LD 1945 1871 Copy 2 'fir 1' -5 ^v^~ ^-) ADDRESSES INAUGURATION James C. Welling, LL. D., President of the Columbian College, WASHINGTON, D. C, Monday Evenings November 6, 187 WASHINGTON : Gibson Brothers, Printers. 1871. George Wa.sk iv\o"tor\ urn wersi"tij ; ADDRESSES INAUGURATION James C. Welling, LL. D., President of the Columbian College, WASHINGTON, D. C, Monday Evenings November 6, 1871. WASHINGTON ! Gibson Brothers, Printers. 1871. *% INTRODUCTORY NOTE. The public inauguration of James C. Welling, LL. D., as President of the Columbian College, took place on the evening of November 6, 1871, in the Congregational Church, corner of Tenth and G streets, Washington, D. C. The exercises were opened with prayer by the Rev. James H. Cuthbert, D.D., after which the Rev. George W. Samson, D.D., delivered a Farewell Address, as the retiring President of the College. An Ode, written for the occasion by the Rev. Stephen P. Hill, D.D., was then sung, upon which the Hon. John A. Bolles, LL. D., Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the College, delivered to the newly-elected President the keys, symbolical of his office, and accompa- nied their presentation with an Address, at the close of which he formally introduced Dr. Welling, who thereupon proceeded to deliver his Inaugural Discourse. The exercises were closed with a Doxology, sung by the audience, and with a Benediction pronounced by the Rev. Cleland K. Nelson, D. D., Vice-President of St. John's College, at Annapolis, Md. The following pages contain the Presentation Address of Mr. Bolles and the Inaugural Discourse of President Welling, as published by request of the Executive Com- mittee of the Board of Trustees. Tl EMAEZS OF THE Hon. John A. Bolles, LL. D Mr. Welling: The Board of Trustees of the Columbian College had, until this morning, hoped that their respected and beloved President, Wm. W. Corcoran, Esq., "clarum et venerahile nomen," a gentleman identified for a long series of years with every enterprise intended to promote the welfare and prosperity of this District, would have been able, not only to be present on this occasion, but also to take an active part in these Inaugural Ceremonies ; to place in your hands the keys of the College as symbols of your official powers and duties, and to address you, for a few minutes at least, upon the topics suggested by that presentation. Mr. Corcoran, however, does not feel well enough even to read the one short sentence which he had written, and at his request I take his place, and, yielding to his urgency, I shall, as the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees, first read to you his own carefully chosen words, and then add thereto a few observations of my own, which seem to be called for by this interesting occasion. He intended to say : "President Welling, it affords me great pleasure to place in your hands the keys of the Columbian College, and to express my belief that your execution of the important trust confided to you will be char- acterized by ability and zeal " Sir, the '■' belief" of Mr. Corcoran is also the belief of 6 the Board of Trustees, who have unanimously elected you President of the College. That belief and that choice were founded upon a long and familiar acquaintance with your intellectual power, your moral worth, your ample learning, and your administrative and executive ability. This knowl- edge guided our action and choice when, upon the resigna- tion of your predecessor, it became our duty to select and appoint a new President for that seat of learning, the man- agement of whose general interests is confided to us, but whose success depends far more directly, and far more largely, upon its President than upon the Trustees them- selves. We felt, very deeply, the responsibility devolved upon us by the retirement of the Rev. Dr. Samson ; and we felt also, as our thoughts and eyes turned toward you, that you were the man to fill, with honorable success, the position thus vacated. We now feel that our choice was wise, and that your acceptance of the offered Presidency justifies us, and the public in whose midst you have so long dwelt, in expecting for the College a brilliant and successful future. We feel sure that our convictions and our hopes are echoed in the hearts, (as they seem to shine in the faces), of this assembly, composed, as we believe it to be, of gentlemen and ladies who are the delegates and representatives of a public far too large to find seats in this spacious audience-room. With such convictions and confidence, with such faith and hope, we give you these symbolic keys. They are six in number. The first is the key of the President's house. Take it, sir, feeling that your house is your castle, and that we shall not presume to interfere with your domestic rights and duties. They are your exclusive domain, and will, I doubt not, be worthily exercised and enjoyed. May you long and happily find a home in that dwelling, surrounded by those whom you love and by whom you are beloved. The second of these keys opens to you the door, the control, the prosperity of our Preparatory School, the nursery of our College, within whose walls are to be trained and disci- plined the younger pupils confided to your oversight. Then comes the key of the College proper, wherein our ingenuous youth are to be prepared for admission to studies and schools more strictly professional — which schools and studies are opened to your authority and care by these three other keys — the keys to our Departments of Law, Medicine and Theology. Receive these all, sir, as tokens of our con- fidence in you, as emblems of your authority, and as sym- bols of your duty. With them open and occupy all those Departments of our beloved College ; and while with them you thus take possession of these abodes of learning, may you, in the exercise of the powers which they represent, open the hearts, and possess the minds, and form the life- long habits, of more than one generation of loving and deserving disciples. We give you now these six keys alone. But ere long we expect to increase their number so as to represent every department of learning needful to the formation of a Uni- versity as broad in its endowments, in its plans of instruc- tion and its field of duty, as the wants of the great people in whose centre and Capital it will be placed. We hope — we purpose — so to enlarge this College that within its walls shall be studied all arts, all sciences, all literatures, all pro- fessions, occupations, and callings which the ambitious youth of our glorious Union may desire to study or pursue ; that here, in an institution worthy of the great Capital of a great nation, may be taught and learned whatever develops and adorns the mind and soul of man. Such is the determination of the Trustees, who have 8 chosen you to administer this College of the present, this University of the future. We know that you fully sympa- thize and concur in this plan and purpose, and that you believe with us that such a future is a not distant possibility. So thinks our venerable and beloved head I Nor will you or I, or any of us, forget the pleasant, prophetic light which beamed from his eyes on a recent occasion, when, after con- ference with us upon this glowing theme, he exclaimed : c( Gentlemen, it depends upon us whether this great scheme be carried into full execution V Ladies and Gentlemen, I now have the pleasure of introducing to you James C. Welling, LL. D., President of the Columbian College^ who will deliver his inaugural address. INAUGURAL DISCOURSE OF PRESIDENT WELLING. THE FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION, The subject of Education offers a theme for discussion at once the most easy and most difficult ; the most easy if we content ourselves with the rehearsal of common places on the topic, such as are universally received among men ; and the most difficult if we undertake to propound a theory of education which shall be in all respects true without being trite, or novel without being in some respects un- sound. Education is a subject on which men have been thinking and writing from the very dawn of intellectual activity in the race, and yet it is a subject on which men widely differ, even at the present day, in regard to both the processes and the objects of that higher training which looks to the best attainable good of the human mind. This diversity of credence and practice springs, in a great de- gree, from the fact that all Education is partly an Art and partly a Science ; so much an art that it must ever depend on the varying skill of different teachers, and on the varying aptitudes of different learners, but, at the same time, so much a science that all forms of education, having regard to any specific end, cannot be equally good, and, among the various- competing theories of mental culture, there must be one which, on a consideration of all the elements involved in the problem, we can adjudge to be the best that the wit of man has thus far been able to devise. For, however the 10 elements of the problem may differ, according to the capa- bilities of the teacher, the capacity of the scholar, the ends which the scholar proposes to himself, and the general wants of society in any given age, there must still be a scheme of education which, " smoothed, and squared, and fitted to its place," shall be more wise and more expedient than any other — a scheme in which the applied art of edu- cation shall be based on such scientific foundations as the nature of the case may admit. Accepting the theme thus suggested to me by the proprie- ties and formalities of this occasion, I have, in the first place, to inquire what is the object which we should set before us in determining the elements of higher academic learning. For with the lower stages of juvenile culture we are not directly concerned to-night, and, as to them, there is not so much room for difference among educators. Ac- cording to the terms of the problem proposed by higher education, we are called, as I conceive, not to discuss the special adaptation of specific educational studies designed to meet the requirements of any particular vocation in indus- trial or professional life, but to investigate the fundamental elements of that more liberal and generous culture which looks to the symmetrical development of the whole man in all his powers and capacities. And as this is the object of higher academic education, it necessarily follows that any system of such education must be defective if it omits from its purview any one of those essential studies by which the human race has been advanced to its present civil, social, intellectual, moral, and religious status. As in ancient Egypt men were able, it is said, by the graduated scales of the Nilometer, not only to measure, the depth of the fertiliz- ing waters that covered the land but also to predict the extent of the coming harvest, so from the standard of educa- 11 tion in any age we may not only gauge the degree in which it rises to the wants of the present time, hut may also fore- cast the destiny it prefigures to the coming generation. In- stitutions of higher learning are founded among men to perpetuate and to transmit the existing stock of knowledge in all those departments which conduce to the intellectual progress of our race. Failing in this end, whether from a defect in the methods or means of education, they visibly fall below the standard erected for them in the requirements of the living age. But they do not subserve all the ends of their creation by achieving this purpose alone. It is not enough for educators, in the higher walks of their art, to preserve and propagate the elements of didactic knowledge, but they are bound so to impart these elements in all their fulness and vitalizing power, as to create the conditions of a growing advancement in learning and civilization. To accomplish these great objects the teacher must have equal regard to the number and quality of the subjects taught, and to the method, and order, and spirit of his instructions. t( Teachers," says Bacon, " are not Ordained for transitory uses, but for the progression of the sciences— ad sufficiendam sobolem sciential in scecida " No university, it is true, even in all its Faculties, can teach, as Sir William Hamilton has said, the omne scibile, hut a university can comprise in its curriculum such "a compend of the past thought and cul- tivation of the race " as shall be reduced to the shape and dimension best fitted to he taken in by the minds of the pres- ent generation, and therefore best fitted 1o promote the growth of culture. It was from a disregard of this latter educational require- ment that the progress of mental culture was arrested in Greece so soon as the pedagogues, who succeeded the age of original inquiry, contented themselves simply with the exist- 12 ing state of knowledge, instead of so learning it themselves, and so teaching it to their pupils as to propagate, with knowledge, the love of it, and thus to stimulate and direct that spirit of inquiry which leads to never-ending conquests in the world of Thought and of'Nature. And so, too, during the Middle Ages, knowledge came to a stand-still in Europe, not from any torpor of the mental faculties among the School-men, for never were men more laborious and more acute than they ; but because their mental activity revolved in the verbal philosophy of Aristotle as if in a treadmill, and was not suffered to go beyond the tether of that profes- sorial and didactic discipline which bound it to the Past, as if the Past had contained in itself the be-all and the end-all of human philosophy. They failed to see in the successive stages of human history the stepping-stones of an ever- advancing progress. Under such a theory science degener- ates into a mere logomachy, and literature dwindled into a dry and formal rhetoric. Education was still conducted in the Trivium and Quadrivium of the Cathedral and Cloistral schools with a vast expenditure of logical apparatus brought to bear on topics which lacked the quality of real truth, and which, from defects both of substance and form, failed to afford either the basis or the instruments of a higher intel- lectual proficiency. The world was then not indeed with- out its Doctors, u divine" and " transcendental " and ' ' irrefragable ;" but from Peter Lombard, its famous Magis- ter Sententiarum Sopientum, to John of Occam, its redoubt- able Doctor invincibilis, singularis et venerabilis, it was with- out teachers who rightly apprehended either the elements or the methods of that true intellectual culture which teaches men not only wlmt to know but also liow to learn. It is only in so far as the Occidental Nations have made learning 13 reproductive and progressive that "fifty years of Europe" are, as Tennyson tells us, better than " a cycle of Cathay." But even when it is said that higher academic education must at least aim to transmit the existing sum of knowledge unimpaired, we have, by necessary implication, defined, in a measure, the methods and means of university culture, for it is obvious that the essential factors of that knowl- edge which constitutes the mental wealth of the present age must enter into the constitution of any scheme of studies designed to impart the higher education in its complete- ness. The education of the individual, as that of the race, may be said, indeed, to depend, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, on all those complex influences of the past and present which have combined to determine the resultant intellectual state of humanity. The Present is what the Past has made it, and bears in its bosom the germs of the Future, But, confining our view, as we do on this occasion, to a general survey of the fundamental elements which enter into the present constitution of human knowl- edge, we may say, with Bacon, that out of the five-and- twenty centuries over which the memory and learning of men extend, we can hardly pick out six that were fertile in sciences or favorable to their development. Speaking from the point of view reached in his day, he adds : "Only three revolutions and periods of learning can be properly reckoned — one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us; that is to say, the nations of Western Europe." In a still wider survey of human progress on the line of man's intellectual education, it may be said that three great civilizing nations have mainly determined the quality and the range of those studies which lay the basis of modern intellectual life and culture. We derive from the Hebrews 14 the rudiments of that knowledge which ascertains the rela- tions of man to God, and which lays in Divine Theology the foundations of both theoretical and practical ethics. Of this education, the Family and the Christian Church are at once the peculiar guardians and the most efficient agents. But no scheme of university education can, even on intel- lectual grounds, ignore the Wisdom that cometh from above, and which is profitable to direct in all things. The college which does not write Jehovah-Nissi on its banners has already written Ichabod on its door-posts. And as the elements of our religious culture have been mainly transmitted to us by the chosen people of Gol, so the elements of our intellectual and political education have been primarily derived from the Greeks and Romans. It is the Greeks and the Romans who have been the federal representatives of humanity in all that pertains to the origi- nal institutes of secular learning, literature, art, and polity ■ — the great elements which have mainly combined to make our intellectual condition what it is to-day. Now, if it be true that a liberal education il consists in sharing in the best influences of the progressive intellectual refinement of man ;" if the present age is not independent of the ages that have preceded it ; but if the days of the race, as of the individual, are bound each to each by a sort of natural piety, it needs no elaborate argument to vindi- cate the place which the Grecian and the Roman languages and literatures must hold in any course of studies designed to furnish the basis of an integral education of the intellect. When Dr. Arnold, the honored Master of Rugby School, in England, first caught a view of Rome, as he drew near to that "City of the soul," on the occasion of his visit to Italy, in the year 1840, he exclaimed: " Of earthly sights, this is the third — Athens and Jerusalem are the other 15 two — the three peoples of God's election, two for things temporal and one for things eternal." As the thunders of Sinai still peal through the innermost recesses of man's spiritual nature, so from the Acropolis of Athens we still catch, as it echoes down the " corridors of Time," the reverberation of that resistless eloquence which once " fui- mined over Greece," while in Roman polity and in Roman literature we still find the traditions of a civilization which has become part and parcel of modern times. But it is argued by some that for this very reason, be- cause the modern civilization has absorbed the best elements of Greek and Roman life, we may omit the cultivation of Greek and Roman letters in order to devote the more atten- tion to the modern literatures of Italy, or France, or Spain, or Germany, with which we stand in more direct and imme- diate relations. In reply to this allegation, I have only to say that when I am referred to the case of any scholar who, after mastering the tongues, and familiarizing himself with the literatures of modern Europe, for purposes of mental culture, has been content to turn away from the great original fountains of culture in Greece and Rome, it will be time enough to reconsider my estimate of the place and value traditionally assigned to the ancient classics. Shall we put the study of the German in the place of the Greek? But we find Schil- ler, as he says, delightedly walking under the intellectual sky of Greece, that he might learn how to purify the strains of his German muse. Shall we put the Italian in the place of the Roman tongue? But we find Dante in his great poem referring to Aristotle as il maestro di color che sanno, and turning a reverential eye to Virgil as to the source from which he derived the beautiful style that has done him honor and immortalized the Divina Commedia. 16 Some years ago, when the subject of education was under discussion in the French Chamber of Deputies, M. Arago, then a member of that body, is represented to have held the following language : *'l ask for classical studies. I require them. I deem them indis- pensable. But I do not think that they must necessarily be in Greek and Latin. I wish that in certain schools these studies should be superseded, at the pleasure of the municipal authorities, by a thorough study of our own tongue. I wish that in every college it might be permitted to put in the place of Greek and Latin the study of some living tongue. I require even that the language thus substituted may be different according to the situation of the place — that at Perpiguan and at Bayonne, for instance, it may be Spanish, at Havre the English, at Besancon the German." I entirely concur in this view of the French physical phi- losopher wherever the object of education is partial and not integral — aiming at professional or artisan dexterity as a means of livelihood, rather than to perfect the whole man by the full, harmonious, and thorough development of his capacities. If it be the mission of the French college, in the idea of Arago, to equip the stores of Perpignan and Bayonne, of Havre and Besancon, with fluent corresponding clerks and despatchfui commissionaires, it cannot be doubted that he has suggested the most expeditious means of reach- ing that object. But it has been commonly supposed that University education aims at something higher than this. It proposes to develop the whole man that he may, in the truest sense of the term, be an end to himself, and not to the end that he may excel in any single manipulation of handicraft life. This minor and special education has, indeed, its uses, and for the great mass of mankind it is the only form of education which can be adjusted either to their condition or the wants of society ; but it is not the 17 education which will keep the great channels of thought and culture open to the influx of that mighty current which has thus far borne our race to higher and still higher levels in the world of science and in civilization. They who would take the tide of modern civilization at its flood in Germany or France, hut who, at the same time, would dam up the stream of knowledge as it has descended to us from Greece and Rome, propose to themselves a problem no more sensi- ble than that of the engineer who should think to improve the navigation of the Mississippi river below New Orleans by cutting off its affluents, the Ohio and the Missouri. While I thus advocate the right of the ancient classical tongues to retain their hereditary place in intellectual edu- cation ; and while I assert for them, considered as instru- ments of education, an advantage over the study of modern languages, I would not have it supposed that I am indifferent to the just claims of the latter, and especially would I guard against the presumption that I am indifferent to the scholarly culture of our own noble language, and of that peerless literature which we inherit as a birth-right. I advocate the study of the ancient classics because I believe them indis- pensable to the thorough study and scholarly appreciation of any modern language, or of any modern literature, not excepting our own. If, then, on historical and logical grounds, as well as from considerations of scholastic discipline and utility, we must claim for classical learning a necessary place in any scheme of university education, it is equally easy to estab- lish the right of the higher mathematics to be included in any such scheme. Mathematical studies were an integral element, if not, as some maintain, the starting-point of that intellectual reformation which dates from the time of Plato. And men have curiously speculated what the Greek 18 civilization might have become if the Greek education had continued to he essentially mathematical, as it was in the days of Plato. It was not until this education had declined that the ancient astronomy became entangled in a cumbrous apparatus of fixed and crystalline spheres., " With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle in epicycle, orb in orb :" — a system incapable of reduction to any form of geometrical analysis, and which, therefore, failed to afford the condi- tions of scientific progress, or to substantiate itself to the reason of men. It is because Numbers, and Form, and Motion in periodic times are the principia of the universe that the "Principia" of Newton can never perish from the memory of man. Whether regarded as a means of discipline or as an instrument of scientific research, the higher mathematics must ever assert their appointed place in any theory of edu- cation which proposes either to strengthen the reason of man or to explicate the phenomena of the universe. If it be, as I have argued, the function of a University not only to embody and perpetuate the existing store of human knowledge, but also to consult for " the progression of the Sciences," it necessarily follows that the sciences based on physical research must occupy a prominent place in any system of modern intellectual education. Considered apart from the modifying force of Christianity, our Modern Age differs from that of Greece and Rome mainly by virtue of those positive sciences which have shed such a surpassing lustre on every path of modern life and on every walk of modern art. And these sciences, more than any others, con- tain in themselves the conditions and the presage of a never- ending advancement. Here are the fountains of a knowl- edge which wells up from the very bosom of Nature. Here 19 are the rudiments of that u potential physics" which enables the finite mind of man to re-think the thought of God in creation, as, step by step, we retrace the presence and work- ing of that Law whose "seat is in His bosom, and whose voice is the harmony of the World." The Dervise of Bal- sora, in the Arabian tale, gave to Baha Abdalla a precious ointment that opened the eyes on which it was laid to behold all the riches hidden in the earth ; but infinitely more precious is the eye-salve of Positive Science, which not onlv opens our eyes to behold the riches of the earth, but purges our intellectual vision, that it may read the works of God by the light of reason, and no longer by the shadows they cast in passing before the senses of man. If it be a ground of just wonder that the devotees of clas- sical culture should have once denied to the physical sciences their legitimate place in any scheme of university education it remains none the less a duty to resist the pretensions of those who would assign to these sciences a too exclusive posi- tion in the scholastic curriculum. Yet Mr. Herbert Spencer, in considering the question, " What knowledge is of most worth?" has not scrupled to say that the study of science (meaning physical science) iC is the best preparation for every order of human activity." Now, it cannot be doubted that an exclusive devotion to the physical sciences must wreak itself in a practical para- lysis or distorted growth of those faculties which, under such a training, are left to pine without cultivation. We hold, with Sir William Hamilton, that