of ridicule. No doubt, in these speculations there is much to repel the modern thinker. Icarus-like these idealists sought the the proximity of the sun with wings fastened by wax, while we like Antaeus draw our strength from the soil under our feet. But the bold systems pretending to penetrate into the very holy of holies of life and being and becoming were the response to a human need, to an unstilled yearning of the human soul, which cannot rest satisfied until it owns, or imagines that it owns, the one key solving all the riddles of self and world. This yearning is the mother of all mythology, all religion, and—all science. In the "brilliant failures" of the German metaphysical system-architects is dominant again the faith in man and his freedom, the protest against overstrained tradition and authority, the autocracy of the book and the master. The modern German university has remained true to the spirit animating from the days of the Reformation its lustrous career. As long as scholasticism wielded the scepter in our American colleges, the German university could not but be the blessed Mecca for the young and ambitious among us thirsting for freedom and opportunity. To those that in body or in the spirit made this pilgrimage, we owe on this side of the ocean the dismantling of the citadel of scholasticism, garrisoned in our methods and institutions. They have, in tearing down the Chinese wall of authority and book worship to make room for man in American education, won for America a new independence. Germany and Europe today are no longer the only shrines the young scholar must visit. His own country has erected and equipped the arsenals where he may wield his knightly armor.
As long as the book, the precedent, and tradition were the exclusive solicitude, knowledge was repetition, and facts and definitions in whatever order amassed and memorized stood not merely for the scaffolding of science but for science itself. The teacher was, indeed, merely the medium to transmit facts, which he himself had learned from another. The moment the supremacy of man over facts and books is conceded the teacher's mission, in whatever school he may be placed, changes. With
