The History of Dartmouth College Part 18

"Early in its history the members of the Chandler Scientific Department founded the 'Philotechnic Society,' the library of which, together with some books belonging to the department, contains 1,700 volumes.

"The three society libraries continued under separate management until 1874, although the societies, as far as literary work is concerned, had for some time given way to the secret societies, and the interest in them was so slight that only with great difficulty could a quorum be obtained for ordinary business. During that year an arrangement was made by which the three society libraries were placed under the same management as the library of the college, the latter receiving the society taxes which were slightly reduced, a.s.suming all expenses including the support of the reading-room, and providing for the increase of the library by books to be annually selected by the Senior cla.s.s. Under this arrangement the different libraries have been brought together and considered as departments of one, the hours for drawing and consulting books have been increased from three hours per week in the society libraries and six in the college, to twenty-one hours per week, and in many respects the facilities for use have been greatly increased. Since 1870, the yearly additions for all the libraries have averaged 700 volumes, and they at present contain exclusive of pamphlets about 45,000 volumes, besides nearly 5,000 books which are either duplicates or worthless. These figures are independent of the Astronomical library located at the Observatory, the library of the 'Society of Inquiry,' and of the libraries of the Medical and Agricultural departments, which will probably be connected with the main library. The library as it is now const.i.tuted is well adapted to the work of the college, and is especially so in some of the departments of instruction, in connection with which a large amount of reading is done. There are in use at present three printed catalogues: one of the college library, printed in 1868; one of the 'Social Friends' library, dated 1859; and one of the 'United Fraternity' library, issued in 1861. These are supplemented by a card catalogue arranged under t.i.tle, author, and subject."

The "Centennial" celebration of the founding of the college, at the Commencement of 1869, was a season of rare interest and profit to the very large number of alumni and friends of the college a.s.sembled from nearly every quarter of the globe.

The following is the substance of the address of Chief Justice Chase, who presided on the occasion, as given by Mr. William H. Duncan:

"He began by alluding to the fact that the college received its charter from 'our right trusty and well beloved John Wentworth, Governor of the Province of New Hampshire,' and said that the venerable name was 'borne, to-day, by an honored citizen of Illinois,[36] who, like his ancestor, towered head and shoulders above his fellow men. He also happily referred to the descendants of the other founders of the college. 'When the college was organized the third George was heir to the British throne. Under the great Empress Catherine, Russia was prosecuting that career of aggrandizement then begun which is even now menacing British empire in the East. Under the fifteenth Louis, in France, that wonderful literary movement was in progress, which prepared a sympathetic enthusiasm for liberty in America, at length overthrowing, for a time, monarchy in France. China and j.a.pan were wholly outside the modern community of nations. A hundred years have pa.s.sed, and what a new order has arisen! Great Britain has lost an empire, has gained other empires in Asia and Australia, and extends her dominion around the globe. France, so great in arts and arms, has seen an empire rise and fall and another empire arise, in which a wise and skillful ruler is seeking to reconcile personal supremacy with democratic ideas. Russia, our old friend, seems to withdraw, for the present, at least, her eager gaze from Constantinople and seeks to establish herself on the Pacific Ocean and in Central Asia. China sends one of our own citizens, Mr. Burlingame, on an emba.s.sy throughout the world to establish peaceful, commercial, and industrial relations with all the civilized nations. j.a.pan, too, awakes to the necessity of a more liberal policy, and looks toward a partnership in modern civilization. Who, seeing this, and reflecting on the manifold agencies at work in the old world and the prodigious movements in the new, which I cannot even glance at, can help exclaiming, in the language of the first telegraphic message which was sent to America, 'What hath G.o.d wrought?' How great a part has this college, antedating the Republic, played in all the enterprises of America! It has been well said of it that three quarters of the globe know the graduates of Dartmouth. Every State in the Union, certainly, is familiar with their names and their works, and the influence which they exert is the influence of this college. What an insignificant beginning was that which has been described, to-day;--what splendid progress! How great the present, and who can predict the future?

Ninety-eight cla.s.ses of young men have already gone forth from this inst.i.tution. Who can measure the religious, the moral, the intellectual, the political influence, which they have exerted? Great names like Webster and Choate rise at once to memory, but I refer more particularly to the mighty influence exerted by the vast numbers, unrecognized upon the theatre of national reputation, which the college has sent into all the spheres of activity and duty. When I think of the vast momentum for good which has originated here, and is now in unchecked progress, and must extend beyond all the limits of conception, I cannot help feeling that it is a great and precious privilege to be in some way identified as a member of this college. It does not diminish my satisfaction that other graduates of other American colleges can say the same thing. It rather increases the satisfaction. Glad and thankful that my name is in the list of those who have been educated here, and have endeavored to do something for their country and their kind, I rejoice that, under our beneficent inst.i.tutions, legions of Americans have the same or greater cause for gladness.'

[36] Hon. John Wentworth, LL. D.

"After some remarks to the graduating cla.s.s, the Chief Justice said: 'And let me add, my brethren of the alumni, a practical word to you.

We celebrate to-day the founding of our college. We come hither to testify our veneration and our affection for our benign Alma Mater. We can hardly think she is a hundred years old, she looks so fresh and so fair. We are sure that many, many blessed days are before her, but a mother's days are made happy and delightful by the love and faithfulness of her children. Much has been done for this inst.i.tution, recently, much which makes our hearts glad. The names of the benefactors of the inst.i.tution, mentioned here to-day, dwell freshly in the hearts of every graduate, and will live forever; but let us remember, that while much has been done, much also remains to be done.

I do not appeal to you for charity. I wish that every graduate may feel that the college is, in a most true and n.o.ble sense, his mother, and to remind you of your filial obligations.'"

Addresses having been made by Hon. Ira Perley, LL. D., Hon. Daniel Clark, and Richard B. Kimball, Esq., Mr. Duncan says:

"Judge Chase called upon Judge Barrett, Vice President of the a.s.sociation of the Alumni, to read a poem, which had been furnished for the occasion by George Kent, Esq., of the Cla.s.s of 1814. He had read but a few stanzas when the rumbling of distant thunder was heard.

Then came a few scattering drops of water pattering upon the roof of the tent, but soon the winds blew, and the rain descended and fell upon the roof, as if the very windows of heaven had been opened. There followed such a scene as no tongue, nor pen, nor pencil can describe,--it baffles all description. Judge Barrett, with the true pluck of an Ethan Allen, stood by his colors, and the more the wind blew and the storm raged, the louder he read his poetry. But he was obliged at length to cease, and with his slouched hat and dripping garments left the stage.

"But he was not alone in his misery. The manly and stately form of the Chief Justice, the president of the college, reverend doctors of divinity, were all in the same condition--they all stood drenched and dripping, like fountains, in the rain. Even General Sherman had to succ.u.mb, once in his life, and seek the protection of an umbrella.

Some huddled under umbrellas, some held benches over their heads, and some crept beneath the platform.

"The storm pa.s.sed over, and Judge Barrett came forward and finished reading the poem.

"Hon. James W. Patterson, of the Cla.s.s of 1848, was then called upon, and spoke with force and eloquence, receiving the greatest compliment that could be paid him,--the undivided attention of the audience."

Addresses were also made by Dr. Jabez B. Upham, Samuel H. Taylor, LL.

D., Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., and others.

We quote some of the closing pa.s.sages of the "Historical Address" by President Brown, of Hamilton College.

"There is not much time to speak of the general policy of the college through these hundred years of its life, but I may say in brief, that it has been sound and earnest, conservative and aggressive at the same time. As the motto on its seal,--_vox clamantis in deserto_,--indicated and expressed the religious purpose of its founders, so this purpose has never been lost sight of. Through l.u.s.trum after l.u.s.trum, and generation after generation, while cla.s.ses have succeeded cla.s.ses, while one corps of instructors have pa.s.sed away and others have taken their places, this high purpose of presenting and enforcing the vital and essential truths of the Christian religion, has never been forgotten or neglected. The power of Christianity in modifying, inspiring, and directing the energies of modern civilization,--its art, its literature, its commerce, its laws, its government, has been profoundly felt. Nor has it for a moment been forgotten that education, to be truly and in the largest degree beneficent, must also be religious,--must affect that which is deepest in man,--must lead him, if it can, to the contemplation of truths most personal, central, and essential, must open to him some of those depths where the soul swings almost helplessly in the midst of experiences and powers unfathomable and infinite,--where the intellect falters and hesitates and finds no solution of its perplexities till it yields to faith. Within later years there have been those who have advocated the doctrine that education should be entirely secular,--that the college should have nothing to do with religious counsels or advice. Now while I do not think that this would be easy, as our colleges are organized, without leaving or even inciting the mind to dangerous skepticism, nor possible but by omitting the most powerful means of moral and intellectual discipline, nor without depriving the soul of that food which it specially craves, and dest.i.tute of which it will grow lean, hungry, and unsatisfied,--as a matter of history, no such theory of education has found favorable response among the guardians of Dartmouth. At the same time while the general religious character of the college has been well ascertained and widely recognized, while the great truths of our common Christianity have been fully and frankly and earnestly brought to the notice of intelligent and inquiring minds, it has not been with a narrow, illiberal, and proselyting spirit, not so as rudely to violate traditionary beliefs, not so as to wound and repel any sincere and truth loving mind. And this is the consistent and sound position for the college to hold.

"With respect to its curriculum of studies the position of the college has been equally wise. She has endeavored to make her course as broad, generous, and thorough as possible; equal to the best in the land; so that her students could feel that no privilege has been denied them which any means at her disposal could provide. She has endeavored wisely to apportion the elements of instruction and discipline. She has provided as liberally as possible, by libraries, apparatus, laboratories, and cabinets for increase in positive knowledge. She has equally insisted on those exact studies which compel subtleness and precision of thought, which habituate the mind to long trains of controlled reasoning, which discipline alike the attention and the will, the conservative and the elaborative powers. She has given full honor to the masterpieces of human language and human thought, through which, while we come to a more complete knowledge of peoples and nations, of poetry and eloquence, we feel more profoundly the life of history, and comprehend the changes of custom and thought, while the finer and more subtle powers of fancy and imagination stir within the sensitive mind, and gradually by constant and imperceptible inspiration lift the soul to regions of larger beauty and freedom.

"So may she ever hold on her way, undeluded by specious promises of easier methods, inuring her students to toil as the price of success; not rigid and motionless, but plastic and adapting herself to the necessities of different minds; yet never confounding things that differ, nor vainly hoping on a narrow basis of culture to rear the superstructure of the broadest attainment and character, but ever determined to make her instructions the most truly liberal and n.o.ble.

"With no purpose of personal advantage, but with the deepest filial love and grat.i.tude have we a.s.sembled this day. Of all professions and callings, from many States, from public business and from engrossing private pursuits,--you, my young friend who have just come, with hesitation and ingenuous fear, to add your name if you may, to the honored rolls of the college, and you Sir,[37] whose memory runs back to the beginning of the century, the oldest or nearly the oldest living alumnus of the college, the contemporary of Chapman and Harvey, and Fletcher, and Parris, and Weston, and Webster,--you who came from beyond the 'Father of Waters,' and you who have retreated for a moment from the sh.o.r.e of the dark Atlantic--you Sir,[38] our brother by hearty and affectionate adoption, who led our armies in that memorable march from the mountain to the sea, which shall be remembered as long as the march of the Ten Thousand, and repeated in story and song as long as history and romance shall be written, and you, Sir, who hold the even scales of justice in that august tribunal, from which Marshall proclaimed the law which insured to us our ancient name and rights and privileges, unchanged, untarnished, unharmed,--all of us, my brothers, with one purpose have come up to lay our trophies at the feet of our common mother, to deck her with fresh garlands, to rejoice in her prosperity, and to promise her our perpetual homage and love.

Let no word of ours ever give her pain or sorrow. Loyal to our heart of hearts, may we minister so far as we can, to her wants, may we be jealous of her honor, and solicitous for her prosperity. May no ruthless hand ever hereafter be lifted against her. May no unholy jealousies rend the fair fabric of her seamless garment. May no narrow or unworthy spirit mar the harmony of her wise counsels. May she stand to the end as she ever has stood, for the Church and State, a glory and a defense. And above all and in order to all, may the spirit of G.o.d in full measure rest upon her; 'the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.'"

[37] Job Lyman, Esq., of the cla.s.s of 1804.

[38] General Sherman received the highest honorary degree of the college in 1866.

President Smith, whose character was a rare union of energy and gentleness, was preeminently a man of affairs.

The results of his untiring efforts to promote the welfare of the college, in various directions, will be more fully developed upon subsequent pages. Having performed valuable service for thirteen years, he resigned his office, on account of failing health, March 1, 1877, and died on the sixteenth of August following, his wife, Mrs.

Sarah Ann (Adams) Smith, surviving him.

CHAPTER XIX.

INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT BARTLETT.

Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., of the Chicago Theological Seminary, was elected the eighth president of the college. We insert entire his inaugural address, delivered at the Commencement, June, 1877:

"Certain occasions seem to prescribe their own themes of discourse, and certain themes are endowed with perpetual life. There are problems with which each coming generation and each last man grapples as freshly as the first.

"How shall the ripest growth of the ages be imparted to one young soul? Twice, at least, in a lifetime, is this great question wont to rise solemnly before each thoughtful man--when he looks forward in youthful hope, and when he looks back in parental solicitude. It is a question of many forms and multiplying answers. Shall there be a long, fundamental training, wide and general? or, shall it be closely professional? Shall it be predominantly cla.s.sic, or scientific, or esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive "nines" not known on Helicon, and challenge British Oxford, alas? with its boat crew? Shall the American College student follow his option, or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches?

or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the Concord sage,--'You send your son to the schoolmasters, and the schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the whole tone of the inst.i.tution?

"In these and other forms is the same fundamental question still thrust sharply before us. I do not propose to move directly on such a line of bristling bayonets, but to make my way by a flank movement across this "wilderness" of conflict. It will go far towards determining the methods of a liberal education, if we first ascertain, as I propose to do, The Chief Elements of a Manly Culture.

"Obviously the primal condition of all else must be found in a self-prompted activity or wakefulness of intellect. The time when the drifting faculties begin to feel the helm of will, when the youth pa.s.ses from being merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the first remove from the _tohu va-vohu_ was when the Spirit of G.o.d brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic.

It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round restlessly by a yearning instinct; it may be driven by the strong impulse of native genius; or, it may rise to the condition of being the facile servant of the forceful will. When the boy at Pisa curiously watches the oil lamp swinging by its long chain in the cathedral, a pendulum begins to vibrate in his brain, and falling bodies to count off their intervals; and when afterward he deliberately fits two lenses in a leaden tube, the moon's mountains, Jupiter's satellites, and Saturn's rings are all waiting to catch his eye. A thoughtful meditation on the spasms of a dead frog's leg in Bologna becomes galvanic. The gas breaking on the surface of a brewery vat, well watched by Priestley, bursts forth into pneumatic chemistry.

A spider's web in the Duke of Devonshire's garden expands in the mind of my lord's gardener, Brown, into a suspension bridge. A sledge hammer, well swung in Cromarty, opened those New Walks in an Old Field. The diffraction of light revealed itself to Young in the hues of a soap-bubble. As the genie of the oriental tale unfolded his huge height from the bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, so the career of Davy first evolved itself out of old vials and gallipots. When the boy Bowditch was found in all his leisure moments s.n.a.t.c.hing up his slate and pencil, when Cobbett grappled resolutely with the grammar, when Cuvier dissected the cuttlefish found upon the sh.o.r.e, or Scott was seen sitting on a ladder, hour after hour, poring over books, they will be further heard from.

"If such instances ill.u.s.trate the propulsive force of native genius, they also indicate what training must do when the impulsive genius is not there. No idler plea was ever entered for an idler than when he says,--'I have no bent for this, no interest in that, and no genius for the other.' The animal has his _habitat_, and stays fast. A complete man is intellectually and physically a cosmopolite. Till he has gained the power to throw his will-force wherever the work summons him, most of all to the weak points of his condition, till he has learned to be his own task-master and overseer, he is but a 'slave of the ring.'

"In most lines the highest gift is the gift of toil. Indeed, men of genius have often been the most terrible of toilers, and in the regions of highest art. How have the great masters of music first welded the keys of the organ and harpsichord to their fingers' ends and their souls' nerves before they poured forth the Creation or the Messiah, the symphonies and sonatas! Think of Meyerbeer and his fifteen hours of daily work; of Mozart's incessant study of the masters, and his own eight hundred compositions in his short life; of Mendelssohn's nine years elaboration of Elijah. Or in the sister art, how we track laborious, continuous study in the Peruginesque, the Florentine, and the Roman styles successively of Raphael, and in the incredible activity that crowded a life of thirty-seven years with such a vast number of portraits and Madonnas, of altar-pieces and frescoes, mythological, historical, and Biblical. And that still grander contemporary genius, how he wrought by night with the candle in his pasteboard cap, how he had dissected and studied the human frame like an anatomist or surgeon before he chiseled the David and Moses, or painted the Sistine chapel, and how the plannings of his busy brain were always in advance of the powers of a hand that, till the age of eighty-eight, was incessantly at work.

"The servant is not above his master. The lower intellect can buy at no cheaper price than the higher, and the hour of full intellectual emanc.i.p.ation comes only when the student has learned to serve--to turn the whole freshness and sharpness of his intellect on any needful theme of the hour; it may be the scale of a fossil fish, or the annual movement of a glacier, the disclosures of the spectrum, or the secrets of the arrow-headed tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His emanc.i.p.ation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the t.i.tanic scholarship of Germany. It stood embodied in the life and motto of the aged, matchless artist Angelo,--'_Ancora imparo_,' I am learning still.

"But impulse and activity may move blindly. Another cardinal quality of such a culture, therefore, must be precision--the close, clean working of the faculties. A memory trained to clear recollection, what a saving of reiterated labor and of annoying helplessness. A discrimination sharpened to the nicest discernment of things that differ, though always a shining mark for the arrow of the satirist, will outlive all shots with his gray-goose shaft; for it shines with the gleam of tempered steel. An exactness of knowledge that defines all its landmarks, how is it master of the situation. A precision of speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of gra.s.s grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great a.s.sembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,--'They are a continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had 'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook, scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual Sing-Sing for the culprit!

"How refreshing, on the other hand, to follow the clear unfolding of the silken threads of thought that lie side by side, single and in knots and skeins, but never tangled. What a beautiful process was an investigation by Faraday in electro-magnetism, as he combined his apparatus, manipulated his material, narrowed his search, eliminated his sources of error, and drew his careful conclusions. With similar persistent acuteness, in the field of Biblical investigation, how does Zumpt, by an exhaustive exclusion and combination, at length make the annals of Tacitus shake hands with the gospel of Luke over the taxing of Cyrenius. In metaphysics, how matchless the razor-like acuteness with which Hamilton could distinguish, divide, and clear up the questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of perception. What can be more admirable than the workings of the trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of day;--it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case, shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.

"It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times, because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual diversity. They proceed not by a.n.a.lytical incision, but by summary excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!'

What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends, and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure ether, or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and taking, firmly a.s.sumes that there is no essential difference in objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and mysterious thing, _life_, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth of folly? And how such a central paralysis of the mental retina spreads its darkness, as, for example, in the affirmation that as oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are water, ammonia, and carbolic acid convertible into and resolvable from living protoplasm!--a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if need be, work a week to correct in his trial balance the variation of a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait and Thompson p.r.o.nounce it 'utterly impossible' to grant more than ten, or, at most, fifteen millions,--this poor, benighted clerk is bound to sit and hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that reckon with a lee-way of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?

"Brilliancy, so-called, is no equivalent or subst.i.tute for precision.

It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in a.n.a.logy where it should be a.n.a.lysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech, and not on a logical proposition. The well-known story _se non vero e ben trovato_, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all that?" "No, but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.

"The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some great discussion, heads for a fog-bank or a wind-mill. When a man proposes to chronicle a 'Conflict between Religion and Science,' and makes religion stand indiscriminately for Romanism, Mohammedanism, superst.i.tion, malignant pa.s.sion, obstinate prejudice, and what not, also confounding Christianity with so-called Christians, and those often most unrepresentative,--at the same time appropriating to 'Science' all intellectual activity whatever, though found in good Christian men, and though fostered and made irrepressible by the fire of that very religion, it is easy to see what must be the outcome of such a sweepstakes race. There will be a deification of science, and not even a whited sepulchre erected over the measureless Golgothas of its slaughtered theories. There will be, on the other hand, the steady _suppressio veri_ concerning books, systems, men, and events, the occasional though unintended _a.s.sertio falsi_, the eager conversion of theories into facts, constructions unfair and uncandid and, throughout, with much that is bright and just, that 'admixture of a lie that doth ever add pleasure' to its author and grief to the judicious. Such confusions are no doubt often the outgrowth of the will. But a main end of a true culture is to prevent or expose all such bewilderments, whether helpless or crafty.

"The great predominance of the disciplinary process was what once characterized the English university system even more than now. It consisted in the exact and exhaustive mastery of certain limited sections of knowledge and thought, as the gymnastic for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, c.o.ke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make answer. The whole ma.s.sive literature of England shall respond.

"But to this precision of working must be furnished material with which to work. Mental fullness is, therefore, another prime quality of a manly culture. To what degree it should be sought in the curriculum has been in dispute. It is the American theory, and a growing belief of the English nation, that the British universities have been defective here. Their men of mark have traveled later over the broader field.

"Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone to beat the air.

Behold in some national patent-office a grand mummy-pit of ignorant inventors.

"Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the Schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them have been well called, by Hallam, men 'of extraordinary powers of discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to examine.' 'If these Schoolmen,' says Bacon, 'to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all learning and knowledge.' And so, for lack of other timber, they split hairs. Hence the ma.s.s of ponderous trifling that has made their name a by-word. A force, sometimes Herculean, was spent in building and demolishing castles of moonshine.