the theory of descent and natural selection. Biology has been until now a science of observation; it is beginning to be one of observation plus experiment. The evidence for its principal theories might be expected to be thoroughly objective in character; to be of the nature of positive, observed and perhaps experimentally proved, facts. How is it actually? Speaking by and large, we only tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable cases of species forming or transforming, that is of descent, have been observed; and that no recognized case of natural selection really selecting has been observed. I hasten to repeat the names of the Ancon sheep, the Paraguay cattle, the Porto Santo rabbit, the Artemias of Schmankewitch and the de Vriesian evening primroses to show that I know my list of classic possible exceptions to this denial of observed species forming, and to refer to Weldon's broad-and-narrow fronted crabs as a case of what may be an observation of selection at work. But such a list, even if it could be extended to a score, or to a hundred, of cases, is ludicrous as objective proof of that descent and selection, under whose domination the forming of millions of species is supposed to have occurred." (Italics mine.)

Mr. Kellogg, as might be expected from this, objects very much to the application that has been so heedlessly made of certain supposed principles of evolution to pedagogy. In practically every science to which Darwinian principles have been applied it is the weakest of the principles that have been appealed to as the foundation for presumedly new developments in the particular science. With regard to the so-called science of education Professor Kellogg says:

"In Pedagogy it is also the theory of descent rather than the selection theory which has been drawn on for some rather remarkable developments in child study and instruction. Unfortunately it is on that weakest of the three foundation pillars of descent, namely the science of embryology with its Müllerian-Haeckelian capitulation theory or biogenetic law, that the child-study pedagogues have builded. The species recapitulates in the ontogeny (development) of each of its individuals the course or history of its phylogeny (descent or evolution). Hence the child corresponds in different periods of its development to the phyletic stages in the descent of man. As the child is fortunately well by its fish, dog and monkey stages before it comes into the care of the pedagogue, he has to concern himself only with safe progress through the various stages of prehistoric and barbarous man. Detect the precise phyletic stage cave-man, stone-age man, hunter and roamer, pastoral man, agriculturalist, and treat with the little barbarian accordingly! What simplicity! Only one trouble here for the pedagogue: the recapitulation theory is mostly wrong and what is right in it is mostly so covered up by the wrong part, that few biologists longer have any confidence in discovering the right. What, then, of our generalizing friends, the pedagogues?"

It is in educational matters, above all, then, that we must be careful about assumptions with regard to evolution and supposed inevitable progress because we must, forsooth, be taking advantage of the accumulated experience of previous generations. There is no inevitability about progress in any line. The attainment of any generation depends absolutely on what that generation tries to do, the ideals that it has and the fidelity with which it sets itself to work. We can make just as egregious mistakes, and we have made them, as any generation of the past. We can foster delusions with regard to our all-knowingness just as many another foolish people before us have done, and our one hope of real accomplishment for ourselves and our generation is to choose our purposes carefully and then set about their accomplishment with strenuous effort. The lessons of the past in history are extremely precious not only because they show us where others made mistakes but also because they show us the successes of the past. The better we know these, the deeper our admiration for them, the better the outlook for ourselves and our accomplishment. This is the ideal that I would like to emphasize in this series of lectures and addresses and in this, far from there being any pessimism, there is, as it seems to me, the highest optimism. Any generation that wants to can do well, but it must want to do efficaciously.

Any one who thinks that education, in the sense of training of character or advice with regard to practical, every-day life, has evoluted in the course of time, should read this little book that I bring to you this evening. Indeed, it is as the first chapter in the history of education that it finds its most valuable place in literature. This teacher of the old-time, who had his boy's best interest at heart, not only knew what to say but how to say it so as to attract a young man's attention. Of course it is probable that, even with all this good advice, the young man went his way in his own fashion; for that is ever the mode of the young. But, so far as the experience of another could supply for that personal experience which every human being craves, and will have, no matter what the cost, surely this oldest book in the world supplies the best possible material. As literature, it has a finish that is quite surprising. Art is said to be the elimination of the superfluous. Surely, then, this is artful, in the best sense of that word, to a supreme degree. It is surprising how few repetitions there are, how few tergiversations, how few unnecessary words; and yet the style is not so austere as to be dry and lacking in human interest.

Probably the most interesting feature of the book is the fact that in it God is always spoken of in the singular. It is not the "gods" who help men, who punish them, who command and must be obeyed, whose providence is so wonderful, but it is always "God." The latest editor,³ Mr. Battiscombe G. Gunn, in his version always inserts the definite article before the word God because, he says, in different places there were different local gods, and the idea of the writer was to emphasize the fact that the god of any particular locality would act as he declared in his instructions. There are many distinguished Egyptologists, however, who insist that the expression "the God," which occurs not only in this but in many other very early Egyptian writings, is a monotheistic deity whose name is above all names, and transcends all the power of humanity to name him, and hence is spoken of always without a name but with the definite article.

It is curious indeed to find that the very first bit of instruction given to his son by this wise father is, not to be conceited about what he knows. How striking the expression of his first sentence of this oldest book: "Be not proud because thou art learned." And the second is like unto the first: "But discourse with the ignorant man as with the sage." And then at the end of this very first paragraph comes the first figure of speech in human literature that has been presented for us. It is as beautiful in its simplicity and illuminating quality as any of the subsequent time. "Fair speech" (by which is meant evidently kindly speech toward those who know less than we do) "is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave maidens on the pebbles." Then there comes a series of directions as to how the young man should treat his superiors, his equals and his inferiors. If in argument he is worsted by some one who knows more than himself, he is cautioned. "Be not angry." If some one talks nonsense. "Correct him." If an ignorant man insists on arguing, "Be not scornful with him, but let him alone; then shall he confound himself"; for "it is shameful to confuse a mean mind."

The advice may be summed up. Do not argue with your superiors, it does no good; nor with your equals, state your case and let it go; but above all, not with your inferiors; let them talk and they will make fools of themselves.

Kindness is always insisted on as the quality most indispensable to a man. "Live therefore," says the father, "in the house of kindliness, and men shall come and give gifts of themselves." There are lessons in politeness as well as in kindliness. For instance: "If thou be among the guests of a great man, pierce him not with many glances. It is abhorred of the soul to stare at him. Speak not till he address thee. Speak when he questioneth thee; so shalt thou be good in his opinion." Again, he wants his son not to eat the bread of idleness: "Fill not thy mouth at thy neighbor's table." He insists much on the lesson that God helps those who help themselves. "Behold," he says, "riches come not of themselves. It is their rule to come to him that actively desires. If he bestir him and collect them himself, God shall make him prosperous; but He shall punish him if he be slothful." On the other hand, the gaining of riches for riches' sake is not worth the while. "When riches are gained, follow the heart; for riches are of no avail if one be weary." As much as to say, after having gained a competency, do not spend further time in amassing wealth, but enjoy in a reasonable way that which has been obtained.