ANTHROPOLOGY A UNIVERSITY STUDY. 511 



ized only by the contribution of every fact dug out by tireless 

 and devoted research, fitted together by workers equally tireless, 

 equally devoted. Isolated facts are of little value for the ad- 

 vancement of human knowledge; it is only when correlated 

 brought into their proper relationship to other data that they 

 are able to yield their full quota of aid. 



For more than two thousand years speculative philosophy has 

 dominated the schools, and in all that time has made no actual ad- 

 vance toward explaining the nature of man or his relationship to 

 his environment. 



Tied to the ever- varying and unverifiable personal equation, 

 there could not be a sound basis for a worthy superstructure. It 

 was not until Herbert Spencer, taking as the basis of his deduc- 

 tions those objective activities from which alone the subjective 

 states of another can be judged, reared his splendid synthetic phi- 

 losophy, which is destined to supplant all others as a system, even 

 if every detailed deduction made by him were disproved. 



If anthropology, then, comprises every department of human 

 learning, it might seem that a university is as a whole devoted 

 to the study of anthropology, that its various departments are 

 branches of this one universal study. Were universities ideal 

 institutions of learning, and had they been reared at once on 

 a true scientific basis, this might be so. Then, again, anthro- 

 pology views the details of each branch of research chiefly with 

 reference to its bearing on the evolution and present status of 

 man, while the active specialist as an earnest searcher for truth 

 must wrest from the unknown each minutest fact in his own 

 domain. 



Were a university curriculum arranged on a perfect scheme of 

 anthropological unity, the time at a student's disposal would not 

 permit him to gain any adequate acquaintance therewith. Desir- 

 able as it might be to have a university founded on such a scheme 

 of logical unity, yet it would fail in giving the student a complete 

 grasp of the interdependence of all phenomena through its very 

 multiplicity of detail. 



As our universities are constituted, where is there one that has 

 a definite curriculum so arranged that its various departments 

 bear any true relationship to the whole, whose scheme of training 

 is so arranged that there arises in the student's mind any concep- 

 tion of unity ? 



The very requirements for admission and the consequent train- 

 ing furnished by the preparatory school are based almost wholly 

 on the old scholastic mode and Platonic cosmogony. The minor 

 colleges, having set courses, are still controlled by the same influ- 

 ences. The larger colleges, having professional schools attached, 

 and aspiring to the broader title of universities, pile all the Intel- 



