Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/32

28 or scientific, or whatever else there may he, must give way to the needs of individual training. Ready-made clothing, even though it take the form of heroic uniform, does not guarantee a fit. The needs of modern life demand actual fitting. The best training is that best adjusted to our own individual needs.

I am told that Colorado College is one of those which aspires to be 'only a college,' a thoroughly good college of course, but that she has no thought of becoming a university. I do not learn this from my friend, Dr. Slocum, and I know that his ambition is boundless. But whether it be true or not, I am going to oppose the idea. She will be a university before you know it. This Palmer Hall may be offered in evidence that the college period is past. Colorado College has already become a university. A university in embryo, perhaps, if you like, but still with all the marks by which the university is known—as certain to become a university in fact, as a pine seedling on your royal hills is sure some day to become a pine tree.

A university in America is a place where men find their life-work, where men think lofty thoughts, where men test for themselves that which seems to be true, where men go up to the edge of things and look outward into the great unknown.

The university does not consist of colleges and departments, deans and dignitaries, rules and regulations. It is not a cluster of professional schools, nor even a group of graduate students. Its spirit is not measured by printed theses, by elaborate examinations, by the number of the hoods of black and gold its doctors are privileged to wear. Il i> measured by the animating spirit, the spirit of intellectual enterprise, of academic devotion. This spirit will in time create for itself the brick and stone, test-tubes and microscope, book and manuscripts, all the machinery with which a university must work.

In the development of an animal there is a subtle influence, which we can not measure, always at work, and working to the end that the embryo becomes at last that which from the first it was fated to become. We call this the influence of heredity, but to name it leaves more to be explained than there was before. In like fashion, the spirit of the university, the spirit of zeal and devotion, of beauty-loving and truth-fearing which is in Colorado College to-day will make the university an accomplished fact. Truth-fearing—there is no better phrase—truth-fearing is the spirit of the university.

There is no real difference between the American college and the university, and there will never be any. The lower achievement lead to the higher ambition. Many colleges are little, or weak, or lean or narrow universities; yet even the poorest of them may he hallowed by some one's devotion, ennobled by some one's scholarship. It is scholarship and devotion which, in the long run. make (he university.