ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN GERMAN UNIVERSITIES. 251 



For most foreigners the uncontrolled freedom of 

 German students is a subject of astonishment; the 

 more so as it is usually some obvious excrescences 

 of this freedom which first meet their eyes ; they are 

 unable to understand how young men can be so left 

 to themselves without the greatest detriment. The 

 German looks back to his student life as to his golden 

 age ; our literature and our poetry are full of expres- 

 sions of this feeling. Nothing of this kind is but 

 even faintly suggested in the literature of other Euro- 

 pean peoples. The German student alone has this 

 perfect joy in the time, in which, in the first delight in 

 youthful responsibility, and freed more immediately 

 from having to work for extraneous interests, he can 

 devote himself to the task of striving after the best and 

 noblest which the human race has hitherto been able to 

 attain in knowledge and in speculation, closely joined 

 in friendly rivalry with a large body of associates of 

 similar aspirations, and in daily mental intercourse 

 with teachers from whom he learns something of the 

 workings of the thoughts of independent minds. 



When I think of my own student life, and of the 

 impression which a man like Johannes Miiller, the 

 physiologist, made upon us, I must place a very high 

 value upon this latter point. Anyone who has once 

 come in contact with one or more men of the first rank 

 must have had his whole mental standard altered for 



