He
finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding
fault with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than
his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had
known at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years
later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of
the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boy
of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the
year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The
calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of
twentieth-century thought, but the story will show his reasons
for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics,
philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all
science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854
stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The education he
had received bore little relation to the education he needed.
Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at
all. He knew not even where or how to begin.
CHAPTER IV
HARVARD COLLEGE (1854-1858)
ONE day in June, 1854, young Adams walked for the last time
down the steps of Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place, and
felt no sensation but one of unqualified joy that this experience
was ended. Never before or afterwards in his life did he close a
period so long as four years without some sensation of loss --
some sentiment of habit -- but school was what in after life he
commonly heard his friends denounce as an intolerable bore.
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