the history of [its] development’.^42 He has the capacity to motivate himself and
incite passion in others by connecting their sense of personal vocation to an
immense and noble tradition of inquiry. The university, according to Döllinger,
‘lives upon, feeds upon, its past. Happy is it, if the sins and follies of a former
generation, not yet understood and abandoned, do not continue as a source
of disturbance, of confusion, of bitterness in the present.’^43 In other words,
only by learning from, being grateful for, but,finally, by overcoming the past
and its errors can knowledge progress. But, again, it does not, or ought not, do
this inattentive to the imperative of‘organic unity’. In thefinal analysis,
this striving for newer, better knowledge while recognizing the interrelation-
ship of all knowledge made Germany rightly considered‘the classical lands of
universities’.^44
But if it was important for universities to remember the past while trying to
supersede it, there was still another way in which German universities engaged
the past, according to Döllinger. They had improved the methods and the
mindset that enabled more accurate knowledge of the past. We might refer to
this disposition of mind today as‘historicism’; Döllinger, again, calls it simply
‘the historical sense’.^45 And this, for him, was truly the pride of German
universities in the nineteenth century and one of their leading‘exports’to
other countries. In his own words:
I venture to assert that we possess it [‘the historical sense’] in a more eminent
degree than other nations. This power—this impulse to withdraw our minds from
the dominion of habit, to break through the atmosphere that the present draws
around us, to penetrate through the clouds of prejudice to knowledge of the spirit
and of hidden remote times and foreign nations—is doubtless one of the highest
and noblest gifts that God can bestow on man. And only to them is it given who
are penetrated by a spirit of restless effort, of unwearied research in delving for
truth; who have courage and persistence enough to buy the most precious
possessions at the highest price, not less than the surrender of all other pleasures
and enjoyments of life; who are not content with surface views, or with the
working up of what has been already been discovered, but who pierce down to
the very core and bottom of things.^46Döllinger illustrates his claim by calling attention to the many authoritative
works of German scholarship on other nations’histories before exclaiming
again that‘our universities...alone are the proper workshops for all branches
of historical knowledge and investigation’. What is more, whether or not one
(^42) Universitäten, 27;Universities, 23. (^43) Universitäten, 27;Universities, 23.
(^44) Universitäten, 28;Universities, 24.
(^45) On the rise of historical thought generally in German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, see Georg Iggers,The German Conception of History: The National
Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. edn (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan
University Press, 1968).
(^46) Universitäten,37–8;Universities, 33 (translation modified).
Ignaz von Döllinger and the University 233