UNIVERSITY REFORMS 69 



top to the bottom, is it possible to retain tbe freshness and mental vigor 

 as essential to the teacher as it is to the investigator. The pnblic, as a 

 rule, does not appreciate the fact that successful teaching and investi- 

 gating can not be disassociated in the university. The teacher who 

 fails to take an active interest in research is srenerallv deficient in his 

 appreciation of the importance and difficulty of keeping the mind free 

 from all those prejudices which tend to warp both sympathies and 

 judgments and prevent the student from acquiring the faculty of ap- 

 preciative discernment of new truths. A sharp and purely arbitrary 

 distinction is often drawn between teaching and research, as if the two 

 departments had nothing in common. Many persons look upon the 

 latter as a luxury, something for which provision should be made only 

 after every effort has been expended in teaching students how to meet 

 the conventional restrictions imposed by examinations. The fact that 

 this action is pretty generally accepted furnishes another instance of 

 the relatively higher educational value placed by the general public 

 upon the mere storing up of information than upon any effort made to 

 develop other than the acquisitive functions of the brain. One of the 

 chief aims of a modern education should be to cultivate in the student 

 the spirit of a genuine love for learning. Teachers may preach this 

 doctrine until *'"' crack o" doom '"' without accomplishing as much by 

 sermonizing as can be gained with the expenditure of less effort in giv- 

 ing practical demonstrations of what it is to learn. The frequent and 

 sometimes noisy arraignments of the mental defects of college gradu- 

 ates made by business men not infrequently contain an element of 

 justification, for many of the former unfortunately give evidence of 

 having been taught to teach without first having been encouraged in 

 their attempts to learn. The teaching not the learning spirit dominates 

 in our American universities. In the selection of a professor the suc- 

 cess of a teacher is too generally estimated by the ability to speak well, 

 coin phrases, to give students their mental food in the compressed- 

 tablet form, and in the capacity of maintaining until the end of the 

 course a superficial, even if it be only a temporary, interest in the 

 subject. 



In the constant struggle for existence carried on by all nations it 

 has become evident that success will crown the efforts of the people in 

 which the brain power of its citizens has been developed to the highest 

 state of efficiency. Any attempt to confer upon an individual the op- 

 portunities of obtaining an education is equivalent to offering him the 

 chance of exercising the functions of the brain along the lines indi- 

 cated by those who are generally without even an elementary knowledge 

 of a very complicated organ. Eousseau fully appreciated the absurdity 

 of expecting a professional opinion as to the functional capacity of this 

 organ from those having only an amateurs knowledge of its anatomy 



