PRESIDENT MCCOSH.

Ar a meeting of the Board of Trustees cheers, and escorted to the President's house, from the porch of which he made a short address to the students, which was warmly applauded.

of the College of New Jersey, at Princeton, April 29th, 1868, the Reverend James McCosh, D.D., LL. D., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Queen's College, Belfast, Ireland, was unanimously chosen to the office of President of the College, made vacant by the resignation of the Reverend Dr. Maclean.

On the day of the inauguration, October 27th, special trains from New York and Philadelphia brought to Princeton such a concourse of graduates and of learned, and distinguished men from different parts of the country, as has never before been known in the history of the College.

His acceptance of the office called forth unusual marks of public favor on both sides of the Atlantic. In Scotland, as well as After the Inaugural Address of the PresIreland, distinguished assemblies were gath- ident, which was heard with unabated inered in honor of the President-elect, to ex- terest to the close, the whole assembly rose press to him their good wishes at parting. and greeted him with enthusiastic cheers. In our own country, the sister Colleges of In the evening the President held a reHarvard, Brown, and Jefferson, conferred ception at his house, while a promenade upon him their highest academic degrees; concert, provided by the students, was and on his arrival at Princeton, October given in the adjoining campus, the College 20th, he was met at the station by the fac- grounds and buildings being brilliantly illuulties and students of the College and The- minated. ological Seminary, welcomed with hearty

Dr. Mc Cosh's published works (Robert Carter & Brothers,) are:

1. The Method of Divine Government, Physical and Moral.

2. Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation.

3. The Intuition of the Mind Inductively Investigated.

4. An Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill's Philosophy, Being a Defence of Fundamental Truth. 5. Philosophical Papers.

INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

How does it come that, with so many su- | welfare and progress of the world do so perior men in America, I have been invited much depend, into warmer friendship, and to become President of Princeton, is a closer fellowship. Are we not one in race, question which I have often been putting to a somewhat mixed race, the main element myself these last few months, without being in both being the Anglo-Saxon with its love able to find a satisfactory answer. So I of personal liberty and its perseverance; think it best to "give it up," and turn to the same in language, in literature, in reinquiries which have no personal bearing. ligion, in the love of education and of freeBut before doing so, I feel bound to say dom? Why, with such bonds uniting them, that the very fact of your calling me to this should not the hearts of the two great comhigh office is a proof that you have no jeal-munities beat in unison, and their hands ousy of the old country. It is one of the combine in common efforts for the Chrismotives impelling me to tear myself from tianization, the enlightenment and civilizathe land which I so much loved, and to tion of mankind. I do not expect to be come to this country, which I will not love able to further this end by politics (in which the less because I loved and do still love I do not mean to appear as a partisan); the one I have left, that I may labor to but surely all here may help it by the bindbring the two nations on which the future ing influence of literature, science and

philosophy, which are citizens not of one ing erudition by mere lectures, and have

country but of the world; and above all by the attractive power of religion, which is a citizen of heaven come down to spread peace among men.

introduced more of the tutorial and examination system.* Even in Germany some are becoming sick of their drill system and dry routine, and are longing for an infusion of the more fresh and manly training of Great Britain. This discontent with the present is stirring up a strong desire to improve for the future: and out of the discussions will arise, I am satisfied, great improvements in the Universities of the old world. I am in this lecture to carry you into the very heart of these discussions.

I

that I have also visited upward of a dozen colleges and theological seminaries in the United States; and I have seen enough of them to become convinced that they are not rashly to be meddled with. They are the spontaneous outgrowth of your position and your intelligence; they are associated with your history and have become adjusted to your wants; and whatever improvements they admit of must be built on the old foundation. Still the circumstance that you

The question for me to answer is, what can I do for you now that I am among you? The reply to this question in all its width must be found in what I do the remainder of my life. But there is a narrower and more immediate inquiry, what can I do this day in response to the generous reception you have given me? All that I can offer is to give some information derived from It is to be understood that in doing this the experience through which I have passed. have no design, avowed or secret, to revIt so happens that I have a considerable olutionize your American colleges or to reacquaintance with the universities of the old construct them after a European model. I world. I have attended two of the Scottish take up this subject because it is one comUniversities, and I believe I am a graduate petent to me, and because it enables me to of three of them. I have visited Oxford unfold what I believe to be the proper naand Cambridge, and lived within their walls ture of collegiate instruction, without comwith some of their most distinguished men. mitting myself prematurely to American In Ireland I was officially connected with questions, in regard to which I am seeking the latest established university in the Three information. It fortunately so happens Kingdoms, the Queen's University; and I had incidentally means of being acquainted with Dublin University. I have visited some half dozen colleges in Germany and several in Switzerland and Holland. I feel therefore that I ought to know something of academic teaching in Europe. And then it also happens that the question of what academic education ought to be, is being keenly discussed in Germany and in England, Scotland and Ireland by some of the most thoughtful men in those countries, such as Dællinger, Pattison, Mathew Arnold, Seeley, Farrar, Lowe, Grant Duff, J. S. Mill, Tyndall, H. Spencer, Huxley, Lorimer, Cairnes, and many others. The younger moving spirits in the old colleges are alive to the evils which have become encrusted round the venerable structures to which they are attached, and are bent on having them removed. The more enlightened teachers in Oxford and Cambridge are becoming ashamed of the exclusive study of Latin and Greek, or Mathematics, very specially of their exaction of verse-making -as Milton expressed it long ago: and verses wrung from poor striplings like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit." In Scotland they have become fully aware of the futility of impart-ucation, pp. 117, 853.

"Themes

* But there is a risk that certain dispensers of English Universities, most of whom have abandoned patronage, by preferring candidates trained at the Presbyterianism, bring the Colleges into collision with the religious convictions of the people. There

is another danger: by aping Oxford and Cambridge,

without equalling them in their own line; and by glorying in the fact, that their best pupils leave them to get prizes at the English Universities, they may lose that independence of thought and scientific research for which the Scottish Colleges have been famous. There are Englishmen who see this, Professor Seeley says: "If we take the single department of philosophy, is it not evident that if the English system had been followed in the Scottish Universities, there would have been no Scotch school of philosophy." Mr. Johnson: "It is to Edinburgh men more than to any pubiic school or Oxford or Cambridge men (unless Oxford and Westminster take credit for Bentham), that we owe the enlightened legislators and the righteous government of the last forty years." "If we ever had an educator, it was Dugald Stewart."-See Essays on Liberal Ed

have called me from a foreign country is a proof that you are anxious to receive supposed good from any and from every quarter. A composite nation like yours, drawing its population from all regions, will be ready to take knowledge from all lands. In regard to elementary schools Europe has more need to look to you than you have to look to Europe: but possibly in regard to universities America may advantageously look to the old colleges of Europe, even as these are anxiously looking to each other. This is one of the European wars in which I would have the United States to take their part. I certainly do not ask you to adopt any European method because it is European, or on any other ground than that it can stand a sifting examination on its own merits and of this I am sure that whatever matter your country receives from others, it will put upon it, as it has done upon the divers people who have come within its wide territories, a stamp and a character of its own.

end: but he has not made them perfect; he has left room for growth and progress; and it is a task laid on his intelligent creatures to be fellow-workers with him in finishing that work which he has left incomplete, merely that they may have honorable employment in completing it. Education ought to be a gymnastic to all our powers, not overlooking those of the body; that every muscle may be braced to its manly use; that our students may be able to assume the natural posture, and make proper use of their arms and limbs, which so many of our best scholars feel, in their public appearances, to be inconvenient appendages. It should seek specially to stimulate, and strengthen by exercising, the intellectual powers: such as the generalizing or classifying, by which we arrange the things that present themselves into groups, ordinate and co-ordinate; and the abstracting, analyzing capacities by which we reduce the complexities that meet us to a few comprehensible and manageable elements; and the reasoning faculty by which we rise from the

1. WHAT IS THE IDEA OR FINAL CAUSE known and the present to the unknown

OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING?

and remote. The studies of a university On this point, which settles every other, should be organized towards this end, and there is no agreement theoretically or prac- all its apparatus of languages, sciences, tically. A large and growing number, we physical and mental, and mathematical exmay call them the realists, evidently think ercises, should be means to accomplish it. that the rehos, or end of a university, is to But then man has other endowments than impart knowledge, some would say mere the understanding, in the narrow sense of physical knowledge; to fit students for the the term: he has a fancy capable of preprofessions, or prepare them for the busi-senting brighter pictures than any reality; ness of life. Others, whom we may call an imagination which will not be confined the idealists, embracing the more elevated within the limits of time and this world; minds, deem this a low and unworthy aim and a taste and sensibility which can apprefor the highest educational institutions of a ciate beauty and sublimity in earth and sky; country to set before them; and maintain and these ought to be called forth and culthat it should be the ambition of a univer- tivated in our academic groves, by youth sity to improve the faculties of the mind, being made to know, and led to relish, our to refine the taste, and to elevate the coun- finest literature, ancient and modern, in try by raising up an educated body of men, prose and poetry,—I add, though in doing who draw up all who are under their influ- so, I may seem to be placing the ideal too ence to a higher level, where they will high, by having in museums and art gallerbreathe a purer atmosphere. Let us en- ies the means of displaying the esthetic deavor to cut a clear path through the qualities of the creature, inanimate and anthicket of this controversy. imate, in art and nature. It is a favorite idea of Sir Charles Bell's, that the ancient Greeks reached such incomparable excellence in their statuary by aiming to produce figures as far removed from the brute form as possible: certainly it should be the aim

(1). I do hold it to be the highest end of a university to educate; that is, draw out and improve the faculties which God has given. Our Creator, no doubt, means all things in our world to be perfect in the

of academic teaching to give a form to the a means of ascending to their elevated mind high above the brute shape-high spheres. I hold that there are other means above the sordid and earthly manifestations besides the natural sciences of educating of humanity. And surely our universities, even the faculties of comparison and causalwhich are to fashion the ruling minds of the ity: that these may be called into exercise country, are never to forget that man has quite as effectively by the thoughts and high emotional susceptibilities which should sentiments embodied in a cultivated lanbe evoked by narratives, by eloquence, by guage; by the study of the noblest part of incidents presented in history, in literature, God's workmanship in this lower world, the and in art; and that, as the crown upon his human mind, whether of its laws, as unbrow placed there by his Maker, he has a folded by mental science, or in the concrete moral and spiritual nature, which is to be exhibition of human nature, in its fears and developed and purified by the contempla- hopes, its joys and sorrows, its struggles tion of a holy law, and of a holy God em- and its triumphs, in countries remote and bodying that law, and of a God incarnate near, in ages past and present, as detailed and with creature sympathies, inducing us in travel, in history, and biography, or by to draw nigh when otherwise we should be representations in poetry, in eloquence, in driven back by a consciousness of guilt on the fine arts, and most truthfully of all, in the one hand, and a view of the dazzling the inspired records. purity of the Fountain of Light on the other. Now, at this entrance examination, every study seeking admission into the curriculum of a college should be made to appear. In order to matriculation, it must show that it is fitted to refine and purify the noble faculties which God has given us.

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But then it should be frankly acknowledged and publicly proclaimed, that science, that is, observational science, that the knowledge of nature, that is, of the works of God, is an important means of cultivating those powers with which the God of nature has endowed us; for they show us how to (2). Under this, it should be the aim of observe and how to arrange the objects a university to impart knowledge. I say with which we are surrounded, and as we under this, in order to impose the proper do so, we come to see properties and beaulimit on the principle held by so many in ties before overlooked, and become more the present day, that a college should give interested in them, and acquire a friendship itself mainly, not to languages, and least of for them. They show us how to gather the all dead languages; not to metaphysical law from the scattered particulars that prepursuits, which move in circles without ad- sent themselves; how, by the necessary vancing; not to such old studies which are rejections and exclusions," as Bacon says, leading a sort of doomed existence, like to draw out the essential from the indifthat of flies in autumn; but to real knowl-ferent; how to reach the truth and consisedge, to practical knowledge, by which tency among discordant and apparently it turns out that they mean the various contradictory appearances; when to lay branches of physics, or quite as likely one aside prepossessions and anticipations; and or two favorite departments of natural how to make an "inquisition" of nature, science. Now I hold that even for practi- to catch her when Proteus-like she is anxcal utility, for mere happiness' sake, there ious to escape, and make her reveal her may be a higher end than the attainment secrets. These are not only the true means of knowledge, and that is the improving of of acquiring knowledge, but the fittest for those heaven-bestowed powers which ac- exercising and giving energy to the faculquire knowledge, but acquire many other ties, and of acquiring intellectual habits of things of value; I maintain that there may patience and penetration, useful in every be other knowledge valuable as well as kind of inquiry, speculative and practical. scientific information; and I utterly deny The old schoolmaster adage, that it is of no that the acquisition of knowledge, certainly consequence what the faculties be employed not of the material world, is the only means about, provided they are employed, and of training the nobler parts of humanity. thereby disciplined, is a false one. Some The child prefers nursery rhymes and Rob- have gone so far as to say, that no matter inson Crusoe to science made easy. Some whether the knowledge thus acquired, say of the greatest minds that shine as stars the writing of Latin verses, be of any use above our world knew little of physical in the future life or no; no matter how dull science, such as Homer, and Socrates, and Plato, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Edwards, and Burke, and Wordsworth, and Schiller, who yet found in our world sources of high enjoyment and

and crabbed the work, how harsh the grindstone on which the mind is ground, provided thereby the faculties are sharpened for use. These persons do not see that the mental powers are not healthily exercised,