GERMAN SCIENCE 123 
A consideration of German science leaves us with much to 
honour and admire and much to muse upon. I have found 
a great tendency on the part of those who have come fresh from 
its atmosphere, ardent with the enthusiasm of youth or with the 
impatient and unreflective zeal of hasty reformers—a great 
tendency_to insist that we should forthwith Germanize our 
science. I hope profoundly that we shall do no such thing. 
I will only name one direction in which, I think, we are 
already showing that we are wiser and may do better. The most 
conspicuous educational outcome of the German scientific and 
industrial movement has been tle establishment of their 
technical universities, so often extolled both in Germany and 
here. I would like to say frankly I consider technical univer- 
sities to be an educational mistake and a national danger of the 
first magnitude. Efficient they may be within a particular 
range of human efficiency, but universities, it must be remem- 
bered, are the dominating influence in national education. It 
is in them that the greatest number of minds which will control 
the nation are tutored. The ideals that are fostered there 
will be carried out into the world and impressed upon the 
national life. Will anyone maintain that great institutions, 
given over entirely to the teaching of science and especially of 
science in relation to purely material ends, will form an environ- 
ment in which the leaders of the working world may be best 
prepared to serve their time and generation ? 
There is surely no more mischievous idea than that a uni- 
versity should be a place where a man is fashioned into an 
efficient piece of mechanism, where he is made simply clever, 
and is sent out to be accurately fitted like a cog-wheel in what 
is sometimes called the machinery of civilization. It is 
a desolating doctrine of education and a godless view of life. 
When we hear our great men—such a man, for example, as 
Lord Morley—speak so tenderly and reverently of Oxford, 
do you suppose that he is thinking of it asa place where he 
learnt political economy or history or literature? By no means. 
