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In "The Higher Learning in America," Thorstein Veblen presents a profound critique of American higher education, arguing that it has become increasingly disconnected from its original mission of intellectual pursuit. Written in Veblen's distinctive, incisive style, the book employs a blend of sociology and economics to analyze the commodification of education and the rise of the research university, urging readers to contemplate the implications of these transformations on society. As an early 20th-century work, it serves as a pivotal reflection on the values of the time, particularly the intersection of economic forces and educational objectives. Thorstein Veblen, an influential economist and social critic, crafted this seminal work against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, a period marked by rapid industrialization and the emergence of an elite class. Veblen's own experiences as an academic and his critical stance towards capitalism profoundly shaped his perspective, informing his argument that the higher education system often serves the interests of the economic elite rather than the broader public good, thereby challenging the very foundations of educational purpose. Readers seeking to understand the evolution of American education and its societal implications will find "The Higher Learning in America" invaluable. Veblen's timeless insights resonate with contemporary issues surrounding educational accessibility, institutional priorities, and the true role of education in a democratic society, making this book essential for scholars, educators, and anyone invested in the future of higher education. 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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The Higher Learning in America
Table of Contents
Introduction
What happens to the pursuit of knowledge when the university adopts the habits, hierarchies, and hunger for profit of the marketplace? Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men is a work of pointed social critique, published in 1918 amid the early twentieth-century American transformation of higher education. Written by an economist and social theorist, the book anatomizes the U.S. university as an institution increasingly managed with commercial priorities. Its setting is the American campus and its boardroom; its genre is a rigorous, unsentimental treatise that scrutinizes how governance shapes the substance and spirit of scholarly life.
Veblen frames his study as a memorandum, a spare, analytical brief that proceeds by definition, comparison, and cumulative inference rather than narrative drama. The voice is cool and exacting, edged with irony; the tone is patient yet unsparing, preferring institutional anatomy to polemic. Readers encounter an essayistic investigation that moves from the organization of authority to the routines of publicity, from budgets to the uses of prestige. The effect is not to shock with revelations but to illuminate a pattern: the gradual subordination of scholarly aims to the operational logic and symbols prized by business-minded overseers.
At the center of the book is a conflict between two orders of value: the open-ended, collegial pursuit of inquiry and the managerial pursuit of measurable returns, reputational display, and competitive advantage. Veblen observes how trustees and executives, acting according to commercial canons, favor forms of accountability and spectacle that translate awkwardly into the practices of research and teaching. He is attentive to the reshaping of priorities, the diversion of resources toward promotion, and the pressure to standardize outputs. The result, he argues, is a subtle but consequential redirection of academic energy toward what is countable, saleable, and ceremonially impressive.
Veblen’s method blends institutional history with economic sociology, tracing how universities inherit guild-like scholarly norms yet increasingly answer to external pecuniary expectations. He scrutinizes the roles of governing boards, presidents, and administrative offices, asking what kinds of knowledge flourish under their regimes of control. Rather than offering a program of reform, he clarifies incentives and consequences, showing how organizational forms foster particular habits of mind and lines of work. His analysis is diagnostic rather than consoling, relying on careful distinctions and a dry wit that keeps readers alert to the difference between genuine scholarship and its theatrical substitutes.
For contemporary readers, the book’s resonance is immediate. Conversations about managerialism, branding, rankings, fundraising campaigns, corporate partnerships, and the measurement of academic output continue to shape institutions today. Veblen’s account helps explain why such practices often feel misaligned with the time horizons and collaborative ethos of research and liberal learning. His emphasis on governance—who decides, by what standard, and to what end—remains indispensable, not because the university should ignore economic realities, but because its purposes require forms of stewardship that do not collapse into commercial imitation.
The themes that structure Veblen’s critique—academic freedom, autonomy of inquiry, and the integrity of scholarly standards—are articulated as conditions for intellectual progress, not luxuries. He shows how short-term promotional imperatives can erode the tacit disciplines of a research community and how ceremonial display can displace the slow, unglamorous labor of discovery and teaching. By focusing on incentives, he invites readers to consider design rather than intention: institutions may espouse noble missions yet produce different results when guided by the wrong tools, timelines, and tests of success.
Approaching this book today offers a demanding but clarifying reading experience. The prose is measured, the irony understated, and the argument cumulative; patience is rewarded with a coherent picture of how structures of control shape the life of the mind. Veblen does not sentimentalize the university, nor does he caricature business; instead, he insists on distinguishing ends from means. The Higher Learning in America matters now because it provides a vocabulary and framework for judging whether our universities are organized to cultivate learning—or merely to perform it. Its questions remain the university’s measure.
Synopsis
Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, first published in 1918, examines how American universities in the modern era have come to be managed by principles borrowed from business. Framing his study as a memorandum, Veblen defines higher learning as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge and sets out to trace how administrative imperatives alter that pursuit. He surveys prevailing institutional practices, from budgeting and publicity to student recruitment, to show how nonacademic priorities enter academic life. The opening establishes his central question: what happens to inquiry when governance, accountability, and prestige are organized on a commercial footing?
Veblen begins with governance, describing boards of trustees largely drawn from business and a presidential office modeled on executive management. In his account, these authorities value solvency, expansion, and public standing, and they design procedures to make campuses answer to those aims. Budget controls, centralized decision-making, ceremonial functions, and oversight of appointments reinforce a hierarchy that treats scholarship as a dependent activity. He argues that the vocabulary of efficiency and serviceability, natural to commerce, becomes the yardstick for academic worth. This shift conditions everything from institutional strategy to daily routines, and it prefigures tensions between professional administration and the self-direction of scholars.
From governance he turns to internal organization and curriculum, noting how administrative accounting favors what can be counted. Standardized credits, prescribed schedules, and measurable instructional units help managers tabulate work and compare units. In such a regime, departments are evaluated by enrollments and visible outputs, and professional schools gain leverage through their ties to practical training. Veblen contrasts these patterns with the demands of foundational scholarship, which may be slow, technical, and resistant to display. The resulting emphasis steers resources and attention toward immediate utility, while the arts and basic sciences must justify themselves in terms that fit managerial reasoning.
These structural changes shape the status of the faculty. Appointments and promotions depend not only on scholarly distinction but also on administrative compatibility and the ability to support institutional publicity, enrollment, and fundraising. Veblen recounts how controversial or unprofitable lines of inquiry can become liabilities under trustee oversight, narrowing the range of permissible work. Salaries and workloads are set with regard to budgetary display, encouraging uniform routines rather than specialized inquiry. The cumulative effect is to reduce the discretion scholars have over aims and pace, while expanding the authority of officeholders who judge their worth through managerial categories.
Veblen also analyzes the university’s outward-facing activities, especially the cultivation of public favor. Intercollegiate athletics, festivals, and impressive buildings serve as instruments of advertisement that mobilize alumni loyalty and donor interest. Publicity offices and appeals to community service broaden institutional reach, but they also entangle academic aims with expectations set by spectators and patrons. Student culture, he argues, is colored by this logic of display and consumption, as institutions compete for attention as well as for students. The academic program is adjusted to satisfy demonstrated demand and to sustain goodwill, which alters the conditions under which learning is undertaken.
The book’s middle chapters weigh the consequences for knowledge itself. When academic credit, publicity value, and external patronage guide choices, long-horizon investigations that lack immediate return struggle to secure backing. Competition among institutions for recognition encourages duplication, fashion, and short-term display rather than cooperation in cumulative inquiry. Veblen describes how reporting requirements and standardized appraisals fragment work into administratively legible tasks, diminishing the tacit, collegial processes that advance difficult subjects. The result, in his view, is a misalignment of ends and means: the apparatus built to promote learning begins to divert energy from the very practices that sustain higher learning.
In concluding reflections, Veblen argues that universities realize their purpose only when inquiry is insulated from lay control and measured by scholarly standards set within the disciplines. He recommends arrangements that restore authority over academic matters to the community of investigators and reduce the leverage of commercial criteria in governance. The memorandum thus serves as both diagnosis and warning, capturing an early twentieth‑century moment when managerial norms were refashioning higher education. Its enduring interest lies in how it frames debates that persist—about administrative expansion, market pressures, public image, and academic freedom—while inviting readers to consider what forms of organization best protect independent learning.
Historical Context
Published in New York in 1918 by B. W. Huebsch, Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America appeared at the close of the Progressive Era, a period of intensive reform and expansion in U.S. higher education. American universities—including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins—were consolidating new administrative structures and academic divisions while endowments and enrollments grew. Veblen, a leading figure in institutional economics and a sharp critic of modern capitalism, turned his attention to universities’ governance. His memorandum assessed how trustees, presidents, and donors influenced academic priorities in an era when business organization and corporate wealth permeated public life.
From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, the German research university served as the primary model for American reformers. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876 under Daniel Coit Gilman, emphasized specialized research and the PhD, stimulating similar graduate programs nationwide. Charles W. Eliot’s long presidency at Harvard (1869–1909) advanced the elective system and professional schools, while the Association of American Universities formed in 1900 to coordinate standards among leading institutions. Laboratories, seminar methods, and departmental specialization expanded rapidly. This environment elevated organized research and professional administration, reshaping older collegiate traditions and setting the stage for debates over academic autonomy and control.
At the same time, the rise of large corporations and fortunes created unprecedented channels of educational philanthropy. Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1905) endowed pensions for professors and promoted standards, including the “Carnegie Unit” that shaped secondary schooling and college admissions. John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board (1902) directed large grants to colleges, universities, and medical education. The 1910 Flexner Report—sponsored by Carnegie’s foundation—helped restructure American medical schools, intensifying debates about external influence on curricula and institutional priorities. Trustees drawn from business circles increasingly supervised budgets and expansion, entrenching corporate styles of planning and accountability within universities.
Progressive Era faith in “efficiency” and scientific management also reached campuses. Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) popularized measurement, scheduling, and cost-accounting techniques that many administrators adapted to academic settings. Boards of trustees dominated by business leaders encouraged presidents to act as executive managers, pursue large fund-raising campaigns, and cultivate alumni relations. Intercollegiate athletics, especially football, posed governance and safety challenges that drew national attention; President Theodore Roosevelt convened conferences in 1905, leading to the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States in 1906, renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.
The federal land-grant system broadened universities’ missions toward practical arts and public service. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 established and expanded colleges in agriculture and the mechanic arts; the Hatch Act of 1887 funded agricultural experiment stations; and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 supported cooperative extension. Engineering, agriculture, and teacher-training grew alongside new professional programs in commerce and business—Wharton (1881), Harvard Business School (1908), and Columbia Business School (1916) among them. These developments diversified curricula and tied universities more closely to regional economies and state priorities, sharpening questions about how pure scholarship related to vocational and service obligations.
Academic freedom became a central concern as administrations, donors, and political authorities asserted influence. The American Association of University Professors formed in 1915, led by figures such as John Dewey and Arthur O. Lovejoy, and issued a landmark statement on academic freedom and tenure. Earlier controversies framed the stakes: economist Richard T. Ely at the University of Wisconsin faced a public inquiry in 1894 and was vindicated, prompting the Board of Regents’ famous “sifting and winnowing” declaration. At Stanford, sociologist Edward A. Ross resigned in 1900 after conflicts linked to donor Jane Stanford, highlighting vulnerabilities in university governance.
Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), a Norwegian American scholar associated with institutional economics, taught at the University of Chicago (1892–1906), Stanford University (1906–1909), and the University of Missouri (1911–1918). He was best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), which analyzed consumption, status, and the logic of business organization. During World War I he served in federal war-related agencies. His proximity to major universities and familiarity with corporate practices supplied a vantage point for scrutinizing administrative power, donor influence, and the rhetoric of efficiency that increasingly structured academic life in the United States.
Appearing in 1918, amid wartime mobilization and the maturation of philanthropic foundations and centralized administration, The Higher Learning in America distilled anxieties characteristic of its age. It interrogated whether techniques borrowed from commerce—branding, publicity, competition for funds, and hierarchical management—served or compromised inquiry. The book’s portrait of trustees and presidents as decisive actors spoke to ongoing debates over academic freedom, professional authority, and the purposes of public and private universities. By capturing the tensions between research ideals, vocational imperatives, and business governance, Veblen’s memorandum offered a contemporary critique of higher education at a pivotal moment in American institutional development.
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men
Preface
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
I
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, and the Instinct of Workmanship.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[2].
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.
The truth of this view is borne out by the professions even of those lieutenants of the powers of darkness who are straining to lay waste and debauch the peoples of Christendom[3]. In high-pitched concert they all swear by the name of a "culture" whose sole inalienable asset is this same intellectual mastery of matters of fact. At the same time it is only by drawing on the resources of this matter-of-fact knowledge that the protagonists of reaction are able to carry on their campaign of debauchery and desolation.
Other interests that have once been held in higher esteem appear by comparison to have fallen into abeyance, -- religious devotion, political prestige, fighting capacity, gentility, pecuniary distinction, profuse consumption of goods. But it is only by comparison with the higher value given to this enterprise of the intellect that such other interests appear to have lost ground. These and the like have fallen into relative disesteem, as being sordid and insubstantial by comparison. Not that these "lower" human interests, answering to the "lower" ranges of human intellect, have fallen into neglect; it is only that they have come to be accounted "lower," as contrasted with the quest of knowledge; and it is only on sober second thought, and perhaps only for the ephemeral present, that they are so accounted by the common run of civilized mankind. Men still are in sufficiently hot pursuit of all these time-worn amenities, and each for himself is, in point of fact, more than likely to make the pursuit of such self-seeking ends the burden of his life; but on a dispassionate rating, and under the corrective of deliberate avowal, it will appear that none of these commend themselves as intrinsically worth while at large. At the best they are rated as expedient concessions to human infirmity or as measures of defense against human perversity and the outrages of fortune. The last resort of the apologists for these more sordid endeavours is the plea that only by this means can the ulterior ends of a civilization of intelligence be served. The argument may fairly be paraphrased to the effect that in order to serve God in the end, we must all be ready to serve the Devil in the meantime.
It is always possible, of course, that this pre-eminence of intellectual enterprise in the civilization of the Western peoples is a transient episode; that it may eventually -- perhaps even precipitately, with the next impending turn in the fortunes of this civilization -- again be relegated to a secondary place in the scheme of things and become only an instrumentality in the service of some dominant aim or impulse, such as a vainglorious patriotism, or dynastic politics, or the breeding of a commercial aristocracy. More than one of the nations of Europe have moved so far in this matter already as to place the primacy of science and scholarship in doubt as against warlike ambitions; and the aspirations of the American community appear to be divided -- between patriotism in the service of the captains of war, and commerce in the service of the captains of finance. But hitherto the spokesmen of any such cultural reversion are careful to declare a perfunctory faith in that civilization of disinterested intellectual achievement which they are endeavouring to suborn to their several ends. That such pro forma declarations are found necessary argues that the faith in a civilization of intelligence is still so far intact as to require all reactionaries to make their peace with it.
Meantime the easy matter-of-course presumption that such a civilization of intelligence justifies itself goes to argue that the current bias which so comes to expression will be the outcome of a secure and protracted experience. What underlies and has brought on this bent in the temper of the civilized peoples is a somewhat intricate question of institutional growth, and can not be gone into here; but the gradual shifting of this matter-of-fact outlook into the primacy among the ideals of modern. Christendom is sufficiently evident in point of fact, to any attentive student of modern times. Conceivably, there may come an abrupt term to its paramount vogue, through some precipitate sweep of circumstances; but it did not come in by anything like the sudden intrusion of a new invention in ideals -- after the fashion of a religious conversion nor by the incursion of a hitherto alien element into the current scheme of life, but rather by force of a gradual and unintended, scarcely perceptible, shifting of emphasis between the several cultural factors that conjointly go to make up the working scheme of things.
Along with this shifting of matter-of-fact knowledge into the foreground among the ideals of civilized life, there has also gone on a similarly unpremeditated change in the attitude of those persons and establishments that have to do with this learning, as well as in the rating accorded them by the community at large. Again it is a matter of institutional growth, of self-wrought changes in the scheme of use and wont; and here as in other cases of institutional growth and displacement, the changes have gone forward for the most part blindly, by impulse, without much foreknowledge of any ulterior consequences to which such a sequence of change might be said to tend. It is only after the new growth of use and wont has taken effect in an altered range of principles and standards, that its direction and ulterior consequences can be appreciated with any degree of confidence. But this development that has thrown up matter-of-fact knowledge into its place of paramount value for modern culture has in a peculiar degree been unintended and unforeseen; the like applies to the case of the schools and the personnel involved; and in a peculiar degree the drift and bearing of these changes have also not been appreciated while they have been going forward, doubtless because it has all been a peculiarly unprecedented phenomenon and a wholly undesigned drift of habituation. History records nothing that is fairly comparable. No era in the historic past has set a pattern for guidance in this matter, and the experience of none of the peoples of history affords a clue by which to have judged beforehand of the probable course and outcome of this specifically modern and occidental phase of culture.
Some slight beginnings and excursions in the way of a cultivation of matter-of-fact learning there may have been, now and again, among the many shifting systems of esoteric lore that have claimed attention here and there, early and late; and these need by no means be accounted negligible. But they have on the whole come to nothing much better than broken excursions, as seen from the point of view of the latterday higher learning, and they have brought into bearing nothing appreciable in the way of establishments designed without afterthought to further the advance of disinterested knowledge. Anything like a cultural era that avowedly takes such a quest of knowledge as its chief and distinctive characteristic is not known to history. From this isolated state of the case it follows, unfortunately, that this modern phase is to be studied only in its own light; and since the sequence of development has hitherto reached no secure consummation or conclusion, there is also much room for conflicting opinions as to its presumptive or legitimate outcome, or even as to its present drift.
