Emil Gustav Hirsch

“ Radicalism shouts from the housetops the premature paean that religion afraid of science is dead. The Bible is beyond all criticism, is the anxious insistence of pseudo-conservatism; the Bible is not worth criticizing, is the retort of religion's unthinking foe. The dogmatism of the conservative produces the dogmatism of the radical. Ingersollism is the inevitable reaction against the bitterness of unscientific bibliolatry. The university does not exempt religion or Bible from methodical scientific investigation. Does it rob religion of her crown jewels or the Bible of her sparkling gems? ”

“ The scholar's influence must be for healthy growth. All half-truths, be they dear to the conservative or moulded by the radical, it is for it pitilessly to expose.
And have we not today a surfeit of half-truths urged by both conservatives and radicals as the cure-all for all our ills, social, financial or religious? Here is the opportunity of the American university. Shall we be silent when on the one hand conservatism makes of competition a fetich and radicalism would ignore the element of human freedom? ”

“ By whatever errors the history of Germany's pedagogical theories and practices may be fringed, however one-sided this or that emphasis may have been; in the steady pursuit of the one ideal, that education of whatever grade or character to be—education shall focus in living man and not in tradition and books, from the days of the Renaissance to this hour, German masters have led the van. The wonderful philology of Germany, child of the Renaissance and the Reformation, was fruit of the passion to learn to know man and to be man. ”

“ At the root of spurious conservatism is thought decayed; at that of pseudo-radicalism thought immature. Thought to keep fresh and to ripen is the mission of the university. Its hands are on the pulse of the age. It must detect the slackened beat of senility and apply its corrective as well as the intermittent throb of fevered impatience and administer the sedative. The hand on the dial of time can neither be arrested nor quickened in its steady progress. Pernicious conservatism would fain attempt the former; destructive radicalism is bent upon the latter. ”

“ It is natural for man to be religious as it is for him to breathe. But mark, nature which includes man and man that claims nature as falling within the range of his humanities, are concepts not connoted by the loose use of either term. But science cannot tolerate loose usage of words. Exactness is the prime condition of the scholar. True to the convictions that natura and homo, and even deus, are not irreconcilable antitheses, the American university realizes fully that as in the Father's house there are many mansions, so in culture's palace there are many living rooms. ”

“ But as the rill descends to the lowlands it must widen; it must meet the sister rivulets and open its arms to them; it must roll on through the plains and hurry to throw itself into the embrace of the ocean of humanity. In other words, the American scholar cannot be a recluse. ”

“ No lover of our country and its institutions but must have in his thoughtful moments taken notice of the flight of black-winged petrels foretelling the gathering of a storm. The danger which none may blink arises as much from an overdose of chlorals called conservatism as from too free an indulgence in nerve tonic, labeled radicalism. The demagogue is busy compounding his drugs; it is he that reaps the harvest, while we alternate between languor and paroxysms of fever. The conservatism of American institutions has often been commented on. ”

“ To search for new truths is also his obligation. Knowledge is not a fixed quantity. Her realm has no boundaries beyond which there is no need to push on. The university professor, and so is the university student, is the Columbus of unknown seas, the Livingstone of unvisited continents. What he knows, is for him an indication of what still remains unknown. What others have found, must always suggest to him that more things are hidden waiting for the explorer's eye!
The American university has in these days found this, to it so long denied, supreme opportunity. ”

“ The last decade of our century augurs so well for our nation because it proclaims the independence of the American university, as confidently as did the fourth quarter of the eighteenth compel recognition of the political autonomy of the republic by the nations of the earth. Independence, of course, can never be more than relative. Humanity whatever the complex manifestations of its teeming energies is organic. ”

“ Knowledge is not repetition but reproduction. The guide to the halls of learning has no other duty but to stimulate the energies of the mind confided to his leadership to reproduction. Method, the power to control facts, the means to discover facts, not the transmission of knowledge, is the ultimate design of all true teaching. This has always been the view of German pedagogics. In winning recognition for this elementary but all important conception, the American scholar has opened for himself another opportunity, admitting him to science's holy of holies. ”

“ Who shall speak the liberating and therefore the conciliating word of the full truth, if not he who is searching for it, who knows how to discriminate between the petrifaction of a former truth outstripped in the fuller life of today, and the hot-house exotic parading as truth as though it was the naturally blown flower—and will have none of either? ”

“ He is not allowed to forget that there is more in this life and to it than a digamma or a twin star; that men are more than consumers of salts and fats. But if by this happy union the scholar is saved from fossilization and ossification, the college student is as effectually protected against shallowness, the stagnation of routine, the ridiculous presumptiousness of sophomorism. The culture studies are as great a solicitude for the American university as are the specialities of the methodic scholar. In this the American is distinct from the European university. ”

“ In fact, American scientific men, whatever their speciality, on the watchtower of the night spying for the erratic brilliancy of the comet, in the bowels of the earth cross-examining into eloquence the petrified forests of antecedent aeons; in the laboratory counting the throbbings of the sun's heart, or taking the census of the population of a single drop of water—a micro-cosmos, allowing a peep into the very life-story of a planet, have even before documented the autonomy of the American scientific investigator. ”

“ According to an old legend, even God's revealing voice shaking Sinai's cloud-crowned peaks to the very foundations and waking the whole universe to responsive and awe-struck attention, clothed its one fundamental truth in as many dialects as found sound on human lips. Science, indeed, knows no geographical and no national boundaries. ”

“ Selfishness always engenders selfishness. Selfishness wears today too often the cloak of conservatism; it cannot be indignantly surprised that as frequently its own motives assumes as readily the livery of radicalism. The duty to mediate devolves clearly upon the trained minds and men who have learned to pierce beyond the selfish outer crust of interest to the inner kernel of principles. To the university primarily addresses itself today the admonition: Videant consules ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat. ”

“ In that sense their literatures will forever be great guides unto humanity. But their deficiencies in another sense shall not be minimized. A classic humanity is less than the humanity demanded by our age. Under wise limitations that experience suggests the gradus ad parnassum, access to the ladder on whose rounds the university guides the student to scale the heights of a cultured scholarship, is open to all from whatever angle of the broad plain the candidate may seek the privilege of participating in the ascent.
Yet another vital duty devolves upon the American university. ”

“ He who would be for American education the Jefferson to herald the liberating word and intone the birth song of a new freedom, will, consciously or unconsciously, pursue paths analogous to those which the framers and signers of the declaration of our political independence chose for their confession of faith. ”

“ But there are other fields and as rich ones which now attract the eye of the American scholar. In them he has already done much more than to glean the corners. The American scholar is no longer the poor wayfarer claiming the leavings under the old Mosaic poor laws. In philosophy and psychology he has made by no means mean contributions. Into archaeology and philology, which one would suppose to be the eminent domain of nations bordering on senility, the young giant of the West has taken mighty strides. ”

“ In the method to be pursued they are insistent today upon loyalty to the same principle. Their matter cannot constitute the essential and clashing distinctions. As man is vitally interested in understanding the home in which he lives, every natural science may be claimed for the humanities; but as again man is of nature's household, every function of his belongs to the domain of the natural sciences. Philology and philosophy are as legitimately natural sciences as are physiology or anatomy. History, literature, even religion, are not extra naturam, but in natura and per naturam. ”

“ The signs are multiplying that the ideal of the American university is beginning to take shape. While the creative week which is destined to mould it into perfect realization has by no means run its appointed length and is perhaps even not very far spent, yet the first day's formative "Let there be light!" ”

“ Guided by the experience of many generations, yet not blind to the changing needs of the new time, in the spirit of broad tolerance and of deep insight into the humanizing power of everything that man is concerned in, our American university has recognized the legitimacy of the claim that many paths lead to culture. ”

“ The emancipation of the American university from slavery to this prejudice was the final triumph over scholasticism, which defeated elsewhere had found its last refuge in our American school methods. The schoolman has implicit faith in books and authority. Knowledge for him is the acquisition of information established before. This view is involved in the very fundamental proposition of all scholasticism. Truth is a fixed quantity. To it nothing may be added, from it nothing can be detracted. Truth, in very fact, comes to man ”

“ Yet, I cannot hold with what would pass and pose for American conservatism, that the "foreigner" is the sole disturber of Israel. Were Ahab not sceptered and crowned among us, neither a native nor an alien Elijah could arise to prophesy the judgment. Microbes of plagues will work their deadly havoc only where the conditions favor their culture. We have become urban when one hundred years ago we were rural. Concentration of population in industrial centers is not an unmixed good. ”

“ Not how man grew but that he grew, and into what, is the fundamental consideration. The university is in this as in all other things constructive.
The researches in the department of our university with which I have the honor of being associated, bear directly upon questions which have agitated the conservative and aroused the radical. Our finds have not and could not have satisfied either. Truth we search for; half-truths we could not stop by the way to entertain.
False conservatism would take religion and its literature out of the reach of scientific investigation. ”

“ Old Rome and Greece rising from the tomb, and old Judea's literature once more addressing its appeal in its original tongue to a world craving for freedom, in opening to students access to the true thought of Aristotle and Moses and Jesus, wrested the scepter from the hands of the peripatetic and the prophets crippled, as was Jacob by the Angel, by Arab and other commentators. Rationalism and criticism are the next movements in the centuried symphony leading away from the prelude of formalism and literalism up to the fully orchestrated finale of emancipation. ”

“ Whatever the American university may and should share with the historic institutions of other lands, enough of its destiny and function is even now indicated to bring out in clear relief the lines along which its own peculiar possessions and possibilities must and will develop. It stands to reason that the American university cannot be a slavish replica of however perfect a European model. ”