THE UNIVERSITY AS A SCIENTIFIC WORKSHOP. 179 



ers of tliis sort. This is especially true of the gymnasium. The 

 deepest and most lasting effects, as history illustrated in biogra- 

 phies, attests, do not proceed from teachers most eminent in drill 

 and persistence, but from those who lead an inner, intellectual 

 life continuously refreshed and renewed by scientific work. The 

 pupils have a fine appreciation of their teacher and his method. 

 Thorough scholarship and earnest participation in scientific re- 

 search have assured and always will assure the teacher particular 

 respect in the eyes of his pupils ; and many a student has first been 

 inoculated with the taste for the intellectual, inconspicuous though 

 it may have seemed to him, by the view of such a life. It is fur- 

 ther true in other learned professions that nothing more firmly 

 fortifies one against the depressing moments that are strange to no 

 calling than a steady interest in science. More than anything 

 else, engagement with concerns of theory operates against the 

 falling into the purely business way of viewing things which ap- 

 parently threatens to degrade such professions as those of medi- 

 cine and law. 



Thus, we can not see harm of any kind in the direction of uni- 

 versity instruction toward scientific research ; on the contrary, 

 the purer and deeper the theoretical interest which our students 

 carry into life from the university the better for them and for the 

 business they engage in. 



If, however, there is danger and I believe the fear is not with- 

 out some foundation of the power of our universities as teach- 

 ing institutions declining, we may look for the cause in accom- 

 panying conditions. Among these is one existing in direct 

 connection with scientific research the ever-increasing division 

 of labor and specializing. This is in itself unavoidable. Special- 

 izing is here and everywhere a condition of stimulated product- 

 iveness. We can not go back to the universality of studies which 

 was possible in antiquity and the middle ages and down into the 

 eighteenth century. With specializing is associated a danger. 

 The splitting up of work into scattering, minute, and often petty 

 study of details weakens the general human interest in science. 

 The immediate interest in knowledge is directed to the whole, to 

 philosophy, from which connected knowledge on all subjects, 

 divine and human, is expected. The long labor of the mind 

 through thousands of years, of which our research is supposed to 

 be the continuation, began with the seeking of the Greeks for a 

 theory of the universe. In the eighteenth century, in the age of 

 Leibnitz, Kant, and Wolff, it was still the object; all scientific 

 work was for a " world-wisdom " for a view of the nature and 

 meaning of the world and life. Many have now forgotten this, 

 and in the pursuit of little single details have lost sight of the 

 end. Indeed, some are proud of knowing nothing of this ; they 



