full agreement with
him. "When I recall the memory of my own University life," he writes, "and
the impression which a man like Johannes Mueller, the professor of
physiology, made on us, I must set the highest value on the personal
intercourse with teachers from whom one learns how thought works in
independent heads. Whoever has come in contact but once with one or
several first-class men will find his intellectual standard changed for
life."

In English Universities, on the contrary, there is too little of academic
freedom. There is not only guidance, but far too much of constant personal
control. It is often thought that English undergraduates could not be
trusted with that amount of academic freedom which is granted to German
students, and that most of them, if left to choose their own work, their
own time, their own books, and their own teachers, would simply do
nothing. This seems to me unfair and untrue. Most horses, if you take them
to the water, will drink; and the best way to make them drink is to leave
them alone. I have lived long enough in English and in German Universities
to know that the intellectual fibre is as strong and sound in the English
as in the German youth. But if you supply a man, who wishes to learn
swimming, with bladders--nay, if you insist on his using them--he will use
them, but he will probably never learn to swim. Take them away, on the
contrary, and depend on it, after a few aimless strokes and a few painful
gulps, he will use his arms and his legs, and he will swim. If young men
do not learn to use their arms, their legs, their muscles, their senses,
their brain, and their heart too, during the bright years of their
University life, when are they to learn it? True, there are thousands who
never learn it, and who float happily on through life buoyed up on mere
bladders. The worst that can happen to them is that some day the bladders
may burst, and they may be left stranded or drowned. But these are not the
men whom England wants to fight her battles. It has often been pointed out
of late that many of those who during this century have borne the brunt of
the battle in the intellectual warfare in England, have not been trained
at our Universities, while others who have been at Oxford and Cambridge,
and have distinguished themselves in after life, have openly declared that
they attended hardly any lectures in college, or that they derived no
benefit from them. What can be the ground of that?