CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY 273 
No one would care to depreciate the conservation of race life that is 
accomplished through the mere fact of the existence of a group of 
teachers, a body of college customs, and well-equipped laboratories and 
libraries. But they are not finished products. They are means to an 
end in a living, growing organism. The end is the best life of all and 
the fullest life of the future. There is a distortion when the rich 
inheritance of the past that the university represents is not directed 
wholly and purposefully toward the students who are to be the race of 
to-morrow. To this end the university may well exert itself to have 
them feel that they are organically a part of it. Each student when he 
goes out should be, not a recipient from the institution, but a real incar- 
nation of its best life. He must be in it and of it. The form of organ- 
ization should tempt him into closer and closer heart relation with his 
school. Let it not be, either, a seeming act of charity or missionary 
enthusiasm on the part of instructors, or the best is lost. The advantage 
is mutual. Each student has some original endowment from nature to 
bring to the institution. I have heard it sometimes expressed that part 
of the fascination of the life of a teacher is in the personal enrichment 
and the multicolored quality of truth that come from mingling with 
many types of student minds when each is allowed to be at his best. 
In order to bring out the riches of his nature, generally as yet undiscoy- 
ered even to himself, the attitude of the university toward the student 
and his attitude are almost everything. It can not reach him from the 
outside in; it can inspire and educate him only from the inside out. 
Let our universities be decentralized from their organization about 
institutionalism, and recentralized in the personal lives of students. 
VOL, LXXVII.—19. 
