THE UNIVERSITY AS A SCIENTIFIC WORKSHOP. 171 



young men from fifteen to twenty years of age a general scientific 

 training. It fulfilled this purpose by explaining, in what were 

 called lectures, text-books containing the recognized material of 

 knowledge, and practicing the students in recitations and exer- 

 cises. This method still continues in English and American 

 colleges. 



No essential change from this method took place in the six- 

 teenth century. The purpose of the philosophical faculty, as 

 Melanchthon understood it, was quite the same, except that 

 classical instruction was added to that in science and philosophy. 

 Completion with a literary and philosophical course of the gen- 

 eral scientific training, which began with the grammatical and 

 rhetorical course in the lower schools, was the aim of the teach- 

 ing which Melanchthon gave at Wittenberg for two and forty 

 years. It was school teaching in scholastic form, so far as certain 

 conditions permitted. So it was Melanchthon's custom to ques- 

 tion his pupils in the lessons at the beginning of the hour. The 

 declamations and disputations which he held were likewise pure 

 school exercises. He boasted once in his old age of himself and 

 his friend Camerarius, that they had spent their whole lives in 

 the lowliness of the school, in the vita scliolastica, in order to 

 serve youth and fair knowledge. A change in the general consti- 

 tution of the university began with a constant increase in the 

 members of the " higher faculties " the theological and juridical 

 for the completion of the university course was more and more 

 held up as a qualification for priestly and secular office. The 

 form, however, of the instruction was still not essentially 

 changed from that of the philosophical faculty. It consisted in 

 the transmission of a teaching of a still fixed substance, only that 

 the hearers were of a greater average age. Connected with this 

 was the dying out of the middle-age form of life ; and from the 

 scholar has been developed since the seventeenth century the 

 student. 



These conditions lasted without change into the eighteenth 

 century. An instructive study of Kant's career as a teacher has 

 recently appeared.* It resembled Melanchthon's in all essentials, 

 and, like him, Kant also lectured as before him Christian Wolff 

 lectured in Halle, upon all the philosophical sciences on mathe- 

 matics and physics, logic and metaphysics, ethics and natural law, 

 besides anthropology and physical geography, and once on min- 

 eralogy. Like Melanchthon, Kant also had as hearers young 

 persons, not who studied a little mathematics or physics as their 

 special branch, but who sought chiefly at the university the com- 

 pletion of their general training, in order afterward to apply 



* Arnoldt, Koiiigsberg. Altpreussische Monatsschrift, vol. xxx, pp. Y, 8. 



