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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVI. No. 664 



as a man. He came from a school where 

 ready-made knowledge was imparted to a 

 passive immature mind; and, when he 

 leaves, he goes out into the world for prac- 

 tical work or professional schooling with 

 that senior maturity which relies on inde- 

 pendent judgment. Secluded from the 

 rough battle of the outer world, he can pass 

 four years of inner growth and self-devel- 

 opment, of learning and comradeship under 

 "the influence of scholars who devote their 

 lives with ever-young enthusiasm to all that 

 is true and good and beautiful. He does 

 not seek there, and ought not to seek there, 

 the specialized research work which belongs 

 to the graduate school. Certainly investi- 

 gation, which focuses the energies of a 

 whole man on a circumscribed field, is the 

 highest aim of scientific study; but it fits 

 a professional specialist only, who has com- 

 pleted his broad course of general culture. 

 This broad culture alone is the abounding 

 gift of the college, secured by those meth- 

 ods which can not be those of the school- 

 teacher nor of the researcher. Neither the 

 time before the college, nor that after the 

 college years, can open the heart and widen 

 the mind, can inspire enthusiasm and deep- 

 en the personality like college days passed 

 in living contact with true college teachers 

 — and no one is a true college teacher who 

 does not make even the most abstract sci- 

 ence a living and refreshing source of cul- 

 ture and humanity. 



It is this breadth of culture gained in 

 work and in play, in the class room and in 

 the club, in the laboratory and in the 

 chapel, which gives unity and community 

 to all who have had the good fortune of 

 collegiate education. Whether their way 

 leads on to law or medicine, to banking or 

 railroading, to teaching or preaching, to 

 politics or commerce, makes no essential 

 difference; essential remains only that 

 which is common to all of them. The pro- 



fessional work seems, then, only like a gar- 

 ment which can be laid off; the collegiate 

 work belongs to the personality itself. It 

 is this phalanx of the collegiate alumni 

 which has to represent the educated public 

 opinion, imparting to the nation the 

 thoughtfulness and earnestness without 

 which the trivial instincts of the crowd 

 would be unchecked. When the masses, 

 misled by the coddling education of early 

 youth into a happy-go-lucky spirit, rush 

 into the path of the cheap and vulgar, it is 

 the collegiate community which has to 

 prove its belief in lasting values. When 

 the masses act in the laissez-faire temper, 

 which begins with the lack of discipline in 

 the schools and ends with the indulgence 

 of public graft and corruption, it is the 

 collegiate community which must show its 

 training in the spirit of civic duty and 

 lofty ideals. 



You all know that there is one way of 

 praise which is more eloquent and signifi- 

 cant than any words of enthusiasm, and it 

 is the effort of imitation. The value which 

 belongs, in my opinion, to this unity of col- 

 legiate culture and to this national commu- 

 nity of the best educated men, independent 

 of their various activities in later life, cam 

 easily be measured by this strongest test. 

 With sincere devotion I have upheld the, at 

 first sight, revolutionary proposal that Ger- 

 many should imitate the American example 

 and found colleges on German ground. 

 What is the situation over there at present ? 

 Every one knows that the German univer- 

 sities are not surpassed by any scholarly 

 institutions the world over. It is not by 

 chance that for nearly a century a steadily 

 growing stream of young American schol- 

 ars has poured through Gottingen and 

 Heidelberg and Giessen and, later, through 

 Leipzig and Munich and Berlin. And those 

 young scholars brought back with their 

 German Ph.D. the spirit of sacred devotion 



