Assessment practitioners and policymakers have focused a good deal of their attention in the past several years on the general intellectual skills that students acquire in college. The American Association of Colleges and Universities' Greater Expectations Project, the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning, and the National Forum on College-Level Learning have all concerned themselves with how college develops students' intellect and understanding. All of these projects presume that our graduates need the advanced communication, analytic, and problem-solving skills that will enable them to contribute to society long after their content knowledge has become out of date or irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. But where are students supposed to acquire these general intellectual skills? In the general education curriculum? Perhaps, to some degree. But between requirements, prerequisites, and electives, students spend most of their class time taking courses in their major disciplines. To answer this question one needs to look to the majors to find out how and where students are most apt to develop their general intellectual skills and understanding. In this study, several Carnegie Scholars in the liberal arts were asked: in what ways does the concentrated study of your discipline develop students' minds (and perhaps hearts), just how does it go about doing that, and how do you know it has been successful? The article presents responses to these questions by Carnegie Scholars in three disciplines: psychology, English, and biology. What the answers suggest is that the liberal arts are remarkably similar in their aims, if not in the ways in which those aims are manifested. All of these scholars believe that their majors acquire a deeper understanding of human life and/or the larger world of which it is a part, although each looks at a different part of the elephant with different optics. They believe as well that such understanding leads to engagement with that world.