UNIVERSITY IDEALS 189 



ability to emulate and surpass them, that they 

 are revered and cherished. At their own valuation 

 their present-day exponents are feeble and pale 

 imitations of the original masters, who uphold an 

 example which they genuinely believe it is impossible 

 to improve upon, and to them of all people are 

 entrusted the shaping of the youth of an age, in 

 science the greatest that has ever been, and in 

 which the achievements are not objects of venera- 

 tion impossible to be imitated, but stepping-stones 

 to greater. Science would accord to the ancient 

 studies the fullest and most generous appreciation 

 were the original ideals which dominated the creative 

 ages of the past, rather than the overgrown ruins 

 of those creations themselves, still in active and 

 effective existence. 



But the overwhelming love of truth for its own 

 sake, and the passion for enlarging the boundaries 

 and deepening the foundations of knowledge, which 

 are the ideals of science and therefore of any 

 scientific school worthy of the name, need not lead 

 us into the error of supposing that these ideals 

 alone are sufficient to satisfy the human mind, 

 though we may believe that, apart from the aspira- 

 tion for truth, and, moreover, apart from the belief 

 that truth is humanly attainable, other aspirations 

 are likely to prove evanescent. 



If we may cut ourselves adrift completely from 

 the past and, in imagination, attempt to state, in 

 this twentieth century, the objects for which a 

 university should live, we shall find them expressed 

 fairly comprehensively in a favourite phrase of 

 Professor J. Arthur Thomson, "the true, the beauti- 

 ful, the good." But we shall not mean precisely 

 by those terms what they would have connoted in 

 any earlier epoch of human thought, for we are 

 living in the twentieth century, and quotations from 



2 c 



