Science and Citizenship
taming and domesticating him. In no other way, probably, can his disforestings and devastations be effectually stopped, and his destructive energies converted to more constructive ideals.
If we define a university as a degree-granting institution, then there are over 700 universities in the United States of America. It is the aspiration of every American city to possess its own university. The university is, in a sense, the cathedral—a somewhat truncated one doubtless—of the American city, and every citizen is unhappy until his city gets what he conceives to be its full complement of culture, in the possession of a university. Here as elsewhere the principle holds—cujus regio, ejus religio—and we may agree with Herder's saying, "that the school is the workshop of the spirit of God," provided we are allowed the proviso of defining the divine artificer as the God of that region. Minerva is building again her temples over the land, and nowhere more assiduously than in the United States.
These 700 to 800 American universities are, it is true, reduced to more modest dimensions in the impartial list of the Minerva Jahrbuch. The German compilers of this annual census of the academic world admit only 70 universities in the United States. This number compares with a list of 21 universities in Germany, 16 in France, 18 in Great Britain, 78 in the rest of Europe, and for the whole world 236.
How far may we accept a certain vague popular sentiment which attributes city rank to a town that
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