WORK OF TEE NATURALIST IN TEE WORLD. 71 



by which our children should acquire some information about 

 themselves, the world around them, and at the same time be 

 disciplined in observation and reasoning ? 



In regard to our schools there prevails the miserable delusion 

 that they are good. We have many private and public good 

 schools, but they constitute the small minority. Most of the 

 young men who enter my classes after leaving our public schools 

 are poorly disciplined in every respect, and a great many of them 

 are absolutely uneducated : they can not express their thoughts 

 in English; they can not spell common words; they can not 

 translate correctly a simple phrase in Latin or any modern lan- 

 guage, and they are ignorant of all sciences. Such is too often 

 the condition of the graduates of the primary, grammar, and high 

 schools of the country which claims to afford the best system of 

 public education in the world. I have very little personal ac- 

 quaintance with our schools, but to my mind their product 

 condemns them, and I believe that our influence can do much to 

 redeem them from their present condition. 



Another public duty, which belongs especially to us, is to 

 advance the development of universities in America. There are 

 three grades of education school, college, and university. In 

 schools elementary knowledge is used to inform and develop the 

 mind ; in colleges advanced knowledge is used for the same pur- 

 poses. Now it is one thing to teach what is known, as in schools, 

 and to teach how to confirm what is known, as in colleges ; but it 

 is a fundamentally different task to advance a student to success- 

 ful original investigation of the unknown. As Mill has justly 

 remarked, the vast majority of mental operations are neither in- 

 ductive nor deductive, but reasoning from particular to the par- 

 ticular. Minds which work in this way suffice for the routine 

 affairs of existence, but the progress of the world depends on the 

 higher faculty of originality, either in the inductive establish- 

 ment of laws by the comparison of particulars or in the deduc- 

 tive applications of these laws. It is the function of universities 

 to develop and discipline originality, to cultivate the faculty of 

 thinking out a conclusion for the first time not for the first time 

 in the history of the thinker, but for the first time in the history 

 of the world. 



To train men to originality in every field of production is the 

 proper function of a true university. This has long been the 

 accepted ideal of German universities, and because they have 

 steadily striven for this ideal they have attained a fame which 

 draws to them students from every other country. In America 

 we are slowly creating a few universities. Of nominal univer- 

 sities we have too many false Duessas, fair in semblance, but not 

 true to their pretensions. We have, in fact, as yet nothing to 



