N.'J TURE 



[November 4, 1909 



of the English universities, and of the many interest- 

 ing experiments in organisation which they embody, 

 there has so far been no comprehensive treatise 

 written in this country upon university administra- 

 tion. The gap is now filled, though from the other 

 side of the Atlantic, by the late president of Harvard, 

 who has condensed his thirt3--nine years of experience 

 as the ruler of the most famous of the American uni- 

 versities into a book which will long rank as the 

 standard authority on the subject. Written with ad- 

 mirable clearness and precision, it states and dis- 

 cusses sensibly and practically problem after problem 

 with which English readers are familiar in news- 

 liaper discussions on university reform, but which it is 

 not easy to see in their wider bearings. 



The book is divided into six chapters, which deal 

 successively with university trustees, inspecting and 

 consenting bodies, faculties, the elective system, 

 methods of instruction, concluding with a chapter on 

 the social organisation of a university, the position of 

 the president, and several questions of general ad- 

 ministration. 



The most novel and interesting chapter in the book 

 is undoubtedly that on the elective system, the intro- 

 duction of which at Harvard has been the main feature 

 of President Eliofs regime, and which he is at pains 

 to e,xplain and defend. He describes it as a " carefully 

 arranged scheme of numerous courses of instruction 

 which are open to the choice of students under 

 rules partly artificial but chiefly natural and inevi- 

 table." Its effect is to give the individual student, not 

 unlimited, but still far more extensive opportunities 

 of " following his bent " in the choice of his university 

 course than he gets under the fixed courses in subjects 

 or groups of subjects which are usual in English uni- 

 versities. President Eliot claims that, if strictly ad- 

 ministered, it satisfies the needs of serious students 

 with ini:ellectual initiative of their own who are apt 

 to feel cramped by a rigid college course, while for 

 the mediocre and unambitious it offers the " only 

 chance of experiencing an intellectual awakening while 

 in college." At the same time, it gives everv teacher 

 the precious privilege " of having no student in his 

 class who has not chosen to be there." Its main 

 difificulty is, of course, that it is very much more ex- 

 pensive than the " prescribed " system. 



President Eliot's two chapters on university "-overn- 

 ment will be read with interest in this country, espe- 

 cially in view of Lord Curzon's recent book on the 

 government of Oxford, which, written from a whollv 

 difTerent standpoint, afTords a striking illustration of 

 some of Prof. Eliot's views. Harvard, which Presi- 

 dent Eliot regards as " the university with the most 

 fortunate organisation in the country," is governed bv 

 a body of trustees, seven in number, controlled bv a 

 body of thirty overseers, elected by the whole body of 

 Alumni, who exercise, through visiting committees 

 and otherwise, powers of inspection and veto. The 

 overseers thus play the part of the whole body of 

 M..'\.'s of Oxford and Cambridge, only with vastly 

 increased efficiency, because they are a representative 

 committee, and not an unorganised mob periodicallv 

 assembled by a whip. Lord Curzon's recent proposal 

 NO. 2088, VOL. 82] 



to constitute at Oxford a new finance board of eight 

 or ten members, partly non-residents, to exercise a 

 general control over college and university finance, is 

 thus clearly on the lines of the American boards of 

 trustees; but President Eliot's book throws no light, 

 of course, on the main difificulty of university organisa- 

 tion in the older universities, the relation between the 

 university and the wealthy and autonomous collegiate 

 corporations which have grown up in its midst. 



PROBLEMS OF IMMORTALITY. 

 Unsterblichkeit : cine Kritik der Bcziehungen 

 zwischen Naturgeschehen und menschlicher ]'or- 

 stellungswelt. By Hermann Graf Keyserling. 

 Pp. iv-l-349. (Miinchen : J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 

 1907.) 



COUNT KEYSERLING has chosen a subject 

 upon which the views even of a dull man are 

 frequently interesting, if only as a " document," and 

 he has treated it in a manner that makes his book 

 a notable contribution to its serious study. He is 

 broad-minded and well informed; he develops his 

 argument lucidly and consecutively, and he illumin- 

 ates it with considerable literary grace. 



An examination of the data of the famous argu- 

 ment for immortality which appeals to the consensus 

 of mankind, semper et iibiqtie, shows that, in reality, 

 it gives no support to any specific form of the doc- 

 trine. The concepts of future existence described by 

 ethnologists and historians diflfer enormously, not 

 only in detail, but even in principle. If, then, we 

 continue (as does the author) to attach importance 

 to the consensus, we . must regard it as giving a 

 merely formal guarantee of some kind of post-vital 

 permanence which it is impossible to specify. To 

 be assured that it has this value requires a critical 

 examination of the nature and functions of faith 

 (Glauhe). Faith is to be identified neither with an 

 unverified belief in matters that may eventually be- 

 come the objects of certain knowledge, nor with a 

 confidence in things of which certain knowledge is, 

 by the nature of the case, impossible ; it is a specific 

 activity of the soul in which it fastens upon, or 

 recognises, the ultimate assumptions of a causal or 

 logical nexus. It is by faith that I recognise the 

 validity of a geometrical axiom, the existence of God, 

 the reality of the objective world, and the correlated 

 reality of my own subjective existence. I may be 

 mistaken in the particulars of my assumptions under 

 any one of these heads — as I am, for instance, in 

 perceptual illusion — but in no case can my final 

 certainties rest upon any other ground than faith. 

 The possibility of error in the contents to which faith 

 attaches merely illustrates its purely formal character 

 as an epistemological function. It follows from this 

 definition that faith is not a temporary phase, but a 

 permanent and essential constituent of the human 

 movement along the lines both of thought and of 

 action. There is, in fact, a " conservation of faith " 

 within the subjective world analogous to the con- 

 servation of energy in the physical world — the one 

 regulating our recognition of Being much in tlie 



