The German Genius

subjects of logic, metaphysics, and ethics, lectures on “empirical psychology,” the law of nature, physics, politics, natural history, pure and applied mathematics (surveying, military, and civilian architecture), history, geography, art, and modern languages. On top of these “philosophical” subjects, Göttingen offered the best training in the courtly arts available at any European institution—dancing, fencing, drawing, riding, music, and conversation in foreign languages. * Observers noted the new desire among young nobles to acquire a university education and a preference for “study and scholarship,” which could pave the way for “important posts.” It was at Göttingen that history, philology, and antiquity ceased to be minor, subordinate fields of study and began to acquire respect as autonomous disciplines. Alongside history, classical philology underwent a dramatic rise at Göttingen, and it and its sister discipline— Altertumswissenschaft , the study of antiquity—became the “German science” par excellence. 41 Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761) and his successor, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), transformed the experience of the classics. They removed the emphasis on grammar, replacing it with the appreciation of the texts as examples of the creative energies of antiquity; in so doing, the purpose of the new scholarship was transformed into an evaluation of the classics for what they revealed about culture, civic life, religion. “Above all, Greek antiquity—hitherto neglected—became the central focus.” 42 Other innovations at Göttingen included publication of the first professional journals. 43
    Göttingen also developed and refined the seminar. This was another innovation whose importance it is difficult to exaggerate. The seminar, as we shall see, led to the modern concept of research, to the modern PhD, to the academic and scientific “disciplines” or subjects, and to the modern organization of universities into “departments,” divided equally between teaching and research. Originally introduced in Halle by Francke, the seminar differed in important ways from the lecture, reflecting a profound change in the concept of knowledge and learning. The crucial distinction was that between late medieval notions of knowledge, or scientia , and the post-Enlightenment idea of Wissenschaft . Scholastic-Aristotelian logic took it as read that there was/is a single, correct method of thinking, a method that, when properly employed—through syllogistic reasoning, disputation, correct definition of terms, and “the clear ordering of arguments”—could be applied to any scholarly subject. 44 Different areas of interest did not require different methods, for all could be approached and understood through right reason ( recta ratio ), apprehended through the study of logic. The main purpose of instruction in the lecture was to help the student acquire general reason.
    In the seminar, however, there were fewer people, criticism was encouraged, knowledge was regarded as mutable, less fixed, and new knowledge was there to be discovered. The aim of the teachers in the seminar was not to reproduce “static knowledge” but to promote the “taste, judgement and intellect” of their charges.
    Seminars evolved over time. They embodied a more intimate form of teaching, where the exchange of ideas and knowledge was more valued, where the students were expected to have more input. Gradually, the passive mastery of a canonically prescribed corpus of materials gave way to the active cultivation of participation, and the early seminars in Germany began to require the submission of written work beforehand as a basis for discussion and evaluation. 45 This fostered the concept of research, with a premium on originality, which—again as we shall see in more detail later—reached its apogee in the Romantic period, when original research was regarded as a form of art. In some Göttingen seminars, the practice evolved whereby the original paper had to be delivered a week in advance so that other students could prepare their responses.
    In line with all this, it was at Göttingen, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that the term Wissenschaft first gained its modern meaning. In its Göttingen sense, Wissenschaft incorporates science, learning, knowledge, scholarship, and also implies a research-based element, an idea that knowledge is a dynamic process, discoverable for