w\ 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 SAMUEL HARRIS. 
 
 ' 
 
^ irnK (^: ,*~* 
 
 INAUGUKAL 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BY 
 
 P 
 
 SAMUEL HARRIS 
 
 AT HIS INDUCTION INTO 
 
 THE PKESIDENCY OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE, 
 
 3l«jjtt0t 6, 1S67. 
 
 BRUNSWICK : 
 JOSEPH GRIFFIN. 
 
 1867. 
 
•ST 
 
J 
 
 BOWDOIN COLLEGE, AUG. 8, 1867. 
 
 At a meeting of the Association of the Alumni of Bowdoin College 
 this day held, it was unanimously voted, that the Alumni present their 
 thanks to President Harris for his very able and acceptable Inaugural 
 Address, and request a copy for publication. 
 
 Also, that His Excellency Gov. Chamberlain, with Hon. Samuel P. 
 Benson, and the Rev. J. O. Fiske, be a Committee to carry this vote into 
 
 effect. 
 
 Attest, 
 
 J. B. Sewall, 
 
 Secretary. 
 
 BRUJNSWICK, AUG. 10, 1867. 
 REV. SAMUEL HARRIS, D.D. 
 
 President of Bowdoin College. 
 Dear Sir : 
 
 In compliance with the accompanying vote the un- 
 dersigned have the honor to request a copy of your Inaugural Address 
 for publication. 
 
 We trust that you will in this way allow a wider influence to that 
 noble exposition of sound scholarship, the spirit of which is to characterize 
 the College over which you are called to preside. 
 "We are with high respect, 
 
 Your friends and servants, 
 
 J. L. Chamberlain, 
 Samuel P. Benson, 
 John O. Fiske. 
 
 BOWDOIN COLLEGE, AUG. 30, 1867. 
 
 Gentlemen : 
 
 I thank the Alumni for their kind reception of my 
 Inaugural Address, and transmit a copy for publication. 
 With much respect, 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 Samuel Harris. 
 His Excellency Governor Chamberlain, 
 Hon. S. P. Benson, 
 Rev. J. O. Fiske, 
 
 Committee. 
 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
 
 It is a German legend that the emperor Charle- 
 magne returns every spring to bless the German land. 
 Up and down the Rhine he walks, flinging his blessing 
 on gardens, vineyards and fields, to make the seed 
 spring up and to multiply the vintage and harvest. 
 The significance of the legend is realized in every an- 
 niversary of a well-ordered institution of learning. As 
 the college sends out its successive classes of trained 
 and cultivated minds, it is its venerated founders, be- 
 nefactors, and supporters who reappear in the scenes 
 of their life-long interest to fling their blessing on 
 the land which they loved and served, to quicken 
 every healthful growth, and to multiply the ingath- 
 ering of human joy. The trust now committed to me 
 I seem to receive, not merely from you who are now 
 the supervisors of the College, but rather from the 
 departed good who have given of their property for 
 its endowment, or consecrated to it the loving and self- 
 denying work of their lives. It is an admonition to 
 faithfulness, a stimulus to endeavor, an incentive to 
 
courage, a pledge of success. An institution, which 
 by its living growth has organized into its own being 
 the faith and love, the prayers and benefactions, the 
 self-denial and toil, of noble men for two generations, 
 deserves to live, and is not likely to die. It deserves 
 and will reward the like precious offerings in time to 
 come. 
 
 The occasion determines my subject. I must speak 
 
 Of THE NECESSITY, THE IDEA AND THE METHODS OF COLLEGIATE 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 I. The necessity of collegiate education. 
 
 There is a floating impression that the diffusion of 
 knowledge is all that is needed in a Republic. Already 
 enthusiastic editors have predicted a good time coming 
 when books will no longer be published or read, and 
 the newspaper will be the only and the sufficient lite- 
 rature. 
 
 But the fountains of knowledge must be full, or the 
 streams will not flow. Diffusion presupposes concen- 
 tration. It is easy to say that the fruitfulness of the 
 earth depends on the general diffusion of moisture. 
 But the moisture must first be condensed by the 
 mountain tops and gathered into springs that feed 
 the streams. Colleges are the mountain tops which 
 fill the fountains whence knowledge is diffused. 
 
 Besides, science is different in kind from popular 
 knowledge. For example, beneath the popular know- 
 ledge of Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry or Mineralogy 
 
lies hidden, like the skeleton within the body, a, com- 
 plicated frame-work of mathematics. Not only the 
 savans who perpetuate and enlarge science, but the 
 teachers and authors who diffuse it, and the profes- 
 sional men who apply it must have scientific as distin- 
 guished from popular education. 
 
 Men, also, of thoroughly trained intellects and of 
 rich literary culture are indispensable to the welfare 
 of society. The civilization which has ceased to pro- 
 duce them is already effete. 
 
 Without this liberal education, charlatanism and 
 quackery will displace science and skill in the profes- 
 sions, the demagogue will usurp the place of the states- 
 man, the disorganizer that of the philanthropic re- 
 former, and instead of popular intelligence and the 
 diffusion of useful knowledge, will gradually come in 
 the diffusion of popular delusion and superstition. 
 
 Especially in this country thorough and complete 
 collegiate education is needed to counteract the tenden- 
 cy to superficiality pervading and enfeebling Ameri- 
 can civilization. 
 
 It may not be unnecessary even to insist that col- 
 leges are congenial with a democracy. Side by side 
 in the class-room sit the son of poverty and the son of 
 wealth, the boy delicately and luxuriously reared and 
 the sun-browned laborer, the youth of genteel and 
 polished manners and the youth having no ac- 
 quaintance with the graces. The conceit of one, the 
 boorishness of another, the bashfulness of another are 
 
8 
 
 worn away. The one standard of reputation and in- 
 fluence is talent, scholarship and manly merit. There 
 is no community more thoroughly democratic in its 
 influences, or in which the determination of a man's 
 standing is more free from factitious distinctions and 
 tests. 
 
 But this is not all. Colleges are indispensable to 
 democratic civilization. The culture incident to aristo- 
 cratic birth is lacking. "VVe cannot replace it with a 
 coarse aristocracy of wealth. Then we must have in- 
 stead the culture of thorough education. 
 
 The very rapidity of the national growth demands 
 it The rapid advance of population into the wilder- 
 ness has created in the West a peculiar type of Ameri- 
 can civilization, characterized by rapidity of thought, 
 strength of conviction and energy of action ; but cer- 
 tainly not by thoroughness of education, breadth of 
 knowledge, or richness of culture. Out of it have 
 arisen politicians uneducated in the schools, but earnest 
 and strong. Because a few of these have won public 
 confidence, the people have been ready to jump to the 
 conclusion that a lack of early and thorough edu- 
 cation is a positive recommendation for high office. 
 Time will teach us better. It will expose the narrow- 
 ness, one-sidedness and incompleteness of half-educated 
 men, however strong. It will demonstrate that even 
 Western civilization,with all its daring and energy, can- 
 not successfully override the universal law which de- 
 mands thorough training, broad information and deep 
 culture for the wise administration of affairs. 
 
This higher education is also needed to quicken, 
 guide and purify human progress. Our own his- 
 tory is an example. In the earlier period of Massa- 
 chusetts and Connecticut colonies, it was ascertained 
 that about one in every one hundred and fifty in- 
 habitants was a graduate either of Oxford or Cam- 
 bridge. The great reformations of the past originated 
 with men trained in the Universities. Wickliffe was 
 acknowledged to be "incomparable in scholastic stud- 
 ies." Huss at the age of twenty was professor in 
 the University of Prague. Reuchlin at the same age 
 taught philosophy, Greek and Latin at Basle. The 
 others, who, like these, bear the sad but sublime title 
 of "Reformers before the Reformation," were trained 
 in the highest education of their time. Luther and 
 the leaders of the Protestant reformation were " col- 
 lege-learned" men. Bilney, Tyndal, Fryth, — young 
 men praying over their Greek Testaments at Cam- 
 bridge and Oxford — conveyed the spiritual power of 
 the Reformation to England. John Knox was a scholar 
 and a teacher at St. Andrew's. The Puritan leaders 
 need only be named to prove the indebtedness of that 
 movement to the universities. Methodism originated 
 in the highest seats of learning in Great Britain. 
 Nothing can be more erroneous than the common as- 
 sertion that reforms originate with the uneducated 
 and work upward. History declares that the ideas 
 and movements which transform the world have ori- 
 ginated with men of the highest education, often be- 
 
10 
 
 fore they had left the schools ; that they have usually 
 been proclaimed by such men before the people were 
 ready to receive them, and often at the price of perse- 
 cution and martyrdom. Thus it has been truly said, 
 Tell me what some scholar is thinking in the solitude 
 of his study today, and you tell me what in the next 
 generation will be the watchword of progress and the 
 staple of the hustings. 
 
 II. The Idea of a College. 
 
 The college, and the university in which the pro- 
 fessional schools are included, imparting scientific edu- 
 cation and liberal culture, must be distinguished from 
 the common schools, and equally from each other. 
 The precise idea of the college must be accurately de- 
 termined in order to correct crude notions as to what 
 its studies should be and what it may reasonably be 
 expected to accomplish for its students. 
 
 The college 'is preparatory to the professional 
 school. It aims to develop the man, to ground him 
 in the principles of knowledge, and to make him ac- 
 quainted with its methods and instruments. The pro- 
 fessional school and the school of industry and arts, 
 aim to impart the special training and knowledge 
 necessary to a special profession. 
 
 On the one hand there must be the special educa- 
 tion. Hippias the sophist taught that the object of 
 education is to make a man sufficient for himself. He 
 therefore appeared at the Olympic games boasting 
 
11 
 
 that all the articles of jewelry and clothing which he 
 wore were manufactured by his own hand ; at the 
 same time he exhibited all sorts of poems, epic, tragic 
 and lyric, and several kinds of prose composition. An 
 attempt to educate a man to be sufficient for himself 
 in this sense, would annihilate the division of labor 
 and reduce society to barbarism. 
 
 On the other hand, as really disastrous would be 
 an education imparting exclusively the special train- 
 ing and knowledge for a special art or profession. 
 
 The college, then, aims to effect a systematic and 
 harmonious discipline of the whole man, and thus to 
 prepare the student for the special study and training 
 necessary to fit him for his special business in life. 
 He is not shut up by his college education to one of 
 the so called learned professions, but is trained as a 
 man so as the more readily to master any business, and 
 in whatever business to possess stronger powers, a 
 better balanced mind, a richer culture, and a broader 
 sympathy with all true minds and true learning in 
 other professions. 
 
 This being the idea of a college, its prime and 
 dominating end must be, not to impart knowledge, 
 but to strengthen and discipline the mind, to put the 
 man in possession of himself, and to enable him with 
 the greatest facility to achieve the greatest and best re- 
 sults. It is not to bloat the man with a plethory of 
 learning, leaving him flabby in organization, slow, fee- 
 ble and awkward in movement ; but to train him to 
 
12 
 
 the development of intellectual muscle, to quickness, 
 power and dexterity in intellectual action. 
 
 First, physical culture must not be neglected. But 
 here observe that it does not belong to the college to 
 train the senses to the special uses, and the hand to 
 the special dexterity necessary in special pursuits. 
 Such training belongs to professional schools, to 
 schools of the arts, and to apprenticeship to trades. 
 Nor does it belong to the college to train men to the 
 highest development of muscle, of agility or speed ; 
 for such training belongs only to the professional ath- 
 lete and acrobat. This is an extraordinary training 
 of special powers, incompatible with the full-orbed 
 and harmonious development of the man, and un- 
 favorable to the greatest health and longevity, and to 
 the best intellectual advancement. No people ever 
 gave more prominence to physical culture than the 
 Greeks ; yet Plato insists that the training of an ath- 
 lete must not be permitted in the education of the 
 young. He says that the athletes are intellectually a 
 sluggish set, who doze away their lives, and that they 
 are of dubious and unreliable health. He therefore 
 insists that the gymnastic training of the young should 
 be more simple and moderate, and recommends mili- 
 tary drill. 
 
 Physical culture must also be kept in subordina- 
 tion to intellectual. If it absorbs the interest and 
 energy that should be devoted to study, it frustrates 
 its own design and makes the whole college course 
 
13 
 
 nugatory. There should be that degree and kind of 
 physical culture which are essential to vigorous health ; 
 so as to insure the greatest serenity of spirit, capacity 
 for work and power of endurance ; so as to dispel 
 despondency and gloom, exhaling like mists from the 
 man's own disordered liver ; so that he may not break 
 down under the first strain accompanying the severer 
 exigencies of life ; so that it may be every day a joy 
 to live and work. ' Other things being equal, the 
 healthy man is the happiest and makes others the 
 happiest ; he is the more pleasant husband and father, 
 the more generous friend, the cheerer and helper of 
 the sad; in every position and relation the whole- 
 some man. He radiates joy. Health, as the per- 
 petual spring of animation and energy, is the first re- 
 quisite of success. It must never be out of sight in 
 the administration of a college. 
 
 The college must also train the intellect so as to 
 give it both strength and dexterity. There are three 
 kinds of intellectual power, thought, expression, exe- 
 cution. By the pre-eminence of one or the other of 
 these the regal minds of the race are characterized. 
 The college must train them all. 
 
 There is first the power of thought. Ordinary 
 scholars may not enlarge the bounds of human know- 
 ledge by discovery, nor originate thoughts which the 
 world will not willingly let die. But since they ought 
 to be, in their respective spheres, the " Carolines rerum" 
 on which events and actions turn, they must be 
 
14 
 
 trained to original and independent thought — original 
 in the only sense in which originality is possible to or- 
 dinary minds, that they have looked at things with 
 their own eyes; — independent, because they do not 
 receive their opinions from others but have thought 
 out conclusions for themselves. They must be able 
 to see the significance and bearing of events, look 
 through appearances to reality, detect the errors of 
 popular opinion, and be wise counsellors of the people. 
 The first aim, then, is to make the student a thinker; 
 to train him to attend fixedly and long, to observe, 
 discriminate and define, to analyze, compare and com- 
 bine, to weigh evidence and reach just conclusions ; 
 that his mind may be, not a warehouse filled with 
 bales of facts, but a growing germ, organizing ma- 
 terial into its own substance and force, as an acorn or- 
 ganizes the soil, water and air into a living oak. 
 
 The second kind of intellectual power is that of 
 expression ; the power of communicating, vindicating 
 and enforcing thought. It is the power of the teacher, 
 the orator and the author. The training of this power 
 is the special object of one department of college in- 
 struction, and should not be overlooked in any. The 
 study of language, though distinct from the depart- 
 ment of rhetoric, is the study of the instrument of 
 expression, giving that scientific knowledge of the his- 
 tory, significance and relations of words, and of the 
 combinations and possibilities of language, which is an 
 unseen but effective help to precision and power of 
 
15 
 
 speech. And every translation — and indeed recita- 
 tions in other departments — should be an exercise in 
 using simple, perspicuous, precise and terse language. 
 
 Next is the power of applying and combining 
 thought in executive and administrative action. This 
 is the power of the inventor, the reformer, the gen- 
 eral, and the statesman ; also of the lawyer, physician 
 and clergyman, using science, skill and training for the 
 uses of daily life. This power must not be neglected. 
 Philosophy formerly was contemplative and not active,, 
 withdrawing from action to academic shades and to 
 retreats of learning. Barrow in his Greek Professor- 
 ship called himself an "Attic owl driven out from the 
 society of all other birds." But at this day and in 
 America every scholar should be a worker. All thought 
 is to be transformed into life. An education which 
 makes a man only a book-worm, which unfits him for 
 the activities of life, is a failure. The philosophy of 
 America must be the Peripatetic. From the nature of 
 the case, special training for special lines of business 
 must be in the professional schools. But this grand ob- 
 ligation of every scholar to a life of action must con- 
 trol the whole college curriculum, so that the student 
 acquire that facility in handling all his faculties and 
 acquisitions, which will fit him to succeed in any line 
 of action, industrial, military, political or professional. 
 
 Argument is superfluous to demonstrate that this 
 is the result of a right college training, and of the 
 training actually given at Bowdoin, since we are 
 
16 
 
 honored with the presence of his Excellency the 
 Governor, distinguished at once as scholar, general 
 and statesman. 
 
 They, therefore, greatly mistake, who estimate the 
 value of the college course by the amount of learning 
 which it imparts ; by the number of facts stored in 
 memory which the man can afterwards make use of 
 in his farm, workshop or office. Much more do they 
 mistake who suppose that the chief value of the four 
 years at college is in the opportunity for general read- 
 ing and that acquaintance with English literature 
 which one can comfortably acquire in his easy chair. 
 It is the object of a college to make men. It is an 
 old and classic illustration, when you give a sheep 
 grass, you do not expect it to return grass, but wool. 
 So when you give a youth instruction you do not ex- 
 pect him to return learning, but manhood; not the 
 crude and undigested facts received, but a mind strong, 
 disciplined and dextrous in the use of all its powers, 
 and rich in culture. 
 
 I have spoken of physical and intellectual training. 
 But as physical training is subordinate to intellectual, 
 so both are subordinate to moral and spiritual ends. 
 The importance of this part of education has been 
 urged by the greatest educators and the greatest 
 minds in all ages. In reading the thoughts of the 
 Emperor M. A. Antoninus one is impressed by the 
 earnestness with which through nearly twenty open- 
 ing sections he enumerates the successive influences 
 
17 
 
 which had established him in various moral principles 
 and expresses his gratitude for them. Plato in his 
 system of. education for his model republic dwells at 
 great length on the same branch of culture. Napo- 
 leon Bonaparte has left his testimony that religion is 
 the foundation of education. Daniel Webster has said 
 that the Christian religion is " of the essence, the vi- 
 tality of useful instruction." " Hence, since the intro- 
 duction of Christianity, it has been the duty, as it has 
 been the effort of the great and good, to sanctify hu- 
 man knowledge, to bring it to the font and baptize 
 learning into Christianity, to gather up all its produc- 
 tions, its earliest and its latest, its blossoms and its 
 fruits, and lay them all upon the altar of religion and 
 virtue." And mark the reverence and devoutness of 
 the greatest minds in scientific investigations. Listen 
 to Kepler: "I give thee thanks, Lord and Creator, that 
 thou hast given me delight in thy creation, and I have 
 exulted in the work of thy hands. I have revealed to 
 mankind the glory of thy works, as far as my limited 
 mind could take in that infinite glory." "If I have 
 given forth anything that is unworthy of thee, or if I 
 have sought my own fame, wilt thou, gracious and 
 merciful, forgive me." Hear Linnaeus in his researches 
 among the plants: "Deum sempitemum, omniscium, omni- 
 jpotentem, a tergo transeunte?n, vidi, et obstupui" Hear Lord 
 Bacon, joining this choir of kingly worshippers : 
 " Thou, therefore, father, who gavest the visible light 
 
 as the first fruits of the creation, and at the comple- 
 3 
 
18 
 
 tion of thy works didst inspire the countenance of 
 man with intellectual light, guard and direct this work, 
 which proceeding from thy bounty, seeks in return 
 thy glory." " If we labor in thy works, thou wilt 
 make us partakers of thy vision and of thy Sabbath. 
 We pray that this mind may abide in us ; and that 
 by our hands and the hands of others to whom thou 
 shalt impart the same mind, thou wilt be pleased to 
 endow with new gifts the family of man." 
 
 We are in sympathy, then, with the great masters 
 of learning, as well as with Jesus and the apostles, when 
 we demand that education aim pre-eminently to culti- 
 vate the moral and spiritual side of man's being, and 
 to establish, strengthen and settle the pupil in the 
 principles and practice of Christian character. 
 
 We meet, indeed, a difficulty growing out of the 
 multiplicity of denominations. The difficulty is safely 
 met in the common school, by leaving the distinctive 
 religious instruction to the parents. But it cannot be 
 met in the same way at college, for, the pupils being 
 away from home, it would deprive them of religious 
 instruction during the four most formative years of life. 
 To the innumerable evils arising from sectarian jeal- 
 ousy we must not add this more fatal than all, of 
 making college education unchristian through fear lest 
 in teaching Christianity, we seem to teach sectarian-, 
 ism. That would be to sacrifice our own sons to the 
 demon. That could be justified only by a sectarianism 
 gQ intense that it would leave the educated intellect of 
 
19 
 
 the country unchristian rather than have it Christian 
 in any sect not our own. The difficulty has been met 
 by a common consent that every college have a de^ 
 nominational character in the sense that its religious 
 instruction accord with some one denomination. In 
 this sense Harvard, Brown, Amherst, Yale, and in fact 
 every college in N. England, and almost every one in 
 the United States, is denominational. In the same 
 sense and no other Bowdoin has always had a de- 
 nominational character. That character has been the 
 same from the beginning. I know no desire or pur- 
 pose in any quarter to make its character in this re- 
 spect in the future any other than it has always been 
 in the past. But while every college is in this sense 
 denominational, no college ought to be sectarian, or 
 be made an engine for propagating sectarian narrow^ 
 ness and animosity. The tendency of high culture is 
 always to enlarge the views, to liberalize the feelings, 
 to purge away partizan bias, passion and prejudice. 
 A college would be perverted from the high ends of 
 liberal education, to say nothing of Christian culture, 
 if made an engine of sectarian zeal or political fac- 
 tion. Especially at this time, when the united ener- 
 gies of all Christians are needed to counteract the 
 powerful influences undermining all Christian faith, 
 and when the whole Christian community is yearning 
 for union and co-operation, the young must be edu- 
 cated to the large heartedness as well as to the devoted* 
 ness and earnestness of Christian love. The instruc- 
 
20 
 
 tion should be, as President Woolsey in his Inaugural 
 expressed his views of religious instruction at Yale, in 
 " a theology so liberal — if that might be — as not to 
 pertain to the party but to universal Christianity, and 
 so majestic in its outline as to commend itself to the 
 consciousness and make it own the presence of God." 
 
 I add, in opposition to the current opinion, that the 
 moral and religious interests of a young man are pro- 
 bably safer in college than in any other situation in 
 which young men are congregated away from home. 
 I make this assertion after long observation, and I am 
 sure that facts sustain it. It has been estimated — I 
 know not with what correctness — that one in four of 
 the young men who go into business in the cities, 
 come to ruin financially and morally. Compare a 
 New England college with an equal number of young 
 men in the shops and stores of any street of a city, 
 you will find in college less of the mean vices of pil- 
 fering and lying, less of nightly revels and degrading 
 sensuality ; you will find a smaller proportion who, 
 virtuous at coming, become morally corrupted ; and a. 
 larger proportion whose moral character is improved, 
 who rise to a higher sense of honor, who are rescued 
 from corruption to which before entering they had 
 been tending, or who are renovated to Christian faith 
 and love. 
 
 Training, then, is the first and dominant design of 
 collegiate education ; training that produces the hap- 
 piest development of the physical, intellectual and 
 moral powers. 
 
21 
 
 The second design is to impart knowledge. A well 
 arranged college course will impart the largest amount 
 of useful knowledge possible in securing the most com- 
 plete mental discipline. 
 
 But the value of the college course in this respect 
 does not consist so much in the amount of knowledge 
 as in its quality. 
 
 Observe, first, that the student is so far initiated 
 into the various great spheres of learning as to awaken 
 an interest in them and a desire to prosecute them 
 further. Whatever his subsequent profession, he will 
 be in sympathy with all literature and science, will be 
 an intelligent and interested observer of the progress 
 of thought and discovery, and a man of large and 
 liberal culture. 
 
 Observe, secondly, that the college has given him 
 a knowledge of principles and methods, rather than of 
 details. And one principle is worth a thousand facts ; 
 and a method is a key to science. 
 
 Observe, next, that the knowledge acquired is 
 scientific rather than popular, and this gives the stu- 
 dent a solid basis for enlarging his knowledge of ap- 
 plications and results. 
 
 Observe, also, that the student has acquired the 
 knowledge and use of languages and of mathematics 
 which are instruments of investigation available in all 
 his subsequent life. 
 
 When the quality of the knowledge acquired in 
 college is appreciated, it will be evident that this 
 
22 
 
 second part of the work accomplished is of vast con- 
 sequence. 
 
 III. Methods of realizing the idea of collegiate education. 
 
 First, I must speak of government and discipline. 
 
 No community can prosper without the main- 
 tenance of order by the enforcement of law. Yet all 
 admit that the maintenance of discipline is the one 
 great difficulty in administering a college. In the re- 
 cent discussions respecting reform in Harvard univer- 
 sity, it has been intimated that the result of discipline 
 there has been to throw the students and faculty 
 into antagonism as hostile parties in perpetual feud. 
 It has even been suggested that the attempt to main- 
 tain college government be abandoned as impractica- 
 ble, and the students be left amenable only to the civil 
 law. The example of the European universities is 
 not to be ajDpealed to in support of this, since they 
 correspond to our professional schools rather than to 
 our colleges. Certainly the New England mind will 
 not consent to this in collegiate education. The diffi- 
 culty probably originates less in the administration of 
 college government than in the state of society, the 
 decay of family government, the neglect to cultivate 
 subordination and respectfulness in the young, and the 
 forgetfulness of the maxim that no one knows how to 
 command till he has first learned to obey. Colleges 
 are not to be blamed for failing to accomplish results 
 which the constant and irresistible influences of society 
 render impossible. 
 
23 
 
 I do not intend to discuss this subject in full. I 
 propose merely to call attention to one aspect of it, 
 which has not received due attention from American 
 educators. ' 
 
 There are two principles, not contradictory but 
 complements of each other, opposite poles of truth, 
 both necessary to the complete circuit of thought 
 on the subject. Held separately they lead to two sys- 
 tems of educational discipline, each erroneous because 
 expressing only a half truth. I may best exhibit 
 them by historical instances. 
 
 The first is exemplified in the education given by 
 the Jesuits to those who were trained for the service 
 of the order, This was almost exclusively discipline, 
 severe and protracted exercises through which the 
 pupil was required to pass, not to store his mind with 
 knowledge, or to train him to think, reason, and speak, 
 but to discipline him to subordination, to the submis- 
 sion of his will without question to his superiors, to 
 entire consecration to the interests of the order, to 
 the abandonment of ease, sloth, pleasure and luxury, 
 and to contempt of hardship, poverty, toil, suffering 
 and death in its service. Here was a system which 
 deliberately imposed the severest artificial restraints 
 and hardships on the pupils on purpose to train them 
 to endure hardness. The success of this training the 
 history of Jesuit missions demonstrates. 
 
 The other principle in its exclusive application is 
 exemplified in the account which Montaigne gives 
 
24 
 
 of his own education. His father, he tells us, " had 
 been advised to make me relish science and duty by 
 an unforced will and of my own voluntary motion, 
 and to educate my soul in all liberty *ancl delight 
 without any severity or constraint." Accordingly to 
 save him from the drudgery of learning, his attendants 
 spoke only Latin, that he might acquire the language 
 as a vernacular. " As to Greek, of which I have but 
 little smattering, my father also designed to have 
 taught it me by art, but in a new way and as a sort of 
 sport; tossing out declensions to and fro, after the 
 manner of those who by certain games at tables and 
 chess learn geometry and arithmetic." The servants 
 were forbidden to awake him in the morning, but a 
 musician was provided to play soft music as he waked, 
 that his mind might be serene when he arose. "By 
 which example," he says, "you may judge of the rest." 
 Hence resulted his marked disinclination to encounter 
 toil or hardship, the busy idleness of his whole life, 
 and his incapacity to appreciate the battle of human 
 life against ignorance and wickedness. 
 
 The latter is becoming the type of modern educa- 
 tion. Says Mr. Youmans: "The free and healthy 
 exercise of the faculties is so pleasurable as universally 
 to be spoken of as play. Who then, has a right to 
 turn it into dreary and repulsive work? The love of 
 enjoyment is the deepest and most powerful impulse 
 of our nature, and the educational' system which does 
 not recognize and build upon it, violates the highest 
 
25 
 
 claim of that nature." Most true ; and yet but a half 
 truth. For life is not play, but work. It cannot be 
 made all pleasurable, but must involve for the accom- 
 plishment of its high ends painful self-denial, sacrifice 
 and toil. No education fits a man for real life which 
 does not train him to endure hardness, to scorn idle- 
 ness, enervation and luxury, to forego ease and indul- 
 gence, to accept toil for the accomplishment of high 
 ends. The command to self-denial has never been re- 
 pealed ; the acceptance of it can never cease to be 
 the condition of entering into life. 
 
 The error of the Mediaeval education was that it 
 was ascetic in the bad sense which that word has ac- 
 quired. But there is a proper askhsis an "exercis- 
 ing" of the soul in conquering difficulties, bearing re- 
 straints, enduring hardness and loss, sacrificing pleasure 
 and drudging through tasks for high ends, without 
 which the soul can never be master of its highest 
 strength nor realize its highest greatness. All who 
 have achieved the most have exhibited this power — 
 witness the ancient Romans, the Saracens, the Puritans. 
 
 Every right system of education must provide this 
 true askesis, this exercise and discipline which shall 
 train the man to simplicity of character, purity and 
 elavation of desires, and earnestness of purpose. It 
 must produce men who live to achieve, not to enjoy; 
 whose joy is in work, not in indulgence. Otherwise 
 education produces only weaklings, whose only con- 
 cern is their own comfort ; whose highest end in life 
 
26 
 
 is to have a good time ; Sybarites at last who kill the 
 cocks that their slumber may not be disturbed, and 
 banish the smiths because they cannot endure the 
 noise, and who cannot sleep at night if the rose leaves 
 lie too thick on them. And this askesis is as indispen- 
 sable today as ever in all right training. 
 
 How then is it to be secured ? Not by abandon- 
 ing discipline, but by clearing it from its errors. The 
 ascetic training of the Jesuit aimed to regulate thought 
 and to make the mind and will submissive to authority. 
 Our askesis must aim to make a man a thinker, inde- 
 pendent in thought and action, but reverently sub- 
 missive to truth and right ; and in obedience thereto 
 freely consecrated to God in the service of man. The 
 mediseval asceticism was imposed by authority ; ours 
 must be accepted freely through interest in the noblest 
 ends. The ancient asceticism imposed artificial re- 
 straints, privations and sufferings for the purpose of 
 training men to hardness ; ours must not be artificial 
 but natural, accordant with the discipline which life 
 itself imposes on every man ; rejoicing in every gift 
 of God as good, and accepting the discipline simply as 
 incidental to the achievements on which the heart is 
 bent. In real life nothing is offered gratis. Nature 
 sells,, and always at the value price. The disciplkie 
 of a college should be simply the conformity of the 
 college to this great law of nature and of life. 
 
 Therefore there should be no artificial regulations 
 creating offences which but for the rules would not 
 
27 
 
 have been offences. Where numbers are prosecuting 
 studies together there must necessarily be fixed hours 
 for college exercises, and fixed hours of study when, 
 for the common convenience, the colleges and grounds 
 shall be quiet and studies may be prosecuted without 
 interruption. Beyond this the young man in college 
 should be held to the same law which governs all hu- 
 man life ; he must be held to truthfulness, sincerity, 
 justice, kindness, honor, integrity, in action and spirit ; 
 to gentlemanliness and courtesy; to diligence and 
 energy in study and the concentration of all his powers 
 on gaining that high education which is the immediate 
 object of the college life. For that end he must be 
 content to forego ease and indulgence and to work 
 with all his might. All requirements of constant and 
 punctual attendance, all assignment of studies easy or 
 hard, all stimulus and pressure to bring out his ener- 
 gies and make him accomplish the utmost consistent 
 with health, he must accept, not as the arbitrary regu- 
 lation of college, but simply as the enforcement in col- 
 lege of the great law of nature and of life that value 
 must be paid for ; that the good of life is gained only 
 by toil and self-denial. " Buy the truth." 
 
 If any student is persistently idle, if he falls into 
 dissipation or other vice, if he habitually disturbs 
 the quiet and order of the college, if he violates the 
 rights of his fellow students or trespasses on the pro- 
 perty or peace of the community, and will not heed 
 admonition, he must be dismissed. Thus the same 
 
28 
 
 laws of propriety and virtue rule in college which rule 
 in society at large ; the law which in college requires 
 punctuality, self-restraint, diligence and energy, is the 
 law which requires the same in actual life. Thus the 
 whole college course will be a constant appeal to all 
 the best sentiments of the heart, and a constant train- 
 ing to self-government; and to self-denying and ener- 
 getic work. And he who has not acquired this ca- 
 pacity must be in society a useless thing ; and when 
 he dies nobody will mourn that the earth is relieved 
 of the burden of his support. 
 
 The course of study has also been under discus- 
 sion, and great changes have been demanded. 
 
 The demand that increased attention be given to 
 the natural sciences is reasonable. The recent expan- 
 sion of knowledge in this direction has been so great, 
 that a collegiate education cannot be complete, nor 
 adapted to the times, which does not introduce the 
 student to these sciences. They provide also a pecu- 
 liar intellectual discipline ; they train the powers of 
 observation, of discrimination and classification ; they 
 educate in inductive reasoning; they hold the mind 
 rigorously to facts ; they restrain, or at least ought to 
 restrain the tendency to fanciful speculation and theo- 
 rising. Although I am constrained to say that if seek- 
 ing through all the history of speculation for the most 
 striking instance of the inverted pyramid, the broadest 
 theory on the smallest apex of fact, I should find it 
 among the shifting scientific theories of cosmology 
 
29 
 
 and paleontology. It may be added, that the basis 
 of mathematics which underlies many of these stud- 
 ies necessitates in them a mathematical discipline. 
 Therefore aside from the knowledge acquired, these 
 studies are important to supplement other studies in 
 securing a complete and harmonious intellectual disci- 
 pline. 
 
 I heartily agree with the modern demand for a 
 more extended course in natural science. And yet I 
 object to it, as actually urged, that it is but a half 
 truth, and as such tends to evil. There are three 
 great spheres of human thought, Nature, Man, and 
 God. My objection to the demand under considera- 
 tion is that in effect it acknowledges only the first of 
 these and allows no proper proportion of attention to 
 the other two. Thus it tends always to the fatal doc- 
 trine that the knowledge of matter and of physical 
 force is the only knowledge useful or possible to man. 
 
 First, in claiming that the knowledge of these 
 branches is pre-eminently useful knowledge, an inade- 
 quate idea of utility is involved. If that only is use- 
 ful which aids in feeding, clothing and sheltering man, 
 then indeed the knowledge of natural science is the 
 only useful knowledge ; then all useful knowledge 
 may be included under the German designation Brod- 
 wissenschaft, which may be translated, a Bread and but- 
 ter science " ; and the tendency to materialism becomes 
 inevitable and irresistible. 
 
 But the highest product of the earth is not corn 
 
30 
 
 and cotton, but man. The highest end of education 
 is to elevate and develop man. The true utility con- 
 sists in promoting this high end. 
 
 Even if we give the widest scope to the common 
 argument from the utility of the natural sciences, it 
 acknowledges as useful only that which supplies exist- 
 ing human wants, and overlooks the prior necessity of 
 so developing the man that he may have wants large, 
 manifold, pure and elevated, which discovery and in- 
 vention may meet. This is the prime and fundamen- 
 tal utility. 
 
 In truth the first named utility is subordinate to 
 and dependent on this second and true utility. Of 
 what use to multiply inventions and facilities of pro- 
 duction while man is capable only of the hideous 
 pleasures of savage life? The wants of the savage 
 are so few and so gross, his desires are so brutish and 
 his pleasures so disgusting, that knowledge and art 
 have but the most limited scope in which they can 
 minister to his wants. The man himself must first be 
 developed. The civilized man is many times more a 
 man than the savage. We say he has more wants. 
 That is because he is more developed ; he has become 
 many sided ; his tastes have been purified ; his desires 
 have been multiplied and elevated; the sources of in- 
 terest and avenues of enjoyment have become manifold 
 more numerous. Nature touches him at a thousand- 
 fold more points than the savage, and c*an give him a 
 thousand-fold more and better blessings. Therefore the 
 
31 
 
 prime necessity and highest utility is the development 
 of the man. 
 
 The same argument may be drawn from a com- 
 parison of civilized men. How limited the scope in 
 which knowledge and art could have been useful to 
 Nero, who, with the resources of the Roman Empire 
 at his sole command to suck it dry as a man sucks an 
 orange, was yet capable of obtaining from all the 
 riches of the world only the sordid pleasures of in- 
 temperance and the horrid pleasures of cruelty. Even 
 in civilization, therefore, the degree to which know- 
 ledge can be useful to a man, depends on the develop- 
 ment and culture of the man ; as the degree to which 
 sunshine and rain can bless a soil depends on the rich- 
 ness and culture of the soil. 
 
 The history of science and art in all ages presents 
 facts in confirmation. It is true of many modern in- 
 ventions and discoveries that they had been found 
 out by some thinker generations before they came 
 into use, but dropped into oblivion again because 
 society was not sufficiently advanced, that is, man was 
 not sufficiently developed to need or to use them. 
 From the days of Archimedes until now, discoveries 
 and inventions have been falling on society and perish- 
 ing without fruit, like seed incapable of germinating, 
 and obliged to perish, because thrown upon a rock. 
 
 Therefore, I repeat, the highest utility consists in 
 the development of man himself. We may say it is 
 the one fundamental utility ; because it is only as this 
 
32 
 
 development is realized that science and art find scope 
 to be useful to man. 
 
 If so, then the natural sciences have no exclusive 
 or even pre-eminent claim to be useful knowledge, or 
 to be the exclusive or even the pre-eminent studies in 
 education. If man is the highest product of the earth, 
 if his development is the grandest end, then the study 
 of man must be equal in dignity and importance to 
 the study of that which merely ministers to his exist- 
 ing wants : and we may re-assert in this century what 
 was a truism in the last ; " The proper study of man- 
 kind is man." On the ground of utility alone I claim 
 the higher place for the study of man himself; those 
 studies fitly called "the humanities" ; the great courses 
 of human thought ; the questions which have occu- 
 pied the human mind ; the jDroducts of human genius; 
 the progress and characteristics of civilization; the 
 conditions and laws of individual action and of the 
 constitution and welfare of society. 
 
 And if so, then the knowledge of human lan- 
 guages and literature is pre-eminently useful know- 
 ledge; for it is pre-eminently the knowledge of man. 
 Comparative Philology is a sort of geology of human 
 thought. In the study of languages the student digs 
 through the strata in which the opinions, the religion, 
 the politics, the social customs of the past have been 
 deposited. Single words are petrified thoughts, fossils 
 perpetuating some peculiar formation in the life of a 
 distant age. Why is not this knowledge as useful as 
 
33 
 
 the knowledge of the deposition of sand and gravel 
 in the ages before human history began ? Literature 
 is the consummate flower and fruit of the human 
 mind, the product of the greatest geniuses which have 
 made the history of the race illustrious. In these 
 studies, also, a student best masters his own language, 
 and acquires the power of expressing his own thoughts. 
 
 The language and literature of Greece and Kome 
 are by universal consent among the most important. 
 In them we come in contact with the human mind in 
 its most formative and influential periods. The civili- 
 zation of Greece and Eome have been determinant 
 forces in the formation of our modern civilization ; and 
 with the civilization of the Hebrews, fused together 
 under the power of Christianity mightier than all 
 three, still penetrate our civilization as they do our 
 language, with elements of abiding power. What a 
 blank would be made in the mind of any highly edu- 
 cated person, if there were struck out at a dash all the 
 knowledge, the culture, the refinement and enlarge- 
 ment of thought, the intellectual strength acquired 
 from contact with the Greek and Eoman mind. 
 
 Herbert Spencer objects, I know, that the dead 
 facts of human history are useless. I reply, that all 
 facts are useless, except as their significance is seen 
 through their relation to some principle, law or end. 
 They lie like heaps of broken granite, mere rubbish, till 
 the mind of the architect constructs them into a tem- 
 ple j till the Orphic music of a master thought makes 
 5 
 
34 
 
 them move and range themselves harmoniously in the 
 grand and beautiful whole. So the facts of meteorolo- 
 gy lie accumulated in huge volumes of recorded ob- 
 servations, meaningless as the incongruous images 
 of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, waiting the Daniel who 
 shall tell us their significance. But this is no more 
 true of the facts of human than of natural history. 
 A dead man is no more dead than a dead dog. If 
 we must compare the value of mere facts, why is 
 not the knowledge that Csesar crossed the Rubicon 
 as useful as the knowledge of the average weight 
 of the human brain? The knowledge of the migra- 
 tions of men and the founding of empires as useful as 
 the knowledge of the movements of great glaciers in 
 an immeasurably distant geological epoch? Why are 
 we not as much benefited by knowing the names of 
 Aristides and Socrates, of Cato and Brutus, as by 
 learning to call a certain shell fish no longer a clam, 
 but a Mi/a Arenaria ? And why is not a knowledge of 
 mythology, which Spencer especially ridicules, being 
 the knowledge of the action of the human mind on 
 the great subject of religion, as capable of use as the 
 knowledge of the monstrous shapes and names of 
 Pentacrinite, Ichthyosaurus, Megalosaurus, and all the 
 " chimaeras dire " of geology ? 
 
 I accept, then, the test of utility. I agree with 
 Milton, 
 
 " That not to know at large of things remote 
 From use, obscure and subtle ; but to know 
 That which before us lies in daily life, 
 Is the prime wisdom." 
 
35 
 
 Yet I insist that man is himself the highest product of 
 the earth ; that his development is the highest end of 
 education ; that the utility which consists in satisfying 
 existing wants is inferior and subordinate to the prime 
 utility which consists in developing; purifying and en- 
 nobling the man ; and that in any view of the subject 
 a knowledge of the languages, history and literature 
 of man is at least as useful as a knowledge of nature. 
 It may be argued in reply that even for the high- 
 est end of education, natural science is the more efc 
 fective. Admitting that the utility of knowledge is 
 to be tested, not merely by its bearing on the supply 
 of existing wants, but on the development, purification 
 and ennobling of man, it may be contended that the 
 knowledge of nature is still pre-eminently the useful 
 knowledge. But this admission changes the whole 
 question; it rectifies the one-sided and inadequate 
 view of utility, which constitutes a fallacy in the argu- 
 ment and necessitates a tendency to materialism. 
 When the question is thus put, the same correct test 
 of utility being appealed to on each side, the respective 
 claims of the different departments of knowledge can 
 be adjudicated. I will only throw out a single thought 
 bearing on this adjudication. The facts of history dis- 
 prove Comte's theory that the progress of the human 
 mind has always been by successive steps from Theolo- 
 gy to Metaphysics and thence to Natural Science ; for 
 these have always been co-existent factors of civiliza- 
 tion. But history does demonstrate that in the earlier 
 
36 
 
 periods of civilization, romance and poetry, aesthetics 
 and literature, rhetoric, logic, and language, ethics and 
 politics, metaphysics and theology, were much larger 
 factors in the education of the race than natural science ; 
 and that the same continued to be the fact up to 
 the most recent centuries. And the civilization 
 which produced Homer and Virgil, Socrates, Plato, 
 and Aristotle, Pericles, and Julius Cassar, has some- 
 thing to say for itself as to its capacity to develop 
 man. Confessedly the natural sciences have become 
 prominent factors in the education of the race only in 
 the last period of its progress. Even during the last 
 two centuries as much of human thought has been ex- 
 pended on the study of man and God as on the study 
 of nature ; education in the schools has continued to 
 this day to be principally in those studies; and the 
 most eminent naturalists owe their own discipline and 
 training first to them. 
 
 Now let it be observed that education must guide 
 the development of every child from the incapacity, 
 ignorance and rudeness of barbarism up to the highest 
 civilization — each child passing through in its own 
 progress the entire progress of the race — and it is 
 reasonable to infer that the same order of studies by 
 which God has educated the race will be the order 
 most effective to educate the individual. Such in sub- 
 stance has been the order of educational influences 
 which either the wisdom or the instinct of man has 
 adopted. And until babes shall begin to be born civi- 
 
37 
 
 lized men and women, there will be no reason, even 
 in the nineteenth century, to change substantially this 
 order, but only to perfect and improve the details. 
 
 A second objection against the argument for a 
 larger attention to the natural sciences is its tendency 
 —I speak of a tendency involved, rather than of a 
 theory avowed — to make education only a special 
 training for a special work, and to overlook the pre- 
 vious general training which gives development and 
 culture to the man. The argument constantly urged, 
 that education from the beginning must consist in the 
 acquisition of knowledge that is to be used in the 
 special work of life, has force only on the premise that 
 all education is a special training for a special work. 
 This false theory of education is latent in the argu- 
 ment. Indeed, in Comte's system it is not latent. At 
 an early age the special adaptation of the child is to 
 be determined by a phrenological examination by state 
 officials ; thenceforward he is to be taken from his pa- 
 rents, and educated for that special trade or business. 
 
 To see how pernicious this error is, notice, first, that 
 after all the broader culture of the college there are 
 certain isolating, one-sided, narrowing influences, a 
 certain professional smack and odor, inseparable from 
 every special profession, trade or business ; a certain 
 incapacity, also, to appreciate the knowledge, skill, diffi- 
 culties, work and worth of other pursuits. If now the 
 training of the college be omitted, and instead, educa- 
 tion from the beginning be a special training for a 
 
38 
 
 special work, these narrowing influences will be in- 
 tolerably intensified. If a person is to spend life in 
 making pins, and his entire education has consisted in 
 acquiring the knowledge and skill necessary for that 
 business, the result is that the man disappears, and a 
 pin-maker alone remains. If the same theory of edu- 
 cation be universally adopted, then in the multitude 
 of artisans and professional drudges, we shall need 
 Diogenes' lamp to find a man. 
 
 Here comes in sight another fatal tendency of this 
 error. It is argued that education must be the teach- 
 ing of the knowledge and skill which are to be used 
 in the special business of life. This argument has 
 force only on the premise that the artisan is of more 
 consequence than the man ; that the highest end of 
 education is to produce the skill of the artisan, not 
 the excellence of the man. Thence it follows that the 
 product of work is of more value than the workman. 
 Thence, in one line of inference, it follows that the 
 workman may be sacrificed to multiply the products 
 of his labor ; all assertions of the dignity and rights 
 of labor, of the sacreclness of humanity, of inaliena- 
 ble rights are silenced ; the door is open for the re- 
 entry of slavery or any enforced service which prom- 
 ises to multiply products. 
 
 In another line of inference it follows that since 
 the highest end is the multiplication of products, all 
 utility lies in that direction, and the farthest scope and 
 Iiighest end of civilization is limited to the material. 
 
39 
 
 Here we come in sight of two systems of civiliza- 
 tion struggling already in the womb of time for the 
 birthright of precedence and lordship in the future — 
 systems contrasted long ago by Jesus — the one that 
 man lives by bread alone ; the other, that he lives by 
 the word of God; — the one, which affirms with Comte 
 that man must abandon his claim to be the lowest of 
 the angels and must be content henceforth to rank as 
 the highest of the beasts ; the other, which acknow- 
 ledges him as spiritual and immortal, in the image of 
 God; — the one, which sees utility only in the multi- 
 plication of products, and, sinking the man in the arti- 
 san, appoints him to moil and fatten "where wealth 
 accumulates and men decay"; the other, which subor- 
 dinates all to man's intellectual, aesthetic, social and 
 spiritual culture ; — the one, which with Lord Bacon 
 recognizes man in his highest exaltation as no more 
 than the minister and interpreter, that is, the servant 
 and student of nature ; the other, which with Kepler 
 recognizes the student and interpreter of nature as 
 also the student and interpreter of the divine mind, 
 reading God's thoughts after him , and, with the Bible, 
 recognizes man not as the servant but the Lord of na- 
 ture, appointed to possess its resources and to compel 
 the service of its forces ; — the one, which explains all 
 human progress as the result of physical forces, de- 
 veloping according to their necessary law ; the other, 
 which regards it as the result of spiritual energies 
 originating in God's love, expressing the action of his 
 
40 
 
 grace, establishing on earth a kingdom of righteous- 
 ness and peace, renovating the earth by and for man, 
 and installing him in that lordship over nature for 
 which he was created. 
 
 I insist that in the conflict of civilizations, all right 
 education must be unmistakably and emphatically pro- 
 nounced on the side of the latter against the former. 
 I object to the plea for the natural sciences and against 
 the humanities in education that so often there are 
 arguments which have no validity and appeals which 
 have no force, except by admitting as premises princi- 
 ciples which legitimately lead to a materialistic civili- 
 zation. 
 
 I need not draw on my own imagination to depict 
 this type of civilization ; for Comte has fully delineated 
 it. For example, he insists that the stellar astronomy, 
 as the investigation of binary stars, ought not to be 
 studied because it is not available for practical use — 
 making of no account the inextinguishable interest of 
 the soul in truth for its own sake, and all the higher 
 uses of such investigations in quickening the imagina- 
 tion, elevating the thoughts, and enlarging our ideas 
 of the glory of the universe and of God. In that 
 state of society which Comte depicts as the highest 
 civilization, the man is educated to be an artisan and is 
 lost in the artisan; he is of less value than his pro- 
 ducts, and, if it is needful, is to be sacrificed to multi- 
 ply them ; he is the tool of the state, having no rights 
 but only owing duties ; the modern doctrines of hu- 
 
41 
 
 man rights and civil liberty are ridiculous errors ; the 
 State is a hierarchy of savans, determining despotically 
 every person's business, regulating the minutiae of con- 
 duct, and like the Inquisition, carrying its dictation 
 and espionage into the sphere of opinion and con- 
 science and into all the privacy of life ; love is regu- 
 lated by the State ; the glow of passion and the free- 
 dom of impulse are suppressed, nobleness of character 
 and heroism of action are made impossible; indi- 
 viduality is lost in the monotony of a universal and 
 regulated productiveness; and even the creation of 
 value and the acquisition of property, while it is the 
 highest end of life, is yet restrained from kindling pas- 
 sion or awakening desire. This is his boasted autruism 
 with which he caricatures Christian love — in name 
 that a man lives for others — in reality that he is the 
 tool of the State for the production of value. In such 
 a civilization Mother Goose and Fairy tales must give 
 place to useful knowledge in the nursery. All the ro- 
 mance of life, which is like the bloom on the plum 
 and the down on the peach, must be rubbed off; and 
 the spring, freedom and variety of life give place to 
 calculating prudence and frigid regulation. J. S. Mill 
 himself takes note of this already discernible tendency. 
 He says, "The chivalrous spirit has nowadays almost 
 disappeared from our books of education. For the 
 first time in history the young of both sexes are grow- 
 ing up unromantic." There results at last an inca- 
 
 • 
 
42 
 
 pacity even to comprehend the loftier enthusiasm and 
 the deeper springs of human action ; as Voltaire could 
 account for the Protestant Reformation only as the 
 result of a quarrel between the Augustinian and Do- 
 minican monks. This is the vision of the good time 
 coming, according to the gospel of the Positive Phi- 
 losophy. And when it has fully come, we may expect 
 the women to dispense with useless ornaments and 
 have interest tables printed on their aprons ; and then 
 may be realized, in accordance with what Herbert 
 Spencer urges, the substitution in the course of study 
 for young men in college of a treatise on hygiene in- 
 stead of Greek, and a treatise on the rearing of chil- 
 dren instead of Latin. 
 
 I do not speak of these tendencies as belonging to 
 the study of the natural sciences; but as indicated 
 and involved in the current arguments for the substi- 
 tution of this study for that of Latin and Greek and 
 of the " humanities " in general. 
 
 On the contrary I insist that these false arguments 
 do injustice to these sciences and place them in a false 
 position. I advocate increased attention to these sci- 
 ences in college, not merely because they are useful 
 in reference to the supply of material wants, nor 
 because they secure a peculiar and necessary kind of 
 intellectual discipline, but also because they enlarge 
 the range of thought, awaken a new and higher interest 
 in nature, and have utility in its highest sense in pro- 
 
43 
 
 moting the culture and development of man and the. 
 best progress of society. The Atlantic cable does not 
 merely transmit the quotations of the markets, but in it 
 
 " The hands of human brotherhood 
 Are clasped beneath the sea." 
 
 While in ancient civilization labor was servile, and the 
 only scope for honorable ambition was in politics or 
 war, modern discoveries and inventions have facilitated 
 labor and made it honorable, have exalted private busi- 
 ness into a public service, have given scope in industrial 
 pursuits to the highest enterprise and genius, and are 
 compelling the nations to feel a common interest as 
 members of the one common family of man. 
 
 Moreover if languages, literature and philosophy 
 give to the student the thoughts of man, in natural 
 science, as Kepler said and as Agassiz teaches, we read 
 the thoughts of God. 
 
 It must be added that the physical sciences in their 
 latest investigations have themselves become metaphy- 
 sical. The question, " What is force ? " belongs at once 
 to physics and to metaphysics. In the doctrine of the 
 correlation and co-ordination of forces, physical science 
 becomes profoundly metaphysical. When science de- 
 monstrates that all force is one, variously transmuted ; 
 that heat, light and electricity are transmuted motion 
 and may be transmuted back into motion, it therein 
 equally demonstrates that physical science itself is 
 transmuted metaphysics and may be transmuted back 
 
44 
 
 into metaphysics, and even into theology. Herbert 
 Spencer himself teaches that science brings us in sight 
 of a force absolute, eternal and inexhaustible. Thus 
 tb,e last word of physical science is the first word of 
 theology. 
 
 The irresistible conclusion is that the healthy and 
 complete course of college study, whether we regard 
 mental discipline or useful knowledge, is that which 
 touches in due proportion the three great subjects of 
 human thought, Nature, Man, and God. 
 
 Alumni and friends of Bowdoin College, I have 
 now set before you my views of the necessity, the 
 idea and the methods of collegiate education. It will 
 be my aim to meet these necessities and to realize this 
 ideal. It is to the honor of the State that a college 
 with these high aims was founded so early in what 
 was then the Province of Maine. Its history has been 
 one which has been an honor to the State. Its gradu- 
 ates have been active and influential in all departments 
 of life. No New England college can show among its 
 alumni a larger proportion of men distinguished in 
 literature and science, and in professional, political and 
 military life. In its course of study it has always aimed 
 at the substantial rather than the showy, at the real 
 rather than the factitious. It has always been slow 
 to adopt novelties, and yet in repeated instances has 
 taken the lead in introducing changes which time and 
 the general concurrence of the colleges have demon- 
 
45 
 
 strated to be improvements. While in the future as 
 in the past -we shall not make haste in innovations, we 
 shall strive to keep abreast of the progress of society, 
 and to adopt all the improvements which that progress 
 demands and by which it can be wisely promoted. " I 
 am sure every alumnus of the college has reason to 
 be proud of his Alma Mater for her record in the 
 past. And I trust that they and all friends of sound 
 learning will give their influence and aid to make her 
 record still brighter in the future ; that while we joy- 
 fully urge forward the development of the resources 
 of the State and multiply our railroads, our mills and 
 the product of our farms, we may in the same propor- 
 tion increase our interest in education, and enlarge 
 the resources of this old and honored institution. 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 029 915 705 2