XII. INTELLECTUAL DUTIES OF STUDENTS IN THEIR ACADEMIC YEARS.* I CONGRATULATE you all, students, officers of this college, and patrons and friends of it, upon this anniversary, upon the excellence of the exercises to which we have listened, and upon the good auspices for the future. None of you, young men, are Alumni yet. The highest class here has one year more of academic opportunity before assuming the responsibility of active life, or turning to the narrower lines of an exclusive professional training. Many of you look forward to several years of privilege in the quiet absorption of preliminary knowledge. Years of opportunity and privilege, I say. Would that you might account them as precious as those who are engaged in the wear and waste of professional toil know and feel that they are! The preparatory school and the college lay the basis of the power and the satisfaction with which, in after years, the work of life will be discharged. Young men do not go to college to complete their * An address before the students of Oakland College, California, June 4, 1862. education, but to draw the ground-plan of it, and to lay the under courses of a future building deep and firm. To use the words of St. Paul in a secular sense, they are then "laying up for themselves a good foundation against the time to come.” And the years are profitably used just to the extent that habits of mental industry are formed, loyalty to truth confirmed, and the principles which underlie and support knowledge and culture are laid and cemented imperishably by the masonry of application. Nobody can become wise, in the best college on this planet, between twelve and twenty. But a youth of capacious powers can do more in those years towards enlarging the resources and ennobling the proportions of his mental character and influence, than in any twice eight years after he shall have taken up the tasks of life. It is no time to look to the lower tiers of the edifice after the rafters are up and the roof is on. It is no time to be attending to a crack in the basement, or a leaning wall, after the builder has moved into the house with his family. The best he can do is to move out of it and buy another, or spend largely to have it put in friendship with mathematics and gravitation. But a student cannot remove from his mental house, in his busy years, although he may see that the ground-tier of stone is not based right, and that the walls are not thick enough for the weight they must bear. And then the misery that comes! To be obliged to apply principles and not to be sure of them! To feel the need of fundamental instruction, which might once have been thoroughly acquired, while the mind must act, and in responsible callings too, as though it felt secure! To be under the necessity of being student and worker, journeyman and artist, in the same hour, without the satisfactions that belong to either branch of toil, and with the burden of practical, and perhaps very important duty upon the hands and conscience, — this is a species of refined and exquisite agony which many a professional man in our day experiences, and which is the penalty either of an enforced adoption of the duties of a profession without ample preparation, or of wasted academic hours. Do not be so eager, young men, to advance in knowledge as to become masters of elementary knowledge, so that it can never slip from your grasp, but becomes incorporated with your mental substance. There is no intellectual wretchedness more keen, as I have said, than conscious inadequacy of the mental furniture to the mental duties, especially in the grasp of primal truths. And there is no intellectual pleasure more sweet than the assurance, tested in arduous labor, of being grounded in truth, of finding that you have built your house upon a rock, than the repose that comes when you know something positively and know that you know it, and feel the mastery of a practical field because of that consciousness. - This pain or reward a student in the seclusion of college may store up for himself. If he is to be called to any prominent professional position, he is laying it up by his sloth or his diligence. Be more careful for elements and principles than for results, for the multum than the multa. Think less of harvests than of the supply and temper of reaping-instruments and the knowledge of the composition of the soil. In English composition do not try to write something as imaginative as Burke or as sinewy as Webster, ten chances to one you will not succeed in the attempt,—but study as thoroughly as you can the structure and forces of the English tongue, the powers of words, their shades of distinction, their relative purity and excellence in the immense scale of our composite and wonderful language. This is the proper employment of the years of training. If you are ever to rival Burke or Ruskin, Macaulay or Webster, it will be by dissolving and digesting the English dictionary as they did. And if you should never rival either of them, you will fit yourself to express your thought, whatever its grade may be, in a pure and scholarly way, and you will not be obliged to begin to learn the principles of language when you need to use it. In mathematics, do not be afraid of learning Euclid too thoroughly, or of wielding too easily the formula that lead towards the adytum of the Calculus. In chemistry, or botany, or geology, or physiology, keep your eye on the ground-plan |