Professor Norton's Lecture on "Some Conditions of Intellectual Life in America."

Divinity School Chapel was crowded fairly to over flowing, last evening, with an audience that had assembled to hear one of the most remarkable addresses that has been heard for a long while at Harvard. Professor Norton said that the United States presents a spectacle never before seen in the history of the world-of sixty million people at peace and without fear. He spoke of the unparalleled growth in wealth and material resources which has marked this century of American life. To get wealth, much that is equally valuable and far more noble has been sacrificed. Fame, renown and honor have become weaker motives than they formerly were, and men's energies have been bent on the acquirement of material comfort and physical well-being. And, unfortunately, men's energies are not like water that turns the wheel of one mill and then flows on with undiminished vigor to the next; but like coal, which is consumed and lost in begetting steam. It is as true to-day as ever that man cannot serve two masters. What names can our civilization show among philosophers, poets and writers whose fame will outlive this century to warm the hearts and fire the imaginations of coming generations? There is less zeal for the true intellectual life to-day than there was a hundred years ago.

The great evil of our American civilization is its uniformity. Uniformity in the common school education, uniformity of standards in thought and in action always check a broad development of intellectual life. Then there grows the absolute tyranny of public opinion that stifles all that is good in individuality.

It is the function of the true university to encourage depth and broadness of thought in the men that it sends forth into the world, that they may save our American life from degenerating into a glittering barbarism of vulgarity.