L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 249 
and has every right of an ordinary citizen—engineer, lawyer, doctor or 
banker—to express his opinions on civic affairs. It may even be urged 
that he has a special right to express himself, in virtue of the possession of 
special knowledge ; and it is possible to contend that he has even a duty 
to aid the judgment of the community by contributing his knowledge and 
his opinion in vexed questions which lie specially within the ambit of his 
chair. A professor of Spanish, for example, may hold himself bound to 
instruct the public opinion of his community on Spanish affairs, and even 
to suggest the adoption of a definite attitude by his fellow-countrymen in 
relation to such affairs, if they have become the question of the hour, 
pregnant with issues of peace or war, and if he has a knowledge which has 
not yet been attained by publicists, journalists, and other such guides of 
public thought. On the other hand, it is a pity that a professor should 
become a publicist except in the gravest emergency. It is difficult to be 
at once a publicist and a scholar; and a professor is primarily a scholar. 
Here we touch a fundamental consideration. A professor is a citizen, 
with the general rights or obligations of a citizen : he is also a member of a 
profession, with the special obligations of that profession. Herein he is 
like the doctor or lawyer, who have also their special obligations, as, for 
example, the obligation of secrecy in regard to the affairs of their clients. 
The special obligations of the professor, which are contained in the unwritten 
code of which we have already spoken, are less definite than those of the 
doctor or lawyer; but they are there. He has embraced a profession 
devoted to the dispassionate search for pure truth. He seeks truth for 
truth’s sake by a rigorous method of inquiry. The temper of his mind 
must be steeled into a resolute disposition to see every side and to weigh 
every factor. He is training young minds: what he is, and what he does, 
affects the growth of those minds, just because the attitude, the temper and 
the method of the teacher are always a suggestive force to the young, and 
are always, however unconsciously, in virtue of that law of imitation which 
sways so strongly all our minds, the fountain and source of a like attitude, 
temper and method among the taught. If there is a discipline which is a 
special obligation of the soldier, there is also a discipline which is a special 
obligation of the professor who serves under the banner of truth. To see, 
and to show to others, the six sides of a square question : to amass every 
relevant fact, and to leave no fact unverified: to shun the limelight of 
publicity, because it distorts and is not the clear light of truth: not to lend 
knowledge to the service of a one-sided cause, or to divulge research in 
aid of a journalistic ‘ scoop ’—all these are parts of the discipline. At 
the same time, the professor must be a man, and not an automaton. He may 
_ become the latter, if he is purely and solely of the laboratory. Some 
| Measure of outside interest and outside work is a condition of vitality and 
_ even of balance. Without it he may be anemically academic, and lose 
himself in an exaggerated sense of the sovereignty of his subject. F. D. 
Maurice was not in error when he said of his colleagues that ‘ their classes 
in the college, I believe, are infinitely the better for their labours and 
studies out of it.’ ? 
a There are certain subjects in which the freedom and the duty of a 
_ professor raise specially difficult problems. They are the subjects of 
_ history, government and economics—to which we may perhaps add the 
“4 
t 
, 
| 
2 Op. cit., ii., p. 85. 
