652 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the busi- 

 ness of a university 



It may be granted that the function of a university, as Newman 

 here describes it, is not always realized; universities, like other human 

 institutions, have their failures. But his words truly express the aim 

 and tendency of the best university teaching. It belongs to the spirit 

 of such teaching that it should nourish and sustain ideals; and a uni- 

 versity can do nothing better for its sons than that; a vision of the 

 ideal can guard monotony of work from becoming monotony of life. 

 But there is yet another element of university training which must not 

 be left out of account; it is, indeed, among the most vital of all. I 

 mean that informal education which young men give to each other. 

 Many of us, probably, in looking back on our undergraduate days, could 

 say that the society of our contemporaries was not the least powerful 

 of the educational influences which we experienced. The social life 

 of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge is a most essential part of the 

 training received there. In considering the questions of the higher 

 education in South Africa it is well to remember that the social inter- 

 course of young students, under conditions such as a great residential 

 university might provide, is an instrument of education which nothing 

 else can replace. And it might be added that such social intercourse 

 is also an excellent thing for the teachers. 



The highest education, when it bears its proper fruit, gives not 

 knowledge only, but mental culture. A man may be learned, and yet 

 deficient in culture ; that fact is implied by the word ' pedantry.' 

 " Culture," said Huxley, " certainly means something quite different 

 from learning or technical skill. It implies the possession of an ideal, 

 and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by a theoretic 

 standard." " It is the love of knowledge," says Henry Sidgwick, " the 

 ardor of scientific curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new facts 

 and ideas, to make them our own, and fit them into the living and 

 growing system of our thought; and the trained faculty of doing this, 

 the alert and supple intelligence exercised and continually developed 

 in doing this— it is in these that culture essentially lies." And if this 

 is what culture really means, evidently it can not be regarded as some- 

 thing superfine — as an intellectual luxury suited only for people who 

 can lead lives of elegant leisure. Education consists in organizing the 

 resources of the human being; it seeks to give him powers which shall 

 fit him for his social and physical world. One mark of an uneducated 

 person is that he is embarrassed by any situation to which he is not 

 accustomed. The educated person is able to deal with circumstances 

 in which he has never been placed before; he is so, because he has ac- 

 quired general conceptions; his imagination, his judgment, his powers 

 of intelligent sympathy, have been developed. The mental culture 



