Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/551

Rh is ignorant. The state that attempts to follow his counsel is stupidly, even if unintentionally, illiberal and uncivic.

As to whether the advancement of learning and the elevation of the intellectual standard constitute a benefit to the state, any one who has read of dark ages and ages of enlightenment, or is acquainted with cultivated men and ignorant, or has lived in intellectual and intellectless centers, may settle the question for himself. It is the difference between running water and the stagnant pool.

And further, as to the uses of advanced scholarship in the liberal arts. The public is familiar with the absurdities of the dry-as-dust professor, and takes great credit to itself when it more or less goodhumoredly tolerates him. It does not stop to think that the books and articles and lectures which are its own sole means of intelligent thinking about the past and present of nature and mankind are possible only because of the patience and devotion of those same dry-as-dust professors, who have searched out the details of fact from which enlightened conclusions could be drawn. It does not stop to think that knowledge has always proceeded from above downward—which is only another way of saying that not all men can be leaders, and that progress is always a matter of leadership.

Least of all does the public stop to think, while clamoring for the practical and discouraging the liberal arts, that pure learning, learning for the mere satisfaction of the learner, has always preceded applied learning. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but pure science has always been its father, and pure science is dependent for its spirit upon the household of pure learning.

There is still another aspect of the liberal arts professor. So far, it is his active side that we have considered. But his contribution to society lies not only in the services of teacher and scholar. It lies also. in his personal qualities. More than the members of almost any other profession or class, he contributes by Being, as well as by Doing.

With the college professor, too. Being is not, as it is in the case of most professions, an accident. It is a duty strictly required of him. The college professor must be clean-lipped and clean-hearted, honest and honorable. In what other calling, except the ministry, does a single instance of scandal involve immediate dismissal? The world is as strict with the college professor as with priest or pastor. "If a man desire the office of professor, he must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous. Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil."