I also desire that you should be a man of scholarly sympathy and
appreciation. I can hardly hope you will be a scholar. Yet you may.
The scholar seldom emerges. If one out of each thousand students,
entering the American college this year, should prove to be a scholar,
the proportion is as large as one can hope for. For up to one in a
thousand is as big a proportion as the world is prepared to accept.
Yet it is to be hoped that you and that most men should have
appreciation and sympathy with scholarship. You should know what
scholarship means: in work as toilsomeness, in method as wisdom, in
atmosphere as thoroughness and patience, in result as an addition to
the stock of human knowledge. If you be a laborer in one field, you
should not seek, and I know you will not seek, to discount the
existence of other fields, or despise the laborers in those fields.
If you become an engineer, you will not condemn the classicist as
useless. If you are a Grecian, you will not despise the mechanical
engineer as crass and coarse.
One finds that the best men of any one field or calling are more
inclined to recognize the eminence of the claims of other fields or
callings. Smallness spells provincialism, and provincialism spells
smallness. I have heard one of the greatest teachers of chemistry say
that if he were to make a boy a professor of chemistry, he would,
among other things, first teach him Greek.
V
The first principle of college life is the principle of doing one's
duty. In your appreciation of scholarship, your first duty is to learn
your lessons. I have known many college men who learned their lessons,
who yet failed to get from the college all that they ought to get. But
I have never known a man who failed to get his lessons, whatever else
he may have got, to receive the full advantage of the course. The
curriculum of every good college is the resultant of scores or of
hundreds of years of reflection and of trial. It represents methods,
content, purposes, which many teachers through many experiments of
success and of failure have learned are the best forces for training
mind and for forming character.
But for the student to receive worthy advantage from these forces he
is obliged to relate himself to them by hard intellectual attention
and application. Sir Leslie Stephen says that the Cambridge teachers
of his time were not given to enthusiasms, but preached common-sense,
and common-sense said: "Stick to your triposes, grind at your mill,
and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your
bachelor's degree." The duty of the American college student is no
less evident. He is to stick to his triposes. His triposes are his
lessons. Among the greatest of all teachers was Louis Agassiz. A story
has become classical as told by the distinguished naturalist, the late
Dr. Samuel H. Scudder, regarding the methods of the great teacher with
his students.
In brief the story is that Mr. Scudder on going to Agassiz was told,
"'Take this fish and look at it. We call it a Haemulon. By and by I
will ask you what you have seen.' ... In ten minutes I had seen all
that could be seen in that fish.... Half an hour passed, an hour,
another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and
around; looked it in the face--ghastly!--from behind, beneath, above,
sideways, at three-quarters view--just as ghastly. I was in despair.
At an early hour I concluded that lunch was necessary; so, with
infinite relief, the fish was carefully replaced in the jar, and for
an hour I was free.
"On my return I learned that Professor Agassiz had been at the Museum,
but had gone, and would not return for several hours.... Slowly I drew
forth that hideous fish, and, with a feeling of desperation, again
looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all
kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish; it
seemed a most limited field.... At last a happy thought struck me--I
would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new
features in the creature....
"He listened attentively to my brief rehearsal of the structure of
parts whose names were still unknown to me.... When I had finished he
waited, as if expecting more, and then, with an air of disappointment,
'You have not looked very carefully; why,' he continued most
earnestly, 'you haven't even seen one of the most conspicuous features
of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the animal
itself. Look again! Look again!' and he left me to my misery.
"I ventured to ask what I should do next.
"'Oh, look at your fish,' he said, and left me again to my own
devices. In a little more than an hour he returned and heard my new
catalogue.
"'That is good, that is good,' he repeated: 'but that is not all; go
on.' And so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes,
forbidding me to look at anything else or use any artificial aid.
'Look, look, look,' was his repeated injunction."
Doctor Scudder says that this was the best entomological lesson he
ever had, and a lesson of which the influence extended to the details
of every subsequent study.
It is the duty of the college student to look at his fish, to thumb
his lexicon, to read his textbook, to study his notes, to think, and
think hard, upon the truth therein presented. Of all the students in
the world the Scotch represent this simple duty the best. The men at
Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen toil mightily.
The duty of learning one's lessons is, in these times, opposed by at
least two elements of college life. One is self-indulgence and the
other is athletics. Self-indulgence is a general cause and constant.
Athletics have in the last thirty years come to be a force more or
less dominant. Athletics represent a mighty force for collegiate and
human betterment. Football, which is _par excellence_ the college
game, is an admirable method of training the man physical, the man
intellectual and the man ethical. But football is not a college
purpose; it is a college means. It is a means for the promotion of
scholarship, for the formation of manhood. When football or other
forms of college sport are turned from being a method and a means into
being ends in themselves the misfortune is lamentable.
At a recent Harvard commencement, Professor Shaler, than whom no man
in Harvard was more vitally in touch with all undergraduate interests,
spoke of the harm wrought upon many students through their absorption
in athletics. It cannot be denied for an instant that many men are
hurt by giving undue attention to sports. Of course many men are
benefited, and, are benefited vastly, by athletics, but men who are
harmed should at once be obliged to learn the lesson of learning their
lessons. That is the chief lesson which they ought to learn.