PROBLEMS OF THE UNIVERSITY 163 



don the training of these to purely technical or professional schools 

 would be suicidal for the universities, and a calamity to the state. 



Our own country is much too lax in this respect, and is full of in- 

 competent practitioners, by no means all of whom are self-taught; 

 most have graduated from some school which has the right to bestow 

 degrees. In some other countries, wiser than ours in this particular, 

 the practice of a profession is made in effect impossible for those who 

 have not been trained in a university school, and governmental con- 

 trol of the latter holds them rigidly to a high standard. In lands 

 where this regulation is impossible, owing to the form of govern- 

 ment or to deeply rooted traditions, the duty of upholding the highest 

 standards of professional training falls upon the universities. These 

 can, by providing the best training to be had anywhere, attract the 

 best men to their schools, and with them leaven the whole body of 

 practitioners. 



The university, to be serviceable to the fullest extent, must be 

 impartial in its welcome to subjects of research. It must not pro- 

 scribe certain fields of research or withdraw its support from inves- 

 tigations therein merely because few students are attracted to them, 

 or because such studies seem unpractical and not likely to " pay." 

 After a long and hard struggle the natural sciences have, in many 

 quarters, prevailed, and by reason of the countless ways in which 

 the results of researches therein can be put to practical use, for 

 commercial profit and for the physical welfare of man, their appeal, 

 particularly in newer countries, drowns the voice of the advocate 

 of the philosophical, philological, and historical sciences. Unfor- 

 tunately the bitterness of controversy is not yet extinct; the scorn 

 formerly poured out in blind wrath by the " classical men " upon 

 studies in natural science has been returned with interest. The 

 classical languages and literatures seem threatened with starva- 

 tion by withdrawal of their nutriment. A naturalist, who will 

 cheerfully spend his life in determining the number of recognizable 

 variations in a species of beetles, will be heard to sneer at researches 

 into the history of human institutions or of human speech, no less 

 bitter and one-sided in his views than the classical scholar who 

 sneers at him. Yet as long as man's associations are with his fellow 

 men, as long as he remains the " political animal " of Aristotle, so 

 long will the sciences that make for the comprehension of man, of 

 his history, of his future, deserve at least an equal place with the 

 sciences of the extra-human world. No knowledge, however ex- 

 tensive and accurate, of natural science can dispense us from the 

 need of better knowledge than we possess of the human mind, of 

 human passions, and human ambitions, of the history of mankind 

 upon the earth. The person who discovers or helps to discover a law 

 of any part of the vast complex which we call nature is a benefactor 



