The emphasis is laid not so much upon
their function as schools for the supply of certain professional
services, but upon them as great national laboratories for the extension
of knowledge and the betterment of practice. In Great Britain, and
especially in Scotland, this conception of the function of the
University has not received the same prominence as, _e.g._, in Germany,
where the intimate union of scientific investigation and professional
instruction gives the German Universities their peculiar character.
Indeed, in the latter country the tendency at the present time is rather
to over-emphasise the function of the Universities in furthering
scientific and literary research to the neglect of the other and no less
important aim. Two dangers must be avoided. In the first place, whenever
the chief emphasis is laid upon the Universities as mainly schools for
professional training, the teaching tends to become narrow and dogmatic.
The teacher ceasing to be an investigator, gradually loses touch with
the spirit of the age, and as a consequence he fails adequately to
perform the duty of efficiently training his students for their after
life-work. In the second place, when the emphasis is laid strongly upon
the function of the University as an institution for the carrying on of
scientific and literary research there is the danger of again lapsing
into the old fallacy that knowledge for knowledge' sake is an end in
itself, that the object of education is to acquire and organise systems
of means which function in the attainment of no practical end, and that
the acquisition of knowledge is valuable for the culture of the
individual mind apart from any social purpose which the knowledge
subserves.

The University must therefore ever keep in view the two aims, of
advancing knowledge not for its own sake but in order that future action
may be rendered more efficient, and of adequately training for
professional services.

But to the older professions for which the University prepares there
have been added during the past century other vocations or professions
which need and demand an education no less important and no less
thorough than the education for the well established recognised
professions. The need for the higher training of the future leaders of
industry and the future captains of commerce has been provided by the
organisation and establishment of technological schools and colleges.
The establishment and organisation o