Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/189

Rh When we inquire into the consequences of this situation to teaching, we begin to ask whether our universities have not declined as institutes for instruction; whether there is not danger, at least, that teaching will suffer from its combination with research; whether the professors are not disposed to neglect it in their zeal for investigation; and whether they are not too much inclined to draw their students to that side, with the result that the training for practical occupations is shortened. Are not our teachers and pastors, our jurists and officers, and even our doctors, too much devoted to theorizing and doctrine, and too little to life and reality; and do they not acquire this habit at the university? Are they not led by their teachers and by the customs into an exaggerated valuation of pure scientific work? And do not many come to regard practical work as something inferior, which they take up as a means of support only while the more distinguished career of the academy is for some cause inaccessible to them?

Fears of this kind, which are often expressed, are possibly not without ground; but I have another result to present of the association of research and teaching at our universities. I have already referred to it in an essay on the Nature of the German Universities, and content myself now with the repetition of two remarks made there: "According to the German idea the university professor is both a teacher and a scientific investigator, principally the latter, so that one may truly say that in Germany scientific investigators are at the same time the teachers of academic youth. This fixes the position of scientific men in the life of the German people. Our thinkers and investigators are known to us not merely from their writings, but face to face, as personal teachers. Men like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher labored during their lives before the public as teachers. So Kant, Christian Wolff, Heyne, and F. A. Wolf, as personal teachers of our people, trained its leaders and teachers. . . . The relation is undoubtedly advantageous to both. The German youth, who at the university come into immediate contact with the intellectual leaders of the people, receive there the deepest and most enduring stimulus. On the other side, the relation is delightful to our scientific men. They continue young in contact with youth; the personal exchange of thought acquires something moving and vivifying through the silent but intelligent reaction of the students which is lacking to the solitary writer. And if knowledge stands nearer to the hearts of the public in Germany than with other people, that also is connected with the fact that here the great men of science have always been, too, the personal teachers of the young men."

I think there are advantages which may well compensate us for the few embarrassments and disadvantages that may arise