Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/191

Rh of this sort. This is especially true of the gymnasium. The deepest and most lasting effects, as history illustrated in biographies, attests, do not proceed from teachers most eminent in drill and persistence, but from those who lead an inner, intellectual life continuously refreshed and renewed by scientific work. The pupils have a fine appreciation of their teacher and his method. Thorough scholarship and earnest participation in scientific research have assured and always will assure the teacher particular respect in the eyes of his pupils; and many a student has first been inoculated with the taste for the intellectual, inconspicuous though it may have seemed to him, by the view of such a life. It is further true in other learned professions that nothing more firmly fortifies one against the depressing moments that are strange to no calling than a steady interest in science. More than anything else, engagement with concerns of theory operates against the falling into the purely business way of viewing things which apparently threatens to degrade such professions as those of medicine and law.

Thus, we can not see harm of any kind in the direction of university instruction toward scientific research; on the contrary, the purer and deeper the theoretical interest which our students carry into life from the university the better for them and for the business they engage in.

If, however, there is danger—and I believe the fear is not without some foundation—of the power of our universities as teaching institutions declining, we may look for the cause in accompanying conditions. Among these is one existing in direct connection with scientific research—the ever-increasing division of labor and specializing. This is in itself unavoidable. Specializing is here and everywhere a condition of stimulated productiveness. We can not go back to the universality of studies which was possible in antiquity and the middle ages and down into the eighteenth century. With specializing is associated a danger. The splitting up of work into scattering, minute, and often petty study of details weakens the general human interest in science. The immediate interest in knowledge is directed to the whole, to philosophy, from which connected knowledge on all subjects, divine and human, is expected. The long labor of the mind through thousands of years, of which our research is supposed to be the continuation, began with the seeking of the Greeks for a theory of the universe. In the eighteenth century, in the age of Leibnitz, Kant, and Wolff, it was still the object; all scientific work was for a "world-wisdom"—for a view of the nature and meaning of the world and life. Many have now forgotten this, and in the pursuit of little single details have lost sight of the end. Indeed, some are proud of knowing nothing of this; they