Accordingly, no one familiar with the actual working of academic institutions is likely to fall into the error of pinning his faith to them. They are, of course, designed for the purpose of preserving and promoting the highest and most advanced knowledge hitherto attained: but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose? Its execution must of necessity be left to professors not exempt from human frailty, always selected by more or less defective methods, whose interests by no means coincide with those of their subjects. The interest of the subject is to become more widely understood and so more influential. The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if, therefore, he wishes for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure, the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. He will wrap himself in mysteries of technical jargon, and become as nearly as possible unintelligible. Truly, as William James once exclaimed to me, apropos of the policy of certain philosophers, “the natural enemy of any subject is the professor thereof!” It is clear that if these tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time become unteachable, and not worth learning. Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory. The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach.