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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XV. No. 382. 



lie then remains satisfied with a very crude 

 conception of Avhat this rule really is, and 

 what it tells him, and in tliis dangerous 

 state of assurance and self-satisfaction 

 proceeds to give full swing to a number of 

 the instincts of his ordinary self. And these 

 instincts, since he is but human, are toward 

 a general view of the woi'ld from the very 

 narrow and isolated spot on which he 

 stands. Only the largest and bravest spirits 

 can become great specialists in scholarship 

 and resist this instinctive tendency to hasty 

 and crude philosophizing. The true scholar 

 is one who has been brought to see the 

 full meaning of the words development and 

 history. He must, in other words, be a free 

 man as Aristotle understood the term. The 

 free man is he who has a largeness of view 

 which is unmistakable and which permits 

 him to see the other side ; a knowledge of 

 the course of man's intellectual history and 

 its meaning; a grasp of principles and a 

 standard for judging them; the power and 

 habit of reflection firmly established ; a fine 

 feeling for moral and intellectual distinc- 

 tions; and the kindliness of spirit and no- 

 bility of purpose which are the support of 

 genuine character. On this foundation 

 highly specialized knowledge is scholarship ; 

 on a foundation of mere skill, deftness or 

 erudition, it is not. The university is con- 

 cerned with the promotion of the true 

 scholarship. It asks it in its scholars who 

 teach; it inculcates it in its scholars who 

 learn. It believes that the languages, the 

 literatures, the art, the science and the 

 institutions of those historic peoples who 

 have successively occupied the center of the 

 stage on which the great human drama is 

 being acted out, are full of significance for 

 the world of to-day ; and it asks that those 

 students who come to it to be led into spe- 

 cial fields of inquiry, of professional study 

 or of practical application, shall have come 

 to know something of all this in an earlier 

 period of general and liberal studies. 



Mr. Emerson's oration before the oldest 

 American society of scholars, made nearly 

 sixty-five years ago, is the magnetic pole 

 toward which all other discussions of schol- 

 arship must inevitably point. His superb 

 apology for scholarship and for the scholar 

 as Man Tliinking opened an era in our 

 nation's intellectual life. The scholar as 

 Mr. Emerson drew him is not oppressed 

 by nature or averse from it, for he laiows 

 it as the opposite of his soul, answering to 

 it part for part. He is not weighted down 

 by books or by the views which Cicero, 

 which Locke, which Bacon have given, for 

 he knows that they were young men like 

 himself when they wrote their books and 

 gave their views. He is not a recluse or 

 unfit for practical work, because he knows 

 that every opportunity for action passed 

 by is a loss of power. The scholar, in short, 

 as the university views him, and aims to 

 conserve and to produce him and his type, 

 is a free man, thinking and acting in the 

 light of the world's knowledge and guided 

 by its highest ideals. 



In this sense the university is the or- 

 gan of scholarship, and in this sense it 

 aims to be its embodiment. The place of 

 scholarship has been long since won, and 

 is more widely recognized and acknowl- 

 edged than ever before. The church and 

 the state, which first gave it independence, 

 are in close alliance with it and it with 

 them. The three are uniting in the effort 

 to produce a reverent, well-ordered and 

 thoughtful democratic civilization in which 

 the eternal standards of righteousness and 

 truth will increasingly prevail. 



But a university is not for scholarship 

 alone. In these modern days the univer- 

 sity is not apart from the activities of the 

 world, but in them and of them. It deals 

 with real problems, and it relates itself to 

 life as it is. The university is for both 

 scholarship and service; and herein lies 

 that ethical equality which makes the uni- 



