Education and the Good Life

judged by their papers. There is, however, one point of great importance. Every university teacher should be himself engaged in research, and should have sufficient leisure and energy to know what is being done in his subject in all countries. In[310] university teaching, skill in pedagogy is no longer important; what is important is knowledge of one’s subject and keenness about what is being done in it. This is impossible for a man who is overworked and nervously exhausted by teaching. His subject is likely to become distasteful to him, and his knowledge is almost sure to be confined to what he learnt in youth. Every university teacher ought to have a Sabbatical year (one in every seven), to be spent in foreign universities or in otherwise acquiring knowledge of what is being done abroad. This is common in America, but European countries have too much intellectual pride to admit that it is necessary. In this they are quite mistaken. The men who taught me mathematics at Cambridge were almost wholly untouched by the Continental mathematics of the previous twenty or thirty years; throughout my undergraduate time, I never heard the name of Weierstrass. It was only by subsequent travel that I came in contact with modern mathematics. This was no rare or exceptional circumstance. Of many universities at many periods similar things could be said. There is in universities a certain opposition between those who care most for teaching and those who care most for research. This is almost entirely due to a wrong conception of teaching, and to the presence of a number of[311] students whose industry and capacity are below the level which ought to be exacted as a condition of residence. The idea of the old-fashioned schoolmaster persists to some extent at universities. There is a desire to have a good moral effect on students, and a wish to drill them in old-fashioned worthless information, largely known to be false but supposed to be morally elevating. Students ought not to be exhorted to work, but they should not be allowed to remain if they are found to be wasting their time, whether from idleness or from lack of ability. The only morality which can be profitably exacted is that of work; the rest belongs to earlier years. And the morality of work should be exacted by sending away those who do not possess it, since evidently they had better be otherwise employed. A teacher should not be expected to work long hours at teaching, and should have abundant leisure for research; but he should be expected to employ this leisure wisely. Research is at least as important as education, when we are considering the functions of universities in the life of mankind. New knowledge is the chief cause of progress, and without it the world would soon become stationary. It could continue, for a time, to improve by the diffusion and wider use of existing knowledge, but this process, by itself, could[312] not last long. And even the pursuit of knowledge, if it is utilitarian, is not self-sustaining. Utilitarian knowledge needs to be fructified by disinterested investigation, which has no motive beyond the desire to understand the world better. All the great advances are at first purely theoretical, and are only afterwards found to be capable of practical applications. And even if some splendid theory never has any practical use, it remains of value on its own account; for the understanding of the world is one of the ultimate goods. If science and organization had succeeded in satisfying the needs of the body and in abolishing cruelty and war, the pursuit of knowledge and beauty would remain to exercise our love of strenuous creation. I should not wish the poet, the painter, the composer or the mathematician to be preoccupied with some remote effect of his activities in the world of practice. He should be occupied, rather, in the pursuit of a vision, in capturing and giving permanence to something which he has first seen dimly for a moment, which he has loved with such ardour that the joys of this world have grown pale by comparison. All great art and all great science springs from the passionate desire to embody what was at first an unsubstantial phantom, a beckoning beauty luring men away from safety[313] and ease to a glorious torment. The men in whom this passion exists must not be fettered by the shackles of a utilitarian philosophy, for to their ardour we owe all that makes man great.