there are, I apprehend,
few persons with a cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the
ritualistic accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The
very great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
through the later course of the development is evident to any one
who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of the
learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation,
and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees,
dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a
scholarly apostolic succession. The usage of the priestly orders is
no doubt the proximate source of all these features of learned ritual,
vestments, sacramental initiation, the transmission of peculiar
dignities and virtues by the imposition of hands, and the like; but
their derivation is traceable back of this point, to the source from
which the specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished
from the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of
a temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural development
no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker. Their place in the
later phases of devout observance, as well as in the higher educational
system, is that of a survival from a very early animistic phase of the
development of human nature.

These ritualistic features of the educational system of the present and
of the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have their place primarily
in the higher, liberal, and classic institutions and grades of learning,
rather than in the lower, technological, or practical grades, and
branches of the system. So far as they possess them, the lower and less
reputable branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed
these things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence
among the practical schools, without the sanction of the continued
example of the higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable,
to say the least. With the lower and practical schools and scholars, the
adoption and cultivation of these usages is a case of mimicry--due to
a desire to conform as far as may be to the standards of scholastic
reputability maintained by the upper grades and classes, who have