and are not likely to be invigorated and re- the elevation of the faculties, they never freshed when engaged in unprofitable work, will be improved by what is itself useas it were, mounting the steps of a tread-less, or found to be profitless in the future mill, or doing the whole in a close medie-life. And I am prepared to show that the val atmosphere, which, in fact wastes the sciences, physical and moral, not only supstrength, and gives a sallow complexion to ply nutriment and strength to the intellect, the countenance. Do you not see the ter- they give life to it. It has been proved by rible risk of wearying and disgusting the recent science, that the food we eat, got mind, when it is making its first and most from the animal and the plant, not only hopeful efforts, and giving it ever after, by gives nourishment to the frame, but by the the laws of mental association, a distaste force derived from that great source of for severe studies? True, the exercise of force, the sun, furnishes the heat which the mind, like that of the body, is its own keeps the body warm and vital; so knowlreward; but both are most apt to be un-edge, which is power derived from the Divine dertaken when there is some otherwise source of all power, not only communicates pleasant or profitable object in view, and strength to the mind, but imparts fire to most likely to be repeated when we have a kindle a noble enthusiasm, and motive to sense of gratitude for the good we have re-set us forth in our pursuits, when we know ceived. If, after we have walked so hard, that we shall in no wise lose our reward. we see and find nothing of value, if we are Science discloses not only a utility, but a required to labor for that which profiteth beauty in objects which, to the vulgar, apnot, to fight as one that beateth the air, the pear dull and debasing; shows that there is issue is not likely to be refreshing, and life, a loveliness in every work that God has and hope, but ennui, and unconquerable made, even in the skeleton of rattling aversion to exertion. I hold that every bones, from which the uninitiated shrink; study should, as far as possible, leave not even in the insects crawling in the clay from a distaste, but a relish on the palate of the which they flee a beauty fitted to call young, so that they may be inclined to re-forth admiration and love, and in the hearts turn to it.* However it may have been in of the pious adoration and praise. the dark, or rather, as I would call them, (3). It may be the aim of a University the twilight ages, when only a few de- to give professional instruction. This, inpartments of real knowledge could be dis- deed, should always be esteemed a lower cerned, and men had to make the best end, not indeed an unworthy, but still an of the available material, it is not impera- inferior end, that is, subordinate to the imtive now to resort to profitless studies when provement of the mind; and if we make it such rich and fertile fields are evidently supreme, we are turning things upside lying all around us. Our Lord's test ap- down, and putting uppermost the limbs, plied to religion admits of an application to instead of the head which ought to subordistudy, namely, that it brings forth fruits. nate and guide the whole. It is certainly Faith may often be more valuable than not the function of a University to make its works, but it is by works it is to be tried to students artizans, or merchants, or manusee if it is genuine, and by works faith is facturers, or farmers, or shipowners; the made perfect: so it is by profitable work practical knowledge required by such may that the faculties are called forth and ele- best be got from practical men in shops, vated. Bacon adopted our Lord's distinc- and fields, and warerooms, and offices. tion, and applied it to science; not holding Still, as science aids art and perfects it, so (as those who do not understand religion a College by teaching the sciences may fit misunderstand him) that practical fruits are better than knowledge, but that knowledge cannot be genuine when it does not yield such fruits. So, using the same distinction, I hold that in study, while the true end is Plato says, Rep. VII. 15, that instruction should be so given that it may be learned without compul sion. Τι δή; Οτι, ἦν δ ̓ ἐγώ, οὐδεν μάθημα μετά δουλείας τὸν ἐλεύθερον χρὴ μανθάνειν. οἱ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ σώματος πόνοι βία πονούμενοι χεῖρον οὐδὲν τὸ σῶμα ἀπεργαζονται, ψυχῇ δὲ βίαιον οὐδὲν ἔμμονον μάθημα. Αληθή, ἔφη. Με τοίνυν βια εἶπον, ὦ ἀρίστη, τοὺς παῖδις ἐν τοῖς μαθήμασιν ἀλλὰ παίζοντας τρεψε. Some of his statements go too far. Quinctilian's caution is judicious: Nam id in primis cavere oportebit, ne studia qui amare nondum potest oderit, et amaritudinem semel perceptam etiam ultra rudes annos reformidat. its students, not, it may be, for the ordinary avocations of their employments. but for inventing new instruments, and finding improvements; and, by its whole training, it lays up enjoyments denied to the uneducated. But, in order to accomplish even such ends as these, a College should never come down from its high position to be a mere instructor in the mechanical arts, or in shop and office work. Whatever branches it teaches, it should teach as sciences, and in a literary academie spirit, so as to impart to those members of those professions, who come within our precincts, a thoroughly scientific acquaint ance with their subjects, so that they may those who are placed in the offices of a improve the trades and increase their re- University should aim at something more sources, while they carry with them an ele- than being merely the teachers of a revation of tone which will keep the meanest stricted body of young men. The youths work in which they require to engage from who are under them and who look up to being felt to be a degradation. And then them will be greatly stimulated to study by there are walks of life, such as the learned the very circumstance that their professor profession, those preparing for which re- is a man of wide sympathies and connecquire to know literature and science, and tions with the literature or science of the certainly to these the instruction given country generally, or of other countries. should be of a philosophic character, to fit It was thus that the Scottish professors of them for entering in an intelligent manner, the last century, such as Adam Smith, and and with a rich furniture of fundamental Reid, and Stewart, and Black, and Munro, and established principles, upon their pro- and Playfair, did so much to promote their fessional studies. But the different branches favorite departments, in political economy admitted into the University being so taught, and mental philosophy, and certain branches it may be allowable for the student to give of physics. It was thus that Newton, Lua preference to those which may assist him casian Professor of Mathematics at Camin his professional pursuits. Thus, those bridge, published the Principia, and made who are intended for theology, might legit- his University and his College famous for imately and properly show a partiality for all time. It is thus that in our day in Gerthe language of the New Testament, or for many every professor labors to bring forth mental science which brings them into such every year or two the product of his studies intimate connection with the great truths in a work which may add to the permanent of religion; and a medical student might knowledge of mankind in some department, draw lovingly towards chemistry or physi- wide or narrow. The applications of sciology; while the lawyer might give less ence and the good uses of literature may attention to other subjects, to undertake a be found elsewhere in our workshops, and more special study of political economy. schools, and lighter literature, but where All this is in entire harmony with the idea should we expect to find our highest scholof a University, whose office it is to train arship and profoundest science but in our the powers, but which may do so by any Colleges with their leisure, their independthing which is fitted to elevate and refine ence, and the great stimulus which they the mind. furnish. 66 (4). It should be the aim of a Uni- And then the glory of every Alma Mater versity to promote literature and science, consists in her children, "as arrows in the and by these and by its pupils to raise the hand of a mighty man; happy is he, whole community. The Rev. Mr. Pattison that hath his quiver full of them; they shall of Oxford would have his University look not be ashamed, but they shall speak with on the teaching vocation as a subordinate the enemies in the gate." It should be the one, and devote its splendid revenues to ambition of every College to send forth a make its Colleges houses for a profes- body of educated men who, as ministers, sional class of learned and scientific men; as lawyers, as physicians, as private gentle"homes for the life study of the highest men, or in the public service, or as engaged and most abstruse parts of knowledge." in business which their character and refineThis is carrying an idea, which has some ments elevate, are spreading around them, truth in it, too far. I am not sure that the consciously or unconsciously, a civilizing healthiest scholarship or highest science and humanizing influence; making learning would be promoted by the men who might respected because respectable, and spreadbe selected, no matter on what principle ing a thirst for culture. Such a radiating of candidature and election, to these offices power is especially needed in our day, when of leisure and emolument, which would there is such a devotedness to the practical tend, I fear, to become places of ease and and money-making pursuits to what Sir laziness, possibly of obstruction to activity W. Hamilton translating a German phrase, and independence of thought; or whether calls the "bread and butter sciences; the men would best accomplish the end by and we need it to counteract the coarsebeing formed into an exclusive community. ness, the earthliness, the clayeyness, thus Of this I am sure, that the people of this engendered, and to set before the country country and of every country will insist on higher and more generous ends. its Universities being primarily the edu- shows in all his works that he sets a value cators of its more promising youths, des- not only on bare utility but on beauty and tined for the higher walks of life. Still ornament,-you see it in that lily so God adorned, in that dome of heaven spangled | other severe study; and why should they. with stars. I suppose that in this country not be employed in what they are capable your coal and iron, your earth and oil, are of doing? There are persons forever tellafter all more valuable than your precious ing us that children should be taught to atmetals, but since God hath deposited them tend to " things," rather than words." in your soil you would not part with your But then words are "things," having an silver and your gold. So you should see important place in our bodily organization that with all your other attainments, with and mental structure, in both of which the your general intelligence and your emi-power of speech is one of the things that nence in the practical arts, you have also raise us above the brutes. And then it the highest learning and science. Our Col- can be shown that it is mainly by language leges in relation to the lower education that we come to get a knowledge of things. should rise like towers and steeples out of This arises not merely from the circumour towns and villages, like hills and moun- stance that we get by far the greater part tains out of our plains. A College like of our knowledge from our fellow-men Princeton should, as Athens and Alexan- through speech and writing, but because it dria were in ancient times, be an intellec- is, in a great measure, by words that we tual metropolis whence a refining influence are induced, nay compelled, to observe, to goes down to the provinces. I magnify compare, to abstract, to analyze, to clasmine office: a professor should be like the central sun with planets circulating around it, and each of these a centre round which other bodies revolve; so a professor by himself and by his pupils and their labors may reach in his influence to the most distant hamlet in the country through which his students are scattered. II. WHAT SHOULD BE THE BRANCHES I am prepared to vindicate the high place which has hitherto been allotted to languages in all the famous Colleges of the Old World and the New; though I cannot defend the exclusive place which has been given them in some. Without entering upon the psychological question whether the power of thinking by means of symbols be or be not an original faculty of the mind; or the physiological one, whether its seat, as M. Broca thinks he has proven, be in the left hemisphere of the brain, specially in the posterior part of the third frontal convolution of the left anterior lobe, I am prepared to maintain that it is a natural gift, early appearing and strong in youth. You see it in the young child acquiring its language so spontaneously, and delighting to ring its vocables the live-long day; in the boy of nine or ten years of age, learning Latin when he could not master a science quite as quickly as the man of mature age. Now, in the systematic training of the mind, we should not set ourselves against, but rather fall in with this natural tendency and facility. Boys can acquire a language when they are not able to wrestle with any sify, to reason. How little can we know of things without language? How little do deaf mutes know of things till they are taught the use of signs? I have known some of them considerably advanced in life who not only did not know that the soul was immortal, they did not know that the body was mortal. Children obtain by far the larger part of their information from parents, brothers, sisters, nurses, teachers, companions, and fellow-men and women in general, and this comes by language. But this is, after all, the least part: it is in understanding and using intelligently words and sentences that children are first taught to notice things and their properties, to discern their differences and perceive their resemblances. Nature presents us only with particulars, which, as Plato remarked long ago, are infinite, and therefore confusing, and the language formed by our forefathers, and inherited by us, puts them into intelligible groups for us. Nature shows us only concretes, that is, objects with their varied qualities, that is, with complexities beyond the penetration of children, and language makes them intelligible by separating the parts, and calling attention to common qualities. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and other parts of speech in a cultivated tongue, introduce us to things, as men have thought about them in the use of their faculties, and combined them for general and for special purposes; prima rily, no doubt, for their own use and advantage, but turning out to be a valuable inheritance to their children, who get access to things with the thought of ages superinduced upon them—as it were, set in à frame-work for us, that we may study them more easily. In the phrases of a civilized tongue, we have a set of discriminations and comparisons spontaneously fash ioned by our ancestors, often more fresh | venerated grandmothers of our own, ready and subtle, always more immediately and to tell us of its descent, its lineage practically useful, than those of the most and its history; let us not forget, as the advanced science. Then a new language transmitter of ancient and eastern learning introduces us to new generalizations and to modern times and western countries; new abstractions, made, it may be, by a and as the common language for ages in litpeople of a different genius and differently erature, philosophy, law and theology, and situated, and thus widens and varies our thus containing treasures to which every view of things, and saves us from being the educated man requires some time or other slaves of the words of our own tongue, to have access. Then there is the Greek, saves us, in fact, from putting words for the most subtle, delicate and expressive of things, putting counters for money (as all old languages, embodying the fresh Hobbes says), which we should be apt to thoughts of the most intellectual people of do, if we knew only one word for the the ancient world, and containing a literathing. Charles V. uttered a deep truth, ture which is unsurpassed, perhaps not whether he understood it or no, when he equalled, for the loveliness, purity and grace said that a man was as many times a man of its poetry, for the combined firmness and as he acquired a new tongue. Then, in flexibility of its prose, as seen for instance, learning a language grammatically, whether in Plato, who can mount to the highest our own or another, we have to learn or sublimities and go down to the lowest gather rules, and judiciously apply them, familiarities without falling-like the eleto see the rule in the example and collect phant's trunk, equally fitted to tear an oak the rule out of the example; and in all this or lift a straw. And it is never to be forthe more rudimentary intellectual powers, gotten that it is the language of the New not only the memory, but the apprehension Testament; that it was the favorite lanand quickness of perception and discern-guage of the Reformers. Luther said, "If ment are as quite effectually called forth we do not keep up the tongues, we will not and disciplined, as by any other study in keep up the gospel;" and so the stream which the youthful mind is capacitated to is still to be encouraged to flow on, if we engage. would keep up the connection between Christianity and its fountain. A nation studiously giving up its attention to these tongues would be virtually cut off from the past, and would be apt to become stagnant like a pool, into which no streams flow, and from which none issue, instead of a lake receiving pure waters from above, and giving them out below. Their languages differ widely from ours, but just because they so do, they serve a good purpose, letting us into a different order and style of thought, less analytic, more synthetic, as it is commonly said, more concrete, as I express it; that is, introducing us to things as they are, and in their natural connection. True, they are dead languages, but then, just because they are so, we can get a completed biography of them; and, as we dissect them, they lie passive, like bodies under the knife of the anatomist. As Hobbes expresses it, "they have put off flesh and blood to put on immortality;" they are dead, and yet they live; live in the works which have been written in them with their diversity of knowledge, living specially in their literature, which is imperishable, which, for fitness of phraseology, brevity, clearness, directness, severity, are models for all ages, bringing us back to simplicity, when we should err by extravagance; and to he specially studied by the rising gene I have been struggling to give expression in a few sentences to thoughts which it would require a whole lecture fully to unfold. Such considerations seem to me to prove that we should continue to give to language an important-I have not said an exclusive place in the younger collegiate classes. Among languages a choice must be made, and there are three which have such claims that every student should be instructed in them; and there are others which have claims on those who have special aptitudes and destinations in life. There is the Latin, important in itself, and from the part which it has played. It has an educational value from the breadth, regularity and logical accuracy of its structure, giving us a fine specimen of grammar, from its clear expression, and from its stately methodical march- like that of a Roman army. It is of inestimable value from its literature, second only to that of Greece in the old world, and to that of England and Germany in modern times; and a model still to be looked to by English and by Germans, if they would make progress as they have hitherto done. Then, besides its intrinsic worth, it has historical value as the mother of several other European languages, as the Italian, the French, the Spanish, and Portuguese, to all of which it is the best introduction, and, as one of the ration in our time, when there is so much conceive. If a Briton or an American can of looseness and inflation, stump oratory study only one language let it be the Engand sensationalism. It would be difficult to lish. A College youth's education is incomdefine it, but we all know what is meant by plete, though he should know all other a classical taste; there are persons who tongues, if he be ignorant of the genius and seem to acquire its chaste color spontane-literature of his own. There should, I ously, as the ancient Greeks and Romans must have done; but, in fact, it has been mainly fostered by living and breathing in the atmosphere of ancient Greece and Rome; and our youths may acquire it most readily by travelling to the same region where the air is ever pure and fresh. I believe that our language and literature will run a great risk of hopelessly degenerating, if we are not ever restrained and corrected, while we are enlivened and refreshed, by looking to these faultless models. There are other foreign languages which have a claim on educated men, such as the French with its delicate conversational idiom, and the abstract clearness, amounting to transparency, of its prose; and the German with its profound common sense, and its noble literature, worthy of being placed alongside that of ancient Greece, and excelling it in the revelation of the depths of human nature. I am inclined to the opinion that either of these might under certain restrictions have a place in the Course, provided always it be taught as Greek and Latin are, that is, as branches of learning, taught philologically, taught so as to illustrate character and history, and above all so as to open up to us, and lead us to appreciate, the literature of the countries. hold, be a special class for the English language and literature in every College of every English-speaking country. But in order that English have a place in a University it must fall in with the spirit of the place and conform to its laws: it must be taught as a branch of learning, as a branch of science (wissenschaftlich); it must be traced up to the roots; it must be studied in its formation, growth and historical development; and, above all, it must be taught so as to give a relish for its noblest works, and secure that it has a literature in the future not unworthy of the literature of the past. (2). Mathematics should also constitute an essential part of a College curriculum, and a portion should be obligatory on every student. Over the gates of every College should be written what is said to have been inscribed over the Academy in which Plato taught, "Let no one who is without geometry enter here." They serve ends which cannot be effected by any other training. First, they introduce youths early and conveniently to self-evident truth. They show that every thing cannot be proven: that there is such a thing as a priori principles founded in the very nature of things, and perceived at once by intuitive reason,―lt But prior to all these and posterior to was to mathematics that the great German them, above them all and below them all, metaphysician primarily appealed in estabis a tongue which has an imperative claim lishing the existence of necessary truth. on us; and that is, our own tongue, the This is a very important conviction to have language of the mother of us all, Great fixed in the minds of young men, especially Britain and her colonies, and the language in these times, when an attempt is made to of her eldest daughter, which should ac- derive all certainty from experience, which knowledge her inferiority only in this, that must ever be limited, and can never — she is the daughter and the other the more than a stream can rise above its founmother. It has a claim on our love and tain-establish a universal, a necessary esteem because it is our own tongue which proposition. Having seen that there are a we learned on our mother's knees, the priori truths in mathematics the mind will tongue with which we are and ever must be be better prepared to admit that there are most familiar; because it is in itself a noble eternal and unchangeable principles lying language, with roots simple and concrete at the basis of morality and religion, and striking deep into home and heart experi- guaranteeing to us the immutable character ence, and grafted on these from foreign of the law and of the justice of God. Then stocks abstract terms for reflective and sci- mathematics exhibit to us more clearly than entific use; because it has been enriched any other science the interdependence and by the ideas and fancies, the comparisons connections of all truth, and the links by and metaphors, of men profound in thought which premises and conclusion are tied in and fertile in imagination; and yet more the reasoning process. Moreover the study because of its manly and massive, its rich gives a concentration to the attention and a and varied, literature, prose and poetic, re- logical consecutiveness to the thoughts, volving round themes which it never en- and so saves from that tendency to wantered into the heart of Greek or Roman to dering and dissipation of mind, which is - any |