600 REPORT—1905. 
diploma in the Science and Practice of Agriculture; and the examinations for the 
diploma are open to persons who are not members of the University. 
But the University training, whatever its subject, ought to give something 
which the pureiy specialist training does not give. What do we understand by 
a University education? What are its distinctive characteristics? The word 
Universitas, as you know, is merely a general term for a corporation, specially 
applied in the Middle Ages to a body of persons associated for purposes of study, 
who, by becoming a corporation, acquired certain immunities and privileges. 
Though a particular University might be strongest in a particular faculty, as 
Bologna was in Law and Paris in Theology, yet it is a traditional attribute of such 
a body that several different branches of higher study shall be represented in it. 
It is among the distinctive advantages of a University that it brings together in 
one place students—by whom I mean teachers as well as learners—of various 
subjects. By doing this the University tends to produce a general breadth of 
intellectual interests and sympathies; it enables the specialist to acquire some 
sense of the relations between his own pursuit and other pursuits; he is helped to 
perceive the largeness of knowledge. But, besides bringing together students of 
various subjects, it is the business of a University to see that each subject shall be 
studied in such a manner as to afford some general discipline of the mental 
faculties. In his book on ‘The Idea of a University ’ Newman says :— 
‘This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or 
sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or pro- 
fession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its 
own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Mducation ; 
and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose 
intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely 
anyone but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards 
it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard of 
excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it and secure it 
to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right standard, and to 
train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to 
their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University.’ 
It may be granted that the function of a University, as Newman here describes 
it, is not always realised; Universities, like other human institutions, have their 
failures. But his words truly express the aim and tendency of the best University 
teaching. It belongs to the spirit of such teaching that it should nourish and 
sustain ideals ; and a University can do nothing better for its sons than that ; a vision 
of the ideal can guard monotony of work from becoming monotony of li’e. But there 
is yet another element of University training which must not be left out of account 
it 1s, indeed, among the most vital of all. I mean that informal education which 
young men give to each other. Many of us, probably, in looking back on our 
undergraduate days, could say that the society of our contemporaries was not the 
least powerful of the educational influences which we experienced. The social life 
of the Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge is a most essential part of the training 
received there. In considering the questions of the higher education in South 
Africa it is well to remember that the social intercourse of young students, under 
conditions such as a great residential University might provide, is an instru- 
ment of education which nothing else can replace. And it might be added that 
such social intercourse is also an excellent thing for the teachers. 
The highest education, when it bears its proper fruit, gives not knowledge only, 
but mental culture. A man may be learned, and yet deticient in culture ; that fact 
is implied by the word ‘pedantry.’ ‘Culture, said Huxley, ‘certainly means 
something quite different from learning or technical skill. It implies the posses- 
sion of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by a 
theoretic standard.’ ‘It is the love of knowledge,’ says Henry Sidgwick, ‘the 
ardour of scientific curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new facts and ideas, 
to make them our own, and fit them into the living and growing system of our 
thought ; and the trained faculty of doing this, the alert and supple intelligence 
