And when one contemplates the band of recruits
added each year to the army of investigators, and the choice of ever
minuter fields--not to say lanes and alleys--of research, one is led to
doubt whether research is not one of the disintegrating forces of
society, and whether ever increasing specialisation must not mean a
perpetual narrowing of human sympathies in the intellectual leaders of
mankind. Both types of university appear to me to present the phenomena
of a country suffering from the effects of overproduction, where the
energies of workers had been concentrated upon adding to the sum of
wealth, and all too little attention had been given to the distribution
of that wealth through the different ranks of the community. Just at
this point the University Extension movement appears to recall academic
energy from production to distribution; suggesting that devotion to
physics, economics, art, can be just as truly shown by raising new
classes of the people to an interest in physical and economic and
aesthetic pursuits, as by adding to the discoveries of science, or
increasing the mass of art products. To the young graduate, conscious
that he has fairly mastered the teaching of the past, and that he has
within him powers to make advances, I would suggest the question
whether, even for the highest powers, there is any worthier field than
to work through University Extension towards the University of the
Future.
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