Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/392

386 Pattison, from whom I learned that the method of science is one with the method of true scholarship; of Henry Nettleship, whose width of view in academic matters aided those of us who were struggling against prerogative and prejudice in London; of York Powell, who taught me that a study of history is incomplete if it pass by the great biological factors which make for the rise and fall of nations; of Eaphael Weldon, whose life culminated in Oxford, and whose activity will, I trust, continue to bear fruit here—of Weldon who taught us that biology is ripe for receiving aid from the exact sciences; who, breaking down yet another barrier, emphasized the unity of logical method throughout the whole field of knowledge.

The calm, critical judgment of these men, their scorn, one and all, for the rhetorical, the superficial, the idola of the market-place, have built up my Gentile conception of Oxford and given me a not unwholesome fear of an Oxford audience. Their keen power of sympathy, however, their very intense, if much repressed, national spirit—amounting to the truest form of patriotism—would, I believe and trust, have been not wholly withdrawn from me to-day in my endeavor to put before you the claims of this new science of mankind.

I do not demand your attention for this new field of inquiry because a university is expected to embrace all sciences. On the contrary, I do it partly because I think the success of a university, as of an individual, depends largely on specialization in study. Now there is one form of technical education, which, although Oxford is too modest to give it a name, has yet been largely claimed for this university. I refer to the education of statesmen and administrators. There is need, I venture to hold, of a more conscious recognition of the existence of a school of statecraft, and that recognition must involve a fuller study of what can make and what can mar national life and racial character. We are told by a poet, who, understanding the spirit of his age, carefully balanced himself on the fence which separates the field of true insight from that of conterminous platitude, that "the proper study of mankind is man." But he has not helped us to see wherein this proper study of man consists. In all our universities there are branches of study which deal more or less directly with man. We have philosophy with its discussions of man's mental processes, ethics with the consideration of man's affections, passions and conduct; Fichte, Hegel and other ethical philosophers have given us, here and there, luminous ideas, flash-lights on society and state. But has philosophy, as such, taught us a single law by aid of which we can understand how a nation becomes physically or mentally more vigorous? Has it taught our statesmen to make their folk fitter for its task on the world-stage, or helped a race to meet a crisis in its history? We have had other branches of the science of man, measuring him, classifying him by his hair, by his skin or by his skull. Yet anthropometry and craniometry