Practical Essays Part 12

THE IDEAL GRADUATE.

All this supposes that you realise the position; that you fill up the measure of the opportunities; that you keep in view at once the Professional life, the Citizen life, and the life of Intellectual tastes. The mere professional man, however prosperous, cannot be a power in society, as the Arts' graduate may become. His leisure occupations are all of a lower stamp. He does not partic.i.p.ate in the march of knowledge. He must be aware of his incompetence to judge for himself in the greater questions of our destiny; his part is to be a follower, and not a leader.

It is not, then, the name of graduate that will do all this. It is not a sc.r.a.pe pa.s.s; it is not decent mediocrity with a languid interest. It is a fair and even attention throughout, supplemented by auxiliaries to the cla.s.s work. It is such a hold of the leading subjects, such a mastery of the various alphabets, as will make future references intelligible, and a continuation of the study possible.

Our curriculum is one of the completest in the country, or perhaps anywhere. By the happy thought of the Senatus of Marischal College, in 1753, you have a fundamental cla.s.s (Natural History) not existing in the other colleges. You have a fair representation of the three great lines of science--the Abstract, the Experimental, and the Cla.s.sifying. When it is a general education that you are thinking of, every scheme of option is imperfect that does not provide for such three-sided cultivation of our reasoning powers. A larger quant.i.ty of one will no more serve for the absence of the rest than a double covering of one part of the body, will enable another part to be left bare.

VOLUNTARY EXTENSION OF THE BASIS.

Your time in the Arts' curriculum is not entirely used up by the cla.s.ses. You can make up for deficiences in the course, when once you have formed your ideal of completeness. For a year, or two after graduating, while still rejoicing in youthful freshness, you can be widening your foundations. The thing then is, to possess a good scheme and to abide by it. Now, making every allowance for the variation of tastes and of circ.u.mstances, and looking solely to what is desirable for a citizen and a man, it is impossible to refuse the claims of the department of Historical and Social study. One or two good representative historical periods might be thoroughly mastered in conjunction with the best theoretical compends of Social Philosophy.

[THE WELL-INSTRUCTED MAN.]

Farther, the ideal graduate, who is to guide and not follow opinion, should be well versed in all the bearings of the Spiritual Philosophy of the time. The subject branches out into wide regions, but not wider than you should be capable of following it. This is not a professional study merely; it is the study of a well-instructed man.

Once more. A share of attention should be bestowed early on the higher Literature of the Imagination. As, in after life, poetry and elegant composition are to be counted on as a pleasure and solace, they should be taken up at first as a study. The critical examination of styles, and of authors, which forms an admirable basis of a student's society, should be a work of study and research. The advantages will be many and lasting. To conceive the exact scope and functions of the Imagination in art, in science, in religion, and everywhere, will repay the trouble.

THE ARTS' GRADUATE IN LITERATURE.

Ever since I remember, I have been accustomed to hear of the superiority of the Arts' graduate, in various crafts, more especially as a teacher.

Many of you in these days pa.s.s into another vocation--Letters, or the Press. Here too, almost everything you learn will pay you professionally.

Still, I am careful not to rest the case for general education on professional grounds alone. I might show you that the highest work of all--original enquiry--needs a broad basis of liberal study; or at all events is vastly aided by that. Genius will work on even a narrow basis, but imperfect preparatory study leaves marks of imperfection in the product.

The same considerations that determine your voluntary studies, determine also the University Ideal. A University, in my view, stands or falls with its Arts' Faculty. Without debating the details, we may say that this Faculty should always be representative of the needs of our intelligence, both for the professional and for the extra-professional life; it should not be of the shop, shoppy. The University exists because the professions would stagnate without it; and still more, because it may be a means of enlarging knowledge at all points. Its watchword is Progress. We have, at last, the division of labour in teaching; outside the University, teachers too much resemble the Regent of old--having too many subjects, and too much time spent in grinding.

Our teachers are exactly the reverse.

Yet, there cannot be progress without a sincere and single eye to the truth. The fatal sterility of the middle ages, and of our first and second University periods, had to do with the mistake of gagging men's mouths, and dictating all their conclusions. Things came to be so arranged that contradictory views ran side by side, like opposing electric currents; the thick wrappage of ingenious phraseology arresting the destructive discharge. There was, indeed, an elaborate and pretentious Logic, supplied by Aristotle, and amended by Bacon; what was still wanted was a taste of the Logic of Freedom.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: RECTORIAL ADDRESS, to the Students of Aberdeen University, _15th November_, 1882.]

VII.

THE ART OF STUDY.

Of hackneyed subjects, a foremost place may be a.s.signed to the Art of Study. Allied to the theory and practice of Education generally, it has still a field of its own, although not very precisely marked out. It relates more to self-education than to instruction under masters; it supposes the voluntary choice of the individual rather than the constraint of an outward discipline. Consequently, the time for its application is when the pupil is emanc.i.p.ated from the prescription and control of the scholastic curriculum.

There is another idea closely a.s.sociated with our notion of study--namely, learning from books. We may stretch the word, without culpable licence, to comprise the observation of facts of all kinds, but it more naturally suggests the resort to book lore for the knowledge that we are in quest of. There is a considerable propriety in restricting it to this meaning; or, at all events, in treating the art of becoming wise through reading, as different from the arts of observing facts at first hand. In short, study should not be made co-extensive with knowledge getting, but with book learning. In thus narrowing the field, we have the obvious advantage of cultivating it more carefully, and the un.o.bvious, but very real, advantage of dealing with one h.o.m.ogeneous subject.

In the current phrase, "_studying under_ some one," there is a more express reference to being taught by a master, as in listening to lectures. There is, however, the implication that the learner is applying his own mind to the special field, and, at the same time, is not neglecting the other sources of knowledge, such as books. The master is looked upon rather as a guide to enquiry, than as the sole fountain of the information sought.

Thus, then, the mental exercise that we now call "study" began when books began; when knowledge was reduced to language and laid out systematically in verbal compositions. A certain form of it existed in the days when language was as yet oral merely; when there might be long compositions existing only in the memory of experts, and communicable by speech alone. But study then was a very simple affair: it would consist mainly in attentive listening to recitation, so as to store up in the memory what was thus communicated. The art, if any, would attach equally to the reciter and to the listener; the duty of the one would be to accommodate his lessons in time, quant.i.ty, and mode of delivery to the retentive capacity of the other; who, in his turn, would be required to con and recapitulate what he had been told, until he made it his own, whatever it might be worth.

[BOOK STUDY AMONG THE ANCIENTS]

Even when books came into existence, an art of study would be at first very simple. The whole extent of book literature among the Jews before Christ would be soon read; and, when once read, there was nothing left but to re-read it in whole or in part, with a view of committal to memory, whether for meditative reflection, or for awakening the emotions. We see, in the Psalms of David, the emphasis attached to mental dwelling on the particulars of the Mosaic Law, as the nourishment of the feelings of devotion.

The Greek Literature about 350 B.C., when Aristotle and Demosthenes had reached manhood (being then 34), had attained a considerable ma.s.s; as one may see at a glance from Jebb's chronology attached to his Primer.

There was a splendid poetical library, including all the great tragedians, with the older and the middle Comedy. There were the three great historians--Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; and the orators--- Lysias, Isocrates, and Isaeus; there were the precursors of Socrates in Philosophy; and, finally, the Platonic Dialogues. To overtake all these would employ several years of learned leisure; and to imbibe their substance would be a rich and varied culture, especially of the poetic and rhetorical kind. To make the most of the field, a judicious procedure would be very helpful; there was evident scope for an art of study. The fertile intellect of the Greeks produced the first systematic guides to high culture; the Rhetorical art for Oratory and Poetry, the Logical art for Reasoning, and the Eristic art for Disputation. There was nothing precisely corresponding to an Art of Study, but there were examples of the self-culture of celebrated men.

The most notorious of these is Demosthenes; of whom we know that, while he took special lessons in the art of oratory, he also bestowed extraordinary pains upon the general cultivation of his intellectual powers. His application to Thucydides in particular is recounted in terms of obvious mythical exaggeration; showing, nevertheless, his idea of fixing upon a special book with a view to extracting from it every particle of intellectual nourishment that it could yield: in which we have an example of the art of study as I have defined it. Then, it is said that, in his anxiety to master his author, he copied the entire work eight times, with his own hand, and had it by heart _verbatim_, so as to be able to re-write it when the ma.n.u.scripts were accidentally destroyed. Both points enter into the art of study, and will come under review in the sequel.

We do not possess from the genius of Aristotle--the originator or improver of so many practical departments--an Art of Study. The omission was not supplied by any other Greek writer known to us. The oratorical art was a prominent part of education both in Greece and in Rome; and was discussed by many authors--notably by Cicero himself; but the exhaustive treatment is found in Quintilian. The very wide scope of the "Inst.i.tutes of Oratory" comprises a chapter upon the orator's reading, in which the author reviews the princ.i.p.al Greek and Roman cla.s.sics from Homer to Seneca, with remarks upon the value of each for the mental cultivation of the oratorical pupil. Something of this sort might be legitimately included in the art of study, but might also be withheld, as being provided in the critical estimates already formed respecting all writers of note.

[MODERN GUIDES TO STUDY.]

After Ouintilian, it is little use to search for an art of study, either among the later Latin cla.s.sics, or among the mediaeval authors generally. I proceed at once to remark upon the well-known essay of Bacon, which shows his characteristic subtlety, judiciousness, and weight; yet is too short for practical guidance. He hits the point, as I conceive it, when he identifies study with reading, and brings in, but only by way of contrast and complement, conference or conversation and composition. He endeavours to indicate the worth of book learning, as an essential addition to the actual practice of business, and the experience, of life. He marks a difference between books that we are merely to dip into (books to be tasted) and such as are to be mastered; without, however, stating examples. He ventures also to settle the respective kinds of culture a.s.signable to different departments of knowledge--history, poetry, mathematics, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, logic and rhetoric; a very useful attempt in its own way, and one that may well enough enter into a comprehensive art of study, if not provided for in the still wider theory of Education at large.

Bacon's ill.u.s.trious friend, Hobbes, did not write on studies, but made a notable remark bearing on one topic connected with the art,--namely, that if he had read as much as other men, he should have remained still as ignorant as other men. This must not be interpreted too literally.

Hobbes was really a great reader of the ancients, and must have studied with care some of the philosophers immediately preceding himself. Still, it indicates an important point for discussion in the art of study, in which great men have gone to opposite extremes--I mean in reference to the amount of attention to be given to previous writers, in taking up new ground.

To come down to another great name, we have Milton's ideal of Education, given in his short Tractate. Here, with many protestations of knowing things, rather than words, we find an enormous prescription of book reading, including, in fact, every known author on every one of a wide circle of subjects. This was characteristic of the man: he was a voracious reader himself, and an example to show, in opposition to Hobbes, that original genius is not necessarily quenched by great or even excessive erudition. As bearing on the art of study, especially for striplings under twenty, Milton's scheme is open to two criticisms: first, that the amount of reading on the whole is too great; second, that in subjects handled by several authors of repute, one should have been selected as the leading text-book and got up thoroughly; the others being taken in due time as enlarging or correcting the knowledge thus laid in. Think of a boy learning Rhetoric upon six authors taken together!

[LOCKE'S CONDUCT OF THE UNDERSTANDING.]

The transition from Milton to Locke is the inverse of that from Hobbes to Milton. Locke was also a man of few books. If he had been sent to school under Milton, as he might have been,[16] he would have very soon thrown up the learned drudgery prescribed for him, and would have bolted.

The practical outcome of Locke's enquiries respecting the human faculties is to be found in the little treatise named--"The Conduct of the Understanding". It is an earnest appeal in favour of devotion to the attainment of truth, and an exposure of _all_ the various sources of error, moral and intellectual; more especially prejudices and bias.

There are not, however, many references to book study; and such as we find are chiefly directed to the one aim of painful and laborious examination, first, of an author's meaning, and next of the goodness of his arguments. Two or three sentences will give the clue. "Those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great deal of collections, unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment." Farther: "Books and reading are looked upon to be the great helps of the understanding, and instruments of knowledge, as it must be allowed that they are; and yet I beg leave to question whether these do not prove a hindrance to many, and keep several bookish men from attaining to solid and true knowledge". Here, again, is his stern way of dealing with any author:--"To fix in the mind the clear and distinct idea of the question stripped of words; and so likewise, in the train of argumentation, to take up the author's ideas, neglecting his words, observing how they connect or separate those in the question." Of this last, more afterwards.

[WATT'S IMPROVEMENT OF THE MIND.]

A disciple of Locke, and a man of considerable and various powers, the non-conformist divine Isaac Watts, produced perhaps the first considerable didactic treatise on Study. I refer, of course, to his well-known work ent.i.tled "The Improvement of the Mind"; on which, he tells us, he was occupied at intervals for twenty years. It has two Parts: one on the acquisition of knowledge; the other on Communication or leaching. The scheme is a very wide one. Observation, Reading, attending Lectures, Conversation,--are all included. To the word "Study," Watts attaches a special meaning, namely Meditation and Reflection, together with the control or regulation of all the exercises of the mind. I doubt if this meaning is well supported by usage. At all events it is not the signification that I propose to attach to the term.

Observation is an art in itself: so is Conversation, whether amicable or contentious. The _proportions_ that these exercises should bear to reading, would fairly claim a place in the complete Art of Study.

Watts has two short chapters on Books and Reading, containing sensible remarks. He urges the importance of thorough mastery of select authors; but a.s.sumes a power of discriminating good and bad beyond the reach of a learner, and does not show how it is to be attained. He is very much concerned all through as to the moral tone and religious orthodoxy of the books read, he also reproves hasty and ill-natured judgments upon the authors.

Watts's Essay is so pithily written, and so full of sense and propriety, that it long maintained a high position in our literature; he tells us, that it had become a text-book in the University. I do not know of any better work on the same plan. A "Student's Guide," by an American named Todd, was in vogue with us, some time ago; but anyone looking at its contents, will not be sorry that it is now forgotten. It would not, however, be correct to say that the subject has died out. If there have not been many express didactic treatises of late, there has been an innumerable host of small dissertations, in the form of addresses, speeches, incidental discussions, leading articles, sermons--all intended to guide both young and old in the path of useful study. What to read, when to read, and how to read,--have been themes of many an essay, texts of many a discourse. According as Education at large has been more and more discussed, the particular province of self-education, as here marked out, has had an ample share of attention from more or less qualified advisers.

What we have got before us, then, is, first, to define our ground, and then to appropriate and value the acc.u.mulated fruits of the labour expended on it. I have already indicated how I would narrow the subject of Study, so as to occupy a field apart, and not jumble together matters that follow distinct laws. The theory of Education in general is the theory of good Teaching: that is a field by itself, although many things in it are applicable also to self-education. To estimate the values of different acquisitions--Science, Language, and the rest, is good for all modes of culture. The laws of the understanding in general, and of the memory in particular, must be taken into account under every mode of acquiring knowledge. Yet the alteration of circ.u.mstances, when a pupil is carving out his own course, and working under his own free-will, leads to new and distinct rules of procedure. Also, that part of self-education consisting in the application to books is distinct from the other forms of mental cultivation, namely, conversing, disputing, original composition, and tutorial aid. Each of these has its own rules or methods, which I do not mean to notice except by brief allusion.

In connection with the Plan of study, it is material to ask what the individual is studying for. Each profession, each accomplishment, has its own course of education. If book reading is an essential part, then the choice of books must follow the line of the special pursuit. This is obvious; but does not do away with the consideration of the best modes of studying whatever books are suitable for the end. One man has to read in Chemistry, another in Law, another in Divinity, and so on. For each and all of these, there is a profitable and an unprofitable mode of working, and the speciality of the matter is unessential.

[DIFFERENT ENDS OF STUDY.]

The more important differences of subject, involving differences of method, are seen in such contrasted departments as Science and Language, Thought and Style, Reality and Poetry, Generality and Particularity. In applying the mind to these various branches, and in using books as the medium of acquisition, there are considerable differences in the mode of procedure. The study of a book of Science is not on the same plan as the study of a History or a Poem. Yet even in these last, there are many circ.u.mstances in common, arising out of the const.i.tution of our faculties and the nature of a verbal medium of communication of thought.

An art of Study in general should not presume to follow out in minute detail the education of the several professions. There should still be, for example, a distinct view of the training special in an Orator, on which the ancients bestowed so much pains; there being no corresponding course hitherto chalked out for a Philosopher as such, or even for a Poet.

Next, there is an important distinction between studies for a professional walk, and the studies of a man's leisure, with a view to gratifying a special taste, or for the higher object of independent thinking on all the higher questions belonging to a citizen and a man.

Both positions has its peculiarities; and an art of study should be catholic enough to embrace them. To have the best part of the day for study, and the rest for recreation and refreshment, is one thing: and to study in by-hours, in s.n.a.t.c.hes of time, and in holidays is quite another thing. In the latter case, the choice of subjects, and the extent of them, must be considerably different; while the consideration of the best modes of economizing time and strength, and of harmonizing one's life as a whole, is more pressing and more arduous. But, when the course is chalked out, the details of study must conform to the general conditions of all acquirements in knowledge through the instrumentality of books.