were really implied in Aristotle, were, in fact, what Aristotle meant all the time, though it needed clever people like the lecturers to make this evident.
As the excessive authority of the old writers waned, it was permitted to the lecturers to set forth their own discoveries, and gradually it became the custom for men who had acquired great knowledge or made important discoveries to gather together to exchange their knowledge among themselves, and to communicate to ordinary students as much of their learning as the students were ready to take in. Thus we had the gradual growth of the universities. At first the students merely listened to the professors and wrote down as much of what they heard as enabled them to store it up and carry it away with them from the university. With this part of the professors' work we shall deal more fully in our next chapter. Here we are interested in the change that took place on the invention of printing and the multiplication of books. When a learned man could put all his knowledge into the form of a book there was no longer an absolute necessity for people to assemble at certain centres so as to gather the knowledge that fell from the lips of the professors. The book began to take the place of the teacher. This is what underlies Carlyle's saying that the modern university is a library.
So far as the communication of knowledge is concerned we may accept Carlyle's statement, though, as we have seen, there are other influences at work
[ 180 ]
