Science in Public Affairs 



possesses a university ? That, to be sure, would 

 be a criterion of civic status unrecognised by, and 

 unknown to, the lawyer and the politician. But 

 universities are not institutions that appeal to 

 juristic and political minds. In Russia, the state 

 corrects academic exuberance by occasional appli- 

 cation of the military musket and the police baton ; 

 in India by proscribing progressive literature ; in 

 England by the more subtle processes of financial 

 starvation. There is in the normal undergraduate 

 mind a youthful ardour that is highly resistant to 

 the juristic ideals which lawyers and politicians call 

 stability, and physiologists call ossification. Is, then, 

 this popular conception of the vital civic import- 

 ance of the university a useful starting-point for 

 the sociological investigator ? In any case, it is a 

 well-recognised truth that popular conceptions are, 

 for science, more convenient points of departure 

 than culture ones, since they are nearer to that 

 naked and unadorned order of nature, to which 

 the scientist must constantly return for the verifica- 

 tion of his thought. 



IX 



Assuming, then, as a provisional criterion, the 

 possession of a university as a determinant of civic 

 status, we have in the university cities of the world 

 two hundred and thirty-six objects which actually 

 exist in time and space. Here is an abundance of 

 concrete objects for observation, without which the 

 scientific investigator, whether of cities or other 

 phenomena, cannot get to work at all. His methods, 



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