276 
NATVORE 
| JANUARY 17, 1907 
because of the necessity of specialisation, just because of 
the vast amount of work which people will have to do 
if they are to do anything successfully, that the men of 
science to-day have to know a great deal more, and there- 
fore have to specialise a great deal more, before they can 
work usefully for the realisation of a common purpose. 
It is an age in which we recognise the enormous strides 
which science has made, the vast amount that has to be 
known before an individual contribution is possible. It is 
an age in which we are coming to see more and more 
clearly that the man who will contribute anything, who 
wishes to serve his country, who wishes to serve the world, 
does best to confine himself to that which he is sufficiently 
furnished to undertake. ‘‘ He,’’ wrote a great man, ‘* who 
would accomplish anything in this world must learn to 
limit himself,’’ and that is essentially true of science 
to-day. 
Tue UNIVERSITY SPIRIT AND FUNCTION. 
Mr. Haldane delivered his address as Lord Rector of 
the University of Edinburgh on January 10. He referred 
at length to the function of the university in the modern 
State. The first purpose of a nation—and especially of 
a modern nation—ought, he said, to be to concentrate 
its energies on its moral and intellectual development ; and 
this means that, because it requires leaders as the instru- 
ments of this development, it must apply itself to pro- 
viding schools where leaders can be adequately trained. 
At this point the history of the modern State shows that 
the university plays an important part. For the produc- 
tion of that small body of men and women whose calling 
requires high talent, the university alone, or its equivalent, 
suffices. It is the almost indispensable portal to the career 
of the highest and most exceptionally trained type of 
citizen. If -universities exist in sufficient numbers and 
strive genuinely to foster the moral and intellectual virtue, 
the humanity which has the ethical significance that 
ought to be inseparable from high culture, then the State 
need not despair. For from among men who have attained 
to this level there will emerge those who have that power 
of command which was born of penetrating insight. In 
a university it is not merely the lecture-rooms and labor- 
atories and libraries that are important—the places where 
those who are busy in the pursuit of different kinds of 
learning meet and observe each other are hardly less so. 
The union, the debating society, the friendship of those 
who are struggling to maintain a high level—all these 
things go to the making of the scholar. Certainly in the 
Scottish university of to-day there is no lack of either 
opportunity or provision for the formation of the tastes of 
the scholar and the habits of the worker. A man may go 
from these surroundings to devote his life yet more com- 
pletely to literature, or science, or philosophy, or he may 
go to seek distinction in a profession or success in com- 
merce. Whatever occupation the student chooses, he is the 
better the greater has been his contact with the true spirit 
of the university. The university training cannot by itself 
supply capacity, but it can stimulate and fashion talent, 
and, above all, it can redeem from the danger of con- 
tracted views. Thus the university becomes a_ potent 
instrument for good to a community, the strength of which 
is measured by the capacity of the individuals who compose 
it. The university is the handmaid of the Stgte, of which 
it is the microcosm—a community in which also there are 
rulers and ruled, and in which the corporate life is a 
moulding influence. 
Speaking of the true and two-fold function of the 
university, Mr. Haldane said it is a place of research 
where the new and necessary knowledge is to be developed. 
It is the place of training where the exponents of that 
knowledge—the men who are to seek authority based on 
it—are to be nurtured and receive their spiritual baptism. 
Such a university cannot live or thrive under the domin- 
ation either of the Government or the Church. Freedom 
and development are the breath of its nostrils, and it can 
recognise no authority except that which rests on the 
right of the Truth to command obedience. It was Lessing 
who declared that were God to offer him the Truth in one 
hand and the Search for Truth in the other, he would 
choose the Search; and it is in the devotion to this search 
after the most high—a search which may assume an 
NO. 1942, VOL. 75] 
infinity of varied forms—that the dedicated life consists ; 
the life dedicated to the noblest of quests, and not to be 
judged by apparent failure to reach some fixed and rigid 
goal, but rather by the quality of its striving. 
Mr. Asquith, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered his 
address as Rector of Glasgow University on January 11. 
He took as his subject ‘* Ancient Universities and the 
Modern World.’’ He said the mediaeval universities had 
two characteristics ; they were always in theory and almost 
always in practice cosmopolitan, and the true university 
has always been, in addition, catholic in its range. A 
university never was, is not, and never ought to become 
| a technological institute for the creation and equipment of 
.specialists. 
The limits of the knowable, wherever they 
are to be placed, have in these days expanded so far that 
no ambition and no assiduity is equal to the task of taking 
all that lies within them for its province. Nothing can be 
more alien, then, from the business of a university than 
to produce the shallow and fluent omniscience which has 
scratched the surface of many subjects and got to the 
heart of none. The fidelity of a university to the intel- 
lectual side of its mission must now, as always, be judged 
by the degree in which it has succeeded in enlarging and 
humanising the mental outlook of its students and develop- 
ing the love of knowledge for its own sake. Such an ideal 
does not imply a divorce of knowledge from practice. 
When James Watt in 1756 came back to Glasgow from 
London, the Corporation of Hammermen refused him per- 
mission to set up his business in the burgh, because he was 
neither son of a burgess nor an apprentice. The Faculty 
of Professors, of whom Adam Smith was one, at once 
appointed him mathematical instrument maker to the Uni- 
versity, and gave him a room in the college buildings for 
his workshop. It is often out of the mouths of professors 
and at the hands of universities that the practical man 
learns for the first time the real meaning and the latent 
possibilities of his own business. In the long run a uni- 
versity will be judged, not merely or mainly by its success 
in equipping its pupils to outstrip their competitors in 
the crafts and professions. It will be judged also by 
the influence which it is exerting upon the imagination 
and the character; by the ideals which it has implanted 
and nourished; by the new resources of faith, tenacity, 
aspiration with which it has recruited and reinforced the 
| untrained and undeveloped nature; by the degree in which 
it has helped to raise, to enlarge, to enrich, to complete 
the true life of the man, and by and through him the 
corporate life of the community. 
UNIVERSITIES AND THE SCHOOLS. 
Presiding at a meeting of the Scottish Education Reform 
Association, held in Glasgow University on January 12, 
Mr. Haldane spoke of the necessity for reform in Scottish 
university arrangements. If teachers are to be trained 
there must be considerable elasticity; access to the uni- 
versity must be easy and yet difficult. A man should not 
go there who is not fit to take a university training, and 
if he is not fit to take that he is not fit to be a Scottish 
teacher. On the other hand, access to the university - 
should not be a straight and narrow gate, accessible only 
to people who approach by one particular path. If a high 
standard is to be secured in fashioning that elasticity, 
greater individual freedom must be given to each of the 
Scottish universities. The Act of 1889 was passed in the 
days when what was called the federal idea was dominant. 
If the Scottish universities were freed so that they might 
pass ordinances which would open their territories still 
wider and give a larger range in subject and vision, a 
greater elasticity in fashioning their degrees, it is certain 
that there would be no lowering of the standard; there 
would be a heightening. In education, primary, secondary, 
and higher schools cannot be separated one from the other ; 
they must be treated as one, and the teachers matter more 
to the schools than anything else. Mr. Haldane protested 
against the superstition that it is possible’ to form a 
judgment upon things that require a great deal of know- 
ledge without possessing that knowledge. The leadership 
in education in Scotland must be in competent hands, and 
the key to the situation is the raising of the status of the 
teachers in Scotland, and that is to be done by binding 
them more and more closely with the universities. 
