May 25, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



803 



the devotion and sympathetic insight of 

 the growing body of graduates, to prolong 

 the vision where the founders ' vision termi- 

 nated, and to insure that all the succeeding 

 steps, like the first steps, shall single out 

 this university more and more as the uni- 

 versity of quality peculiarly. 



And what makes essential quality in a 

 university? Years ago in -New England 

 it was said that a log by the roadside with 

 a student sitting on one end of it, and 

 Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end, 

 was a university. It is the quality of its 

 men that makes the quality of a university. 

 You may have your buildings, you may 

 create your committees and boards and 

 regulations, you may pile up your ma- 

 chinery of discipline and perfect your 

 methods of instruction, you may spend 

 money till no one can approach you; yet 

 you will add nothing but one more trivial 

 specimen to the common herd of American 

 colleges, unless you send into all this or- 

 ganization some breath of life, by inocula- 

 ting it with a few men, at least, who are 

 real gehiuses. And if you once have the 

 geniuses, you can easily dispense with 

 most of the organization. Like a con- 

 tagious disease, almost, spiritual life passes 

 from man to man by contact. Education 

 in the long run is an affair that works 

 itself out between the individual student 

 and his opportunities. Methods, of which 

 we talk so much, play but a minor part. 

 Offer the opportunities, leave the student 

 to his natural reaction on them, and he 

 will work out his personal destiny, be it 

 a high one or a low one. Above all things, 

 offer the opportunity of higher personal 

 contacts. A university provides these 

 anyhow within the student body, for it at- 

 tracts the more aspiring of the youth of 

 the country, and they befriend and elevate 

 one another. But we are only beginning 

 in this country, with our extraordinary 



American reliance on organization, to see 

 that the alpha and omega in a university 

 is the tone of it, and that this tone is set 

 by human personalities exclusively. The 

 world, in fact, is only beginning to see 

 that the wealth of a nation consists more 

 than in anything else in the number of 

 superior men that it harbors. In the prac- 

 tical realm it has always recognized this, 

 and known that no price is too high to pay 

 for a great statesman or great captain of 

 industry. But it is equally so in the re- 

 ligioiis and moral sphere, in the poetic and 

 artistic sphere and in the philosophic and 

 scientific sphere. Geniuses are ferments; 

 and when they come together as they have 

 done in certain lands at certain times, the 

 whole population seems to share in the 

 higher energy which they awaken. The 

 effects are incalculable and often not easy 

 to trace in detail, but they are pervasive 

 and momentous. Who can measure the 

 effects on the national German soul of the 

 splendid series of German poets and Ger- 

 man men of learning, most of them 

 academic personages? 



From the bare economic point of view 

 the importance of geniuses is only begin- 

 ning to be appreciated. How can we meas- 

 ure the cash-value to France of a Pasteur, 

 to England of a Kelvin, to Germany of an 

 Ostwald, to us here of a Burbank? One 

 main care of every country in the future 

 ought to be to find out who its first-rate 

 thinkers are and to help them. Cost here 

 becomes something entirely irrelevant, the 

 returns are sure to be so incommensurable. 

 This is what wise men the world over are 

 perceiving. And as the universities are 

 already a sort of agency providentially 

 provided for the detection and encourage- 

 ment of mental superiority, it would seem 

 as if that one among them that followed 

 this line most successfully would quickest 

 rise to a position of paramountcy and dis- 

 tinction. 



