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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

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mental and dramatic experiments are now under way involving both
the personalities of the experimenters and the function of the college.
Scores of other experiments involving the purpose of the college in
general and the curriculum and teaching methods in particular give
a various and cumulative content to what has been called "a move-
ment" for the college of liberal arts. The history of the college of
liberal arts, whether as the denominational college which heroically
blazed the trail for all the others, or as the privately endowed inde-
pendent college, or as the central college of the modern university,
private or state, gives solid ground for such reinvigoration of the
college of arts and sciences. The college of arts and sciences, the
foundation college for the professional and graduate schools and
service province of them all, has a kingdom of its own and a purpose
within its own high nature. This purpose, toward which it has in
various forms been groping for centuries, is the development of the
more complete human being, a unified victorious personality, in-
creasingly equipped to understand himself and the world in which
he is to play his useful and coöperative part. The struggle of the col-
lege to find its place and purpose has helped both to reflect and develop
the spirit of the age. Any sound reconsideration of the curriculum of
the college should be from the approaches of historical experience,
the unchanging values of the whole personality, and the needs of the
changing times.

1. The Background of the Curriculum

Amid its mediaeval origins the liberal arts were subordinated to
the ecclesiastical ends of preparation for the next world. With the
Renaissance, despite its vivid implications in the affairs of this world,
its recovery of old ideas, leading to discoveries of a new world and
a new way to an old world, a new earth and the new heavens, yet
the widening interests of the universities centered largely in the
ancient learning as containing all learning. Learning for the next
world gave way in part to learning from the classic past. The scientific
revolution of the last three centuries brought the minds of the men
of the universities from their absorption in the next world and their
preoccupation with the ancient culture to a concern for the present
and the mastery of this earth and the forces of nature. It came to be
thought that the human intellect, with its new sciences, could go
beyond the learning of the ancients and bring heaven to earth now,
whether in the New Atlantis or in New Worlds for Old.