228 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. IX 



Justice Fry's scheme, and I was so convinced that that 

 scheme would be wrecked amidst the complication of 

 interests and ideals that claimed consideration, that I 

 gave up attending to it. In fact, living so much out of 

 the world now, and being sadly deaf, I am really unfit to 

 intervene in business of this kind. 



Worse still, I am conscious that my own ideal is, for 

 the present at any rate, hopelessly impracticable. I 

 should cut away medicine, law, and theology as technical 

 specialities in charge, of corporations which might be left 

 to settle (in the case of medicine, in accordance with the 

 State) the terms on which they grant degrees. 



The university or universities should be learning and 

 teaching bodies devoted to art (literary and other), history, 

 philosophy, and science, where any one who wanted to 

 learn all that is known about these matters should find 

 people who could teach him and put him in the way of 

 learning for himself. 



That is what the world will want one day or other, as 

 a supplement to all manner of high schools and technical 

 institutions in which young people get decently educated 

 and learn to earn their bread — such as our present 

 universities. 



It will be a place for men to get knowledge ; and not 

 for boys and adolescents to get degrees. 



I wish I could get the younger men like yourself to 

 see that this is the goal which they may reach, and in 

 the meanwhile to take care that no such Philistine com- 

 promise as is possible at present, becomes too strong to 

 survive a sharp shake. — I am, youi's very faithfully, 



T. H. Huxley. 



He sketches his ideal of a modern university, and 

 especially of its relation to the Medical Schools, in a 

 letter to Professor Ray Lankester of April 11: — 



