CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY 273 



No one would care to depreciate the conservation of race life that is 

 accomplished through the mere fact of the existence of a group of 

 teachers, a hody of college customs, and well-equipped laboratories and 

 libraries. But they are not finished products. They are means to an 

 end in a living, growing organism. The end is the best life of all and 

 the fullest life of the future. There is a distortion when the rich 

 inheritance of the past that the university represents is not directed 

 wholly and purposefully toward the students who are to be the race of 

 to-morrow. To this end the university may well exert itself to have 

 them feel that they are organically a part of it. Each student when he 

 goes out should be, not a recipient from the institution, but a real incar- 

 nation of its best life. He must be in it and of it. The form of organ- 

 ization should tempt him into closer and closer heart relation with his 

 school. Let it not be, either, a seeming act of charity or missionary 

 enthusiasm on the part of instructors, or the best is lost. The advantage 

 is mutual. Each student has some original endowment from nature to 

 bring to the institution. I have heard it sometimes expressed that part 

 of the fascination of the life of a teacher is in the personal enrichment 

 and the multicolored quality of truth that come from mingling with 

 many types of student minds when each is allowed to be at his best. 

 In order to bring out the riches of his nature, generally as yet undiscov- 

 ered even to himself, the attitude of the university toward the student 

 and his attitude are almost everything. It can not reach him from the 

 outside in; it can inspire and educate him only from the inside out. 

 Let our universities be decentralized from their organization about 

 institutionalism, and recentralized in the personal lives of students. 



YOL. lxxvii. — 19. 



