Modern Scholarship and the American Tradition

Abstract

N EARLY every educated American, not too far on the sunny side of fifty, cherishes the memory of some venerable scholar, who still seems to him the embodiment of the richness and dignity of humane learning. There were many of them in America in the last century. They were not always productive scholars, in the modern sense, and not a few of them would find themselves at a sad disadvantage in the competitions of the academic world to-day. We can afford to smile, if we choose, at their old-fashioned methods, and we may certainly take pride in the fact that any smart young man, fresh from the modern graduate school, has a better grasp on the technique of investigation than they were ever able to achieve. Many of them, indeed, never made any original contribution to the sum of knowledge, and some of them never wrote a book. If they were to be judged strictly according to the standards that prevail to-day, they would hardly be considered worthy of a professor's chair; yet they gave a dignity to the profession of teaching in this country that it has not yet outlived, and what they were able to do to enrich the culture of an adolescent civilization can not even be assessed at its full value for another hundred years. The clear,