Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m TEUE AND FALSE STANDARDS OF GRADUATE WORK1 We need not stop to prove at the outset of this dis- ' cussion that the literal arts and sciences are and must be the central and regulative part of every true uni- versity. This body of studies alone, taken in its en- tirety, presents us with the nearest approach to a system of pure knowledge of universal value, ever improving, self-renewing, growing slowly clearer, more complete from age to age. It represents to us, as no other body of studies can, the sum of things best worth knowing by men whose object is to follow truth for its own sake, not as a means for obtaining a living, nor for social and political gain, but for the sake of ordering their lives in accordance with the highest ends. It was not without some glimpse of this truth that mediaeval letters referred to the uni- versities of Paris and Oxford as " the two eyes of Christendom," nor was it without like insight some 1 Read in Chicago, Friday, March 31,1905, at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the North Central Association of Colleges aad Secondary Schools. of the oldest university documents began with the phrase: " We seek the pearl of knowledge, of great price, in the field of liberal studies." And what was thus true of universities at their birth has been true in every generation down to our own time and is evidenced in many ways—as, for instance, in the fine declaration of Hofmann in his address as Rector of the University of Berlin, wherein he figured the liberal knowledge enshrined in the Philosophical Faculty as " the Palladium of the Ideal." And so it is. Watch the wavering fortunes of university history. No deterioration in the purity and strength of intellectual standards has taken place without affecting injuriously these studies. No great wave of comme... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.