Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/185

Rh in scientific investigation were the single object. There is nothing to indicate that the students of these faculties expect to be called to practical teaching. The difference is plainest in the seminaries and in the exercises. In the higher faculties they aim at the preparation for practice; as in the clinic course of the medical schools, in the academical exercises in the juridical faculty, more strongly prominent of late, and in the theological drill. On the other hand, the seminaries have given the philosophical faculties the character of schools of scientific investigation—philological and historical, as well as scientific and mathematical; so that the dissertations come out even from them with a peculiar predominantly scientific character; while the scholastic exercises—the old declamations and disputations—have ceased.

When we ask for the causes of this change, the most decisive of them is found to be the great change which has come over the scientific self-consciousness of the modern world since the seventeenth century. The whole scientific course of the middle ages and down to the sixteenth century was the result of the presumption that knowledge was created in antiquity and was complete. Aristotle especially was regarded as the highest authority in matters of science; he was the philosopher; his writings were the canonical text-books which were transmitted to the universities, expounded and adopted by them. The authority of Aristotle was broken down and the new method founded by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Bacon, and Harvey. Science is not now supposed to be complete at hand, but must be created by our labor.

This new method began to penetrate university instruction in the eighteenth century. The young University of Halle first recognized the novel principle of the libertas philosophandi. The duty of the university teacher was not to transmit the familiar scholastic philosophy, but to exercise and cultivate independent thinking. The philosophy of Christian Wolff was the first free philosophy found in this school. The scholastic philosophy was supplanted by it in the German universities in the course of the eighteenth century. Its principle is independence in thought: nothing without sufficient reason. The Kantian philosophy began to dispute with it for the mastery at the end of the eighteenth century; but Kant stands, if possible, still more distinctly on the same ground—the ground of independent thought. The view now penetrates the whole of university life that knowledge is not a gift but a duty. The calling of a professor is, in the first place, to labor to produce it; and, second, to train the rising generation to the same work; the university becomes the workshop and nursery of scientific research. This is the view which has gradually gained prevalence in Germany since the last century; and the