ducational system of a country the university stands out as the
apex, the culminating and crowning point of its intellectual life. For,
as the college course develops the studious and acquisitive powers of the
mind, the university course has in view its creative and formative
powers. "Glorious to most are the days of life in a great school," says
Morley, "but it is at college that aspiring talents enter into their own
inheritance." "It is the function of education in the highest sense, to
teach man that there are latent in him possibilities beyond what he has
dreamed of, and to develop in him capacities of which without contact
with the highest learning, he had never become aware." (Haldane.) We may
well call the university "the brains of a nation." It equips the student
with standards and tests of objective truth. . . . It makes him dig down
to the bed-rock on which truth in its various manifestations rests. . . .
Universities are indeed the nurseries of the higher life, the living
sources from which knowledge and culture flow in abundant streams. They
do the thinking for the teeming masses who have neither the leisure nor
the opportunity to think for themselves and who live on that mental
atmosphere we call "public opinion." From the heights of our
universities, ideas and principles gradually filter down into the lower
strata of the nation. The novel, the Sunday supplement, the stage, the
cinema screen--these post-graduate courses of the working man--are
popularizing to-day the theories and ideals that were yesterday honoured
in our secular institutions of higher education. It may take time,
perhaps centuries, for this process of intellectual filtration; but
ideas, like the stream, are bound to follow the incline of the water-shed.

If the change that takes place in the mind and conscience of the
individual is a slow and subtle process, what should we not expect when
there is question of a nation? Yes, the process is slow but it is sure.
The permeation of evolutionism into every domain of human thought is a
recent and most striking illustration of it. This fact stands out
conspicuously on the pages of history. "Lord Acton's view of history,"
said Shane Leslie, "was that ideas, not men or events, made the
differences between one era and the next." The mind is always the storm
centre of revolutions, the breeding ground of the most conflicting
theories. The great storms that sweep over humanity always gather