In the minds of Gilman and his abettors, however, all this was intended to emphasize the fact that Johns Hopkins was a real university, in which the unbiased truth was to be the only aim.

And certainly this was the spirit of the institution.

"Gentlemen, you must light your own torch," was the admonition of President Gilman, in his welcoming address to his twenty fellows; intellectual independence, freedom from the trammels of tradition, were thus to be the directing ideas.

One of Page's associates was Josiah Royce, who afterward had a distinguished career in philosophy at Harvard.

"The beginnings of Johns Hopkins," he afterward wrote, "was a dawn wherein it was bliss to be alive.