The Higher Learning in America E-Book

Thorstein Veblen

• Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 476

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Thorstein Veblen's 'The Higher Learning in America' is a critical examination of the state of higher education in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Veblen scrutinizes the prevailing practices of universities, highlighting the commercialization of education and the influence of capitalism on academia. Written in a straightforward and incisive style, Veblen's work is a mix of sociological critique and economic analysis, shedding light on the inner workings of educational institutions. The book serves as an important commentary on the role of education in shaping society and the impact of economic forces on intellectual pursuits. Veblen's observations remain relevant today, making 'The Higher Learning in America' a timeless piece of scholarship. Veblen, a renowned economist and social critic, was known for his groundbreaking work on the theory of the leisure class and conspicuous consumption. His sharp insights and unflinching critique of societal norms set him apart as a pioneering thinker of his time. Veblen's background in economics and sociology likely influenced his perspective on the intersection of education and capitalism, leading to the writing of this seminal work. For readers interested in the history of higher education, the influence of capitalism on academia, and the societal implications of educational systems, 'The Higher Learning in America' is a must-read. Veblen's keen observations and analytical prowess make this book a valuable resource for understanding the complex dynamics at play in the world of higher learning. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

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Thorstein Veblen

The Higher Learning in America

Enriched edition. A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Joel Foster

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Edited and published by Musaicum Press, 2017

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Synopsis

Historical Context

The Higher Learning in America

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Notes

Introduction

Table of Contents

At its core, The Higher Learning in America confronts the uneasy collision between the disinterested search for knowledge and the managerial imperatives of modern business. Thorstein Veblen examines how universities, devoted to inquiry and instruction, organize themselves around pecuniary standards and administrative display. He does not treat higher education as a sanctuary but as an institution embedded in a commercial society, vulnerable to its habits and ambitions. The book’s argument is less a lament than a diagnosis of structural pressures reshaping academic life. By tracking how priorities shift from scholarship to oversight, Veblen invites readers to ask what purposes universities can pursue when governed by the logic of enterprise.

First published in 1918, this work belongs to the tradition of social and institutional criticism, set within the landscape of early twentieth-century American higher education. Veblen, an economist and social theorist, writes not as a nostalgic insider but as a skeptical analyst of organizational behavior. The era he surveys had seen expanding enrollments, growing endowments, and the rise of powerful administrative offices in universities across the United States. Against this background, he considers how governance, finance, and public reputation shape the aims of advanced study. The volume stands as a historically grounded appraisal rather than a policy manual, attentive to causes more than prescriptions.

As a reading experience, the book presents a sustained inquiry rather than a narrative, proceeding through careful definitions, comparative examples, and a steady, sometimes caustic, tone. Veblen’s voice blends dry irony with methodological patience, moving from general principles to institutional particulars without haste. The style rewards attentive reading: sentences build layered distinctions between learning, training, and publicity, while the argument retains a firm economic vocabulary. Readers encounter a critique that is exacting yet restrained, skeptical of grand claims yet unafraid to name recurrent patterns. The result is a work that feels both anchored in its moment and startlingly transferable to later academic debates.

Central to Veblen’s analysis is the changing balance of authority on campus, especially the ascent of trustees, presidents, and professional managers who import business routines into scholarly domains. He traces how budget rules, administrative schedules, and ceremonial practices can reorder scholarly time and symbolic priorities. Alongside governance, he examines the roles of publicity and intercollegiate athletics in cultivating prestige, donors, and popular attention. The inquiry does not hinge on personalities; it concerns systems, incentives, and the language institutions use to justify themselves. Without reducing universities to corporations, he asks how corporate habits recalibrate the standards by which research, teaching, and reputation are judged.

Across these chapters, themes emerge that remain visible today: competition for status, measurement for its own sake, and the gradual substitution of market signals for scholarly criteria. Veblen considers how endowments, buildings, and pageantry may function as signs to external audiences while diverting energy from inquiry. He probes the tension between research as an open-ended pursuit and education as credentialed preparation for occupations. The analysis suggests that when prestige and revenue dominate, knowledge can become a secondary effect of institutional strategy rather than its guiding motive. Readers will recognize in this portrait an early anatomy of what later discussions call academic managerialism.

Another constant concern is the autonomy of scholars and the conditions required for sustained, disinterested work. Veblen scrutinizes how oversight over curriculum, laboratories, and appointments can tilt inquiry toward immediate usefulness or publicity, narrowing the space for patient investigation. He differentiates scholarly norms from administrative discretion, emphasizing how small procedural shifts alter the character of a research university. While the book refrains from sentimentalizing the past, it insists that institutional design either protects or erodes academic freedom in practice. The discussion is less about heroic individuals than about the quiet, cumulative effects of rules, schedules, and incentives upon intellectual life.

Why does this century-old critique still matter? Because it clarifies questions that animate contemporary debates over universities: What is the purpose of higher learning, and who decides? Readers navigating issues of commercialization, branding, intercollegiate sport, and the governance of research will find Veblen’s diagnostics persistently relevant. The book offers no simple verdicts; rather, it equips readers with a vocabulary for noticing how organizations alter scholarly ends. Approached with patience, it provides an exacting mirror for current institutions and a reminder that the defense of inquiry depends not on ideals alone but on the structures that make those ideals workable.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

The Higher Learning in America (1918) by Thorstein Veblen is a sustained analysis of the organization and culture of United States universities. Treating higher education as a social institution, Veblen examines how business ideals and competitive norms shape places nominally devoted to scholarship and science. He traces the rise of large universities that compete for students, funds, and prestige, and foregrounds the tensions that follow from that competition. The study sets a central contrast between disinterested inquiry and managerial imperatives, asking how far the latter remakes instruction and research. Veblen proceeds by surveying governance, finance, publicity, curricula, and everyday academic routines.

Veblen begins by clarifying the historic aims of the higher learning: cumulative inquiry, rigorous workmanship tested by peers, and the training of future investigators. He distinguishes this enterprise from general cultural instruction, noting that American institutions commonly blend undergraduate teaching, professional preparation, and research under one roof. That mixture, he argues, requires an organization that protects the exacting standards of science and scholarship. Yet the same institutions also seek visibility and growth, accumulating students, departments, and symbols of status. From the outset, then, the book poses a question: can a competitive, multi-purpose university maintain primary allegiance to disciplinary norms?

He then turns to governance. Boards, presidents, and expanding administrative offices increasingly adopt corporate methods of control, budgeting, and publicity. Centralized authority encourages policies that prize measurable gains in enrollment, income, and public attention. In such an environment, faculty deliberation yields to executive decision, and the internal criteria of scholarly communities have less leverage over institutional priorities. Veblen tracks how managerial habits influence curriculum design, staffing, and the distribution of funds, rewarding enterprises that bolster reputation. The resulting policy environment aligns universities with market-like competition among peers rather than with the slow, cumulative, and often opaque processes of advanced inquiry.

The study next considers the standardization of academic work. Administrative interest in tidy schedules, credits, grades, and degrees promotes quantifiable throughput and comparability across institutions. These uniform measures can supplant the substantive demands of disciplinary training, encouraging formal compliance over mastery. Curricular flexibility is managed to hold enrollments and meet external expectations, yet may fragment the coherent sequences required for research competence. Catalog clarity, accreditation-like benchmarks, and interinstitutional comparisons facilitate competition but narrow the space for organic development under the authority of expert practitioners. In Veblen’s account, such routines privilege appearance and speed over the patient craft of learning.

Financing receives sustained attention. Endowments, gifts, tuition, and public appropriations shape priorities through incentives and oversight. Donor preferences and the quest for visibility foster investments in conspicuous facilities and in professional schools that promise immediate utility. Universities cultivate alumni loyalty and broad publicity; intercollegiate athletics, ceremonials, and pageantry function as promotional tools to attract attention and funds. These practices can secure resources but also divert money and focus from work that yields slow, cumulative results. Veblen places such activities within an economy of prestige, where signs of prosperity and growth stand as proxies for merit, regardless of their bearing on scientific productivity.

The effects on faculty and students are assessed in detail. Staff are drawn into routines that emphasize teaching volume, administrative conformity, and institutional promotion, leaving less protected time for sustained investigation. Appointment and advancement reflect institutional strategies and public standing as much as scholarly judgment, exposing researchers to nonacademic pressures. For students, organized campus life is mobilized to reinforce loyalty and spectacle, while classroom work is governed by efficiency and vocational expectations. The combined result, Veblen argues, is a drift toward expedient outcomes and away from the apprenticeship of exacting inquiry, with the university’s intellectual core only partially sheltered.

Without prescribing a single blueprint, the book closes by specifying conditions under which higher learning can thrive: insulation from pecuniary control, collegial authority, and support oriented to long horizons rather than immediate returns. It warns that treating universities as competitive enterprises risks displacing their defining purposes. The broader significance of Veblen’s analysis lies in articulating how administrative habits, finance, and publicity reshape knowledge-making. Its questions about commercialization, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy continue to resonate. By tracing the everyday mechanisms through which business ideals enter the academy, the work offers a durable framework for judging reforms while leaving outcomes for readers to weigh.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Thorstein Veblen wrote against the backdrop of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American higher education was expanding rapidly. Land-grant colleges founded under the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 multiplied public institutions oriented to agriculture and the mechanical arts. At the same time, the German research university model, introduced most notably at Johns Hopkins (1876), reshaped graduate study and laboratory science. Harvard under Charles W. Eliot popularized the elective system, signaling a move away from fixed classical curricula. This mixed landscape—public service mandates alongside research specialization—frames Veblen’s scrutiny of how universities balanced learning with institutional growth and public expectations.

Private philanthropy and corporate wealth decisively influenced universities’ structures and priorities. The University of Chicago (1890) was built on John D. Rockefeller’s largesse and governed by a powerful board of trustees. Leland and Jane Stanford endowed Stanford University (1885; opened 1891), closely overseeing its direction. National foundations—the General Education Board (1902, Rockefeller) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1905)—channeled funds and set standards, including pension systems for faculty. Such donors and trustees, often industrialists and financiers, exercised oversight through budgeting and policy. Veblen’s critique emerges amid this consolidation of control by “business men” whose managerial priorities shaped academic agendas.

An administrative revolution cast university presidents as executive managers. William Rainey Harper’s rapid expansion at Chicago, Charles W. Eliot’s long tenure at Harvard, and Nicholas Murray Butler’s centralized stewardship at Columbia exemplified the era’s scale and pace. The broader Progressive Era “efficiency” movement, later crystallized in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911), legitimized cost accounting, publicity bureaus, and measurable outputs in public institutions. Universities adopted hierarchical structures, enrollment targets, and fundraising campaigns modeled on corporate practice. Veblen wrote amid this managerial ascendancy, questioning how executive power, public relations, and budget logic converged to redefine academic work and institutional purpose.

Simultaneously, academic professions and research standards tightened. The Association of American Universities (1900) formed to uphold graduate training and research benchmarks, while the College Entrance Examination Board (1900) coordinated standardized admissions testing among elite colleges. The Hatch Act (1887) had already established agricultural experiment stations, embedding research within land-grant universities. Graduate programs proliferated, laboratory facilities expanded, and disciplinary societies codified norms. These developments elevated scholarly specialization and output, but also increased dependence on centralized funding and metrics. Veblen assesses how such professionalization—while advancing knowledge—risked subordinating inquiry to administrative controls and reputational strategies tied to sponsorship and endowments.

Controversies over academic freedom sharpened concerns about governance. In 1900, sociologist Edward A. Ross resigned from Stanford after objections by Jane Stanford to his public positions on immigration and corporate power—a national cause célèbre highlighting trustee influence over faculty. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) formed in 1915 and issued its Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure the same year, launching investigations into dismissals at multiple institutions. These episodes underscored the vulnerability of scholars in systems dominated by boards and donors. Veblen’s analysis reflects this climate, probing how institutional authority can discipline dissent and steer curricula toward acceptable, marketable ends.

Intercollegiate athletics, especially football, became a focal point for prestige and revenue. A crisis over injuries and deaths in 1905 drew the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt; reform meetings led to the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (1906), renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910. Gate receipts, alumni enthusiasm, and campus identity amplified pressures to invest in teams, coaches, and facilities. Veblen examines athletics as a public-relations apparatus that courts donors and students, interrogating whether spectacle and institutional advertising overshadow the disinterested pursuit of knowledge that universities claim as their core mission.

World War I intensified the entanglement of universities with state and corporate priorities. After U.S. entry in 1917, campuses hosted the Student Army Training Corps (1918) and redirected research toward wartime needs, while loyalty demands narrowed space for dissent. At Columbia, psychologist James McKeen Cattell was dismissed in 1917 after urging opposition to conscription in letters to Congress. Veblen’s book, published in 1918 after earlier private circulation, appeared amid these pressures, capturing prewar trends and their wartime acceleration. The context illustrates how external imperatives—national service, funding contingencies, and public scrutiny—could reinforce administrative controls over academic life.

Veblen, a Norwegian American economist and social critic who taught at Chicago, Stanford, and Missouri, drew on direct experience with the modern university. Drafted around 1904 and published in 1918 as The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, the work coins memorable labels for administrators and probes the effects of philanthropy, marketing, athletics, and vocational drift on scholarship. It crystallizes Progressive Era anxieties about efficiency and democratic governance, arguing that managerial and reputational imperatives can “sabotage” inquiry. The book’s critique reflects its era’s institutional transformations while inviting enduring debate about academic purpose.

The Higher Learning in America

Main Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter I. Introductory

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Chapter II. The Governing Boards

Chapter III. The Academic Administration and Policy

Chapter IV. Academic Prestige and the Material Equipment

Chapter V. The Academic Personnel

Chapter VI. The Portion of the Scientist

Chapter VII. Vocational Training

Chapter VIII. Summary and Trial Balance

Preface

Table of Contents

It is something more than a dozen years since the following observations on American academic life were first assembled in written form. In the meantime changes of one kind and another have occurred, although not such as to alter the course of policy which has guided American universities. Lines of policy which were once considered to be tentative and provisional have since then passed into settled usage. This altered and more stable state of the subject matter has permitted a revision to avoid detailed documentation of matters that have become commonplace, with some resulting economy of space and argument. But, unhappily, revision and abridgment carries its own penalties, in the way of a more fragmentary presentation and a more repetitious conduct of the argument; so that it becomes necessary to bespeak a degree of indulgence on that ground.

Unhappily, this is not all that seems necessary to plead in extenuation of recurrent infirmities. Circumstances, chiefly of a personal incidence, have repeatedly delayed publication beyond what the run of events at large would have indicated as a propitious date; and the same circumstances have also enjoined a severer and more repressive curtailment in the available data. It may not be out of place, therefore, to indicate in the most summary fashion what has been the nature of these fortuitous hindrances.

In its earlier formulation, the argument necessarily drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago[1], under the administration of its first president. As is well known, the first president's share in the management of the university was intimate, masterful and pervasive, in a very high degree; so much so that no secure line of demarcation could be drawn between the administration's policy and the president's personal ruling. It is true, salient features of academic policy which many observers at that time were inclined to credit to the proclivities of Chicago's first president, have in the later course of things proved to belong to the impersonal essence of the case; having been approved by the members of the craft, and so having passed into general usage without abatement. Yet, at the time, the share of the Great Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy could scarcely have been handled in a detached way, as an impersonal phenomenon of the unfolding historical sequence. The personal note was, in fact, very greatly in evidence.

And just then, presently, that Strong Man's life was brought to a close. So that it would unavoidably have seemed a breach of decorum to let these observations seek a hearing at that time, even after any practicable revision and excision which filial piety would enjoin. Under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum, there seemed nothing for it but a large reticence.

But swiftly, with the passage of years, events proved that much of what had appeared to be personal to the Great Pioneer was in reality intrinsic to the historical movement; so that the innovations presently lost their personal colour, and so went impersonally to augment the grand total of human achievement at large. Meanwhile general interest in the topic had nowise abated. Indeed, discussion of the academic situation was running high and in large volume, and much of it was taking such a turn -- controversial, reproachful, hortatory, acrimonious -- that anything in the way of a temperate survey should presumably have been altogether timely.

But fortuitous circumstances again intervened, such as made it seem the part of insight and sobriety again to defer publication, until the colour of an irrelevant personal equation should again have had time to fade into the background. With the further passage of time, it is hoped that no fortuitous shadow will now cloud the issue in any such degree as to detract at all sensibly from whatever value this account of events and their causes may have.

This allusion to incidents which have no material bearing on the inquiry may tolerantly be allowed, as going to account for a sparing use of local information and, it is hoped, to extenuate a degree of reserve and reticence touching divers intimate details of executive policy.

It goes without saying that the many books, papers and addresses brought out on the academic situation have had their share in shaping the essay. More particularly have these various expressions of opinion and concern made it possible to take many things for granted, as matter of common notoriety, that would have appeared to require documentation a dozen or fifteen years ago, as lying at that time still in the field of surmise and forecast. Much, perhaps the greater bulk, of the printed matter issued on this head in the interval has, it is true, been of a hortatory or eloquently optimistic nature, and may therefore be left on one side. But the academic situation has also been receiving some considerable attention with a view to getting an insight into what is going forward. One and another of these writers to whom the present essay is in debt will be fond referred to by name in the pages which more particularly lean on their support; and the like is true for various utterances by men in authority that have been drawn on for illustrative expressions. But a narrow scrutiny would doubtless make it appear that the unacknowledged indebtedness greatly exceeds what so is accredited and accounted for. That such is the case must not be taken as showing intentional neglect of the due courtesies. March 1916.

In the course of the past two years, while the manuscript has been lying in wait for the printer, a new situation has been forcing itself on the attention of men who continue to take an interest in the universities. On this provocation a few paragraphs have been added, at the end of the introductory chapter. Otherwise there appears to be no call for a change in the general argument, and it has not been disturbed since the earlier date, which is accordingly left as it stands.

June 1918.

Chapter I. Introductory: The Place of the University in Modern Life

Table of Contents

I

Table of Contents

In any known civilization there will be found something in the way of esoteric knowledge[1q]. This body of knowledge will vary characteristically from one culture to another, differing both in content and in respect of the canons of truth and reality relied on by its adepts. But there is this common trait running through all civilizations, as touches this range of esoteric knowledge, that it is in all cases held, more or less closely, in the keeping of a select body of adepts or specialists -- scientists, scholars, savants, clerks, priests, shamans, medicinemen -- whatever designation may best fit the given case.

In the apprehension of the given society within which any such body of knowledge is found it will also be found that the knowledge in question is rated as an article of great intrinsic value, in some way a matter of more substantial consequence than any or all of the material achievements or possessions of the community. It may take shape as a system of magic or of religious beliefs, of mythology, theology, philosophy or science. But whatever shape it falls into in the given case, it makes up the substantial core of the civilization in which it is found, and it is felt to give character and distinction to that civilization.

In the apprehension of the group in whose life and esteem it lives and takes effect, this esoteric knowledge is taken to embody a systematization of fundamental and eternal truth; although it is evident to any outsider that it will take its character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the group, from the institutions with which it is bound in a web of give and take. Such is manifestly the case in all the historic phases of civilization, as well as in all those contemporary cultures that are sufficiently remote from our everyday interests to admit of their being seen in adequate perspective. A passably dispassionate inquiry into the place which modern learning holds in modern civilization will show that such is also the case of this latest, and in the mind of its keepers the most mature, system of knowledge. It should by no means be an insuperably difficult matter to show that this "higher learning" of the modern world, the current body of science and scholarship, also holds its place on such a tenure of use and wont, that it has grown and shifted in point of content, aims and methods in response to the changes in habits of life that have passed over the Western peoples during the period of its growth and ascendancy. Nor should it be embarrassingly difficult to reach the persuasion that this process of change and supersession in the scope and method of knowledge is still effectually at work, in a like response to institutional changes that still are incontinently going forward.1

To the adepts who are occupied with this esoteric knowledge, the scientists and scholars on whom its keeping devolves, the matter will of course not appear in just that light; more particularly so far as regards that special segment of the field of knowledge with the keeping and cultivation of which they may, each and several, be occupied. They are, each and several, engaged on the perfecting and conservation of a special line of inquiry, the objective end of which, in the view of its adepts, will necessarily be the final and irreducible truth as touches matters within its scope. But, seen in perspective, these adepts are themselves to be taken as creatures of habit, creatures of that particular manner of group life out of which their preconceptions in matters of knowledge, and the manner of their interest in the run of inquiry, have sprung. So that the terms of finality that will satisfy the adepts are also a consequence of habituation, and they are to be taken as conclusive only because and in so far as they are consonant with the discipline of habituation enforced by that manner of group life that has induced in these adepts their particular frame of mind.

Perhaps at a farther remove than many other current phenomena, but none the less effectually for that, the higher learning takes its character from the manner of life enforced on the group by the circumstances in which it is placed. These constraining circumstances that so condition the scope and method of learning are primarily, and perhaps most cogently, the conditions imposed by the state of the industrial arts, the technological situation; but in the second place, and scarcely less exacting in detail, the received scheme of use and wont in its other bearings has its effect in shaping the scheme of knowledge, both as to its content and as touches the norms and methods of its organization. Distinctive and dominant among the constituent factors of this current scheme of use and wont is the pursuit of business, with the outlook and predilections which that pursuit implies. Therefore any inquiry into the effect which recent institutional changes may have upon the pursuit of the higher learning will necessarily be taken up in a peculiar degree with the consequences which an habitual pursuit of business in modern times has had for the ideals, aims and methods of the scholars and schools devoted to the higher learning.

The Higher Learning as currently cultivated by the scholars and scientists of the Western civilization differs not generically from the esoteric knowledge purveyed by specialists in other civilizations, elsewhere and in other times. It engages the same general range of aptitudes and capacities, meets the same range of human wants, and grows out of the same impulsive propensities of human nature. Its scope and method are different from what has seemed good in other cultural situations, and its tenets and canons are so far peculiar as to give it a specific character different from these others; but in the main this specific character is due to a different distribution of emphasis among the same general range of native gifts that have always driven men to the pursuit of knowledge. The stress falls in a somewhat obviously different way among the canons of reality by recourse to which men systematize and verify the knowledge gained; which is in its turn due to the different habituation to which civilized men are subjected, as contrasted with the discipline exercised by other and earlier cultures.

In point of its genesis and growth any system of knowledge may confidently be run back, in the main, to the initiative and bias afforded by two certain impulsive traits of human nature: an Idle Curiosity[2], and the Instinct of Workmanship[3].2

In this generic trait the modern learning does not depart from the rule that holds for the common run. Men instinctively seek knowledge, and value it. The fact of this proclivity is well summed up in saying that men are by native gift actuated with an idle curiosity, -- "idle" in the sense that a knowledge of things is sought, apart from any ulterior use of the knowledge so gained.3 This, of course, does not imply that the knowledge so gained will not be turned to practical account. In point of fact, although the fact is not greatly relevant to the inquiry here in hand, the native proclivity here spoken of as the instinct of workmanship will unavoidably incline men to turn to account, in a system of ways and means, whatever knowledge so becomes available. But the instinct of workmanship has also another and more pertinent bearing in these premises, in that it affords the norms, or the scheme of criteria and canons of verity, according to which the ascertained facts will be construed and connected up in a body of systematic knowledge. Yet the sense of workmanship takes effect by recourse to divers expedients and reaches its ends by recourse to varying principles, according as the habituation of workday life has enforced one or another scheme of interpretation for the facts with which it has to deal.

The habits of thought induced by workday life impose themselves as ruling principles that govern the quest of knowledge; it will therefore be the habits of thought enforced by the current technological scheme that will have most (or most immediately) to say in the current systematization of facts. The working logic of the current state of the industrial arts will necessarily insinuate itself as the logical scheme which must, of course, effectually govern the interpretation and generalizations of fact in all their commonplace relations. But the current state of the industrial arts is not all that conditions workmanship. Under any given institutional situation, -- and the modern scheme of use and wont, law and order, is no exception,workmanship is held to a more or less exacting conformity to several tests and standards that are not intrinsic to the state of the industrial arts, even if they are not alien to it; such as the requirements imposed by the current system of ownership and pecuniary values. These pecuniary conditions that impose themselves on the processes of industry and on the conduct of life, together with the pecuniary accountancy that goes with them -- the price system have much to say in the guidance and limitations of workmanship. And when and in so far as the habituation so enforced in the traffic of workday life goes into effect as a scheme of logic governing the quest of knowledge, such principles as have by habit found acceptance as being conventionally salutary and conclusive in the pecuniary conduct of affairs will necessarily leave their mark on the ideals, aims, methods and standards of science and those principles and scholarship. More particularly, standards of organization, control and achievement, that have been accepted as an habitual matter of course in the conduct of business will, by force of habit, in good part reassert themselves as indispensable and conclusive in the conduct of the affairs of learning. While it remains true that the bias of workmanship continues to guide the quest of knowledge, under the conditions imposed by modern institutions it will not be the naive conceptions of primitive workmanship that will shape the framework of the modern system of learning; but rather the preconceptions of that disciplined workmanship that has been instructed in the logic of the modern technology and sophisticated with much experience in a civilization in whose scheme of life pecuniary canons are definitive.

The modern technology is of an impersonal, matter-of-fact character in an unexampled degree, and the accountancy of modern business management is also of an extremely dispassionate and impartially exacting nature. It results that the modern learning is of a similarly matter-of-fact, mechanistic complexion, and that it similarly leans on statistically dispassionate tests and formulations. Whereas it may fairly be said that the personal equation once -- in the days of scholastic learning -- was the central and decisive factor in the systematization of knowledge, it is equally fair to say that in later time no effort is spared to eliminate all bias of personality from the technique or the results of science or scholarship. It is the "dry light of science" that is always in request, and great pains is taken to exclude all color of sentimentality.

Yet this highly sterilized, germ-proof system of knowledge, kept in a cool, dry place, commands the affection of modern civilized mankind no less unconditionally, with no more afterthought of an extraneous sanction, than once did the highly personalized mythological and philosophical constructions and interpretations that had the vogue in the days of the schoolmen.

Through all the mutations that have passed over this quest of knowledge, from its beginnings in puerile myth and magic to its (provisional) consummation in the "exact" sciences of the current fashion, any attentive scrutiny will find that the driving force has consistently been of the same kind, traceable to the same proclivity of human nature. In so far as it may fairly be accounted esoteric knowledge, or a "higher learning," all this enterprise is actuated by an idle curiosity, a disinterested proclivity to gain a knowledge of things and to reduce this knowledge to a comprehensible system. The objective end is a theoretical organization. a logical articulation of things known, the lines of which must not be deflected by any consideration of expediency or convenience, but must run true to the canons of reality accepted at the time. These canons of reality, or of verity, have varied from time to time, have in fact varied incontinently with the passage of time and the mutations of experience. As the fashions of modern time have come on, particularly the later phases of modern life, the experience that so has shaped and reshaped the canons of verity for the use of inquiring minds has fallen more and more into the lines of mechanical articulation and has expressed itself ever more unreservedly in terms of mechanical stress. Concomitantly the canons of reality have taken on a mechanistic complexion, to the neglect and progressive disuse of all tests and standards of a more genial sort; until in the off-hand apprehension of modern men, "reality" comes near being identified with mechanical fact, and "verification" is taken to mean a formulation in mechanical terms. But the final test of this reality about which the inquiries of modern men so turn is not the test of mechanical serviceability for human use, but only of mechanistically effectual matter-of-fact.

So it has come about that modern civilization is in a very special degree a culture of the intellectual powers, in the narrower sense of the term, as contrasted with the emotional traits of human nature. Its achievements and chief merits are found in this field of learning, and its chief defects elsewhere. And it is on its achievements in this domain of detached and dispassionate knowledge that modern civilized mankind most ingenuously plumes itself and confidently rests its hopes. The more emotional and spiritual virtues that once held the first place have been overshadowed by the increasing consideration given to proficiency in matter-of-fact knowledge. As prime movers in the tide of civilized life, these sentimental movements of the human spirit belong in the past, -at least such is the self-complacent avowal of the modern spokesmen of culture. The modern technology, and the mechanistic conception of things that goes with that technology, are alien to the spirit of the "Old Order." The Church, the court, the camp, the drawing-room, where these elder and perhaps nobler virtues had their laboratory and playground, have grown weedy and gone to seed. Much of the apparatus of the old order, with the good old way, still stands over in a state of decent repair, and the sentimentally reminiscent endeavors of certain spiritual "hold-overs" still lend this apparatus of archaism something of a galvanic life. But that power of aspiration that once surged full and hot in the cults of faith, fashion, sentiment, exploit, and honor, now at its best comes to such a head as it may in the concerted adulation of matter-of-fact.

This esoteric knowledge of matter-of-fact has come to be accepted as something worth while in its own right, a self-legitimating end of endeavor in itself, apart from any bearing it may have on the glory of God or the good of man. Men have, no doubt, always been possessed of a more or less urgent propensity to inquire into the nature of things, beyond the serviceability of any knowledge so gained, and have always been given to seeking curious explanations of things at large. The idle curiosity is a native trait of the race. But in past times such a disinterested pursuit of unprofitable knowledge has, by and large, not been freely avowed as a legitimate end of endeavour; or such has at any rate been the state of the case through that later segment of history which students commonly take account of. A quest of knowledge has overtly been rated as meritorious, or even blameless, only in so far as it has appeared to serve the ends of one or another of the practical interests that have from time to time occupied men's attention. But latterly, during the past few generations, this learning has so far become an avowed "end in itself" that "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" is now freely rated as the most humane and meritorious work to be taken care of by any enlightened community or any public-spirited friend of civilization.

The expediency of such "increase and diffusion" is no longer held in doubt, because it has ceased to be a question of expediency among the enlightened nations, being itself the consummation upon which, in the apprehension of civilized men, the advance of culture must converge. Such has come to be the long-term common sense judgment of enlightened public opinion. A settled presumption to some such effect has found lodgment as a commonplace conviction in the popular mind, in much the same measure and in much the same period of time as the current body of systematic knowledge has taken on the character of matter of fact. For good or ill, civilized men have come to hold that this matter-of-fact knowledge of things is the only end in life that indubitably justifies itself. So that nothing more irretrievably shameful could overtake modern civilization than the miscarriage of this modern learning, which is the most valued spiritual asset of civilized mankind.