UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE. 651 



ing of a specialist, however high the level of the teaching in the special 

 subject may be. Here, however, I pause for a moment to guard against 

 a possible misconception. I am not suggesting that the specialist train- 

 ing given in a technical institute, though limited, is not an excellent 

 thing in itself; or that, in certain conditions and circumstances, it is 

 not desirable to have such a training, attested by a diploma or certifi- 

 cate, instead of aiming at a university standard and a university degree. 

 Universities themselves recognize this fact. They reserve their degrees 

 for those who have had a university training; but they also grant 

 diplomas for proficiency in certain special branches of knowledge. 

 Cambridge, for instance, gives a diploma in the science and practise of 

 agriculture; and the examinations for the diploma are open to persons 

 who are not members of the university. 



But the university training, whatever its subject, ought to give 

 something which the purely specialist training does not give. What 

 do we understand by a university education? What are its distinctive 

 characteristics? The word universitas, as you know, is merely a gen- 

 eral term for a corporation, specially applied in the middle ages to a 

 body of persons associated for purposes of study, who, by becoming 

 a corporation, acquired certain immunities and privileges. Though a 

 particular university might be strongest in a particular faculty, as 

 Bologna was in law and Paris in theology, yet it is a traditional attri- 

 bute of such a body that several different branches of higher study 

 shall be represented in it. It is among the distinctive advantages of a 

 university that it brings together in one place students — by whom I 

 mean teachers as well as learners — of various subjects. By doing this 

 the university tends to produce a general breadth of intellectual inter- 

 ests and sympathies; it enables the specialist to acquire some sense of 

 the relations between his own pursuit and other pursuits; he is helped 

 to perceive the largeness of knowledge. But, besides bringing together 

 students of various subjects, it is the business of a university to see that 

 each subject shall be studied in such a manner as to afford some general 

 discipline of the mental faculties. In his book on ' The Idea of a 

 University ' Newman says : 



This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or 

 sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or pro- 

 fession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception 

 of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called liberal edu- 

 cation; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is con- 

 ceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be 

 made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training 

 is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not some- 

 thing else, his standard of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit 

 themselves to it and secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth 

 the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students 



