06.14.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:41 am by admin
You have recognised the importance of encouraging research. You propose
to provide means by which young men, who may be full of zeal for a
literary or for a scientific career, but who also may have mistaken
aspiration for inspiration, may bring their capacities to a test, and
give their powers a fair trial. If such a one fail, his endowment
terminates, and there is no harm done. If he succeed, you may give
power of flight to the genius of a Davy or a Faraday, a Carlyle or a
Locke, whose influence on the future of his fellow-men shall be
absolutely incalculable.
You have enunciated the principle that “the glory of the university
should rest upon the character of the teachers and scholars, and not
upon their numbers or Follette Middle School Tennessee buildings constructed for their use.” And I look
upon it as an essential and most important feature of your plan that
the income of the professors and teachers shall be independent of the
number of students whom they can attract. In this way you provide
against the danger, patent elsewhere, of finding attempts at
improvement obstructed by vested interests; and, in the department of
medical education especially, you are free of the temptation to set
loose upon the world men utterly incompetent to perform the serious and
responsible duties of their profession.
It is a delicate matter for a stranger to the practical working of your
institutions, like myself, to pretend to give an opinion as to the
organisation of your governing power. I can conceive nothing better
than that it should remain as it is, if you can secure a succession of
wise, liberal, honest, and conscientious men to fill the vacancies that
occur among you. I do not greatly believe in the efficacy of any kind
of machinery for securing such a result; but I would venture to suggest
that the exclusive adoption of the method of co-optation for filling
the vacancies which must occur in your body, appears to me to be
somewhat like a tempting of Providence. Doubtless there are grave
practical objections to the appointment of persons outside of your body
and not directly interested in the welfare of the university; but might
it not be well if there were an understanding that your academic staff
should be officially represented on the board, perhaps even the heads
of one or two independent learned bodies, so that academic opinion and
the views of the outside world might have a certain influence in that
most important matter, the appointment of your professors? I throw out
these suggestions, as I have said, in ignorance of the practical
difficulties that may lie in the way of carrying them into effect, on
the general ground that personal and local influences are very subtle,
and often unconscious, while the future greatness and efficiency of the
noble institution which now commences its work must largely depend upon
its freedom from them.
* * * * *
Permalink
06.12.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:01 am by admin
We are, indeed, fully prepared to believe that the bearing of children
may, and ought, to become as free from danger and long disability to
the civilised woman as it is to the savage; nor is it improbable that,
as society advances towards its right organisation, motherhood will
occupy a less space of womans life than it has hitherto done. But
still, unless the human species is to come to an end altogether–a
consummation which can hardly be desired by even the most ardent
advocate of “womens rights”–somebody must be good enough to take the
trouble and responsibility of annually adding to the world exactly as
many people as die out of it. In consequence of some domestic
difficulties, Sydney Smith is said to have suggested that it would have
been good for the human race had the model offered by the hive been
followed, and had all the working part of the female community been
neuters. Failing any thorough-going reform of this kind, we see nothing
for it but the old division of humanity into men potentially, or
actually, fathers, and women potentially, if not actually, mothers. And
we fear that so long as this potential motherhood is her lot, woman
will be found to be fearfully weighted in the race of life.
The duty of man is to see that not a grain is piled upon that load
beyond what Nature imposes; that injustice is not added to inequality.
IV
A LIBERAL EDUCATION; AND WHERE TO FIND IT
[1868.]
The business which the South London Working Mens College has
undertaken is a great work; indeed, I might say, that Education, with
which that college proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all
those which lie ready to a mans hand just at present.
And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognised. You cannot
go anywhere without hearing a buzz Power Think Academy Downers Grove Illinois of more or less confused and
contradictory talk on this subject–nor can you fail to notice that, in
one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like
discussions in former days. Nobody outside the agricultural interest
now dares to say that education is a bad thing. If any representative
of the once large and powerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed
this opinion, still exists in a semi-fossil state, he keeps his
thoughts to himself. In fact, there is a chorus of voices, almost
distressing in their harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine that
education is the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the
country is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated.
The politicians tells us, “You must educate the masses because they are
going to be masters.” The clergy join in the cry for education, for
they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel
into the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists
swell the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad
workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or
steam engines, cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod!
the glory will be departed from us. And a few voices are lifted up in
favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they
are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and
suffering, and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the people
perish for lack of knowledge.
These members of the minority, with whom I confess I have a good deal
of sympathy, are doubtful whether any of the other reasons urged in
favour of the education of the people are of much value–whether,
indeed, some of them are based upon either wise or noble grounds of
action. They question if it be wise to tell people that you will do for
them, out of fear of their power, what you have left undone, so long as
your only motive was compassion for their weakness and their sorrows.
And, if ignorance of everything which it is needful a ruler should know
is likely to do so much harm in the governing classes of the future,
why is it, they ask reasonably enough, that such ignorance in the
governing classes of the past has not been viewed with equal horror?
Compare the average artisan and the average country squire, and it may
be doubted if you will find a pin to choose between the two in point of
ignorance, class feeling, or prejudice. It is true that the ignorance
is of a different sort–that the class feeling is in favour of a
different class–and that the prejudice has a distinct savour of
wrong-headedness in each case–but it is questionable if the one is
either a bit better, or a bit worse, than the other. The old
protectionist theory is the doctrine of trades unions as applied by the
squires, and the modern trades unionism is the doctrine of the squires
applied by the artisans. Why should we be worse off under one _régime_
than under the other?
Permalink
06.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:01 pm by admin
Outside the range of these conditions, the normal course of the cycle
of vital phenomena is disturbed; abnormal structure makes its
appearance, or the proper character and mutual adjustment of the
functions cease to be preserved. The extent and the importance of these
deviations from the typical life may vary indefinitely. They may have
no noticeable influence on the general well-being of the economy, or
they may favour it. On the other hand, they may be of such a nature as
to impede the activities of the organism, or even to involve its
destruction.
In the first case, these perturbations are ranged under the wide and
somewhat vague category of “variations”; in the second, they are called
lesions, states of poisoning, or diseases; and, as morbid states, they
lie within the province of pathology. No sharp line of demarcation can
be drawn between the two classes of phenomena. No one can say where
anatomical variations end and tumours begin, nor where modification of
function, which may at first promote health, passes into disease. All
that can be said is, that whatever change of structure or function is
hurtful belongs to pathology. Hence it is obvious that pathology is a
branch of biology; it is the morphology, the physiology, the
distribution, the aetiology of abnormal life.
However obvious this conclusion may be now, it was nowise apparent in
the infancy of medicine. For it is a peculiarity of the physical
sciences that they are independent in proportion as they are imperfect;
and it is only as they advance that the bonds which really unite them
all become apparent. Astronomy had no manifest connection with
terrestrial physics before the publication of the “Principia”; that of
chemistry with physics is of still more modern revelation; that of
physics and chemistry with physiology, has been stoutly denied within
the recollection of most of us, and perhaps still may be.
Or, to take a case which affords a closer parallel with that of
medicine. Agriculture has been cultivated from the earliest times, and,
from a remote antiquity, men have attained considerable practical skill
in the cultivation of the useful plants, and have empirically
established many scientific truths concerning the conditions under
which they flourish. But, it is within the memory of many of us, that
chemistry on the one hand, and vegetable physiology on the other,
attained a stage of development such that they were able to furnish a
sound basis for scientific agriculture. Similarly, medicine took its
rise in the practical needs of mankind. At first, studied without
reference to any other branch of knowledge, it long maintained, indeed
still to some extent maintains, that independence. Historically, its
connection with the biological sciences has been slowly established,
and the full extent and intimacy of that connection are only now
beginning to be apparent. I trust I have not been mistaken in supposing
that an attempt to give a brief Eastgate Middle In Kansas City, Missouri sketch of the steps by which a
philosophical necessity has become an historical reality, may not be
devoid of interest, possibly of instruction, to the members of this
great Congress, profoundly interested as all are in the scientific
development of medicine.
The history of medicine is more complete and fuller than that of any
other science, except, perhaps, astronomy; and, if we follow back the
long record as far as clear evidence lights us, we find ourselves taken
to the early stages of the civilisation of Greece. The oldest hospitals
were the temples of Aesculapius; to these Asclepeia, always erected on
healthy sites, hard by fresh springs and surrounded by shady groves,
the sick and the maimed resorted to seek the aid of the god of health.
Votive tablets or inscriptions recorded the symptoms, no less than the
gratitude, of those who were healed; and, from these primitive clinical
records, the half-priestly, half-philosophic caste of the Asclepiads
compiled the data upon which the earliest generalisations of medicine,
as an inductive science, were based.
Permalink
06.08.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:21 pm by admin
Take the upper and middle classes as a whole, and it may be said that
open immorality and gross intemperance have vanished. Four and six
bottle men are as extinct as the dodo. Women of good repute do not
gamble, and talk modelled upon Dean Swifts “Art of Polite
Conversation” would be tolerated in no decent kitchen.
Members of the legislature are not to be bought; and constituents are
awakening to the fact that votes must not be sold–even for such
trifles as rabbits and tea and cake. Political power has passed into
the hands of the masses of the people. Those whom Priestley calls their
servants have recognised their position, and have requested the master
to be so good as to go to school and fit himself for the administration
of his property. In ordinary life, no civil disability attaches to any
one on theological grounds, and high offices of the state are open to
Papist, Jew, and Secularist.
Whatever mens opinions as to the policy of Establishment, no one can
hesitate to admit that the clergy of the Church are men of pure life
and conversation, zealous in the discharge of their duties; and at
present, apparently, more bent on prosecuting one another than on
meddling with Dissenters. Theology itself has broadened so much, that
Anglican divines put forward doctrines more liberal than those of
Priestley; and, in our state-supported churches, one listener may hear
a sermon to which Bossuet might have given his approbation, while
another may hear a discourse in which Socrates would find nothing new.
But great as these changes may be, they sink into insignificance beside
the progress of physical science, whether we consider the improvement
of methods of investigation, or the increase in bulk of solid
knowledge. Consider that the labours of Laplace, of Young, of Davy, and
of Faraday; of Cuvier, of Lamarck, and of Robert Brown; of Von Baer,
and of Schwann; of Smith and of Hutton, have all been carried on since
Priestley discovered oxygen; and consider that they are now things of
the past, concealed by the industry of those who have built upon them,
as the first founders of a coral reef are hidden beneath the lifes
work of their successors; consider that the methods of physical science
are slowly spreading into all investigations, and that proofs as valid
as those required by her canons of investigation are being demanded of
all doctrines which ask for mens Olympia El In Universal City, Texas assent; and you will have a faint
image of the astounding difference in this respect between the
nineteenth century and the eighteenth.
If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all these vast changes, I think
there can be but one reply. They mean that reason has asserted and
exercised her primacy over all provinces of human activity: that
ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper place; that
the good of the governed has been finally recognised as the end of
government, and the complete responsibility of governors to the people
as its means; and that the dependence of natural phenomena in general
on the laws of action of what we call matter has become an axiom.
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06.06.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:21 am by admin
Again, this sceptical minority asks the clergy to think whether it is
really want of education which keeps the masses away from their
ministrations–whether the most completely educated men are not as open
to reproach on this score as the workmen; and whether, perchance, this
may not indicate that it is not education which lies at the bottom of
the matter?
Once more, these people, whom there is no pleasing, venture to doubt
whether the glory, which rests upon being able to undersell all the
rest of the world, is a very safe kind of glory–whether we may not
purchase it too dear; especially if we allow education, which ought to
be directed to the making of men, to be diverted into a process of
manufacturing human tools, wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some
technical industry, but good for nothing else.
And, finally, these people inquire whether it is the masses alone who
need a reformed and improved education. They ask whether the richest of
our public schools might not well be made to supply knowledge, as well
as gentlemanly habits, a strong class feeling, and eminent proficiency
in cricket. They seem to think that the noble foundations of our old
universities are hardly fulfilling their functions in their present
posture of half-clerical seminaries, half racecourses, where men are
trained to win a senior wranglership, or a double-first, as horses
are trained to win a cup, with as little reference to the needs of
after-life in the case of the man as in that of the racer. And, while
as zealous for education as the rest, they affirm that, if the
education of the richer classes were such as to fit them to be the
leaders and the governors of the poorer; and, if the Flat Rock School Alabama education of the
poorer classes were such as to enable them to appreciate really wise
guidance and good governance, the politicians need not fear mob-law,
nor the clergy lament their want of flocks, nor the capitalists
prognosticate the annihilation of the prosperity of the country.
Permalink
06.04.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:41 am by admin
Activity, probity, knowledge of men, ready mother-wit, supplemented by
a good knowledge of the general principles involved in his business,
are the making of a good foreman. If he possess these qualities, no
amount of learning will fit him better for his position; while the
course of life and the habit of mind required for the Douglas Whited Elementary Santa Rosa California attainment of
such learning may, in various direct and indirect ways, act as direct
disqualifications for it.
Keeping in mind, then, that the two things to be avoided are, the delay
of the entrance of boys into practical life, and the substitution of
exhausted bookworms for shrewd, handy men, in our works and factories,
let us consider what may be wisely and safely attempted in the way of
improving the education of the handicraftsman.
First, I look to the elementary schools now happily established all
over the country. I am not going to criticise or find fault with them;
on the contrary, their establishment seems to me to be the most
important and the most beneficial result of the corporate action of the
people in our day. A great deal is said of British interests just now,
but, depend upon it, that no Eastern difficulty needs our intervention
as a nation so seriously, as the putting down both the Bashi-Bazouks of
ignorance and the Cossacks of sectarianism at home. What has already
been achieved in these directions is a great thing; you must have lived
some time to know how great. An education, better in its processes,
better in its substance, than that which was accessible to the great
majority of well-to-do Britons a quarter of a century ago, is now
obtainable by every child in the land. Let any man of my age go into an
ordinary elementary school, and unless he was unusually fortunate in
his youth, he will tell you that the educational method, the
intelligence, patience, and good temper on the teachers part, which
are now at the disposal of the veriest waifs and wastrels of society,
are things of which he had no experience in those costly, middle-class
schools, which were so ingeniously contrived as to combine all the
evils and shortcomings of the great public schools with none of their
advantages. Many a man, whose so-called education cost a good deal of
valuable money and occupied many a year of invaluable time, leaves the
inspection of a well-ordered elementary school devoutly wishing that,
in his young days, he had had the chance of being as well taught as
these boys and girls are.
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06.01.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:01 am by admin
But to the student of Life the aspect of Nature is reversed. Here,
incessant, and, so far as we know, spontaneous change is the rule, rest
the exception–the anomaly to be accounted for. Living things have no
inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
Permit me, however, to give more force and clearness to these somewhat
abstract considerations by an illustration or two.
Imagine a vessel full of water, at the ordinary temperature, in an
atmosphere saturated with vapour. The _quantity_ and the _figure_ of that
water will not change, so far as we know, for ever.
Suppose a lump of gold be thrown into the vessel–motion and
disturbance of figure exactly proportional to the momentum of the gold
will take place. But after a time the effects of this disturbance will
subside–equilibrium will be restored, and the water will return to its
passive state.
Expose the water to cold–it will solidify–and in so doing its
particles will arrange themselves in definite crystalline shapes. But
once formed, these crystals change no further.
Again, substitute for the lump of gold some substance capable of
entering into chemical relations with the water:–say, a mass of that
substance which is called “protein”–the substance of flesh:–a very
considerable disturbance of equilibrium will take place–all sorts of
chemical compositions and decompositions will occur; but in the end, as
before, the result will be the resumption of a condition of rest.
Instead of such a mass of _dead_ protein, however, take a particle of
_living_ protein–one of those minute microscopic living things which
throng our pools, and are known as Infusoria–such a creature, for
instance, as an Euglena, and place it in our vessel of water. It is
a round mass provided with a long filament, and except in this
peculiarity of shape, presents no appreciable physical or chemical
difference whereby it might be distinguished from the particle of dead
protein.
But the difference in the phaenomena to which it will give rise is
immense: in the first place it will develop a vast quantity of physical
force–cleaving the water in all directions with considerable rapidity
by means of the vibrations of the long filament or cilium.
Nor is the amount of chemical energy which the little creature
possesses less striking. It is a perfect laboratory in itself, and it
will act and react upon the water and the matters contained therein;
converting them into new compounds resembling its own substance, and at
the same time giving up portions of its own substance which have become
effete.
Furthermore, the Euglena will increase in size; but this increase is by
no means unlimited, as the increase of a crystal might be. After it has
grown to a certain extent it divides, and each portion assumes the form
of the original, and proceeds to repeat the process of growth and
division.
Nor is this all. For after a series of such divisions and subdivisions,
these minute points assume a totally new form, lose their long
tails–round themselves, and secrete a sort of envelope or box, in
which they remain shut up for a time, eventually to resume, directly or
indirectly, their primitive mode of existence.
Now, so far as we know, there is no natural limit to the existence of
the Euglena, or of any other living germ. A living species once
launched into existence tends to live for ever.
Consider how widely different this living particle is from the dead
atoms with which the physicist and chemist have to do!
The particle of gold falls to the bottom and rests–the particle of
dead protein decomposes and disappears–it also rests: but the
_living_ protein Matthew Gilbert Middle School Jacksonville Florida mass neither tends to exhaustion of its forces nor
to any permanency of form, but is essentially distinguished as a
disturber of equilibrium so far as force is concerned,–as undergoing
continual metamorphosis and change, in point of form.
Tendency to equilibrium of force and to permanency of form, then, are
the characters of that portion of the universe which does not live–the
domain of the chemist and physicist.
Permalink
05.30.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:51 am by admin
Mayor in his speech, when he not obscurely hinted–and most justly
hinted–that in dealing with this question there are other matters than
technical education, in the strict sense, to be considered.
It would be extreme presumption on my part if I were to attempt to tell
an audience of gentlemen intimately acquainted with all Hollywood Cosmetology Center branches of
industry and commerce, such as I see before me, in what manner the
practical details of the operations that we propose are to be carried
out. I am absolutely ignorant both of trade and of commerce, and upon
such matters I cannot venture to say a solitary word. But there is one
direction in which I think it possible I may be of service–not much
perhaps, but still of some,–because this matter, in the first place,
involves the consideration of methods of education with which it has
been my business to occupy myself during the greater part of my life;
and, in the second place, it involves attention to some of those broad
facts and laws of nature with which it has been my business to acquaint
myself to the best of my ability. And what I think may be possible is
this, that if I succeed in putting before you–as briefly as I can, but
in clear and connected shape–what strikes me as the programme that we
have eventually to carry out, and what are the indispensable conditions
of success, that that proceeding, whether the conclusions at which I
arrive be such as you approve or as you disapprove, will nevertheless
help to clear the course. In this and in all complicated matters we
must remember a saying of Bacon, which may be freely translated thus:
“Consistent error is very often vastly more useful than muddle-headed
truth.” At any rate, if there be any error in the conclusions I shall
put before you, I will do my best to make the error perfectly clear and
plain.
Now, looking at the question of what we want to do in this broad and
general way, it appears to me that it is necessary for us, in the first
place, to amend and improve our system of primary education in such a
fashion as will make it a proper preparation for the business of life.
In the second place, I think we have to consider what measures may best
be adopted for the development to its uttermost of that which may be
called technical skill; and, in the third place, I think we have to
consider what other matters there are for us to attend to, what other
arrangements have to be kept carefully in sight in order that, while
pursuing these ends, we do not forget that which is the end of civil
existence, I mean a stable social state without which all other
measures are merely futile, and, in effect, modes of going faster to
ruin.
Permalink
05.28.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:11 am by admin
But now let me turn to another point, or rather to two other points,
with which I propose to occupy myself. How far does the experience of
the last fourteen years justify the estimate which I ventured to put
forward of the value of scientific culture, and of the share–the
increasing share–which it must take in ordinary education? Happily, in
respect to that matter, you need not rely upon my testimony. In the
last Platt College-okc Central Campus half-dozen numbers of the “Journal of Education,” you will find a
series of very interesting and remarkable papers, by gentlemen who are
practically engaged in the business of education in our great public
and other schools, telling us what is doing in these schools, and what
is their experience of the results of scientific education there, so
far as it has gone. I am not going to trouble you with an abstract of
those papers, which are well worth your study in their fulness and
completeness, but I have copied out one remarkable passage, because it
seems to me so entirely to bear out what I have formerly ventured to
say about the value of science, both as to its subject-matter and as to
the discipline which the learning of science involves. It is from a
paper by Mr. Worthington–one of the masters at Clifton, the reputation
of which school you know well, and at the head of which is an old
friend of mine, the Rev. Mr. Wilson–to whom much credit is due for
being one of the first, as I can say from my own knowledge, to take up
this question and work it into practical shape. What Mr. Worthington
says is this:–
“It is not easy to exaggerate the importance of the information
imparted by certain branches of science; it modifies the
whole criticism of life made in maturer years. The study has
often, on a mass of boys, a certain influence which, I think, was
hardly anticipated, and to which a good deal of value must be
attached–an influence as much moral as intellectual, which is
shown in the increased and increasing respect for precision of
statement, and for that form of veracity which consists in the
acknowledgment of difficulties. It produces a real effect to find
that Nature cannot be imposed upon, and the attention given
to experimental lectures, at first superficial and curious only,
soon becomes minute, serious, and practical.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I could not have chosen better words to
express–in fact, I have, in other words, expressed the same conviction
in former days–what the influence of scientific teaching, if properly
carried out, must be.
But now comes the question of properly carrying it out, because, when I
hear the value of school teaching in physical science disputed, my
first impulse is to ask the disputer, “What have you known about it?”
and he generally tells me some lamentable case of failure. Then I ask,
“What are the circumstances of the case, and how was the teaching
carried out?” I remember, some few years ago, hearing of the head
master of a large school, who had expressed great dissatisfaction with
the adoption of the teaching of physical science–and that after
experiment. But the experiment consisted in this–in asking one of the
junior masters in the school to get up science, in order to teach it;
and the young gentleman went away for a year and got up science and
taught it. Well, I have no doubt that the result was as disappointing
as the head-master said it was, and I have no doubt that it ought to
have been as disappointing, and far more disappointing too; for, if
this kind of instruction is to be of any good at all, if it is not to
be less than no good, if it is to take the place of that which is
already of some good, then there are several points which must be
attended to.
Permalink
05.26.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:31 pm by admin
Ask the man who is investigating any question, profoundly and
thoroughly–be it historical, philosophical, philological, physical,
literary, or theological; who is trying to make himself master of any
abstract subject (except, perhaps, political economy and geology, both
of which are intensely Anglican sciences), whether he is not compelled
to read half a dozen times as many German as English books? And
whether, of these English books, more than one in ten is the work of a
fellow of a college, or a professor of an English university?
Is this from any lack of power in the English as compared with the
German mind? The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert
Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no further back than the
contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a
suggestion. England can show now, as she has been able to show in every
generation since civilisation spread over the West, individual men who
hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of
her intellectual eminence.
But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are in virtue of
their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character which
will not recognise impediments. They are not trained in the courts of
the Temple of Science, but storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts
of irregular ways, and with much loss of time and power, in order to
obtain their legitimate positions.
Our universities not only do not encourage such men; do not offer them
positions, in which it should be their highest duty to do, thoroughly,
that which they are most capable of doing; but, as far as possible,
university training shuts out of the minds of those among them, who are
subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in the world for
which they are specially fitted. Imagine the success of the attempt to
still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by
putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry
of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose!
Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to
persuade such men that the education which leads to perfection in such
elegances is alone to be called culture; while the facts of history,
the process of thought, the conditions of moral and social existence,
and the laws of physical nature are left to be dealt with as they may
by outside barbarians!
It is not thus that the German universities, from being beneath notice
a century ago, have become what they are now–the most intensely
cultivated and the most productive intellectual corporations the world
has ever seen.
The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes and of
professors University Montana-helena College Technology a fair picture of the world of knowledge. Whatever he needs
to know there is some one ready to teach him, some one competent to
discipline him in the way of learning; whatever his special bent, let
him but be able and diligent, and in due time he shall find distinction
and a career. Among his professors, he sees men whose names are known
and revered throughout the civilised world; and their living example
infects him with a noble ambition, and a love for the spirit of work.
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