Abstract
MB. MAYCOCK, in a contribution to the Hibbert Journal (32, No. 4), hopes that the universities may save us from an anarchic and materialistic society “where all will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation”. This salvation will be possible only if the universities have due reverence for the tra ditions of their past, and for the value and dignity of learning. A survey of their history shows that they have to-day a great opportunity. They are once more as influential as they were in the Middle Ages; all that is wanting is an equivalent of the medieval synthesis. Mr. Maycock sees hope for this in the present-day pre-occupation with the social sciences, since these lead more readily to integration than the nineteenth century development of physical science. Over-specialisation has put learning out of touch with life, and has endangered our social order, and this the universities can remedy, not by becoming technical schools but by teaching an attitude to knowledge; the new age needs to recover the spiritual values of the Middle Ages, and, like Aquinas, to call those men wise ‘ ‘who control things rightly and set them in order”.
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The University in the New Age. Nature 134, 491 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134491b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134491b0