Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.

Cousins links “education” not to credentials or technical mastery but to a cultivated moral sensibility. The “fragility” of life underscores how easily a person can be harmed—by violence, neglect, indifference, or systems that treat people as abstractions. Calling respect for individual life the “mark” of the educated suggests a standard by which learning should be judged: knowledge ought to enlarge empathy and restraint, not merely power. The line also implies a critique of modern sophistication that can coexist with cruelty; true cultivation is measured by how one treats the vulnerable, and by a refusal to sacrifice individuals to ideology, efficiency, or collective goals.