It has seemed to me, then, that it would be interesting and opportune to trace the origin, the development and the accomplishments of the first institution of learning that is very similar to our own; and to retrace some of the achievements of its professors, the circumstances in which they were done and the conditions surrounding an ancient school which I think our study will make clear as well deserving of the title of the first modern university. This was not the collection of schools at Athens, though there is no doubt at all that great intellectual and educational work was accomplished there, but not in our modern university sense. The schools were independent, and while the rivalry engendered by this undoubtedly did good so long as genius ruled in the schools, it brought about a degeneration into sophistry, from here comes the word, and argumentativeness, once the great master had been displaced by disciples who were sure that they knew their master’s mind, and probably thought, as disciples always do, that they were going beyond their master, but who really occupied themselves with curious and trifling tergiversations of mind within the narrow circle of ideas laid down by the master,—as has nearly always been the case.
The first modern university was that of Alexandria. It was quite as much under Greek influence as the schools of Athens. There have been commentators on the story of Cleopatra, who have suggested that her African cast of countenance did not prove a deterrent to her success as a conqueror of hearts, and who argue from this to the fact that it is not physical charm but personality that counts in woman’s power over men, quite forgetting, if they ever knew, that Cleopatra was a Greek of the Greeks, a daughter of the line of the Ptolemys, probably a direct descendant though with the bar sinister of Philip of Macedon, born of a house so watchful over its Greek blood and so resentful of any possible admixture of anything less noble with itself, that for generations it had been the custom for brother to marry sister, in order that the race of the Ptolemys might be perpetuated in absolute purity. Alexandria, while a cosmopolitan city in the inhabitants who dwelt in it and in the wide diffusion of commercial interests that centred there as a mart for East and West, was absolutely ruled by Greeks and represents for many centuries after the decline of Athens had come, the brightest focus of Greek intellectual life, Greek culture and art, Greek letters and education and every phase of that Greek influence in aesthetics which has always meant so much in the world’s history.
The interesting fact about Alexandria in the history of education, is that it was the home of a modern university in every sense of that term, having particularly the features that many people are prone to think of as representing modern evolution in education. The buildings of the university were erected practically by a legacy left by the great Conqueror himself, Alexander. The central point of interest in the university was a great library, the nucleus of which was the library of Aristotle, tutor of Alexander, which had been collected with the help of that great Conqueror and was the finest collection of books in the world of that time. The main subject of interest in the university was physical science and its sister subject mathematics, which raises mere nature-study into the realm of science, and this scientific physical education was conducted in connection with the great museum or collection of objects of interest to scientists that had also been made partly by Aristotle himself and partly for his loved tutor by the gratitude of Alexander during his conquering expeditions in the far East. Finally professors were attracted to Alexandria by the offer of a better salary than had ever been paid at educational institutions before this, and by the additional offer of a palace to live in, supplied by the ruler of the country. It is no wonder, then, that in attendance also, as well as in the prestige of its professors, Alexandria resembled a modern university.
It was its devotion to science, however, that especially characterized this first great institution of learning of which we have definite records. This devotion to science went so far that even literature was studied from the scientific standpoint. Such details as we have of the instruction at Alexandria and the books that have come down to us, all show men interested in philology, in comparative literature, in grammar and comparative grammar, rather than in the idealistic modes of knowledge. We have commentaries on the great authors, but no great original works of genius in literature from the professors of Alexandria. The translation of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament is a typical example of the sort of work that was being done at Alexandria. They collected the documents of the nations and translated them for purposes of comparative study. It was an education for information rather than for power. The main idea of the time and place was to know as much as possible about literature, rather than to know what it represented in terms of life, and the real meaning of both literature and life was obscured in the study about and about them. People studied books about books rather than the books themselves. There was much writing of books about books, and it was nearly always comparatively trivial things in the great authors that attracted most attention from the many scholiasts, critics, editors, commentators, lecturers of the time.
Personally I could well understand such an incident happening at Alexandria as is said to have happened at a well-known English (of course not American!) university not long ago. The class was construing Shakespeare and one of the students asked the professor what the meaning of a particular figure used by the great dramatist was. The professor replied that they were there to construe Shakespeare’s language and not bother about his meaning—yet it was a class in literature. Literature in recent years as studied at the universities has come to be quite as scientific in its modes and methods as it was at the University of Alexandria. May I also add that it has become quite as sterile of results of any importance. There is very little real study of literature, practically no encouragement of the attempt to draw inspiration from the great authors, but all devotion to the grammar, to the philology, to comparative literature as exemplified in the old writers.
Books were the great essentials at Alexandria. This is not surprising seeing that the university was founded around a great library, and that this library continued to be the greatest in the world in its time. Every student who came to Alexandria bringing a book with him of which there was no copy in the library, was required by a decree of the authorities to leave a copy behind him. In all the university towns of the times—and there were many founded in the rising eastern cities of Alexander’s empire, as it gradually crumbled into smaller pieces providing new capitals with less power but with quite as much national feeling as the capital cities of larger states, libraries became the fashion and a city’s main claim to prestige in education and the intellectual life was the number of its books. Antioch, Tarsus, Cos, Cnidos and Pergamos are examples of this state of affairs. Pergamos was so jealous of the prestige of the Alexandrian Library that it forbade the exportation of parchment, an invention of Pergamos which received its name from that city. Petty jealousies were quite as much the rule among educational institutions then as they have been at any time since.
To many people it will seem quite absurd to talk of Alexandria as having done serious scientific work because the methods of science and scientific investigation are supposed to have been, as they think, discovered by Lord Bacon in the seventeenth century. It is curious how many educated people, or at least supposedly educated people, have this as their basic notion of the history of science. Men wandered in the mazes of inductive reasoning utterly unable to bring observations together in such a way as to discover laws, utterly incompetent to note phenomena and bring them into relations to one another so as to show their scientific bearing, until Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chancellor came to show the way out of the labyrinth and leave the precious cord through its corridors, by which others may easily thread their way into the free air of scientific truth. I know nothing that is more absurd than this. It is a commonplace among educators, however; it is frequently referred to in educational addresses as if it were a universally accepted proposition, and to dispute it would seem the rankest kind of scientific heresy to these narrow minds. Fortunately there are two writers, Macaulay and Huxley, to whom even these people are likely to listen, who have expressed themselves with regard to this precious historic superstition that Lord Bacon invented the inductive method of reasoning