166 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



7. 



Relation of 





as to their number, the German universities were destined 

 to become the most powerful organisation for the diffusion 

 of knowledge. Further, they have been in the course of 







^ ne P resent century more closely linked with many hun- 

 dreds of high schools, and with the growing number of 

 technical schools. 1 For both of these they had to train 

 the teaching staff, and from the ranks of these they 

 again largely filled their own chairs. Thus they not 

 only combined in themselves the spirit of research and 

 the profession of teaching, but they infused into the 

 widely scattered teaching staff of many hundreds of 



1 The technical schools in Ger- 

 many and Switzerland are a crea- 

 tion of modern times. We can dis- 

 tinguish three classes. (1) The 

 " Realschule." This stands in a 

 kind of opposition to the " Latin 

 school." The name (according to 

 Paulsen, p. 483) occurs first in Halle, 

 where the archdeacon Semler es- 

 tablished in 1706 a mathematical 

 and mechanical "Realschule." J. J. 

 Hecker established at Berlin in 1739 

 an "economico-inathematical Real- 

 schule." The object of these schools 

 was to teach " Realia," to introduce 

 practical rather than learned infor- 

 mation. A special development was 

 the " philanthropinism " of Base- 

 dow, well known even to English 

 readers from Lewes's Life of Goethe 

 (see vol. i. p. 276, &c.) (2) A 

 second class embraces the " Gewer- 

 beschulen," which may be rendered 

 " schools of industry." Karl 

 Schmidt ('Geschichte der Piida- 

 gogik,' vol. iv. p. 163) calls Beuth 

 the founder of them in Prussia, 

 1817, and gives the school of 

 Aachen as the first. They form 

 a kind of bifurcation with the 

 higher classes of the Gymnasia (or 

 learned schools). They may be 

 more specially commercial, agricul- 



tural, or military. (3) Out of these 

 a third class answering to the 

 growing demand for the practical 

 application of the higher mathe- 

 matical sciences has grown up, 

 named polytechnic schools. The 

 celebrated Ecole Polytechnique of 

 Paris has been the model. The first 

 of this class in Germany was estab- 

 lished at Vienna in 1816. Then 

 followed Munich, Hanover, Karls- 

 ruhe, Stuttgart, Niirnberg, Augs- 

 burg, Darmstadt, Zurich, Aachen, 

 latterly also Berlin (Reichsanstalt) 

 and Brunswick (Carolinum). In 

 many ways they equal the univer- 

 sities in the scientific spirit of their 

 teaching. What is wanting is the 

 philosophical, the historical, the 

 encyclopaedic treatment. In this 

 respect they form in their best 

 examples a contrast to the Gbtting- 

 en programme. To many serious- 

 thinking minds they indicate the 

 gradual dissipation of the German 

 ideal of Wissenschaft, the narrowing 

 down of Wissenschaft to science in 

 the English and French meaning of 

 the word. Their danger lies in the 

 direction of being contented with 

 practical usefulness, as the danger 

 of the German type of university lay 

 in being contented with erudition. 



