SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT 545 



time for the examination and sifting of the immense piles of fact that 

 constitute the great bodies of knowledge. 



The professor is an interpreter. He receives, transforms, and trans- 

 mits. If he is a professor of science, he interprets the world of nature. 

 If he is a professor of art, he interpret's ideals of beauty. Without his 

 services, art and science would be to the general run of mankind "a 

 mere arrangement of colors, or a rough footway where they may very 

 well break their shins" — to use a phrase from Stevenson. If he is a 

 historian, he interprets the past, and the present in the light of the 

 past. If he is a professor of literature or philosophy, he interprets the 

 wisdom, the emotion, and the conduct of human experience. He is a 

 mediator between his own generation and generations gone. He bridges 

 the chasm between the modern and the ancient, the quick and the dead. 

 He is the lens that gathers and brings to a focus the thousand rays of 

 knowledge. He is second only to the artist in helping the race to re- 

 member what it has done, and how, and why, and to what purpose. 

 The artist made the records; the professor of liberal arts interprets 

 them. 



And the professor of liberal arts is not an interpreter only. He is 

 an apostle. There is an intellectual life, as there is a spiritual, to enter 

 which ye must be born again. The professor is the priest of this life. 

 His great ambition is to bring minds into the intellectual kingdom. 

 He guides, inspires, converts, baptizes, ministers. Outwardly, he is 

 concerned with concrete instruction; in reality, he is much more con- 

 cerned with the quickening of the mind. The kingdom of the intel- 

 lectual is vsdthin you. To say it once more, the professor's calling is 

 inspirational. If at any time inspiration fails him, nothing so makes 

 him unhappy, nothing is so missed by his students. The tongues of 

 men and angels can not make up for it. 



There is a still larger service of the intellectual expert upon which 

 the public rarely reflects. The college professor has a function and a 

 duty beyond the class room, beyond his community, beyond his state. 

 To put it in a word, it is the college professor, first of all, who is re- 

 sponsible for the intellectual standard of the world. 



The direct personal contact of the professor with his students is of 

 course one means of his contributing to the world's intellectual ideals. 

 Through the scattering abroad of alumni his ideas are disseminated and 

 his spirit communicated to society in general. But this is only one 

 means. 



It is in taking for granted that this indirect contact with the world 

 is all, that the unreflecting are most mistaken. The college professor's 

 work must not be thought of too much in terms of recitation room and 

 students. The professorial class has its ways of reaching the world at 

 large directly as well as indirectly. The liberal arts professor contrib- 

 utes to the intellectual life of his own community in the lectures and 



