518 
they formed the following plan of carrying out this 
education. Their eyes were fixed on the young men 
of the country and they thought the best way to train 
them for civil and political life, and for the discharge 
of all the highest duties of statesmanship, was to 
divide their education into two periods. Thus arose 
the gymnasium and the present form of their univer- 
sities. The idea of the gymnasium was that the boys 
should remain at school from eleven years of age until 
they were about twenty, under the strict discipline of 
the schoolmasters and be guided by them in all their 
studies. In these schools the young men were to be 
instructed in all the important knowledge which pre- 
vious generations discovered and acquired. It was 
deemed that young men up to that age should not be 
invited to specialise. They were to be the recipients 
of the best ideas and methods which had come down 
to them through tradition. 
The universities were to be the means of educating 
the young men from twenty to twenty-three, twenty- 
four, or twenty-five. It was at once seen that the 
method of education must be different. The experi- 
ence which had been carried out successfully in the 
University of Halle gave the cue to the new work of 
the universities. This work assigned to the universi- 
ties was to give a scientific education to all the young 
men who were fit to receive it. Science is the key- 
note of the system. There can be no good scientific 
training except on certain conditions. First of all the 
professors or teachers must themselves be men who 
pursue the scientific method of study and are advanc- 
ing the boundaries of scientific knowledge. They 
must show in all their lectures the scientific spirit. 
Then there must be no restriction in the liberty to 
teach. Every man who is following the scientific 
method with adequate acquirements and capacity must 
be invited to teach; and, finally, the teacher must be 
untrammelled in his scientific investigations. He 
must search for truth solely for its own sake, and he 
must be allowed to express the conclusions to which 
he comes, whatever they may happen to be. This is 
what the legislators called Lehrfreiheit—the freedom 
of the instructor and the instruction. But along with 
these there must be Lernfreiheit—the freedom of 
learning and the learner. The learner must be free 
to choose the professors whose lectures he is to attend. 
There must be no restriction. The parents may advise 
him, but the State imposes no limitations. He goes 
where he has reason to believe that he will get what 
will stimulate him and guide him best. Of course, it 
was only those young men who had shown ability to 
whom a continuance of study would be profitable. 
They must be the best young men of the nation. Then 
these young men were no longer to be under the 
discipline of schoolmasters, but were to be free to 
choose for themselves how they were to study. No 
compulsion was to be used, but they were to select 
for themselves the teachers that would suit them, and 
the State was to supply them with all the best teachers 
or professors who could be found willing to teach 
and to lecture. 
All this was done nearly 100 years ago. The plans 
of Humboldt and others were carried out consistently, 
and they now continue to the present day. The 
uniform opinion in Germany in regard to them is that 
the universities thus conducted have been of infinite 
benefit to the State, and have been along with the 
secondary schools a most important element in Ger- 
many’s acquisition of extraordinary intellectual influ- 
ence amidst the nations of the world, and in the 
building up of a great empire. I have adduced in 
proof of this in my previous addresses the testimony 
of eminent witnesses, such as Savigny, Stotzner, Max 
Miiller, and I now adduce the opinion of Paulsen, 
NO. 2305, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
| 
[JANUARY I, I914 
the best authority on the subject. His little book, 
“The German Universities,” is admirable, and de- 
serves the attention of all whoware interested in this 
subject. ‘‘ Whoever understands youth,” he says, 
“‘and knows the circumstances of German universi- 
ties, will not doubt that all attempts to help along 
devotion to study by more or less mild expedients 
would be vain and harmful; vain, because only the 
semblance of such devotion, not thg thing itself, can 
be forced; and harmful, because they weaken the 
sense of independence and_ responsibility. Forced 
study implies a scholastic system and scholastic rela- 
tions between teacher and pupil, of the sort which 
existed in the medizeval universities. Such “a condi-— 
tion is to-day inconceivable in the German universi- 
ties.” . . . ‘‘In the first place, the relations between 
| student and instructor would be disturbed. At pre- 
sent these relations are throughout most satisfactory, 
resting as they do on a basis of freedom and mutual 
confidence, and every attempt to increase attendance 
on lectures by any other means than the attractiveness 
of the lectures would necessarily impair their charm. 
Who could endure to face a circle of hearers to whom 
he could not say at all times: ‘ Whoever thinks he 
does not find here what he wants, is under no com- 
pulsion to come’? Again, the student’s attitude 
towards science herself would be altered. She, free 
herself, must be sought and loved by free men; if, 
forced upon us, she would be detested by all—not only 
by those whose nature keeps them from intimacy with 
her, but by those also who now follow her of their 
own inclination. 
“He who is not convinced of this from his know- 
ledge of human nature may learn it from the experi- 
ence of such measures gained everywhere and always.” 
No other universities for a long time adopted the 
methods of the German universities, but in recent 
times a considerable number of them made approaches 
without rigorously carrying out the ideal either of the 
gymnasium or the ideal of the university. In our 
own country we do a part of the higher work done 
at a German gymnasium at our universities, and for 
continuing this state of matters a powerful argument 
can be drawn from the circumstance that it is advis- 
able that the passage of the boy from the strict dis- 
cipline of the school to the unrestricted freedom of the 
university should be gradual and not too abrupt and 
difficult, as it is believed to be in Germany. In our 
universities also we have classes where the element of 
research is important; and so it is with some universi- 
ties in England and America. But nowhere has there 
been the distinct difference between the education that 
treats the lad up to twenty as receptive and the young 
man of twenty and upwards as following out the 
desires of his own mind in the search for truth, re- 
sponsible for his own development and free to do 
what he deems best for his intellectual and moral 
progress. 
A remarkable start, however, has quite recently 
been made. From 1870, the French have been firmly 
convinced that one of the modes in which they-can 
recover most effectively the position which they lost 
in the Franco-Prussian War is by devoting their atten- 
tion to education at every stage, but most especially 
to the higher education. Gradually the French have 
come to believe that the German ideal is sound and 
their method of accomplishing it the best, and so they 
have now set it forth as that by which they are to 
work. This conviction was brought about by a slow 
process. It did not spring from a wish to imitate the 
Germans, but was borne in upon them by their own 
experience of university work. M. Liard, who has 
been the most prominent agent in creating the revolu- 
tion in the French universities, has thus expressed 
