498 THE POPULAR SOIENCE MONTHLY 
“Am I rousing a spirit of inquiry in my pupils?” And if this can 
not be answered in the affirmative it is a confession that the university 
ideal is not being realized. 
Some assert that this principle should also guide school education, 
and that it should be the first aim of the school teacher to stimulate 
the spirit of inquiry. My own view is that with young children this 
should be less necessary; they all possess it, and are by nature inquisi- 
tive. It should rather be the object of the teacher not to spoil the 
spirit of inquiry by allowing it to run riot, nor to stifle it by making 
the work uninteresting; if the lesson interests them, their inquisitive 
minds will be quick enough to assimilate the teaching. We are, in fact, 
brought back to what I have already emphasized—that the real differ- 
ence between the inquisitive mind of the child and the inquiring mind 
of the adult is that the former is yearning for information quite regard- 
less of what it may lead to, whereas the latter must learn or investigate 
with an object if the interest is to be excited and maintained. 
I have often thought it an interesting parallel that among original 
investigators and researchers there are two quite distinct types of mind, 
which have achieved equally valuable results. There is the researcher 
who pursues an investigation with a constant purpose and to whom the 
purpose is the inspiration. But there is also the investigator who has 
preserved his youthful enthusiasm for novelty and has in some respects 
the mind of a child; passionately inquisitive, he will always seek to do 
something new, and very often, like a child, he will tire of a line of 
research in which he has made a discovery, and take up with equal 
enthusiasm a totally different problem in the hope of achieving new 
conquests. I think that a man well known in Sheffield, the late Henry 
Clifton Sorby, must have been a man of this character. ‘The latter is, 
perhaps, the most fertile type of original investigator, but it is not the 
type that produces the best teacher, except for very exceptional and 
original-minded students ; and such teachers do not often found a school 
of learning and research endowed with much stability. For ordinary 
students the investigator who pursues his researches as far as possible 
to their conclusion is the safer guide. 
It seems to me suggestive that there are to be found, even amongst 
the famous researchers, these two types of mind, that somewhat cor- 
respond to the mental attitude of the school pupil and the university 
student. It is as though these great men have preserved a juvenile 
spirit, some from the days of their childhood, others from early 
manhood. 
It will now be clear that the principle which I am advocating is a 
very simple one, namely, that the business of direct mental training 
should be finished at school, and that at the university the trained mind 
should be given material upon which to do responsible work in the spirit 
