Page:Higher Learning In America, The (Veblen).djvu/63

Rh to rate high; or to include in the academic discipline various lines of inquiry and training which are extraneous to the higher learning but which the class in question may specially have at heart; but taking them one with another, there is no general or abiding consensus among the various classes of the community in favour of diverting the academic establishment to any other specific uses, or of including in the peculiar work of the university anything beyond the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

Now, it may be remarked by the way, that civilized mankind should have come so to set their heart on this chase after a fugitive knowledge of inconsequential facts may be little to the credit of the race or of that scheme of culture that so centres about this cult of the idle curiosity. And it is perhaps to their credit, as well as to the credit of the community whose creatures they are, that the spokesmen of some tangible ideal, some materially expedient aspiration, embodying more of worldly wisdom, are for ever urging upon the institutions of the higher learning one or another course of action of a more palpably expedient kind. But, for better or worse, the passage of time brings out the fact that these sober and sensible courses of policy so advocated are after all essentially extraneous, if not alien, to those purposes for which a university can be maintained, on the ground afforded by the habits of thought prevalent in the modern civilized community.

One and another of these "practical" and expedient interests have transiently come to the front in academic policy, and have in their time given a particular bent to the pursuit of knowledge that has occupied the universities. Of these extraneous interests the two most notable have, as already indicated above, been the