Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/65

 courses and equipment for the highest instruction, and that can hope to draw from their own and from other colleges a sufficient constituency of pupils already trained in a thorough secondary education, should strive to develop themselves into universities. Large means for scientific research—libraries, museums, observatories, etc.—are indispensable for this development. A complement of professional schools, with their faculties, is also, if not indispensable, at least highly important. I venture to assert that not more than a half-dozen (?) universities should be developed in the entire country during the next generation, and that no new institutions to bear that name should, on any grounds whatever, be founded.

It is within lines such as I have drawn above, and by keeping in view the right high ideal while also grasping with a firm hand the hard practical conditions and limitations of the ideal, that the American university should be developed. All the details no man need undertake to arrange beforehand with authority. But every effort may guard against certain errors. And on this point let us recall the significant saying of Lotze: "There are no errors which take such firm hold of men's minds as those in which inexactness of thought and lofty feeling combine to produce a condition of enthusiastic exaltation."