It would be incompatible with all of the conceptions of democracy to assume that the privilege of higher education should be restricted to any class defined by the accident of birth or by the fortuitous circumstance of possession of wealth, but there is such a thing as an aristocracy of brains, made up of men intellectually alert and intellectually eager, to whom increasingly the opportunities of higher education ought to be restricted, if democracy is to become a quality product rather than simply a quantity one, and if excellence and effectiveness are to displace the mediocrity towards which democracy has such a tendency to skid.

I wish carefully to safeguard these statements, however, by iteration and reiteration that it behooves all of us to avoid confusing the symbols and the facts of intellectuality and I should hope that under any circumstances we might avoid confusing mental gymnastics and facility in appropriating the ideas of others with genuine thinking. Unfortunately, intellectual hypocrisy and its complement, intellectual smugness, are not sufficiently infrequent even within college halls while at the same time I believe that on the whole they are as much to be avoided and that they are detrimental to the spirit of true scholarship as is ignorance.

In the last analysis, the stimulation in the individual man of his ability to think and the willingness to follow the logic of his carefully considered thought through to conviction is the desirable ambition for the college. This presupposes the acquisition of certain fundamental knowledge, the mastery, of the technique of finding new knowledge when needed, acquaintanceship with the method of gaining access to original sources, a disposition to seek all facts and to sort these according to relative importance before accepting conclusions, and finally an open-minded tolerance for new facts if they shall appear and be proved valid, even though they attack conclusions already formed. --President Hopkins in an address to the students of Dartmouth College.