It may be granted that the function of a university, as Newman here describes it, is not always realized; universities, like other human institutions, have their failures. But his words truly express the aim and tendency of the best university teaching. It belongs to the spirit of such teaching that it should nourish and sustain ideals; and a university can do nothing better for its sons than that; a vision of the ideal can guard monotony of work from becoming monotony of life. But there is yet another element of university training which must not be left out of account; it is, indeed, among the most vital of all. I mean that informal education which young men give to each other. Many of us, probably, in looking back on our undergraduate days, could say that the society of our contemporaries was not the least powerful of the educational influences which we experienced. The social life of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge is a most essential part of the training received there. In considering the questions of the higher education in South Africa it is well to remember that the social intercourse of young students, under conditions such as a great residential university might provide, is an instrument of education which nothing else can replace. And it might be added that such social intercourse is also an excellent thing for the teachers.
The highest education, when it bears its proper fruit, gives not knowledge only, but mental culture. A man may be learned, and yet deficient in culture; that fact is implied by the word 'pedantry.' "Culture," said Huxley, "certainly means something quite different from learning or technical skill. It implies the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by a theoretic standard." "It is the love of knowledge," says Henry Sidgwick, "the ardor of scientific curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new facts and ideas, to make them our own, and fit them into the living and growing system of our thought; and the trained faculty of doing this, the alert and supple intelligence exercised and continually developed in doing this—it is in these that culture essentially lies." And if this is what culture really means, evidently it can not be regarded as something superfine—as an intellectual luxury suited only for people who can lead lives of elegant leisure. Education consists in organizing the resources of the human being; it seeks to give him powers which shall fit him for his social and physical world. One mark of an uneducated person is that he is embarrassed by any situation to which he is not accustomed. The educated person is able to deal with circumstances in which he has never been placed before; he is so, because he has acquired general conceptions; his imagination, his judgment, his powers of intelligent sympathy, have been developed. The mental culture
