great movement in behalf of the extension of knowledge among those classes
in society whom you represent. This movement has issued in the
establishment of what have been called Mechanics’ Institutes through the
United Kingdom; and a new species of literature has been brought into
existence, with a view, among its objects, of furnishing the members of
these institutions with interesting and instructive reading. I never will
deny to that literature its due praise. It has been the production of men
of the highest ability and the most distinguished station, who have not
grudged, moreover, the trouble, and, I may say in a certain sense, the
condescension, of presenting themselves before the classes for whose
intellectual advancement they were showing so laudable a zeal; who have
not grudged, in the cause of Literature, History, or Science, to make a
display, in the lecture room or the public hall, of that eloquence, which
was, strictly speaking, the property, as I may call it, of Parliament, or
of the august tribunals of the Law. Nor will I deny to the speaking and
writing, to which I am referring, the merit of success, as well as that of
talent and good intention, so far as this,—that it has provided a fund of
innocent amusement and information for the leisure hours of those who
might otherwise have been exposed to the temptation of corrupt reading or
bad company.
So much may be granted,—and must be granted in candour: but, when I go on
to ask myself the question, what _permanent_ advantage the mind gets by
such desultory reading and hearing, as this literary movement encourages,
then I find myself altogether in a new field of thought, and am obliged to
return an answer less favourable than I could wish to those who are the
advocates of it. We must carefully distinguish, Gentlemen, between the
mere diversion of the mind and its real education. Supposing, for
instance, I am tempted to go into some society which will do me harm, and
supposing, instead, I fall asleep in my chair, and so let the time pass
by, in that case certainly I escape the danger, but it is as if by
accident, and my going to sleep has not had any real effect upon me, or
made me more able to resist the temptation on some future occasion. I
wake, and I am what I was before. The opportune sleep has but removed the
temptation for this once. It has not made me better; for I have not been
shielded from temptation by any act of my own, but I was passive under an
accident, for such I may call sleep. And so in like manner, if I hear a
lecture indolently and passively, I cannot indeed be elsewhere _while_ I
am here hearing it,—but it produces no positive effect on my mind,—it does
not tend to create any power in my breast capable of resisting temptation
by its own vigour, should temptation come a second time.
Now this is no fault, Gentlemen, of the books or the lectures of the
Mechanics’ Institute. They could not do more than they do, from their very
nature. They do their part, but their part is not enough. A man may hear a
thousand lectures, and read a thousand volumes, and be at the end of the
process very much where he was, as regards knowledge. Something more than
merely _admitting_ it in a negative way into the mind is necessary, if it
is to remain there. It must not be passively received, but actually and
actively entered into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go half-way to
meet what comes to it from without.
This, then, is the point in which the institutions I am speaking of fail;
here, on the contrary, is the advantage of such lectures as you are
attending, Gentlemen, in our University. You have come, not merely to be
taught, but to learn. You have come to exert your minds. You have come to
make what you hear your own, by putting out your hand, as it were, to
grasp it and appropriate it. You do not come merely to hear a lecture, or
to read a book, but you come for that catechetical instruction, which
consists in a sort of conversation between your lecturer and you. He tells
you a thing, and he asks you to repeat it after him. He questions you, he
examines you, he will not let you go till he has proof, not only that you
have heard, but that you know.
5.
Gentlemen, I am induced to quote here some remarks of my own, which I put
into print on occasion of those Evening Lectures, already referred to,
with which we introduced the first terms of the University. The attendance
upon them was not large, and in consequence we discontinued them for a
time, but I attempted to explain in print what the object of them had
been; and while what I then said is pertinent to the subject I am now
pursuing, it will be an evidence too, in addition to my opening remarks,
of the hold which the idea of these Evening Lectures has had upon me.
“I will venture to give you my thoughts,” I then said, writing to a
friend,(50) “on the _object_ of the Evening Public Lectures lately
delivered in the University House, which, I think, has been misunderstood.
“I can bear witness, not only to their remarkable merit as lectures, but
also to the fact that they were very satisfactorily attended. Many,
however, attach a vague or unreasonable idea to the word ‘satisfactory,’
and maintain that no lectures can be called satisfactory which do not make
a great deal of noise in the place, and they are disappointed otherwise.
This is what I mean by misconceiving their object; for such an
expectation, and consequent regret, arise from confusing the ordinary with
the extraordinary object of a lecture,—upon which point we ought to have
clear and definite ideas.
“The _ordinary_ object of lectures is _to teach_; but there _is_ an
object, sometimes demanding attention, and not incongruous, which,
nevertheless, cannot be said properly to belong to them, or to be more
than occasional. As there are kinds of eloquence which do not aim at any
thing beyond their own exhibition, and are content with being eloquent,
and with the sensation which eloquence creates; so in Schools and
Universities there are seasons, festive or solemn, anyhow extraordinary,
when academical acts are not directed towards their proper ends, so much
as intended to amuse, to astonish, and to attract, and thus to have an
effect upon public opinion. Such are the exhibition days of Colleges; such
the annual Commemoration of Benefactors at one of the English
Universities, when Doctors put on their gayest gowns, and Public Orators
make Latin Speeches. Such, too, are the Terminal Lectures, at which
divines of the greatest reputation for intellect and learning have before
now poured forth sentences of burning eloquence into the ears of an
audience brought together for the very sake of the display. The object of
all such Lectures and Orations is to excite or to keep up an interest and
reverence in the public mind for the Institutions from which the
exhibition proceeds:”—I might have added, such are the lectures delivered
by celebrated persons in Mechanics’ Institutes.
I continue: “Such we have suitably had in the new University;—such were
the Inaugural Lectures. Displays of strength and skill of this kind, in
order to succeed, _should_ attract attention, and if they do not attract
attention, they have failed. They do not invite an audience, but an
attendance; and perhaps it is hardly too much to say that they are
intended for seeing rather than for hearing.
“Such celebrations, however, from the nature of the case, must be rare. It
is the novelty which brings, it is the excitement which recompenses, the
assemblage. The academical body which attempts to make such extraordinary
acts the normal condition of its proceedings, is putting itself and its
Professors in a false position.
“It is, then, a simple misconception to suppose that those to whom the
government of our University is confided have aimed at an object, which
could not be contemplated at all without a confusion or inadvertence, such
as no considerate person will impute to them. Public lectures, delivered
with such an object, could not be successful; and, in consequence, our
late lectures have, I cannot doubt (for it could not be otherwise), ended
unsatisfactorily in the judgment of any zealous person who has assumed for
them an office with which their projectors never invested them.
“What their object really was the very meaning of academical institutions
suggests to us. It is, as I said when I began, _to teach_. Lectures are,
properly speaking, not exhibitions or exercises of art, but matters of
business; they profess to impart something definite to those who attend
them, and those who attend them profess on their part to receive what the
lecturer has to offer. It is a case of contract:—‘I will speak, if you
will listen.’—‘I will come here to learn, if you have any thing worth
teaching me.’ In an oratorical display, all the effort is on one side; in
a lecture, it is shared between two parties, who co-operate towards a
common end.
“There should be ever something, on the face of the arrangements, to act
as a memento that those who come, come to gain something, and not from
mere curiosity. And in matters of fact, such were the persons who did
attend, in the course of last term, and such as those, and no others, will
attend. Those came who wished to gain information on a subject new to
them, from informants whom they held in consideration, and regarded as
authorities. It was impossible to survey the audience which occupied the
lecture-room without seeing that they came on what may be called business.
And this is why I said, when I began, that the attendance was
satisfactory. That attendance is satisfactory,—not which is numerous,
but—which is steady and persevering. But it is plain, that to a mere
by-stander, who came merely from general interest or good will to see how
things were going on, and who did not catch the object of advertising the
Lectures, it would not occur to look into the faces of the audience; he
would think it enough to be counting their heads; he would do little more
than observe whether the staircase and landing were full of loungers, and
whether there was such a noise and bustle that it was impossible to hear a
word; and if he could get in and out of the room without an effort, if he
could sit at his ease, and actually hear the lecturer, he would think he
had sufficient grounds for considering the attendance unsatisfactory.
“The stimulating system may easily be overdone, and does not answer on the
long run. A blaze among the stubble, and then all is dark. I have seen in
my time various instances of the way in which Lectures really gain upon
the public; and I must express my opinion that, even were it the sole
object of our great undertaking to make a general impression upon public
opinion, instead of that of doing definite good to definite persons, I
should reject that method, which the University indeed itself has _not_
taken, but which young and ardent minds may have thought the more
promising. Even did I wish merely to get the intellect of all Dublin into
our rooms, I should not dream of doing it all at once, but at length. I
should not rely on sudden, startling effects, but on the slow, silent,
penetrating, overpowering effects of patience, steadiness, routine, and
perseverance. I have known individuals set themselves down in a
neighbourhood where they had no advantages, and in a place which had no
pretensions, and upon a work which had little or nothing of authoritative
sanction; and they have gone on steadily lecturing week after week, with
little encouragement, but much resolution. For months they were ill
attended, and overlooked in the bustle of the world around them. But there
was a secret, gradual movement going on, and a specific force of
attraction, and a drifting and accumulation of hearers, which at length
made itself felt, and could not be mistaken. In this stage of things, a
friend said in conversation to me, when at the moment I knew nothing of
the parties: ‘By-the-bye, if you are interested in such and such a
subject, go by all means, and hear such a one. So and so does, and says
there is no one like him. I looked in myself the other night, and was very
much struck. Do go, you can’t mistake; he lectures every Tuesday night, or
Wednesday, or Thursday,’ as it might be. An influence thus gradually
acquired endures; sudden popularity dies away as suddenly.”
As regards ourselves, the time is passed now, Gentlemen, for such modesty
of expectation, and such caution in encouragement, as these last sentences
exhibit. The few, but diligent, attendants upon the Professors’ lectures,
with whom we began, have grown into the diligent and zealous many; and the
speedy fulfilment of anticipations, which then seemed to be hazardous,
surely is a call on us to cherish bolder hopes and to form more extended
plans for the years which are to follow.
6.
You will ask me, perhaps, after these general remarks, to suggest to you
the particular intellectual benefit which I conceive students have a right
to require of us, and which we engage by means of our evening classes to
provide for them. And, in order to this, you must allow me to make use of
an illustration, which I have heretofore employed,(51) and which I repeat
here, because it is the best that I can find to convey what I wish to
impress upon you. It is an illustration which includes in its application
all of us, teachers as well as taught, though it applies of course to some
more than to others, and to those especially who come for instruction.
I consider, then, that the position of our minds, as far as they are
uncultivated, towards intellectual objects,—I mean of our minds, before
they have been disciplined and formed by the action of our reason upon
them,—is analogous to that of a blind man towards the objects of vision,
at the moment when eyes are for the first time given to him by the skill
of the operator. Then the multitude of things, which present themselves to
the sight under a multiplicity of shapes and hues, pour in upon him from
the external world all at once, and are at first nothing else but lines
and colours, without mutual connection, dependence, or contrast, without
order or principle, without drift or meaning, and like the wrong side of a
piece of tapestry or carpet. By degrees, by the sense of touch, by
reaching out the hands, by walking into this maze of colours, by turning
round in it, by accepting the principle of perspective, by the various
slow teaching of experience, the first information of the sight is
corrected, and what was an unintelligible wilderness becomes a landscape
or a scene, and is understood to consist of space, and of bodies variously
located in space, with such consequences as thence necessarily follow. The
knowledge is at length gained of things or objects, and of their relation
to each other; and it is a kind of knowledge, as is plain, which is forced
upon us all from infancy, as to the blind on their first seeing, by the
testimony of our other senses, and by the very necessity of supporting
life; so that even the brute animals have been gifted with the faculty of
acquiring it.
Such is the case as regards material objects; and it is much the same as
regards intellectual. I mean that there is a vast host of matters of all
kinds, which address themselves, not to the eye, but to our mental sense;
viz., all those matters of thought which, in the course of life and the
intercourse of society, are brought before us, which we hear of in
conversation, which we read of in books; matters political, social,
ecclesiastical, literary, domestic; persons, and their doings or their
writings; events, and works, and undertakings, and laws, and institutions.
These make up a much more subtle and intricate world than that visible
universe of which I was just now speaking. It is much more difficult in
this world than in the material to separate things off from each other,
and to find out how they stand related to each other, and to learn how to
class them, and where to locate them respectively. Still, it is not less
true that, as the various figures and forms in a landscape have each its
own place, and stand in this or that direction towards each other, so all
the various objects which address the intellect have severally a substance
of their own, and have fixed relations each of them with everything
else,—relations which our minds have no power of creating, but which we
are obliged to ascertain before we have a right to boast that we really
know any thing about them. Yet, when the mind looks out for the first time
into this manifold spiritual world, it is just as much confused and
dazzled and distracted as are the eyes of the blind when they first begin
to see; and it is by a long process, and with much effort and anxiety,
that we begin hardly and partially to apprehend its various contents and
to put each in its proper place.
We grow up from boyhood; our minds open; we go into the world; we hear
what men say, or read what they put in print; and thus a profusion of
matters of all kinds is discharged upon us. Some sort of an idea we have
of most of them, from hearing what others say; but it is a very vague
idea, probably a very mistaken idea. Young people, especially, because
they are young, colour the assemblage of persons and things which they
encounter with the freshness and grace of their own springtide, look for
all good from the reflection of their own hopefulness, and worship what
they have created. Men of ambition, again, look upon the world as a
theatre for fame and glory, and make it that magnificent scene of high
enterprise and august recompence which Pindar or Cicero has delineated.
Poets, too, after their wont, put their ideal interpretation upon all
things, material as well as moral, and substitute the noble for the true.
Here are various obvious instances, suggestive of the discipline which is
imperative, if the mind is to grasp things as they are, and to
discriminate substances from shadows. For I am not concerned merely with
youth, ambition, or poetry, but with our mental condition generally. It is
the fault of all of us, till we have duly practised our minds, to be
unreal in our sentiments and crude in our judgments, and to be carried off
by fancies, instead of being at the trouble of acquiring sound knowledge.
In consequence, when we hear opinions put forth on any new subject, we
have no principle to guide us in balancing them; we do not know what to
make of them; we turn them to and fro, and over, and back again, as if to
pronounce upon them, if we could, but with no means of pronouncing. It is
the same when we attempt to speak upon them: we make some random venture;
or we take up the opinion of some one else, which strikes our fancy; or
perhaps, with the vaguest enunciation possible of any opinion at all, we
are satisfied with ourselves if we are merely able to throw off some
rounded sentences, to make some pointed remarks on some other subject, or
to introduce some figure of speech, or flowers of rhetoric, which, instead
of being the vehicle, are the mere substitute of meaning. We wish to take
a part in politics, and then nothing is open to us but to follow some
person, or some party, and to learn the commonplaces and the watchwords
which belong to it. We hear about landed interests, and mercantile
interests, and trade, and higher and lower classes, and their rights,
duties, and prerogatives; and we attempt to transmit what we have
received; and soon our minds become loaded and perplexed by the
incumbrance of ideas which we have not mastered and cannot use. We have
some vague idea, for instance, that constitutional government and slavery
are inconsistent with each other; that there is a connection between
private judgment and democracy, between Christianity and civilization; we
attempt to find arguments in proof, and our arguments are the most plain
demonstration that we simply do not understand the things themselves of
which we are professedly treating.
7.
Reflect, Gentlemen, how many disputes you must have listened to, which
were interminable, because neither party understood either his opponent or
himself. Consider the fortunes of an argument in a debating society, and
the need there so frequently is, not simply of some clear thinker to
disentangle the perplexities of thought, but of capacity in the combatants
to do justice to the clearest explanations which are set before them,—so
much so, that the luminous arbitration only gives rise, perhaps, to more
hopeless altercation. “Is a constitutional government better for a
population than an absolute rule?” What a number of points have to be
clearly apprehended before we are in a position to say one word on such a
question! What is meant by “constitution”? by “constitutional government”?
by “better”? by “a population”? and by “absolutism”? The ideas represented
by these various words ought, I do not say, to be as perfectly defined and
located in the minds of the speakers as objects of sight in a landscape,
but to be sufficiently, even though incompletely, apprehended, before they
have a right to speak. “How is it that democracy can admit of slavery, as
in ancient Greece?” “How can Catholicism flourish in a republic?” Now, a
person who knows his ignorance will say, “These questions are beyond me;”
and he tries to gain a clear notion and a firm hold of them; and, if he
speaks, it is as investigating, not as deciding. On the other hand, let
him never have tried to throw things together, or to discriminate between
them, or to denote their peculiarities, in that case he has no hesitation
in undertaking any subject, and perhaps has most to say upon those
questions which are most new to him. This is why so many men are
one-sided, narrow-minded, prejudiced, crotchety. This is why able men have
to change their minds and their line of action in middle age, and to begin
life again, because they have followed their party, instead of having
secured that faculty of true perception as regards intellectual objects
which has accrued to them, without their knowing how, as regards the
objects of sight.
But this defect will never be corrected,—on the contrary, it will be
aggravated,—by those popular institutions to which I referred just now.
The displays of eloquence, or the interesting matter contained in their
lectures, the variety of useful or entertaining knowledge contained in
their libraries, though admirable in themselves, and advantageous to the
student at a later stage of his course, never can serve as a substitute
for methodical and laborious teaching. A young man of sharp and active
intellect, who has had no other training, has little to show for it
besides a litter of ideas heaped up into his mind anyhow. He can utter a
number of truths or sophisms, as the case may be, and one is as good to
him as another. He is up with a number of doctrines and a number of facts,
but they are all loose and straggling, for he has no principles set up in
his mind round which to aggregate and locate them. He can say a word or
two on half a dozen sciences, but not a dozen words on any one. He says
one thing now, and another thing presently; and when he attempts to write
down distinctly what he holds upon a point in dispute, or what he
understands by its terms, he breaks down, and is surprised at his failure.
He sees objections more clearly than truths, and can ask a thousand
questions which the wisest of men cannot answer; and withal, he has a very
good opinion of himself, and is well satisfied with his attainments, and
he declares against others, as opposed to the spread of knowledge
altogether, who do not happen to adopt his ways of furthering it, or the
opinions in which he considers it to result.
This is that barren mockery of knowledge which comes of attending on great
Lecturers, or of mere acquaintance with reviews, magazines, newspapers,
and other literature of the day, which, however able and valuable in
itself, is not the instrument of intellectual education. If this is all
the training a man has, the chance is that, when a few years have passed
over his head, and he has talked to the full, he wearies of talking, and
of the subjects on which he talked. He gives up the pursuit of knowledge,
and forgets what he knew, whatever it was; and, taking things at their
best, his mind is in no very different condition from what it was when he
first began to improve it, as he hoped, though perhaps he never thought of
more than of amusing himself. I say, “at the best,” for perhaps he will
suffer from exhaustion and a distaste of the subjects which once pleased
him; or perhaps he has suffered some real intellectual mischief; perhaps
he has contracted some serious disorder, he has admitted some taint of
scepticism, which he will never get rid of.