Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/186

174 men who advance science and form schools constitute the fame of a university. The course in England and France was different from that which matters took in Germany and the countries under German influence. To be high schools for general training has continued till the present time to be the chief end of the English universities, and it was the same in France till the Revolution destroyed the old forms. This condition is connected in part with the fact that in those centralized countries the great scientific institutions in London and Paris answer for the new work of scientific research, while in divided Germany the scientific societies are still relatively unimportant, or have been from the first only annexes of universities, as they all are in fact; and partly with the differences in the internal constitution of the universities, the philosophical faculties having in the western countries almost vanished with the public lectures, and instruction having drawn back into the colleges and assumed within them a scholastic form. Under these infiuences the entrance of the new philosophy was obstructed. In Germany, on the other hand, the middle-age colleges died out and the philosophical faculties remained with their public instruction, to appear now as the organs with which the new scientific and philosophical life was taken up.

The operation of this change in the scientific world by which university teaching, and especially teaching in the philosophical faculty, was divested of its scholastic features and given a purely scientific character, was supplemented by secondary causes. First among these was the development of the old Latin school into the gymnasium. This change, begun in the second half of the eighteenth century, was completed in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The present gymnasium differs from the old Latin school by its giving, besides the linguistic and literary course, a course of considerable extent in mathematics, science, history, and geography. Thereby the philosophical faculty departed in a measure from its old work; for the entering student who now comes to the university when about twenty years old, instead of about his eighteenth year, turns at once to the study of his professional branch, with the intention of concluding the necessary scientific training with his abiturient examination. Besides this class the lectures in history, philosophy, and the history of art were heard only by the attendants of the philosophical and theological faculties and occasional guests from the other faculties.

The result was that the philosophical faculty was able and had to change its course of instruction. General and elementary teaching in languages and science was no longer demanded as before. The teacher could presume more, because the pupils brought more with them. A new scientific calling has been