dangerous operation; that it is a very large subject, and one which is
difficult to deal with, however much I may trespass upon your patience
in the time allotted to me. But the discussion is so fundamental, it is
so completely impossible to make up one's mind on these matters until
one has settled the question, that I will even venture to make the
experiment. A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former age--I
mean Francis Bacon--said that truth came out of error much more rapidly
than it came out of confusion. There is a wonderful truth in that
saying. Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to
be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere.
If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and
fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and
thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have
the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that
sets you all straight again. So I will not trouble myself as to whether
I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say, but at any rate I
hope to be clear and definite; and then you will be able to judge for
yourselves whether, in following out the train of thought I have to
introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not.
I take it that the whole object of education is, in the first place, to
train the faculties of the young in such a manner as to give their
possessors the best chance of being happy and useful in their
generation; and, in the second place, to furnish them with the most
important portions of that immense capitalised experience of the human
race which we call knowledge of various kinds. I am using the term
knowledge in its widest possible sense; and the question is, what
subjects to select by training and discipline, in which the object I
have just defined may be best attained.
I must call your attention further to this fact, that all the subjects
of our thoughts--all feelings and propositions (leaving aside our
sensations as the mere materials and occasions of thinking and
feeling), all our mental furniture--may be classified under one of two
heads--as either within the province of the intellect, something that
can be put into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within the
province of feeling, or that which, before the name was defiled, was
called the aesthetic side of our nature, and which can neither be
proved nor disproved, but only felt and known.
According to the classification which I have put before you, then, the
subjects of all knowledge are divisible into the two groups, matters of
science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning
faculty alone is occupied, come under the province of science; and in
the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and technical sense in which
we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things feelable, all
things which stir our emotions, come under the term of art, in the
sense of the subject-matter of the aesthetic faculty. So that we are
shut up to this--that the business of education is, in the first place,
to provide the young with the means and the habit of observation; and,
secondly, to supply the subject-matter of knowledge either in the shape
of science or of art, or of both combined.
Now, it is a very remarkable fact--but it is true of most things in
this world--that there is hardly anything one-sided, or of one nature;
and it is not immediately obvious what of the things that interest us
may be regarded as pure science, and what may be regarded as pure art.
It may be that there are some peculiarly constituted persons who,
before they have advanced far into the depths of geometry, find
artistic beauty about it; but, taking the generality of mankind, I
think it may be said that, when they begin to learn mathematics, their
whole souls are absorbed in tracing the connection between the
premisses and the conclusion, and that to them geometry is pure
science. So I think it may be said that mechanics and osteology are
pure science. On the other hand, melody in music is pure art. You
cannot reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it. So,
again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "harmony in grey,"
touches none but the aesthetic faculty. But a great mathematician, and
even many persons who are not great mathematicians, will tell you that
they derive immense pleasure from geometrical reasonings. Everybody
knows mathematicians speak of solutions and problems as "elegant," and
they tell you that a certain mass of mystic symbols is "beautiful,
quite lovely." Well, you do not see it. They do see it, because the
intellectual process, the process of comprehending the reasons
symbolised by these figures and these signs, confers upon them a sort
of pleasure, such as an artist has in visual symmetry. Take a science
of which I may speak with more confidence, and which is the most
attractive of those I am concerned with. It is what we call morphology,
which consists in tracing out the unity in variety of the infinitely
diversified structures of animals and plants. I cannot give you any
example of a thorough aesthetic pleasure more intensely real than a
pleasure of this kind--the pleasure which arises in one's mind when a
whole mass of different structures run into one harmony as the
expression of a central law. That is where the province of art overlays
and embraces the province of intellect. And, if I may venture to
express an opinion on such a subject, the great majority of forms of
art are not in the sense what I just now defined them to be--pure art;
but they derive much of their quality from simultaneous and even
unconscious excitement of the intellect.
When I was a boy, I was very fond of music, and I am so now; and it so
happened that I had the opportunity of hearing much good music. Among
other things, I had abundant opportunities of hearing that great old
master, Sebastian Bach. I remember perfectly well--though I knew
nothing about music then, and, I may add, know nothing whatever about
it now--the intense satisfaction and delight which I had in listening,
by the hour together, to Bach's fugues. It is a pleasure which remains
with me, I am glad to think; but, of late years, I have tried to find
out the why and wherefore, and it has often occurred to me that the
pleasure derived from musical compositions of this kind is essentially
of the same nature as that which is derived from pursuits which are
commonly regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source
of pleasure is exactly the same as in most of my problems in
morphology--that you have the theme in one of the old master's works
followed out in all its endless variations, always appearing and always
reminding you of unity in variety. So in painting; what is called
"truth to nature" is the intellectual element coming in, and truth to
nature depends entirely upon the intellectual culture of the person to
whom art is addressed. If you are in Australia, you may get credit for
being a good artist--I mean among the natives--if you can draw a
kangaroo after a fashion. But, among men of higher civilisation, the
intellectual knowledge we possess brings its criticism into our
appreciation of works of art, and we are obliged to satisfy it, as well
as the mere sense of beauty in colour and in outline. And so, the
higher the culture and information of those whom art addresses, the
more exact and precise must be what we call its "truth to nature."
If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and you find works of
literature which may be said to be pure art. A little song of
Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful,
although its intellectual content may be nothing. A series of pictures
is made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and the
effect is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the great mass of the
literature we esteem is valued, not merely because of having artistic
form, but because of its intellectual content; and the value is the
higher the more precise, distinct, and true is that intellectual
content. And, if you will let me for a moment speak of the very highest
forms of literature, do we not regard them as highest simply because
the more we know the truer they seem, and the more competent we are to
appreciate beauty the more beautiful they are? No man ever understands
Shakespeare until he is old, though the youngest may admire him, the
reason being that he satisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest
and harmonises with the ripest and richest experience of the oldest.
I have said this much to draw your attention to what, to my mind, lies
at the root of all this matter, and at the understanding of one another
by the men of science on the one hand, and the men of literature, and
history, and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one order
of study or another should predominate. It is a question of what topics
of education you shall select which will combine all the needful
elements in such due proportion as to give the greatest amount of food,
support, and encouragement to those faculties which enable us to
appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness
which are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is
bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls
and dangers which beset those who break through the natural or moral
laws.
I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration of the question
of the value of purely literary education. Is it good and sufficient,
or is it insufficient and bad? Well, here I venture to say that there
are literary educations and literary educations. If I am to understand
by that term the education that was current in the great majority of
middle-class schools, and upper schools too, in this country when I was
a boy, and which consisted absolutely and almost entirely in keeping
boys for eight or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek
grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly
making verses which, had they been English verses, would have been
condemned as abominable doggerel,--if that is what you mean by liberal
education, then I say it is scandalously insufficient and almost
worthless. My reason for saying so is not from the point of view of
science at all, but from the point of view of literature. I say the
thing professes to be literary education that is not a literary
education at all. It was not literature at all that was taught, but
science in a very bad form. It is quite obvious that grammar is science
and not literature. The analysis of a text by the help of the rules of
grammar is just as much a scientific operation as the analysis of a
chemical compound by the help of the rules of chemical analysis. There
is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic faculty in that operation; and
I ask multitudes of men of my own age, who went through this process,
whether they ever had a conception of art or literature until they
obtained it for themselves after leaving school? Then you may say, "If
that is so, if the education was scientific, why cannot you be
satisfied with it?" I say, because although it is a scientific
training, it is of the most inadequate and inappropriate kind. If there
is any good at all in scientific education it is that men should be
trained, as I said before, to know things for themselves at first hand,
and that they should understand every step of the reason of that which
they do.
I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that science--philology--of
which grammar is a part and parcel; yet everybody knows that
grammar, as it is usually learned at school, affords no scientific
training. It is taught just as you would teach the rules of chess or
draughts. On the other hand, if I am to understand by a literary
education the study of the literatures of either ancient or modern
nations--but especially those of antiquity, and especially that of
ancient Greece; if this literature is studied, not merely from the
point of view of philological science, and its practical application to
the interpretation of texts, but as an exemplification of and
commentary upon the principles of art; if you look upon the literature
of a people as a chapter in the development of the human mind, if you
work out this in a broad spirit, and with such collateral references to
morals and politics, and physical geography, and the like as are
needful to make you comprehend what the meaning of ancient literature
and civilisation is,--then, assuredly, it affords a splendid and noble
education. But I still think it is susceptible of improvement, and that
no man will ever comprehend the real secret of the difference between
the ancient world and our present time, unless he has learned to see
the difference which the late development of physical science has made
between the thought of this day and the thought of that, and he will
never see that difference, unless he has some practical insight into
some branches of physical science; and you must remember that a
literary education such as that which I have just referred to, is out
of the reach of those whose school life is cut short at sixteen or
seventeen.
But, you will say, all this is fault-finding; let us hear what you have
in the way of positive suggestion. Then I am bound to tell you that, if
I could make a clean sweep of everything--I am very glad I cannot
because I might, and probably should, make mistakes,--but if I could
make a clean sweep of everything and start afresh, I should, in the
first place, secure that training of the young in reading and writing,
and in the habit of attention and observation, both to that which is
told them, and that which they see, which everybody agrees to. But in
addition to that, I should make it absolutely necessary for everybody,
for a longer or shorter period, to learn to draw. Now, you may say,
there are some people who cannot draw, however much they may be taught.
I deny that _in toto_, because I never yet met with anybody who
could not learn to write. Writing is a form of drawing; therefore if
you give the same attention and trouble to drawing as you do to
writing, depend upon it, there is nobody who cannot be made to draw,
more or less well. Do not misapprehend me. I do not say for one moment
you would make an artistic draughtsman. Artists are not made; they
grow. You may improve the natural faculty in that direction, but you
cannot make it; but you can teach simple drawing, and you will find it
an implement of learning of extreme value. I do not think its value can
be exaggerated, because it gives you the means of training the young in
attention and accuracy, which are the two things in which all mankind
are more deficient than in any other mental quality whatever. The whole
of my life has been spent in trying to give my proper attention to
things and to be accurate, and I have not succeeded as well as I could
wish; and other people, I am afraid, are not much more fortunate. You
cannot begin this habit too early, and I consider there is nothing of
so great a value as the habit of drawing, to secure those two desirable
ends.
Then we come to the subject-matter, whether scientific or aesthetic, of
education, and I should naturally have no question at all about
teaching the elements of physical science of the kind I have sketched,
in a practical manner; but among scientific topics, using the word
scientific in the broadest sense, I would also include the elements of
the theory of morals and of that of political and social life, which,
strangely enough, it never seems to occur to anybody to teach a child.
I would have the history of our own country, and of all the influences
which have been brought to bear upon it, with incidental geography, not
as a mere chronicle of reigns and battles, but as a chapter in the
development of the race, and the history of civilisation.
Then with respect to aesthetic knowledge and discipline, we have
happily in the English language one of the most magnificent storehouses
of artistic beauty and of models of literary excellence which exists in
the world at the present time. I have said before, and I repeat it
here, that if a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out
of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and
Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I
say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it out of
anything; and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time
of every English child to the careful study of the models of English
writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is
still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that
language with precision, with force, and with art. I fancy we are
almost the only nation in the world who seem to think that composition
comes by nature. The French attend to their own language, the Germans
study theirs; but Englishmen do not seem to think it is worth their
while. Nor would I fail to include, in the course of study I am
sketching, translations of all the best works of antiquity, or of the
modern world. It is a very desirable thing to read Homer in Greek; but
if you don't happen to know Greek, the next best thing we can do is to
read as good a translation of it as we have recently been furnished
with in prose. You won't get all you would get from the original, but
you may get a great deal; and to refuse to know this great deal because
you cannot get all, seems to be as sensible as for a hungry man to
refuse bread because he cannot get partridge. Finally, I would add
instruction in either music or painting, or, if the child should be so
unhappy, as sometimes happens, as to have no faculty for either of
those, and no possibility of doing anything in any artistic sense with
them, then I would see what could be done with literature alone; but I
would provide, in the fullest sense, for the development of the
aesthetic side of the mind. In my judgment, those are all the
essentials of education for an English child. With that outfit, such as
it might be made in the time given to education which is within the
reach of nine-tenths of the population--with that outfit, an
Englishman, within the limits of English life, is fitted to go
anywhere, to occupy the highest positions, to fill the highest offices
of the State, and to become distinguished in practical pursuits, in
science, or in art. For, if he have the opportunity to learn all those
things, and have his mind disciplined in the various directions the
teaching of those topics would have necessitated, then, assuredly, he
will be able to pick up, on his road through life, all the rest of the
intellectual baggage he wants.
If the educational time at our disposition were sufficient, there are
one or two things I would add to those I have just now called the
essentials; and perhaps you will be surprised to hear, though I hope
you will not, that I should add, not more science, but one, or, if
possible, two languages. The knowledge of some other language than
one's own is, in fact, of singular intellectual value. Many of the
faults and mistakes of the ancient philosophers are traceable to the
fact that they knew no language but their own, and were often led into
confusing the symbol with the thought which it embodied. I think it is
Locke who says that one-half of the mistakes of philosophers have
arisen from questions about words; and one of the safest ways of
delivering yourself from the bondage of words is, to know how ideas
look in words to which you are not accustomed. That is one reason for
the study of language; another reason is, that it opens new fields in
art and in science. Another is the practical value of such knowledge;
and yet another is this, that if your languages are properly chosen,
from the time of learning the additional languages you will know your
own language better than ever you did. So, I say, if the time given to
education permits, add Latin and German. Latin, because it is the key
to nearly one-half of English and to all the Romance languages; and
German, because it is the key to almost all the remainder of English,
and helps you to understand a race from whom most of us have sprung,
and who have a character and a literature of a fateful force in the
history of the world, such as probably has been allotted to those of no
other people, except the Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves. Beyond these,
the essential and the eminently desirable elements of all education,
let each man take up his special line--the historian devote himself to
his history, the man of science to his science, the man of letters to
his culture of that kind, and the artist to his special pursuit.
Bacon has prefaced some of his works with no more than this:
_Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit;_ let "sic cogitavi" be the epilogue
to what I have ventured to address to you to-night.
VIII
UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL
[1874]
Elected by the suffrages of your four Nations Rector of the ancient
University of which you are scholars, I take the earliest opportunity
which has presented itself since my restoration to health, of
delivering the Address which, by long custom, is expected of the holder
of my office.
My first duty in opening that Address, is to offer you my most hearty
thanks for the signal honour you have conferred upon me--an honour of
which, as a man unconnected with you by personal or by national ties,
devoid of political distinction, and a plebeian who stands by his
order, I could not have dreamed. And it was the more surprising to
me, as the five-and-twenty years which have passed over my head
since I reached intellectual manhood, have been largely spent in no
half-hearted advocacy of doctrines which have not yet found favour in
the eyes of Academic respectability; so that, when the proposal to
nominate me for your Rector came, I was almost as much astonished as
was Hal o' the Wynd, "who fought for his own hand," by the Black
Douglas's proffer of knighthood. And I fear that my acceptance must be
taken as evidence that, less wise than the Armourer of Perth, I have
not yet done with soldiering.
In fact, if, for a moment, I imagined that your intention was simply,
in the kindness of your hearts, to do me honour; and that the Rector of
your University, like that of some other Universities was one of those
happy beings who sit in glory for three years, with nothing to do for
it save the making of a speech, a conversation with my distinguished
predecessor soon dispelled the dream. I found that, by the constitution
of the University of Aberdeen, the incumbent of the Rectorate is, if
not a power, at any rate a potential energy; and that, whatever may be
his chances of success or failure, it is his duty to convert that
potential energy into a living force, directed towards such ends as may
seem to him conducive to the welfare of the corporation of which he is
the theoretical head.
I need not tell you that your late Lord Rector took this view of his
position, and acted upon it with the comprehensive, far-seeing insight
into the actual condition and tendencies, not merely of his own, but of
other countries, which is his honourable characteristic among
statesmen. I have already done my best, and, as long as I hold my
office, I shall continue my endeavours, to follow in the path which he
trod; to do what in me lies, to bring this University nearer to
the ideal--alas, that I should be obliged to say ideal--of all
Universities; which, as I conceive, should be places in which thought
is free from all fetters; and in which all sources of knowledge, and
all aids to learning, should be accessible to all comers, without
distinction of creed or country, riches or poverty.
Do not suppose, however, that I am sanguine enough to expect much to
come of any poor efforts of mine. If your annals take any notice of my
incumbency, I shall probably go down to posterity as the Rector who was
always beaten. But if they add, as I think they will, that my defeats
became victories in the hands of my successors, I shall be well
content.
* * * * *