October 2, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



469 



still to gain the coveted upper place, to 

 work and teach without subserviency. It 

 is unfortunately true that, being human, 

 even great men find virtue in the merely 

 faithful dog, and under the prevailing 

 system of appointment in America, where 

 to stand in with a powerful professor or to 

 be the graduate of the right school means 

 more than accomplishment, such can not 

 help but prosper. And yet it is the less 

 agreeable young worker who thinks inde- 

 pendently and differently that we really 

 wish to develop. The situation brings 

 vividly to the front the necessity of lower 

 pitched university positions for which any 

 man may qualify and in which he may 

 enjoy independence and opportunity for 

 individual thinking while receiving as com- 

 pensation a fixed salary from the university 

 administration or from the students whom 

 he attracts. A university is not alone a 

 collection of clear and new thinking men, 

 but a nursery for such. As one surveys our 

 American institutions as now constituted 

 one wonders how, should they appear, there 

 would fare in them a Voltaire writing 

 " Oedipe " at twenty-two, a Michelangelo 

 carving the young St. John at twenty, a 

 Galileo discovering the isochronism of the 

 pendulum at nineteen. 



The American has been accused of being 

 racially without individuality. All the 

 men tighten or bag their clothes in the 

 same season and all the women replace, if 

 so able, felt with straw on Easter day. 

 These things mean in toto a desire to stand 

 with the majority, and it is but natural that 

 to so stand should be considered right, for 

 such view receives constant encouragement 

 in a land where the voice of the many is the 

 voice that rules. It is this view carried into 

 our universities that has done so much to 

 keep us well in the rear. Neglecting for 

 the moment its mischievous consequences 

 from the standpoint of material support 



and development, for it is not easy to im- 

 press the ideals of higher education on a 

 grammar-school mind, this majority view 

 has blinded trustees, presidents, faculty 

 members, and the public at large to the real 

 purposes of a university by demanding that 

 they of it constantly exhale this. But to be 

 of university size its men have very de- 

 cidedly to voice a minority point of view. 

 To believe in and teach the circulation of 

 the blood in 1914 does not make or require 

 a university man. The time for this passed 

 about 1628. Nor will our universities reach 

 a higher level before we have accustomed 

 ourselves as a nation to expect heterodoxy 

 in them and have learned to like it so well 

 that we encourage it. Sovereigns, men of 

 power and of wealth, governments even, 

 have for centuries known this, and spread 

 their protecting hands over the men of their 

 universities to the point even of putting 

 them above the law. It is the blighting 

 influence of the majority demanding that 

 its view be taught in all its schools which 

 has so long made our state and muni- 

 cipal universities lag behind the privately 

 endowed. Democracy owes the latter an 

 unpayable debt in the examples they have 

 given of how to breed and develop that 

 minority point of view which time makes a 

 majority one. 



How to encourage this one thing for 

 which our universities exist is well illus- 

 trated by those of Germany. Our colleagues 

 there enjoy complete freedom of teaching. 

 It is not expected of them that each shall 

 teach the same thing and in exactly the 

 same way. "With us there must be so many 

 hours of this and so many hours of that, 

 all neatly divided according to rules and 

 regulations laid down by the latest college 

 conference. Why not as many hours as 

 possible of that which the man knows best 

 and then another man or another insti- 

 tution for another phase of the same or a 



