Excerpt from Universities, Ancient and Modern: Read Before the Birkenhead Literary and Scientific Society at the Opening of Its Fifty-First Session, on Monday, the 7th October, 1907
The ancient Universities, both of this country and of the continent of Europe, have reached their position and functions in relationship to the thought and intellectual life of the present day, by a long process of evolution, lasting since the medieval times in which most of them began to exist.
Without a continued adaptation to environment no institution of civilized man, however powerful, can outlast the passage of centuries. As knowledge increases all our institutions must either become transformed by a gradual process into harmony with new conditions, or be swept away by something in the nature of a revolution to make way for a new departure.
Whenever the continued working of free enquiring minds over social, intellectual, or political problems has accumulated sufficient store of discoveries to show that any human doctrine, policy, or theory, is erroneous and stands in the path of progress, then there must come a renunciation sooner or later, and a new rendering must be put upon what is old to blend it into harmony with what is new.
In such a renunciation, or rather re-modelling, it is usually only the worthless dross which disappears, and out of the fire of criticism there appears something nobler and better than before. For a time, it may seem to an unprepared and unreceptive age that the new work is rank heresy, destroying ruthlessly long loved and cherished doctrines; but in a few years general progress demonstrates that the old eternal essential facts are shining forth like gems in a more appropriate setting and forming a grander jewel with the added gems that patient work has unearthed and polished and placed alongside of them.
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