INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT BARTLETT.
Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., of the Chicago Theological Seminary,
was elected the eighth president of the college. We insert entire his
inaugural address, delivered at the Commencement, June, 1877:
"Certain occasions seem to prescribe their own themes of discourse,
and certain themes are endowed with perpetual life. There are problems
with which each coming generation and each last man grapples as
freshly as the first.
"How shall the ripest growth of the ages be imparted to one young
soul? Twice, at least, in a lifetime, is this great question wont to
rise solemnly before each thoughtful man--when he looks forward in
youthful hope, and when he looks back in parental solicitude. It is a
question of many forms and multiplying answers. Shall there be a long,
fundamental training, wide and general? or, shall it be closely
professional? Shall it be predominantly classic, or scientific, or
esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for
accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey
of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle
with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive
"nines" not known on Helicon, and challenge British Oxford, alas? with
its boat crew? Shall the American College student follow his option,
or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for
schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with
library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches?
or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of
prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the
Concord sage,--'You send your son to the schoolmasters, and the
schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the
whole tone of the institution?
"In these and other forms is the same fundamental question still
thrust sharply before us. I do not propose to move directly on such a
line of bristling bayonets, but to make my way by a flank movement
across this "wilderness" of conflict. It will go far towards
determining the methods of a liberal education, if we first ascertain,
as I propose to do, The Chief Elements of a Manly Culture.
"Obviously the primal condition of all else must be found in a
self-prompted activity or wakefulness of intellect. The time when the
drifting faculties begin to feel the helm of will, when the youth
passes from being merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the
advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the
first remove from the _tohu va-vohu_ was when the Spirit of God
brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from
darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding
purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical
intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic.
It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round
restlessly by a yearning instinct; it may be driven by the strong
impulse of native genius; or, it may rise to the condition of being
the facile servant of the forceful will. When the boy at Pisa
curiously watches the oil lamp swinging by its long chain in the
cathedral, a pendulum begins to vibrate in his brain, and falling
bodies to count off their intervals; and when afterward he
deliberately fits two lenses in a leaden tube, the moon's mountains,
Jupiter's satellites, and Saturn's rings are all waiting to catch his
eye. A thoughtful meditation on the spasms of a dead frog's leg in
Bologna becomes galvanic. The gas breaking on the surface of a brewery
vat, well watched by Priestley, bursts forth into pneumatic chemistry.
A spider's web in the Duke of Devonshire's garden expands in the mind
of my lord's gardener, Brown, into a suspension bridge. A sledge
hammer, well swung in Cromarty, opened those New Walks in an Old
Field. The diffraction of light revealed itself to Young in the hues
of a soap-bubble. As the genie of the oriental tale unfolded his huge
height from the bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, so the career of
Davy first evolved itself out of old vials and gallipots. When the boy
Bowditch was found in all his leisure moments snatching up his slate
and pencil, when Cobbett grappled resolutely with the grammar, when
Cuvier dissected the cuttlefish found upon the shore, or Scott was
seen sitting on a ladder, hour after hour, poring over books, they
will be further heard from.
"If such instances illustrate the propulsive force of native genius,
they also indicate what training must do when the impulsive genius is
not there. No idler plea was ever entered for an idler than when he
says,--'I have no bent for this, no interest in that, and no genius
for the other.' The animal has his _habitat_, and stays fast. A
complete man is intellectually and physically a cosmopolite. Till he
has gained the power to throw his will-force wherever the work summons
him, most of all to the weak points of his condition, till he has
learned to be his own task-master and overseer, he is but a 'slave of
the ring.'
"In most lines the highest gift is the gift of toil. Indeed, men of
genius have often been the most terrible of toilers, and in the
regions of highest art. How have the great masters of music first
welded the keys of the organ and harpsichord to their fingers' ends
and their souls' nerves before they poured forth the Creation or the
Messiah, the symphonies and sonatas! Think of Meyerbeer and his
fifteen hours of daily work; of Mozart's incessant study of the
masters, and his own eight hundred compositions in his short life; of
Mendelssohn's nine years elaboration of Elijah. Or in the sister art,
how we track laborious, continuous study in the Peruginesque, the
Florentine, and the Roman styles successively of Raphael, and in the
incredible activity that crowded a life of thirty-seven years with
such a vast number of portraits and Madonnas, of altar-pieces and
frescoes, mythological, historical, and Biblical. And that still
grander contemporary genius, how he wrought by night with the candle
in his pasteboard cap, how he had dissected and studied the human
frame like an anatomist or surgeon before he chiseled the David and
Moses, or painted the Sistine chapel, and how the plannings of his
busy brain were always in advance of the powers of a hand that, till
the age of eighty-eight, was incessantly at work.
"The servant is not above his master. The lower intellect can buy at
no cheaper price than the higher, and the hour of full intellectual
emancipation comes only when the student has learned to serve--to turn
the whole freshness and sharpness of his intellect on any needful
theme of the hour; it may be the scale of a fossil fish, or the annual
movement of a glacier, the disclosures of the spectrum, or the secrets
of the arrow-headed tongue. All great explorers have been largely
their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of
all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His
emancipation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the
freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils
harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved
activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the
fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the titanic
scholarship of Germany. It stood embodied in the life and motto of the
aged, matchless artist Angelo,--'_Ancora imparo_,' I am learning
still.
"But impulse and activity may move blindly. Another cardinal quality
of such a culture, therefore, must be precision--the close, clean
working of the faculties. A memory trained to clear recollection, what
a saving of reiterated labor and of annoying helplessness. A
discrimination sharpened to the nicest discernment of things that
differ, though always a shining mark for the arrow of the satirist,
will outlive all shots with his gray-goose shaft; for it shines with
the gleam of tempered steel. An exactness of knowledge that defines
all its landmarks, how is it master of the situation. A precision of
speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of
sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been
called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where
one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of
verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the
precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some
men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great
assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal
syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the
heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and
often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own
mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order
and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed
upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and
sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of
a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,--'They are a
continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill
the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have
been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had
'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook,
scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true
science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered
between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual
Sing-Sing for the culprit!
"How refreshing, on the other hand, to follow the clear unfolding of
the silken threads of thought that lie side by side, single and in
knots and skeins, but never tangled. What a beautiful process was an
investigation by Faraday in electro-magnetism, as he combined his
apparatus, manipulated his material, narrowed his search, eliminated
his sources of error, and drew his careful conclusions. With similar
persistent acuteness, in the field of Biblical investigation, how does
Zumpt, by an exhaustive exclusion and combination, at length make the
annals of Tacitus shake hands with the gospel of Luke over the taxing
of Cyrenius. In metaphysics, how matchless the razor-like acuteness
with which Hamilton could distinguish, divide, and clear up the
questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of
perception. What can be more admirable than the workings of the
trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through
labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its
strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of
day;--it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case
the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a
jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case,
shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and
accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.
"It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times,
because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is
a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach
that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more
appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other
confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the
reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and
perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and
uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual
diversity. They proceed not by analytical incision, but by summary
excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What
singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness,
what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what
kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the
deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!'
What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of
structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however
eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together
two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both
in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical
combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends,
and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure
ether, or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every
possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form
of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter
are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the
retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and
taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in
objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and
mysterious thing, _life_, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth
of folly? And how such a central paralysis of the mental retina
spreads its darkness, as, for example, in the affirmation that as
oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are
water, ammonia, and carbolic acid convertible into and resolvable from
living protoplasm!--a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it
certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if
need be, work a week to correct in his trial balance the variation of
a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the
age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one
hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he
sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the
height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when
he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth
more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait and Thompson
pronounce it 'utterly impossible' to grant more than ten, or, at most,
fifteen millions,--this poor, benighted clerk is bound to sit and
hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be
excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that
reckon with a lee-way of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the
hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?
"Brilliancy, so-called, is no equivalent or substitute for precision.
It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in
curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow,
but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in
analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters
and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late
divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and
one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that
for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech, and
not on a logical proposition. The well-known story _se non vero e ben
trovato_, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which
every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of
literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all
that?" "No, but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent
as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.
"The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some
great discussion, heads for a fog-bank or a wind-mill. When a man
proposes to chronicle a 'Conflict between Religion and Science,' and
makes religion stand indiscriminately for Romanism, Mohammedanism,
superstition, malignant passion, obstinate prejudice, and what not,
also confounding Christianity with so-called Christians, and those
often most unrepresentative,--at the same time appropriating to
'Science' all intellectual activity whatever, though found in good
Christian men, and though fostered and made irrepressible by the fire
of that very religion, it is easy to see what must be the outcome of
such a sweepstakes race. There will be a deification of science, and
not even a whited sepulchre erected over the measureless Golgothas of
its slaughtered theories. There will be, on the other hand, the steady
_suppressio veri_ concerning books, systems, men, and events, the
occasional though unintended _assertio falsi_, the eager conversion of
theories into facts, constructions unfair and uncandid and,
throughout, with much that is bright and just, that 'admixture of a
lie that doth ever add pleasure' to its author and grief to the
judicious. Such confusions are no doubt often the outgrowth of the
will. But a main end of a true culture is to prevent or expose all
such bewilderments, whether helpless or crafty.
"The great predominance of the disciplinary process was what once
characterized the English university system even more than now. It
consisted in the exact and exhaustive mastery of certain limited
sections of knowledge and thought, as the gymnastic for all other
spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in
mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the
process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it
forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument,
it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke,
Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make
answer. The whole massive literature of England shall respond.
"But to this precision of working must be furnished material with
which to work. Mental fullness is, therefore, another prime quality of
a manly culture. To what degree it should be sought in the curriculum
has been in dispute. It is the American theory, and a growing belief
of the English nation, that the British universities have been
defective here. Their men of mark have traveled later over the broader
field.
"Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great
achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest
monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single
genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the
vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest
scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone to beat the air.
Behold in some national patent-office a grand mummy-pit of ignorant
inventors.
"Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the
Schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which
to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to
confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their
subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them
have been well called, by Hallam, men 'of extraordinary powers of
discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of
their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the
exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them
the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of
knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off
from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to
employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to
examine.' 'If these Schoolmen,' says Bacon, 'to their great thirst of
truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and
contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all
learning and knowledge.' And so, for lack of other timber, they split
hairs. Hence the mass of ponderous trifling that has made their name a
by-word. A force, sometimes Herculean, was spent in building and
demolishing castles of moonshine.
"A robust mental strength requires various and solid food. The best
growth is symmetrical. There is a common bond--_quoddam commune
vinculum_--in the circle of knowledge, that cannot be overlooked. Men
do not know best what they know only in its isolation. Even Kant
offset his metaphysics by lecturing on geography; and Niebuhr, the
historian, struggled hard and well to keep his equilibrium by throwing
himself into the whole circle of natural science and of affairs. Such,
also, are the interdependencies of scholarship, that ample knowledge
without our specialty is needful to save us from blunders within.
Olshausen was a brilliant commentator, and the slightest tinge of
chemistry should have kept him from suggesting that the conversion of
water into wine at Cana was but the acceleration of a natural process.
A smattering of optics would have prevented Dr. Williams from
repeating the old cavil of Voltaire, that light could not have been
made before the sun. A moderate reflection upon the laws of speech and
the method of Genesis would have restrained Huxley from sneering at
the 'marvelous flexibility' of the Hebrew tongue in the word 'day,'
and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the
joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max Muller
from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of
speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the
framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have
facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable
servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions,
the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have
ever existed,' says an idealist,--'Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton,--were well read, universally educated
men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has
weight, because they had the means of knowing the opposite opinion.'
"While every year increases the impossibility of what used to be
called universal knowledge, it also emphasizes the necessity of a
scholarship that has its outlook toward all the vast provinces of
reading and thought. It cannot conquer them, but it can be on treaty
relations with them. The tendency of modern science is, of necessity,
steadily toward sectional lines and division of labor. It is a
tendency whose cramping influence is as steadily to be resisted, even
in later life, much more in early training. We are to form ourselves
on the model of the integer rather than the fraction of humanity. The
metaphysician cannot afford to be ignorant of the 'chemistry of a
candle' or the 'history of a piece of chalk,' nor the chemist of the
laws of language, the theologian of astronomy and geology, nor the
lawyer of the most ancient code and its history. Mill himself made
complaint of Comte's 'great aberration' in ignoring psychology and
logic.
"Intellectual fetichism is born of isolation, and dies hard. While in
the great modern uprising we may boast that the heathen idols have
been swept away from three hundred dark islands of Polynesia, new
'idols of the cave' stalk forth upon the world of civilized thought.
We are just now much bewildered with brightness in streaks, which
falls on us like the sunlight from a boy's bit of glass, and blinds
our eyes instead of showing our path. Half-educated persons seize
fragments of principles and snatch at half-truths. Crotchets infest
the brains, and hobbies career through the fields of thought.
Polyphemus is after us, a burly wretch with one eye. Better if _that_
were out.
"The remedy is, to correct our narrowness by a clear view of the wide
expanse. We must come out of our cave. We must link our pursuits to
those of humanity. Breadth and robustness given to the mental
constitution in its early training shall go far through life to save
us from partial paralysis or monstrosity.
"To insure this result, however, we must add to that fullness of
material the quality of mental equipoise or mastery, the power of
grasping and managing it all. A man is to possess, and not to be
'possessed with,' his acquisitions. He wants an intellect decisive,
incisive, and, if I might coin a word, concisive.
"The power to unify and organize must go with all right acquisition.
Knowledges must be changed to knowledge. It takes force to handle
weight. Some men seem to know more than is healthy for them. It does
not make muscle, but becomes plethoric, dropsical, adipose, or
adipocere. Better to have thought more and acquired less. Frederick W.
Robertson, in his prime, wrote,--'I will answer for it that there are
few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have;' and
Mrs. Browning confessed,--'I should be wiser if I had not read half as
much;' while old Hobbes, of Malmesbury, caustically remarked,--'If I
had read as much as other men I should know as little.' It may serve
as a hint to the omnivorous college student. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew,
it is said, more than a hundred languages. What came of it all? A
eulogy on one Emanuele da Ponte. He never said anything in all the
languages he spoke! What constitutes the life of an intellectual
jelly-fish? Even the brilliancy of Macaulay was almost overweighted by
the immensity of his acquisitions. The vivid glitter of details in his
memory may sometimes have dazzled his perception of a _tout ensemble_,
and for principles it was his manner to cite precedents. A multitude
of lesser lights have been almost smothered by superabundance of fuel.
A man knows Milton almost by heart, and Shakespeare too, can quote
pages of Homer, has read Chrysostom for his recreation, is full of
history, runs over with statistics right and left, and withal is
strong in mother-wit. But the mother-wit proves not strong enough,
perhaps, to push forth and show itself over the ponderous debris above
it, the enormousness, or, if you please, the enormity of his
knowledge.
"It requires a first-class mind to carry a vast load of scientific
facts. Hence the many eminent observers who have been the most
illogical of reasoners. What a contrast between Hugh Miller and his
friend Francia; the mind of the latter, as Miller describes it, 'a
labyrinth without a clew, in whose recesses was a vast amount of
book-knowledge that never could be used, and was of no use to himself
or any one else;' the former wielding all his stores as he swung his
sledge. What is wanted is the comprehensive hand, and not the
prehensile tail.
"Involved in such an equipoise is the decisiveness, the willforce,
that not only holds, but holds the balance. Common as it may be, it is
none the less pitiable to be just acute enough constantly to question,
but not to answer--forever to raise difficulties, and never to solve
them. Wakeful, but the wakefulness of weakliness. Fine-strung minds
are they often, acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all
around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the
light. It is by nature rather a German than an Anglo-Saxon habit. It
is not always fatal even there. De Wette, 'the veteran doubter,'
rallied at the last, and, like Bunyan's Feeble-mind, went over almost
shouting. In this country, youth often have it somewhat later than the
measles and the small-pox, and come through very well, without even a
pock-mark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, and assumes a languid or
typhoidal cast,--not Positivism, but Agnosticism. It is rather
fashionable to eulogize perplexity and doubt as a mark of strength and
genius. But whatever may be the passing fashion, the collective
judgment of the ages has settled it that the permanent state of mental
hesitancy and indecision, in whatever sphere of thought and action, is
and must be a false condition. It indicates the scrofulous diathesis,
and calls for more iron in the blood. It is a lower type of manhood.
It abdicates the province of a human intelligence, which is to seek
and find truth. It abrogates the moral obligation to prove all things,
and hold fast that which is good. It revolts from the great problem of
life, which calls on us to know, and to know that we may do. Out upon
this apotheosis of doubt. It is the sick man glorying in his
infirmity, the beggar boasting of his intellectual rags.
"The comprehensive and decisive tend naturally to the incisive. The
power to take a subject by its handle and poise it on its centre is
perhaps the consummation of merely intellectual culture. When all its
nutriment has been converted into bone and muscle and sinew and nerve,
then the mind bounds to its work, lithe and strong, like a hunting
leopard on its game. It was exactly the power with which our Webster
handled his case, till it seemed to the farmer too simple to require a
great man to argue. It was the quality that Lincoln so toiled at
through his early manhood, and so admirably gained,--the power of
presenting things clearly to 'plain people.' You may call it 'the art
of putting things,' but it is the art of conceiving things. It is no
trick of style, but a character of thinking, and it marks the
harvest-time of a manly culture.
"I will add to this enumeration one other quality, one without which
this harvest will not ripen. I speak of mental docility and reverence.
A man will have looked forth to little purpose on the universe if he
does not see that, even with his expanding circle of light, there is
an ever-enlarging circle of darkness around it. He will have compared
his achievements with those of the race to little profit, if he does
not recognize his relative insignificance, gathering sands on the
ocean shore.
"The wide range and rapid outburst of modern learning tend undoubtedly
to arrogance and conceit. We gleefully traverse our new strip of
domain, and ask, Were there ever such beings as we? Yes, doubtless
there were,--clearer, greater, and nobler. Wisdom, skill, and strength
were not born with us. All the qualities of manly thought, though with
ruder implements and cruder materials, have been as conspicuously
exhibited down through the ages past as in our day. The power of
governing, ability in war, diplomacy in peace, subtle dialectics,
clear insight, the art of conversation, persuasive and impressive
speech, high art in every form, whatever constitutes the test of good
manhood, has been here in full force. It would puzzle us yet to lay
the stones of Baalbec, or to carve, move, and set up the great statue
of Rameses. Within a generation, Euclid of Alexandria was teaching
geometry in Dartmouth College, and Heraclides and Aristarchus
anticipated Copernicus by sixteen centuries. No man has surpassed the
sculptures of Rhodes, or the paintings of the sixteenth century. The
cathedral of Cologne is the offspring of forgotten brains. Such men as
Anselm were educated on the Trivium and Quadrivium. Five hundred years
ago Merton College could show such men as Geoffrey Chaucer, William of
Occam, and John Wickliffe. If the history of science can produce four
brighter contemporary names than Napier, Kepler, Descartes, and
Galileo, let them be forthcoming. But when, still earlier by a
century and a half, we behold a man who was not only architect,
engineer, and sculptor, and in painting the rival of Angelo, but who,
as Hallam proves, 'anticipated in the compass of a few pages the
discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Maestlin, Maurolycus, and
Castelli immortal,' it may well 'strike us,' he suggests 'with
something like the awe of supernatural knowledge;' and in the presence
of Leonardo da Vinci the modern scientist of highest rank may stand
with uncovered head.
"If wisdom was not born with us, neither will it die with us. There
will be something left to know. Our facts will be tested, our theories
probed, and our assertions exploded by better minds than ours. If it
be true, as Bacon says, '_prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiae_,' it
is also true, '_imprudens assertio excidium scientiae_.' We are in
these days treated to 'demonstrations' which scarcely rise to the
level of presumptions, but, rather, of presumption. There is an
accumulation of popular dogmatism that is very likely doomed within a
century to be swept into the same oblivion with the 'Christian
Astrology,' of William Lilly and the 'Ars Magna' of Raymond Lully--a
mass of rubbish that is waiting for another Caliph Omar and the
bath-fires of Alexandria.
"It will not answer to mistake the despotism of hypothesis for the
reign of law, nor physical law for the great 'I AM.' True thinkers
must respect other thinkers and God. They cannot ignore the primal
utterances of consciousness, the laws of logic, nor the truths of
history. Foregone conclusions are not to bar out the deepest facts of
human nature, nor the most stupendous events in the story of the race.
Hume may not rule out the settled laws of evidence the moment they
touch the borders of religion; nor may Strauss, by the simple
assertion that miracles are impossible, manacle the arm of God. Comte
may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our
being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to
smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley
cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the
trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his
system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through
fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to
the great imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will
be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is
fully proved in detail. We have no disposition, even with so eminent
an authority as St. George Mivart, to denominate Natural Selection 'a
puerile hypothesis.' We will promise to pay our respects to our 'early
progenitor' of 'arboreal habits' and 'ears pointed and capable of
movement,' when he is honestly identified by his ear-marks, and even
to worship the original fire-mist when that is properly shown to be
our only Creator, Preserver, and Bountiful Benefactor.
"Meantime, as a late king of Naples was said to have erected the
negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager
investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we
reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown
and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, the single source of
power,' ourselves 'conscious automatons' in whom 'mind is the product
of the brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of
molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a
'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one
of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank.
But it was Mephistopheles who said,--
"'The little god of this world sticks to the same old way,
And is as whimsical as on creation's day;
Life somewhat better might content him,
But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him.
He calls it Reason--thence his power's increased
To be far beastlier than any beast.
Saving thy gracious presence, he to me
A long-legged grasshopper seems to be,
That springing flies and flying springs,
And in the grass the same old ditty sings.
Would he still lay among the grass he grows in.'
"But even the man of theories might grant that the scheme of one
great, governing, guiding, loving, and holy God is a theory that works
wonders in practice for those that heartily receive it, and is a
conception of magnificence beside which even a Nebular Hypothesis with
all its grandeur grows small. And the man of facts may as well
recognize what Napoleon saw on St. Helena,--the one grand fact of the
living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is
mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in
vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has
pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the
stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped
the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social
life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy
battalions; a force that this hour beats in millions of hearts, all
over this globe, with a living warmth beside which the love of science
and art is cold and clammy. Surely it would be not much to ask for the
docility to recognize such patent facts as these. And I must believe
that any mind is fundamentally unhinged that despises the profoundest
convictions of the noblest hearts, or speaks lightly of the mighty
influence that has moulded human events and has upheaved the world. It
has, in its arrogance, cut adrift and swung off from the two grand
foci of all truth, the human and the divine.
"Of the several qualities,--the wakefulness, precision, fullness,
equipoise, and docility--that form, in other words, the motion, edge,
weight, balance, and direction of the forged and tempered
intellect,--I might give many instances. Such men as Thomas Arnold and
Mr. Gladstone instantly rise to the thoughts,--the one by his
truth-seeking and truth-finding spirit moulding a generation of
English scholars, the other carrying by the sheer force of his
clear-cut intellect and magnanimous soul the sympathies of a great
nation and the admiration of Christendom. But let me rather single out
one name from the land of specialties and limitations,--Barthold
George Niebuhr, the statesman and historian. Not perfect, indeed, but
admirable. See him begin in his early youth by saying,--'I do not ask
myself whether I can do a thing; I command myself to do it.' Read the
singular sketch of his intellectual gymnastics at twenty-one, spurring
himself to 'inward deep voluntary thought,' 'guarding against society
and dissipation,' devoting an hour each day to clearing up his
thoughts on given subjects, and two hours to the round of physical
sciences; exacting of himself 'an extensive knowledge of the facts'
of science and history; holding himself alike accountable for minute
'description,' 'accurate definitions,' 'general laws,' 'deep
reflection,' and 'distinct consciousness of the rules of my moral
being,' together with what he calls the holy resolve--'more and more
to purify my soul, so that it may be ready at all times to return to
the eternal source.' How intensely he toiled to counteract a certain
conscious German one-sidedness of mind, visiting England to study all
the varied phenomena of its robust life, and yet writing home from
London, at twenty-two,--'I positively shrink from associating with the
young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness.' His memory,
not inferior to that of Macaulay or Scaliger, he made strictly the
servant of his thinking. Amid all the speculative tendencies of
Germany, he became a man of facts and affairs. Overflowing with
details, he probed the facts of history to the quick, and felt for its
heart. Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as
'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as
certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the
weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the _verified_
quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to
'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act
and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing
genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness
and colossal egoism of his later career. In the midst of public honors
he valued more than all his delightful home and literary life, and his
motto was _Tecum habita_. Surrounded by Pyrrhonism, and bent by the
nature of his studies toward skeptical habits, how grandly he
recovered himself in his maturity, and said,--'I do not know what to
do with a metaphysical God, and I will have none but the God of the
Bible, who is heart to heart with us.' 'My son shall believe in the
letter of the Old and New Testaments, and I shall nurture in him from
his infancy a firm faith in all that I have lost or feel uncertain
about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,'
contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and
affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are
becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one
can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true
and manly culture.
"Shall I say that such a culture as I have endeavored to sketch, it
is, and will be, the aim of Dartmouth College to stimulate? I cannot,
at the close of this discourse, compare in detail its methods with the
end in view, and show their fitness. The original and central college
is surrounded by its several departments, partly or wholly
professional, each having its own specialty and excellence. The
central college seeks to give that rounded education commonly called
Liberal, and to give it in its very best estate. It will aim to
engraft on the stock that is approved by the collective wisdom of the
past, all such scions of modern origin as mark a real progress. By
variety of themes and methods it would stimulate the mental activity,
and by the breadth of its range it would encourage fullness of
material, both physical and metaphysical, scientific and historic. It
initiates into the chief languages of Europe. By the close, protracted
concentration of the mathematics, by the intuitions, careful
distinctions, and fundamental investigations of intellectual and
ethical science, and by the broad principles of political economy,
constitutional and international law, as well as by a round of
original discussions on themes of varied character, it aims to induce
precision and mastery. And all along this line runs and mingles
harmoniously and felicitously that great branch of study for which,
though often severely assailed because unwisely defended or
inadequately pursued, the revised and deliberate judgment of the
ablest and wisest men can find no fair substitute,--the study of the
classic tongues. Grant that it may be, and often is, mechanically or
pedantically pursued. Yet, when rightly prosecuted, its benefits are
wide, deep, and continuous, more than can be easily set forth--and
they range through the whole scale, rising with the gradual expansion
of the mind. It comprises subtle distinctions, close analysis, broad
generalization, and that balancing of evidence which is the basis of
all moral reasoning; it tracks the countless shadings of human
thought, and their incarnation in the growths of speech, and seizes,
in Comparative Philology, the universal affinities of the race: it
passes in incessant review the stores of the mother tongue; it
furnishes the constant clew to the meaning of the vernacular, a basis
for the easy study of modern European languages, and a key to the
terminology of science and art; it familiarizes intimately with many
of the most remarkable monuments of genius and culture; and it imbues
with the history, life, and thought which have prompted, shaped, and
permeated all that is notable in the intellectual achievements of two
thousand years, and binds together the whole republic of letters. To
such a study as this we must do honor. We endeavor to add so much of
the esthetic and ethical element throughout as shall give grace and
worth. And we crown the whole with some teaching concerning the track
of that amazing power that has overmastered all other powers, and
stamped its impress on all modern history. The college was given to
Christ in its infancy, and the message that comes down through a
century to our ears, sounds not so much like the voice of a president
as of an high-priest and prophet--the 'burden of Eleazar:' 'It is my
purpose, by the grace of God, to leave nothing undone within my power
which is suitable to be done, that this school of the prophets may be,
and long continue to be, a pure fountain. And I do, with my whole
heart, will this my purpose to my successors in the presidency of the
seminary, to the latest posterity; and it is my last will, never to be
revoked, and to God I commit it, and my only hope and confidence for
the execution of it is in Him alone who has already done great things
for it, and does still own it as his cause.' God has never yet revoked
the 'last will' of Wheelock. The college is as confessedly a Christian
college as in the days of her origin; and in the impending conflict
she sails up between the batteries of the enemy with her flag nailed
to the mast and her captain lashed to the rigging.
"The college stands to-day in its ideal and the intention of its
managers, representative of the best possible training for a noble
manhood. And I may venture to say, here and now, that if there be
anything known to be yet lacking to the full attainment of that
conception, if anything needs to be added to make this, in the fullest
sense, the peer of the best college in the land, it will be the
endeavor of the Trustees and the Faculty to add that thing.
"Dartmouth College is fortunate in many particulars. Fortunate in its
situation, so picturesque and so quiet, fitted for faithful study, and
full of healthful influences, physical and moral; fortunate in being
the one ancient and honored as well as honoring college of this
commonwealth; fortunate in enjoying the full sympathy of the people
around and the entire confidence of the Christian community of the
land; fortunate in the great class of young men who seek her
instruction, with their mature characters, simple habits, manly aims,
and resolute purposes; fortunate in a laborious Faculty, whose
well-earned fame from time to time brings honorable and urgent calls
to carry their light to other and wealthier seats of learning;
fortunate in her magnificent roll of alumni, unsurpassed in its
average of good manhood and excellent work, and bright with names of
transcendent lustre. The genius of the place bespeaks our reverence
and awe. For to the mind's eye this sequestered spot is peopled to
overflowing with youthful forms that went forth to all the lands of
the earth to do valiantly in the battle of life. Across this quiet
green there comes moving again invisibly a majestic procession of the
faithful and the strong, laden with labors and with honors. In these
seats there can almost be seen to sit once more a hoary and venerable
array of the great and good whose names are recorded on earth and
whose home is in heaven. And over us there seems to hover to-day a
great cloud of witnesses--spirits of the just made perfect. It is good
to be here. I only pray that the new arm may not prove too weak to
bear the banner in this great procession of the ages."