The German Genius

history—“the three disciplines around which not only German scholarship but all of German intellectual life were being rapidly renewed”—all found their home in the lower faculty (i.e., they were not part of the theological, legal, or medical “higher” faculties). 30
    The philosophical faculty also owed its rise in pre-eminence to the fact that it prepared teachers for the new Gymnasien brought in by Humboldt’s reforms. Beforehand, most teachers had been trained in the theological faculty because the church had run the schools. Humboldt’s initiatives removed the schools from church control and provided an examination, the Abiturexamen , which a student had to pass to enter a university. In line with neohumanistic principles, the Abitur stressed Greek, Latin, and mathematics. These reforms produced a class of professional teachers in Prussia that spawned a rapid increase in the number of Gymnasien across the country between 1818 (91) and 1862 (144). 31
    In tandem, more and more students began to study the natural sciences—again pushing up numbers in the philosophical faculty. Science subjects expanded rapidly, especially after 1840, though to begin with the graduates mainly went into teaching because, even by 1860, Prussia did not possess sufficient industrial plants to absorb more than a fraction of the students. These changes occurred at the expense of applied subjects like Landwissenschaft and cameralism. 32
    By now the seminar was well established. It will be remembered from Chapter 1, that the essence of the seminar was that it was smaller and more intimate than the lecture; there was no place for rhetoric, and it was understood to be an advanced course of study, for those really committed to their subject. Normally, it worked in the following way. Every two weeks a research paper was presented by one member of the seminar and subjected to general criticism. The best papers would be published at the expense of the ministry and 500 thaler allotted for prizes. Admission to a seminar, therefore, promised substantial rewards and other disciplines, like history and theology, copied this model. New seminars spread across Germany and across the disciplines and were understood as being well tailored to transmitting the new critical methods. Gradually they became an elite “inner track” for the brightest students.
    As was mentioned earlier, the 1830s were a critical decade in scholarship in that separate disciplines began to acquire their own journals and other specific infrastructure. It was in the 1830s that the sciences began to assimilate the concepts of philological and historical scholarship. 33 Until then, the sciences had taken no part in Germany’s academic revolution and such science as was taught was elementary: chemistry stressed “recipes,” the life sciences were devoted mainly to classification. Frankly utilitarian, they epitomized the materialistic bread study which Wissenschaftsideologie saw as the main obstacle to spiritual and intellectual rejuvenation and to Bildung. The obsession with classification was, for neohumanists, particularly deadening. 34
    In the end, however, the sciences benefited from the attacks of the neohumanists. Precisely because these attacks were made in terms of Wissenschaftsideologie —that Wissenschaft was an unlimited, organically unfolding “cultural good”—younger scientists began to counterargue that the sciences, no less than the humanities, trained the intellect (Geist) and led to the refinement of the individual (Bildung). One important side effect of this argument was that “pure” science was seen as superior to applied science, which was dismissed as mere “bread study.” 35
    The post-1830 scientists became convinced that research not only added to the sum of learning but also that it helped the moral development of the individual doing the research. As a result, the number of frankly technological courses in science and mathematics dropped markedly, not least in Berlin and Halle. Technological education was relegated to other institutions, notably the forerunners of what were to become technische Hochschulen . Instead, the universities now began to teach science in a “purer” style, and chemistry and the life sciences became an integral part of the philosophical faculty. This was a major change in attitude that found institutional expression at the University of Bonn, where the first Seminarum für die gesammten Naturwissenschaften