Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/183

Rh young men from fifteen to twenty years of age a general scientific training. It fulfilled this purpose by explaining, in what were called lectures, text-books containing the recognized material of knowledge, and practicing the students in recitations and exercises. This method still continues in English and American colleges.

No essential change from this method took place in the sixteenth century. The purpose of the philosophical faculty, as Melanchthon understood it, was quite the same, except that classical instruction was added to that in science and philosophy. Completion with a literary and philosophical course of the general scientific training, which began with the grammatical and rhetorical course in the lower schools, was the aim of the teaching which Melanchthon gave at Wittenberg for two and forty years. It was school teaching in scholastic form, so far as certain conditions permitted. So it was Melanchthon's custom to question his pupils in the lessons at the beginning of the hour. The declamations and disputations which he held were likewise pure school exercises. He boasted once in his old age of himself and his friend Camerarius, that they had spent their whole lives in the lowliness of the school, in the vita scholastica, in order to serve youth and fair knowledge. A change in the general constitution of the university began with a constant increase in the members of the "higher faculties"—the theological and juridical—for the completion of the university course was more and more held up as a qualification for priestly and secular office. The form, however, of the instruction was still not essentially changed from that of the philosophical faculty. It consisted in the transmission of a teaching of a still fixed substance, only that the hearers were of a greater average age. Connected with this was the dying out of the middle-age form of life; and from the scholar has been developed since the seventeenth century the student.

These conditions lasted without change into the eighteenth century. An instructive study of Kant's career as a teacher has recently appeared. It resembled Melanchthon's in all essentials, and, like him, Kant also lectured as before him Christian Wolff lectured in Halle, upon all the philosophical sciences—on mathematics and physics, logic and metaphysics, ethics and natural law, besides anthropology and physical geography, and once on mineralogy. Like Melanchthon, Kant also had as hearers young persons, not who studied a little mathematics or physics as their special branch, but who sought chiefly at the university the completion of their general training, in order afterward to apply