PROBLEMS OF THE UNIVERSITY 167 



The number of persons admitted to the universities, in any country, 

 who are fitted by nature to become exclusively investigators, is very 

 small. Here it is particularly true that many are called but few 

 chosen; but any one who is fitted by nature to become a good 

 practitioner ought to be able to learn how to investigate for himself, 

 and so to add something to the sum of human knowledge, in con- 

 nection with the exercise of his profession. This is the kind of pro- 

 fessional man that the university should expect to turn out; not the 

 physician who is content with merely curing his patients; nor 

 the mining or the civil or the electrical engineer who is content 

 merely with making his creations pay dividends; nor the lawyer who 

 is content merely with winning his cases; but men of all these pro- 

 fessions who look beyond practice to actual enlightenment of places 

 that are still dark, though it be given to each one to shed only a 

 tiny gleam of light which reveals a minute speck of truth hitherto 

 unknown. This is one form of the ideality for which the university as 

 such must strive; not only the ideality of the poet, the painter, or 

 the musician, but also an ideality which may inhere in geology as 

 well as in Greek, in anatomy as well as in the history of literature 

 an ideality which transfigures all study, and fills the pursuit of even 

 the most practical profession with the noble passion for the things 

 beyond and above mere " success in life." By this the university 

 makes of its children an aristocracy within a democracy, not hostile 

 to that democracy, but preservative of it; an aristocracy that is 

 not a " close corporation," but open to every one competent to reach 

 it; not reproducing itself from within, but replenishing itself from 

 without. " Aristocracy " is a noble word, though often dragged in 

 the mire by those who should hold it free from taint; and the aristo- 

 cracy of mind and education can imperil the liberties of no com- 

 munity. The university, and these men and women its offspring, 

 must lead public opinion and not follow it; nor must they sit aloof 

 from the national life nursing their superior culture in a fine sense 

 of detachment. The university graduate who does not feel that he 

 owes service to the community as his yei/e^Ata, as the thank-offering 

 for his spiritual birth, is an unworthy son of his alma mater, and the 

 university that has not made him feel this duty is an unworthy 

 spiritual parent; but his service, so far as lies t within his powers, 

 should be one that can be performed by none in the community so 

 well as by himself. The millions of money annually spent upon 

 universities are wasted if their " output " does not show itself able 

 to do what the rest of the community cannot do. 



I have dwelt at length upon these general phases of the whole duty 

 of the university because this seems to me greater than all other 

 problems of the university, and greater now than in any previous age 

 because of the profound changes already taking place or imminent 



