THE UNIVERSITY AS A SCIENTIFIC WORKSHOP. 173 



in scientific investigation were the single object. There is noth- 

 ing to indicate that the students of these faculties expect to be 

 called to practical teaching. The difference is plainest in the 

 seminaries and in the exercises. In the higher faculties they aim 

 at the preparation for practice ; as in the clinic course of the 

 medical schools, in the academical exercises in the juridical 

 faculty, more strongly prominent of late, and in the theological 

 drill. On the other hand, the seminaries have given the philo- 

 sophical faculties the character of schools of scientific investiga- 

 tion philological and historical, as well as scientific and mathe- 

 matical ; so that the dissertations come out even from them with 

 a peculiar predominantly scientific character; while the scho- 

 lastic exercises the old declamations and disputations have 

 ceased. 



When we ask for the causes of this change, the most decisive 

 of them is found to be the great change which has come over the 

 scientific self-consciousness of the modern world since the seven- 

 teenth century. The whole scientific course of the middle ages 

 and down to the sixteenth century was the result of the presump- 

 tion that knowledge was created in antiquity and was complete. 

 Aristotle especially was regarded as the highest authority in mat- 

 ters of science; he was the philosopher; his writings were the 

 canonical text-books which were transmitted to the universities, 

 expounded and adopted by them. The authority of Aristotle was 

 broken down and the new method founded by Copernicus, Galileo, 

 Kepler, Descartes, Bacon, and Harvey. Science is not now sup- 

 posed to be complete at hand, but must be created by our labor. 



This new method began to penetrate university instruction in 

 the eighteenth century. The young University of Halle first 

 recognized the novel principle of the libertas philosophandi. The 

 duty of the university teacher was not to transmit the familiar 

 scholastic philosophy, but to exercise and cultivate independent 

 thinking. The philosophy of Christian Wolff was the first free 

 philosophy found in this school. The scholastic philosophy was 

 supplanted by it in the German universities in the course of the 

 eighteenth century. Its principle is independence in thought : 

 nothing without sufficient reason. The Kantian philosophy began 

 to dispute with it for the mastery at the end of the eighteenth 

 century ; but Kant stands, if possible, still more distinctly on the 

 same ground the ground of independent thought. The view now 

 penetrates the whole of university life that knowledge is not a 

 gift but a duty. The calling of a professor is, in the first place, 

 to labor to produce it ; and, second, to train the rising generation 

 to the same work ; the university becomes the workshop and nur- 

 sery of scientific research. This is the view which has gradually 

 gained prevalence in Germany since the last century; and the 



