Page:Essays in Science and Philosophy.djvu/17

 mental points of view — philosophical and sociological — diverged, and so with different interests our collaboration came to a natural end.

At the close of the University session, in the summer of 1910, we left Cambridge. During our residence in London, we lived in Chelsea, for most of the time in Carlyle Square. Wherever we went, my wife’s æsthetic taste gave a wonderful charm to the houses, sometimes almost miraculously. The remark applies especially to some of our London residences, which seemed impervious to beauty. I remember the policeman who saw a beautiful girl let herself into our house in the early hours after midnight. She had been presented at Court and had then gone to a party. The policeman later enquired of our maid whether he had seen a real person or the Virgin Mary. He could hardly believe that a real person in a lovely dress would be living there. But inside there was beauty.

During my first academic session (1910-1911) in London I held no academic position. My Introduction to Mathematics dates from that period. During the sessions from 1911 to the summer of 1914, I held various positions at University College, London, and from 1914 to the summer of 1924 a professorship at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in Kensington. During the later years of this period I was Dean of the Faculty of Science in the University, Chairman of the Academic Council which manages the internal affairs concerned with London education, and a member of the Senate. I was also Chairman of the Council which managed The Goldsmith’s College, and a member of the Council of the Borough Polytechnic. There were endless other committees involved in these positions. In fact, participation in the supervision of London education, University and Technological, joined to the teaching duties of my professorship at the Imperial College constituted a busy life. It was made possible by the marvellous efficiency of the secretarial staff of the University.

This experience of the problems of London, extending for fourteen years, transformed my views as to the problem of higher education in a modern industrial civilization. It was then the fashion — not yet extinct — to take a narrow view of the function of Universities. There were the Oxford and Cambridge type, and the German type. Any other type was viewed with ignorant contempt. The seething mass of artisans seeking intellectual enlightenment, of young people from every social grade craving for adequate knowledge, the variety of problems thus introduced—all this was a new factor in civilization. But the learned world is immersed in the past.

The University of London is a confederation of various institutions of different types for the purpose of meeting this novel problem of modern life. It had recently been remodelled under the influence of Lord Haldane, and was a marvellous success. The group of men and women — business men, lawyers, doctors, scientists, literary scholars, administrative heads of departments — who gave their time, wholly or in part, to this new problem