Maboh 12, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



411 



sition of the liberal to the utilitarian and 

 professional was, as we have noted, to pro- 

 tect the intellectual interest and keep the 

 self free from alien constraint or narrow 

 bounds prescribed by vocational condi- 

 tions. But a new face has been put upon 

 this situation by the development which is 

 going on in the industries and occupations, 

 and in some, at least, of the learned pro- 

 fessions. For the various occupations are 

 being organized more and more along 

 scientific lines; they are becoming perme- 

 ated with intellectual and aesthetic inter- 

 est; they demand of themselves a wider 

 reach and stimulate a broader survey. 

 In so far as they do this they break down 

 the distinction between the liberal and the 

 vocational. Not the way in which knowl- 

 edge is to be used— much less the fact that 

 it is not used at all — but the method and 

 spirit in which it is pursued on the one 

 hand, and its breadth of human interest 

 on the other, make it liberal. Any study 

 is liberal, if pursued in a scientific manner 

 and given significance for human life. 

 Such studies call out a widening self. In 

 such studies the mind comes to its own. 

 In such it gains power. In such it is no 

 longer determined by needs or conditions 

 foreign to itself. Rather it is using these 

 needs and conditions ^s the most effective 

 instruments for asserting itself. 



Medicine is perhaps the farthest ad- 

 vanced of the professions in this respect. 

 And the college studies pursued by the 

 future teacher, which are professional so 

 far as their future use makes studies pro- 

 fessional, show the absurdity of the old 

 distinction on the basis of utUity, or non- 

 utility. For Latin or mathematics as 

 pursued by the future teacher of these 

 subjects is probably more liberalizing than 

 when pursued by those who do not expect 

 to make use of them. 



Nor has the process of permeating voca- 

 tions with scientific interest stopped with 



the so-eaUed professions. Modern com- 

 merce and industry involve the use of in- 

 telligence in ways that are properly 

 scientific. And there is no reason why, if 

 studied in their historic development and 

 in their bearing on human welfare, they 

 may not call out as broad and as human an 

 interest as any other field of human ac- 

 tivity. 



This mutual permeation of the vocations 

 by the scientific and of the liberal by the 

 practical looks, indeed, toward a more 

 effective and positive type of "freedom" 

 than the older conception of the more ro- 

 mantic and negative sort, which sharply 

 opposed the interests of the self to the 

 sphere of its action. The older freedom 

 from constraint corresponded to the 

 formal freedom which was so important 

 an element in political and religious lib- 

 erty, and which was so prominent an ideal 

 in the last of the eighteenth and during 

 most of the nineteenth centuries. The 

 courts by their distinction between law 

 and fact, which tends to prevent the con- 

 tamination of legal doctrine by recogni- 

 tion of actual conditions, maintain this 

 theoretical freedom as a basis in many of 

 their decisions. But social and economic 

 facts emphasize that it is positive re- 

 sources which give the only freedom that 

 amounts to anything. Psychological an- 

 alysis shows that only as the mind has 

 both ideas and positive control of its in- 

 struments is it free in any considerable 

 degree. The student is then free of his 

 world, is fitted to lead a free life, is having 

 a liberal education, in proportion as he is 

 getting such control of the instruments of 

 knowledge and such efficiency in dealing 

 with his fellow men as makes him master 

 not merely of his ideas, his emotions and 

 his purposes, but of his world. The old 

 individualism in education, as in religion, 

 was largely to lose or hold off from the 

 world in order to save the soul by culture. 



