Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/549

Rh time for the examination and sifting of the immense piles of fact that constitute the great bodies of knowledge.

The professor is an interpreter. He receives, transforms, and transmits. If he is a professor of science, he interprets the world of nature. If he is a professor of art, he interpret's ideals of beauty. Without his services, art and science would be to the general run of mankind "a mere arrangement of colors, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins"—to use a phrase from Stevenson. If he is a historian, he interprets the past, and the present in the light of the past. If he is a professor of literature or philosophy, he interprets the wisdom, the emotion, and the conduct of human experience. He is a mediator between his own generation and generations gone. He bridges the chasm between the modern and the ancient, the quick and the dead. He is the lens that gathers and brings to a focus the thousand rays of knowledge. He is second only to the artist in helping the race to remember what it has done, and how, and why, and to what purpose. The artist made the records; the professor of liberal arts interprets them.

And the professor of liberal arts is not an interpreter only. He is an apostle. There is an intellectual life, as there is a spiritual, to enter which ye must be born again. The professor is the priest of this life. His great ambition is to bring minds into the intellectual kingdom. He guides, inspires, converts, baptizes, ministers. Outwardly, he is concerned with concrete instruction; in reality, he is much more concerned with the quickening of the mind. The kingdom of the intellectual is within you. To say it once more, the professor's calling is inspirational. If at any time inspiration fails him, nothing so makes him unhappy, nothing is so missed by his students. The tongues of men and angels can not make up for it.

There is a still larger service of the intellectual expert upon which the public rarely reflects. The college professor has a function and a duty beyond the class room, beyond his community, beyond his state. To put it in a word, it is the college professor, first of all, who is responsible for the intellectual standard of the world.

The direct personal contact of the professor with his students is of course one means of his contributing to the world's intellectual ideals. Through the scattering abroad of alumni his ideas are disseminated and his spirit communicated to society in general. But this is only one means.

It is in taking for granted that this indirect contact with the world is all, that the unreflecting are most mistaken. The college professor's work must not be thought of too much in terms of recitation room and students. The professorial class has its ways of reaching the world at large directly as well as indirectly. The liberal arts professor contributes to the intellectual life of his own community in the lectures and