14 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
came has never since been taken away. But we have played tricks with it; 
we have defracted it, distinguishing the lines of its spectrum with an 
extreme nicety exceeding that of the Rowland grating, and so have brought 
upon ourselves a New Ignorance. In our desire to differentiate its rays we 
have forgotten to know the sun in its entirety—its power to illuminate, to 
quicken and expand. Knowledge has lost its synthesis, and lies with its 
colors torn apart, dissolved. That New Learning, which saw knowledge 
whole, shattered the feudal system of society ; this New Ignorance, which 
likes knowledge piecemeal and in weak solution, has created a feudal sys- 
sem of learning. There is no common mastery, but everywhere separate 
baronies of knowledge, where a few strong men rule and many ignorant 
men are held vassals—men ignorant of the freedom of more perfect, more 
liberal knowledge. We need a freer constitution of learning. Its present 
constitution only makes it certain that we shall have disorder and wasteful 
war. To come to the matter immediately in hand, see to how many sub- 
jects the student of medicine must turn if he would master his single prac- 
tical art. It 1s impossible he should understand the physical life of man 
without understanding the physical life of the universe. He may not 
wisely stop short of the widest ranges of biology. And yet the physical 
life of man is made distinctive, after all, by his singular mental life. He 
may imagine himself into distemper and disease, and the physician will 
lose trace of causes of great moment to his own art if he know nothing of 
the laws of the mind—of physiological psychology not only, but of pure 
psychology too. Ie cannot get this range of knowledge in the medical 
school ; he must get it from an antecedent liberal education ; and it will 
be sheer misfortune for him, even as a practical man, if that antecedent 
raining bring him not out upon a plane of knowledge, a vantage ground 
of outlook and command, higher even and more invigorating than these 
special fields of science. The student of theology, it will be admitted, is 
out a poor pretender if no serious survey of other subjects precede and 
accompany his direct preparation for the ministry. He, of all men, must 
anderstand mankind if he is to lead them into better ways of living and 
:0 a death of hope. And how can he understand modern society without a 
cnowledge of the scientific standards and conceptions that condition all 
modern thought ? How can he understand any society without knowing 
aught of philosophy or politics or economy ? He will never reach any 
notive unless he learn to read men and their life. 
The student of law, too: what can he know but the forms and the 
;ricks of the law if he know nothing of the law’s rootage in society, the 
principles of its origin and development ; how it springs out of material 
and social conditions which it is the special task of economy and political 
science to elucidate, out of elements which run centuries deep into the 
history of nations ? No mere technical training can ever make a first- 
rate lawyer. Observe, I do not say jurist—that, of course. I say that no 
LIB? 
first-ra 
master: 
useless 
mand t 
sions n 
is the 1 
in the 
ing of 
the tec 
ble, fin 
All t 
to ever 
advanc 
get at 
ness ol 
tions. 
who h: 
am piri 
ministe 
and sti 
more 1 
“¢ liber 
opinio 
public, 
genera 
even § 
who ht 
is amc 
instruc 
endow 
man a 
equipr: 
the col 
mind, 
not or 
much 
In by « 
man o 
limitaf 
is ign 
The 
count: 
tion if 
oratic