Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/608

602 measure for the quality of all the original work he does, and as our educational institutions, equipped with their splendid libraries, museums and laboratories, are the only places where men are supposed to give their entire time to knowing things and to training others to know, therefore the tone, as we say, of its universities, their attitude towards science, is the chief determining cause of the part any nation takes in adding to the sum of human knowledge and of human power; and therefore too it is properly expected of them that they shall seek the highest type of scholarship, and constantly maintain that peculiar environment that stimulates to creative work. The spirit of its community of course has more or less influence on the work of every university, but it is never of first importance, for each takes the institution in its midst for a model, and as no one rises to the level of his ideal, so too no community equals even in sterile scholarship, much less productive, that of its university. In the main this spirit of the community is but that of its own college reflected in a modified and enfeebled form. Of course there are good and bad reflectors, but everywhere the important thing is the quality and intensity of the central light. In fact the public, whose business is the making of money and the getting of bonds, can not be expected to be so enthusiastic about these higher things as are educational institutions whose very existence is for the development of brains and the training of hands, and therefore for some time to come the university is likely to remain, as it has been in the past, the source of much the greater part of all original knowledge, in spite of the fact that at present there is an increasing amount coming from governmental and from business laboratories, for both these latter, necessarily, are greatly restricted in their fields of operation. Business men wish conducted investigations that promise immediate financial returns to themselves, and investigators that do this class of work have something of the same restrictions thrown about them that hedge in the advertising poet whose inspiration is a special brand of soap; and mighty little of a first class order has ever come from either source. Government institutions, though allowing a greater latitude than do business firms in the investigations selected, often feel compelled to have for their object immediate returns that will encourage congress and the country to continue their support, and only too frequently does this lead to insistent calls for "copy," as though the investigator could submit at stated intervals original ideas and finished results with the same regularity that the farmer can raise a new crop of pumpkins. There remain the special laboratories of the Carnegie Institution that are an inspiration to all the world, but even here the investigator is not so free as is the university professor to follow whithersoever his tastes and his talents may lead, and, besides, even these laboratories have not the opportunity that the university has of fixing the lives of men, of molding public opinion and of determining the destiny of our country.