The universities have trained the intellectual pioneers of our civilization—the priests, t

he lawyers, the statesmen, the doctors, the men of science, and the men of letters. The conduct of business now requires intellectual imagination of the same type as that which in former times has mainly passed into those other occupations.

There is one great difficulty which hinders all the higher types of human effort. In modern times this difficulty has even increased in its possibilities for evil. In any large organization the younger men, who are novices. must be set to jobs which consist in carrying out fixed duties in obedience to orders. No president of a large corporation meets his youngest employee at his office door with the offer of the most responsible job which the work of that corporation includes. The young men are set to work at a fixed routine, and only occasionally even see the president as he passes in and out of the building. Such work is a great discipline. It imparts knowledge, and it produces reliability of character; also it is the only work for which the young men, In that novice stage, are fit, and it is the work for which they are hired. There can be no criticism of the custom. but there may be an unfortunate effect: prolonged routine work dulls the imagination.

The way in which a university should function in the preparation for an intellectual career, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of the various general principles underlying that career. Its students thus pass tutu their period of technical apprenticeship with their imaginations already practiced in connecting details with general principles.

Thus the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge. Apart from this importance of the imagination, there is no reason why businessmen, and other professional men, should not pick up their facts bit by hit as they want them for particular occasions. A university is imaginative or it is nothing—at least nothing useful.

What is a basic requirement for work in all professions according to the passage？

A．Imagination.

B．Reliability of character.

C．Discipline.

D．Obedience to orders,