514 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 617. 



actors in this new culture rejected the old 

 sterile instruction with merciless vigor and 

 displaced it with systems of study touching 

 as closely as possible the actual life of 

 those times. It was their open purpose in 

 which they gloried to treat of things as 

 they actually existed, to get as near to the 

 life of the community as the best knowl- 

 edge would bring them ; in other words, to 

 touch human life intimately and at the 

 greatest possible number of points. 



Scarcely had the humanistic movement 

 reached a successful issue, before it was 

 supplemented by the reformation. Al- 

 though this great religious upheaval was 

 destined ultimately to aid the humanistic 

 movement, an intense struggle marked the 

 first stages of their concurrent develop- 

 ment. While the ultimate effects of these 

 two epoch-making movements were virtu- 

 ally the same in their influence upon the 

 advancement of knowledge and upon the 

 evolution of the university, the fundamen- 

 tally different characters of their two great 

 representatives led to intellectual contests 

 of exceeding bitterness. Fortunately, how- 

 ever, their efforts to advance knowledge 

 along these different lines created a com- 

 mon spirit of true learning, which has been 

 the living stimulant of university life from 

 that day until this. 



During the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries the university may be said to 

 have consisted of the philosophical and 

 theological faculties, supplemented by the 

 faculties of law and medicine. The sub- 

 sequent extensions of the university 

 throughout the eighteenth century result- 

 ing from its closer contact with the things 

 disclosed by experience and its widening 

 influence upon all branches of human ac- 

 tivity, were chiefly marked by the strength- 

 ening of the faculties of law and medicine. 



Throughout all this period of over three 

 centuries the philosophical faculty was pre- 

 dominant in its position and influence in 



the university. It had come to represent 

 a body of more or less abstract instruction 

 covering by far the greater part of the 

 existing field of human knowledge, and, it 

 must be said, divorced largely from the 

 real things to which it properly belonged. 

 In the early history of universities it con- 

 stituted a sort of purveyor of privileged 

 or aristocratic learning ostensibly of better 

 birth than the professional faculties of 

 law and medicine, which had the mis- 

 fortune to deal with the actualities of life 

 on which the welfare and safety of com- 

 munities no less than the rights and duties 

 of individuals are fundamentally based. 

 This conventional class distinction consti- 

 tuting a kind of snobbery of learning was 

 the real influence or force so completely 

 overcome by the movements of humanism 

 and the reformation, and it has bequeathed 

 to us the useless and senseless term 'pure' 

 science as opposed to applied science; as 

 if there could be in some way a science 

 politely distilled as an essence of learning 

 separated from the realities with which 

 absolutely all science whatever has to deal 

 and without which no science whatever can 

 exist. A mere scholastic philosophy based 

 upon the sterility of bare convention and 

 authority was displaced by an honest and 

 fearless search for the real knowledge 

 which lies at the base of all true learning. 

 The deadening influence of prescribed 

 knowledge gave way to the quickening 

 stimulus of individual power and freedom 

 of investigation in every field of experi- 

 ence. All the professional schools of the 

 university, prominent among them being 

 the modern technical schools, are the fruit- 

 ful products of this ever increasing and 

 abundant intellectual life. 



During the latter part of the eighteenth 

 and throughout the nineteenth century 

 the extensions of all branches of physical 

 science so enlarged their fields of applica- 

 tion that the foundations were laid of an- 



