第11章 CHAPTER III(3)

But with all this divergence of purpose and animus there is after all a broad and very substantial bond of community between the technical schools, on the one hand, and the proper work of the university, on the other hand, in that the two are, in great measure, occupied with the same general range of materials and employ somewhat the same logical methods in handling these materials. But the relation that results from this community of material is almost wholly external and mechanical. Nor does it set up any presumption that the two should expediently be included in the same corporate establishment, or even that they need be near neighbors or need maintain peculiarly close relations of personnel. The technical schools, and in a less degree the professional schools not properly classed as technical, depend in large measure on results worked out by the scientists, who properly belong in the universities. But the material so made use of for technical ends are taken over and turned to account without afterthought. The technologist's work is related to that of the scientists very much as the work of the designer is related to that of the inventor. To a considerable extent the scientists similarly depend on the work of the technical men for information, and for correction and verification of their own theoretical work. But there is, on this account, nothing to gain by associating any given technical school with any given university establishment; incorporation in any given university does not in any degree facilitate the utilization of the results of the sciences by the technical men;nor is it found in practice to further the work of the sciences.

The schools in question do not in any peculiar degree draw on the work of the scientists attached to their particular university, nor do these scientists, on the other hand, have any special use for the work of their associated technical schools. In either case the source drawn on is the general literature of the subject, the body of materials available at large, not the work of particular men attached to particular schools. The generalizations of science are indispensable to the technical men; but what they draw on is the body of science at large, regardless of what any given university establishment may have had to do with the work out of which the particular items of scientific information have emerged. Nor is this scientific material useful to the technologists for the further pursuit of science; to them the scientific results are data, raw material to be turned to practical use, not means by which to carry scientific inquiry out to further results.

Similarly, the professions and the technical schools afford valuable data for the use of the professed scholars and scientists, information that serves as material of Investigation, or that will at least be useful as a means of extending correcting, verifying and correlating lines of inquiry on which they are engaged. But the further bearing of these facts upon the affairs of life, their expediency or futility, is of no interest or consequence. The affairs of life, except the affairs of learning, do not touch the interest of the university man as a scholar or scientist. What is of importance to him in all these matters with which the professions and technologists are busy is their bearing on those matters of fact into which his scientific interest leads him to inquire. The tests and experiments carried out at these technical schools, as well as the experience gathered by the members of their staff, will occasionally afford him material for further inquiry or means whereby to check results already arrived at; but for such material he does not by preference resort to any one of the technical schools as contrasted with any other, and it is quite an idle question whether the source of any such serviceable information is a school attached to his own university. The investigator finds his material where he can; which comes to saying that he draws on the general body of technical knowledge, with no afterthought as to what particular technical school may have stood in some relation or other to the information which he finds useful.