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Rh horsemen in the nightly pageant swinging the firebrands handed them to one another. To transmit to his pupils such light as he himself had received from his masters was esteemed the utmost scope of the teacher's professional obligation.

The emancipation of the American university from slavery to this prejudice was the final triumph over scholasticism, which defeated elsewhere had found its last refuge in our American school methods. The schoolman has implicit faith in books and authority. Knowledge for him is the acquisition of information established before. This view is involved in the very fundamental proposition of all scholasticism. Truth is a fixed quantity. To it nothing may be added, from it nothing can be detracted. Truth, in very fact, comes to man; he cannot come to and by it. Under the dominion of this idea, Moses and Aristotle, the Bible and the Organon became the taskmasters of all mediæval thought. Life and man dwindled away to a shadowy background while the "book," the "letter" loomed up in the foreground in gigantic stature. Tradition was the court of final appeal and precedent the peg to every tether. Christianity, Judaism, the Islam were alike under the spell; law and medicine no less than philosophy and theology were left to fret away their fresh impulses in the torture of a Procustes couch to which, under the despotism of the preestablished "truth" as found in the "books" by the surgery of casuistic dialectics "life" and "man" had to be fitted. Scholastic education emphasized books; the modern ideal—man. To restore to living man his birthright which the dead book had usurped, was the motive of the struggle which began when the age of the crusades and discoveries demonstrated by bringing men face to face with new facts, for which, in the scholastic scheme there was neither provision nor place, that the territory of truth embraced wider regions than the parchments of dead authorities had measured. The impulse given by the expeditions of the seafaring nations, to doubt the all-sufficiency of the schoolmen's dogma, and to replace memorizing and disputation by observation, acquired additional momentum in the tendencies leading up to the brilliant century of the Renaissance