"Am I rousing a spirit of inquiry in my pupils?" And if this can not be answered in the affirmative it is a confession that the university ideal is not being realized.
Some assert that this principle should also guide school education, and that it should be the first aim of the school teacher to stimulate the spirit of inquiry. My own view is that with young children this should be less necessary; they all possess it, and are by nature inquisitive. It should rather be the object of the teacher not to spoil the spirit of inquiry by allowing it to run riot, nor to stifle it by making the work uninteresting; if the lesson interests them, their inquisitive minds will be quick enough to assimilate the teaching. We are, in fact, brought back to what I have already emphasized—that the real difference between the inquisitive mind of the child and the inquiring mind of the adult is that the former is yearning for information quite regardless of what it may lead to, whereas the latter must learn or investigate with an object if the interest is to be excited and maintained.
I have often thought it an interesting parallel that among original investigators and researchers there are two quite distinct types of mind, which have achieved equally valuable results. There is the researcher who pursues an investigation with a constant purpose and to whom the purpose is the inspiration. But there is also the investigator who has preserved his youthful enthusiasm for novelty and has in some respects the mind of a child; passionately inquisitive, he will always seek to do something new, and very often, like a child, he will tire of a line of research in which he has made a discovery, and take up with equal enthusiasm a totally different problem in the hope of achieving new conquests. I think that a man well known in Sheffield, the late Henry Clifton Sorby, must have been a man of this character. The latter is, perhaps, the most fertile type of original investigator, but it is not the type that produces the best teacher, except for very exceptional and original-minded students; and such teachers do not often found a school of learning and research endowed with much stability. For ordinary students the investigator who pursues his researches as far as possible to their conclusion is the safer guide.
It seems to me suggestive that there are to be found, even amongst the famous researchers, these two types of mind, that somewhat correspond to the mental attitude of the school pupil and the university student. It is as though these great men have preserved a juvenile spirit, some from the days of their childhood, others from early manhood.
It will now be clear that the principle which I am advocating is a very simple one, namely, that the business of direct mental training should be finished at school, and that at the university the trained mind should be given material upon which to do responsible work in the spirit
