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 the 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 as a place where he 

 learnt political economy or history or literature ? By no means. 



