|
Part I
Part I
On Being Installed as Rector of the University There
2nd April 1866
Gentlemen, - I have accepted the office you have elected me to, and it is
now my duty to return thanks for the great honour done me. Your enthusiasm
towards me, I must admit, is in itself very beautiful, however undeserved it
may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men,
and one well known to myself when I was of an age like yours, nor is it yet
quite gone. I can only hope that, with you, too, it may endure to the end, -
this noble desire to honour those whom you think worthy of honour; and that
you will come to be more and more select and discriminate in the choice of the
object of it:-for I can well understand that you will modify your opinions of
me and of many things else, as you go on [Laughter and cheers]. It is now
fifty-six years, gone last November, since I first entered your City, a boy of
not quite fourteen; to "attend the classes" here, and gain knowledge of all
kinds, I could little guess what, my poor mind full of wonder and awe-struck
expectation; and now, after a long course, this is what we have come to
[Cheers]. There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time
beautiful, to see, as it were, the third generation of my dear old native land
rising up and saying, "Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in
the vineyard; you have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have
had many judges: this is our judgment of you!" As the old proverb says, `He
that builds by the wayside has many masters.` We must expect a variety of
judges: but the voice of young Scotland, through you, is really of some value
to me; and I return you many thanks for it, - though I cannot go into
describing my emotions to you, and perhaps they will be much more perfectly
conceivable if expressed in silence [Cheers].
When this office was first proposed to me, some of you know I was not
very ambitious to accept it, but had my doubts rather. I was taught to believe
that there were certain more or less important duties which would lie in my
power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in going into it, and overcoming
the objections I felt to such things: if it could do anything to serve my dear
old Alma Mater and you, why should not I? [Loud cheers.] Well, but on
practically looking into the matter when the office actually came into my
hands, I find it grows more and more uncertain and abstruse to me whether
there is much real duty that I can do at all. I live four hundred miles away
from you, in an entirely different scene of things; and my weak health, with
the burden of the many years now accumulating on me, and my total
unacquaintance with such subjects as concern your affairs here, - all this
fills me with apprehension that there is really nothing worth the least
consideration that I can do on that score. You may depend on it, however, that
if any such duty does arise in any form, I will use my most faithful endeavour
to do in it whatever is right and proper, according to the best of my judgment
[Cheers].
Meanwhile, the duty I at present have, - which might be very pleasant,
but which is not quite so, for reasons you may fancy, - is to address some
words to you, if possible not quite useless nor incongruous to the occasion,
and on subjects more or less cognate to the pursuits you are engaged in.
Accordingly, I mean to offer you some loose observations, loose in point of
order, but the truest I have, in such form as they may present themselves;
certain of the thoughts that are in me about the business you are here engaged
in, what kind of race it is that you young gentlemen have started on, and what
sort of arena you are likely to find in this world. I ought, I believe,
according to custom, to have written all that down on paper, and had it read
out. That would have been much handier for me at the present moment [A laugh];
-but on attempting the thing, I found I was not used to write speeches, and
that I didn`t get on very well. So I flung that aside; and could only resolve
to trust, in all superficial respects, to the suggestion of the moment, as you
now see. You will therefore have to accept what is readiest; what comes direct
from the heart; and you must just take that in compensation for any good order
or arrangement there might have been in it. I will endeavour to say nothing
that is not true, so far as I can manage; and that is pretty much all I can
engage for [A laugh].
Advices, I believe, to young men, as to all men, are very seldom much
valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful
performing; and talk that does not end in any kind of action is better
suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into advising; but
there is one advice I must give you. In fact, it is the summary of all
advices, and doubtless you have heard it a thousand times; but I must
nevertheless let you hear it the thousand-and-first time, for it is most
intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not:-namely, That
above all things the interest of your whole life depends on your being
diligent, now while it is called to-day, in this place where you have come to
get education! Diligent: that includes in it all virtues that a student can
have; I mean it to include all those qualities of conduct that lead on to the
acquirement of real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will
believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have
heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in which, if you do
not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well
afterwards, and you will arrive at little. And in the course of years when you
come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your
advisers, - and among many counsellors there is wisdom, - you will bitterly
repent when it is too late. The habits of study acquired at Universities
are of the highest importance in after-life. At the season when you are young
in years, the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming
itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to allow it, or
constrain it, to form itself into. The mind is then in a plastic or fluid
state; but it hardens gradually, to the consistency of rock or of iron, and
you cannot alter the habits of an old man: he, as he has begun, so he will
proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence I mean, among other things, and very chiefly too, - honesty,
in all your inquiries, and in all you are about. Pursue your studies in the
way your conscience can name honest. More and more endeavour to do that. Keep,
I should say for one thing, an accurate separation between what you have
really come to know in your minds and what is still unknown. Leave all that
latter on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be
acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to admit a thing as known
when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it is imprinted
clearly on your mind, and has become transparent to you, so that you may
survey it on all sides with intelligence. There is such a thing as a man
endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that
he knows things, when he does not know more than the outside skin of them;
and yet he goes flourishing about with them [Hear, hear, and a laugh]. There
is also a process called cramming, in some Universities [A laugh], - that is,
getting-up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions
about. Avoid all that, as entirely unworthy of an honourable mind. Be modest,
and humble, and assiduous in your attention to what your teachers tell you,
who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right
way, so far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set
before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to follow and
adopt them in proportion to their fitness for you. Gradually see what kind of
work you individually can do; it is the first of all problems for a man to
find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In short, morality
as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and
overrules all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real; he never will
study with real fruit; and perhaps it would be greatly better if he were tied
up from trying it. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters.
That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it
confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of
generations of which we are the latest.
I dare say you know, very many of you, that it is now some seven hundred
years since Universities were first set-up in this world of ours. Abelard and
other thinkers had arisen with doctrines in them which people wished to hear
of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the world. There was
no getting the thing recorded in books, as you now may. You had to hear the
man speaking to you, vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it was
that he wanted to say. And so they gathered together, these speaking ones, -
the various people who had anything to teach; - and formed themselves
gradually, under the patronage of kings and other potentates who were anxious
about the culture of their populations, and nobly studious of their best
benefit; and became a body-corporate, with high privileges, high dignities,
and really high aims, under the title of a University.
Possibly too you may have heard it said that the course of centuries has
changed all this; and that `the true University of our days is a Collection of
Books.` And beyond doubt, all this is greatly altered by the invention of
Printing, which took place about midway between us and the origin of
Universities. Men have not now to go in person to where a Professor is
actually speaking; because in most cases you can get his doctrine out of him
through a book; and can then read it, and read it again and again, and study
it. That is an immense change, that one fact of Printed Books. And I am not
sure that I know of any University in which the whole of that fact has yet
been completely taken in, and the studies moulded in complete conformity with
it. Nevertheless, Universities have, and will continue to have, an
indispensable value in society; - I think, a very high, and it might be,
almost the highest value. They began, as is well known, with their grand aim
directed on Theology, - their eye turned earnestly on Heaven. And perhaps, in
a sense, it may be still said, the very highest interests of man are virtually
intrusted to them. In regard to theology, as you are aware, it has been, and
especially was then, the study of the deepest heads that have come into the
world, -what is the nature of this stupendous Universe, and what are our
relations to it, and to all things knowable by man, or known only to the great
Author of man and it. Theology was once the name for all this; all this is
still alive for man, however dead the name may grow! In fact, the members of
the Church keeping theology in a lively condition [Laughter] for the benefit
of the whole population, theology was the great object of the Universities. I
consider it is the same intrinsically now, though very much forgotten, from
many causes, and not so successful [A laugh] as might be wished, by any manner
of means!
It remains, however, practically a most important truth, what I alluded
to above, that the main use of Universities in the present age is that, after
you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books,
a great library of good books, which you proceed to study and to read. What
the Universities can mainly do for you, - what I have found the University
did for me, is, That it taught me to read, in various languages, in various
sciences; so that I could go into the books which treated of these things,
and gradually penetrate into any department I wanted to make myself master
of, as I found it suit me.
Well, Gentlemen, whatever you may think of these historical points, the
clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in
your reading. Learn to be good readers, - which is perhaps a more difficult
thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read
faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have
a real interest in, a real not an imaginary, and which you find to be really
fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a great
deal of the reading incumbent on you, you must be guided by the books
recommended by your Professors for assistance towards the effect of their
prelections. And then, when you leave the University, and go into studies
of your own, you will find it very important that you have chosen a field,
some province specially suited to you, in which you can study and work. The
most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do,
who has got no work cut-out for him in the world, and does not go into it.
For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset
mankind, - honest work, which you intend getting done.
If, in any vacant vague time, you are in a strait as to choice of
reading, - a very good indication for you, perhaps the best you could get, is
toward some book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the
readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book. It is
analogous to what doctors tell us about the physical health and appetites of
the patient. You must learn, however, to distinguish between false appetite
and true. There is such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man
into vagaries with regard to diet; will tempt him to eat spicy things, which
he should not eat at all, nor would, but that the things are toothsome, and
that he is under a momentary baseness of mind. A man ought to examine and
find out what he really and truly has an appetite for, what suits his
constitution and condition; and that, doctors tell him, is in general the
very thing he ought to have. And so with books.
|
