There is a narrow professional spirit which may grow up among men of
science, just as it does among men who practise any other special
business. But surely a University is the very place where we should
be able to overcome this tendency of men to become, as it were,
granulated into small worlds, which are all the more worldly for their
very smallness. We lose the advantage of having men of varied
pursuits collected into one body, if we do not endeavour to imbibe
some of the spirit even of those whose special branch of learning is
different from our own.
It is not so long ago since any man who devoted himself to geometry,
or to any science requiring continued application, was looked upon as
necessarily a misanthrope, who must have abandoned all human
interests, and betaken himself to abstractions so far removed from the
world of life and action that he has become insensible alike to the
attractions of pleasure and to the claims of duty.
In the present day, men of science are not looked upon with the same
awe or with the same suspicion.
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