Apeil 25, 1902. J 



SCIENCE. 



643 



Man's conception of what is most worth 

 knowing and reflecting upon, of what may 

 best compel his scholarly energies, has 

 changed greatly with the years. His 

 earliest impressions were of his own in- 

 significance and of the stupendous powers 

 and forces by which he was surrounded and 

 ruled. The heavenly fires, the storm-cloud 

 and the thunderbolt, the rush of waters and 

 the change of seasons, all filled him with 

 an awe which straightway saw in them 

 manifestations of the superhuman and the 

 divine. Man was absorbed in nature, a 

 mythical and legendary nature, to be sure, 

 but still the nature out of which science 

 was one day to arise. Then at the call of 

 Socrates, he turned his back on nature and 

 sought to know himself, to learn the se- 

 crets of those mysterious and hidden pro- 

 cesses by which he felt and thought and 

 acted. The intellectual center of gravity 

 had passed from nature to man. From 

 that day to this the goal of scholarship has 

 been the understanding of both nature and 

 man, the uniting of them in one scheme or 

 plan of knowledge, and the explaining of 

 them as the offspring of the omnipotent ac- 

 tivity of a creative spirit, the Christian 

 God. Slow and painful have been the 

 steps toward the goal, which to St. Augus- 

 tine seemed so near at hand, but which has 

 receded through the intervening centuries 

 as problems grew more complex and as the 

 processes of inquiry became so refined that 

 whole worlds of new and unsuspected facts 

 revealed themselves. Scholars divided into 

 two camps. The one would have ultimate 

 and complete explanations at any cost ; the 

 other, overcome by the greatness of the 

 undertaking, held that no explanation in 

 a large and general way was possible. The 

 one camp bred sciolism; the other narrow 

 and helpless specialization. 



At this point the modern university 

 problem took its rise; and for over 400 

 years the university has been striving to 



adjust its organization so that it may most 

 effectively bend its energies to the solution 

 of the problem as it is. For this purpose 

 the university's scholars have unconsciously 

 divided themselves into three types or 

 classes— those who investigate and break 

 new ground ; those who explain, apply, and 

 make understandable the fruits of new in- 

 vestigation; and those philosophically 

 minded teachers who relate the new to 

 the old, and, without dogma or intolerance, 

 point to the lessons taught by the de- 

 veloping human spirit from its first blind 

 gropings toward the light on the uplands 

 of Asia or by the shores of the Mediter- 

 ranean, through the insights of the world's 

 great poets, artists, scientists, philosophers, 

 statesmen and priests, to its highly or- 

 ganized institutional and intellectual life 

 of to-day. The purpose of scholarly ac- 

 tivity requires for its accomplishment men 

 of each of these three types. They are 

 allies, not enemies ; and happy the age, the 

 people, or the university in which all three 

 are well represented. It is for this rea- 

 son that the university which does not 

 strive to widen the boundaries of human 

 knowledge, to tell the story of the new in 

 terms that those familiar with the old can 

 understand, and to put before its students 

 a philosophical interpretation of historic 

 civilization, is, I think, falling short of 

 the demands which both society and uni- 

 versity ideals themselves may fairly make. 

 Again a group of distinguished scholars 

 in separate and narrow fields can no more 

 constitute a university than a bundle of 

 admirably developed nerves without a 

 brain and spinal cord can produce all the 

 activities of the human organism. It may 

 be said, I think, of the unrelated and unex- 

 plained specialist, as Matthew Arnold said 

 of the Puritan, that he is in great dan- 

 ger; because he imagines himself in pos- 

 session of a rule telling him the unum nec- 

 essarium, or one thing needful, and that 



