THE ARBITER OF ETHICS 223 



a rare one, of which the greatest examples are Aris- 

 totle, Descartes, and possibly Kant. 



It is difficult to see how this combination of science 

 and philosophy is to be obtained with the present sys- 

 tem of training men in our graduate schools. The 

 prospective man of science is taught laboratory methods 

 and becomes, thanks to it and to his research work, a 

 rather skillful manipulator of apparatus, but he rarely 

 is required to trace back the gradual development of 

 the subject on which he is working. It remains in his 

 mind as a more or less isolated fragment, since he is 

 quite ignorant of the work of the master minds of 

 science of the past. When he leaves the school, he is 

 impressed by the head of his department with the 

 opinion that he must continue his research work; left 

 to his own devices he casts about for new problems, 

 and, in despair of ideas, continues some of the minor 

 points left unsolved in his thesis. A second article 

 appears and then the curtain drops. In addition to 

 his laboratory work, the student attends lectures in 

 theoretical science and passes rigid examinations which 

 are for the most part exercises in ingenuity in mathe- 

 matical and logical exposition of the most modern and 

 abstruse parts of the science. The lectures treat the 

 science as a modern and fully developed theory devoid 

 of continuity of background. Hypothesis is mixed 

 with fact, and fugitive speculations with permanent 

 laws; his texts are largely confined to purely specula- 



