Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/184

172 themselves to the special study of theology and jurisprudence. Like Melanchthon, Kant also taught single branches from textbooks, as was the strict custom, and held recitations and disputations in addition to his lectures. It was still a schoolmaster's teaching. Only the grammatical and rhetorical branches, with the lessons in the Greek and Roman authors, which formed the principal subjects of Melanchthon's lectures, had fallen away. They were no longer among the most important departments in the universities of the eighteenth century, partly because they had become superfluous through the greater amplitude of the preparatory course in the schools, and partly because classical instruction had declined in importance and esteem.

The difference between this and the present German university instruction is apparent on a comparison of the two. The present teaching has entirely abandoned the schoolmasterly character. It aims no more at a general training, but is special, scientific. Mathematics and science are no longer taught by philosophers to hearers of all these faculties, but by specialists to specialists. The ancient writers are not read—as three hundred years ago by Melanchthon and one hundred years ago by Heyne in Göttingen and Ernesti in Leipsic to the general hearers, for the sake of general training and cultivation, but to philological students for the purpose of inducting them into the technics of the scientific treatment of the text. The name of Fr. A. Wolf, who is given the credit of having raised ancient knowledge to an independent study, marks this revolution. The closest reminders of the old conditions are the lessons called philosophical and a few historical lectures, including the history of literature and art, at which hearers are gathered from the different faculties, and the completion and deepening of the general training is more prominently sought than induction into special studies. The tendency to a transformation is, however, visible here too plainly in History, in which the lectures and still more the accompanying exercises have already the character of professional, special instruction. Signs of the change are beginning to be visible, too, in the philosophical teaching. Psychology, especially, is tending to isolate itself as a special field of scientific investigation. It is further worthy of remark that the faculties have reversed their relation to this branch within the nineteenth century. While formerly the teaching in the philosophical faculty was mostly elementary and general, it is now divided into many branches, and is predominantly special and professional. While in the other faculties the first thing regarded is the preparation of practitioners for their calling as doctors, clergymen, and lawyers—a point that can never wholly be lost sight of the teaching in the philosophical faculty is various, as if the training of specialists or technicalists