39 ■ v.'i'. I MM WM : I ■ m WM] ■ ■ ■ I H ■ pi H Hz ■I »n h H . Hi i I h* < ■HK H ■ itv ■ ■ HUM ■ ON SELF-CULTURE BY THE SAME AUTHOR FOUR PHASES OF MORALS Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism, i vol., i2mo. Cloth, #1-50 ON SELF-CULTURE Intellectual, Physical, and Moral & habc Jttecum for Smtng Mm axib Stufonis BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH NEW YORK SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, AND COMPANY 1874 LC3i RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE : STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BV H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. /c CONTENTS. The Culture of the Intellect .... 7 On Physical Culture . . . . . 53 On Moral Culture . . . . . . • 73 THE CULTURE OF THE INTELLECT Es ist immer gut etwas zu wissen. — Goethe THE CULTURE OF THE INTELLECT. I. In modern times instruction is communi- cated by means of Books. Books are no doubt very useful helps to knowledge, and in some measure also, to the practice of useful arts and accomplishments ; but they are not, in any case, the primary and natural sources of cul- ture, and, in my opinion, their virtue is not a little apt to be overrated, even in those branches of acquirement where they seem most indis- pensable. They are not creative powers in any sense ; they are merely helps, instruments, tools, and even as tools they are only artificial tools, superadded to those with which the wise prevision of Nature has equipped us, like telescopes and microscopes, whose assistance in many researches reveals unimagined won- ders, but the use of which should never tempt us to undervalue or to neglect the exercise of our own eyes. The originaland proper sources of knowledge are not books, but life, experience, 10 THE CULTURE OF personal thinking, feeling, and acting. When a man starts with these, books can fill up many gaps, correct much that is inaccurate, and ex- tend much that is inadequate ; but, .without living experience to work on, books are like rain and sunshine fallen on unbroken soil. -" The parchment roll is that the holy river, From which one draught shall slake the thirst forever ? The quickening power of science only he Can know, from whose own soul it gushes free." This is expressed, no doubt, somewhat in a poetical fashion, but it contains a great general truth. As a treatise on mineralogy can con- vey no real scientific knowledge to a man who has never seen a mineral, so neither can works of literature and poetry instruct the mere scholar who is ignorant of life, nor discourses on music him who has no experience of sweet sounds, nor gospel sermons him who has no devotion in his soul or purity in his life. All knowledge which comes from books comes in- directly, by reflection, and by echo ; true knowledge grows from a living root in the thinking soul ; and whatever it may appro- priate from without, it takes by living assimi- lation into a living organism, not by mere borrowing:. ■&• II. I therefore earnestly advise all young THE INTELLECT. II men to commence their studies, as much as possible, by direct Observation of Facts, and not by the mere inculcation of statements from books. A useful book was written with the title, — " How to Observe." These three words might serve as a motto to guide us in the most important part of our early education — a part, unfortunately, only too much neg- lected. All the natural sciences are particu- larly valuable, not only as supplying the mind with the most rich, various, and beautiful fur- niture, but as teaching people that most useful of all arts, how to use their eyes. It is as- tonishing how much we all go about with our eyes open, and yet seeing nothing. This is because the organ of vision, like other organs, requires training ; and by lack of training and the slavish dependence on books, becomes dull and slow, and ultimately incapable of exercising its natural function. Let those studies, there- fore, both in school and college, be regarded as primary, that teach young persons to know what they are seeing, and to see what they otherwise would fail to see. Among the most useful are, Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Ge- ology, Chemistry, Architecture, Drawing, and the Fine Arts. How many a Highland ex- cursion and continental tour have been ren- dered comparatively useless to young persons 12 THE' CULTURE OF well drilled in their books, merely from the want of a little elementary knowledge in these sciences of observation. TIL Observation is good, and accurate ob- servation is better ; but, on account of the vast variety of objects in the universe, the ob- serving faculty would be overwhelmed and confounded, did we not possess some sure method of submitting their multitude to a cer- tain regulative principle placing them under the control of our minds. This regulative principle is what we call Classification, and is discoverable by human reason, because it clearly exists everywhere in a world which is the manifestation of Divine reason. This classification depends on the fundamental unity of type which the Divine reason has imposed on all things. This unity manifests itself in the creation of points of likeness in things apparently the most different ; and it is these points of likeness which, when seized by a nicely observant eye, enable it to distribute the immense variety of things in the world into certain parcels of greater or less compass, called genera and species, which submit them- selves naturally to the control of a comparing and discriminating mind. The first business of the student, therefore, is, in all that he sees, THE INTELLECT. 1 3 to observe carefully the points of likeness, and, along with these, also the most striking points of difference ; for the points of difference go as necessarily along with the points of likeness, as shadow goes along with light ; and though they do not of themselves constitute any actual thing, yet they separate one genus from an- other, and one species of the same genus from another. The classification or order to be sought for in all things is a natural order ; artificial arrangements, such as that of words in an alphabetical dictionary, or of flowers in the Linnaean system of botany, may be useful helps to learners in an early stage, but, if ex- clusively used, are rather hindrances to true knowledge. What a young man should aim at is to acquire a habit of binding things to- gether according to their bonds of natural affinity ; and this can be done only by a com- bination of a broad view of the general effect, with an accurate observation of the special properties. The names given by the common people to flowers are instances of superficial similarity, without any attempt at discrimina- tion, as when a water-lily seems by its name to indicate that it is a species of lily, with which flower it has no real connection. A botanist, on the other hand, who has minutely observed the character and organs of plants, 14 THE CULTURE OF * will class a water-lily rather with the papav- erous or poppy family, and give you very good reasons for doing so. In order to assist in forming habits of observation in this age of locomotion, I should advise young men never to omit visiting the local museums of any district, as often as they may have an op- portunity ; and when there to confine their attention generally to that one thing which is most characteristic of the locality. Looking at everything generally ends in remembering nothing. IV. Upon the foundation of carefully-ob- served and well-assorted facts the mind pro- ceeds to build a more subtle structure by the process which we call Reasoning. We would know not only that things are so and so, but how they are, and for what purpose they are. The essential unity of the Divine Mind causes a necessary unity in the processes by which things exist and grow, no less than a unity in the type of their manifold genera and species ; and into both manifestations of Divine unity we are, by the essential unity of our divinely emanated human souls, compelled to inquire. Our human reason, as proceeding from the Di- vine reason, is constantly employed in working out a unity or consistency of plan, to speak THE INTELLECT. 1 5 more popularly, in the processes of our own little lives ; and we are thus naturally deter- mined to seek for such a unity, consistency, and necessary dependence, in all the operations of a world which exists only, as has been well said, " in reason, by reason, and for reason." 1 The quality of mind, which determines a man to seek out this unity in the chain of things, is what phrenologists call causality ; for the cause of a thing, as popularly understood, is merely that point in the necessary succession of di- vinely-originated forces which immediately pre- cedes it. There are few human beings so con- tentedly superficial as to feed habitually on the knowledge of mere unexplained facts ; on the contrary, as we find every day, the ready as- sumption of any cause for a fact, rather than remain content with none, afford sample proof that the search for causes is characteristic of every normal human intellect. What young men have chiefly to look to in this matter is to avoid being imposed on by the easy habit of taking an accidental sequence or circumstance for a real cause. It may be easy to understand that the abundant rain on the west coast of Britain is caused by the vicinity of the 'Atlan- tic Ocean; and not very difficult to compre- hend how the comparative mildness of the 1 Stirling on Protoplasm — a masterly tract. 1 6 THE CULTURE OF winter season at Oban, as compared with Edin- burgh or Aberdeen, is caused by the impact of a broad current of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. But in the region of morals and politics, where facts are often much more com- plex, and passions are generally strong, we con- stantly find examples of a species of reasoning which assumes without proving the causal de- pendency of the facts on which it is "based. I once heard a political discourse by a noted demagogue, which, consisted of the assertion, in various forms and with various illustrations, of the proposition that all the miseries of this country arise from its monarchico-aristocratic government, and that they could all be cured, as by the stroke of a magician's wand, by the introduction of a perfectly democratic govern- ment — a species of argumentation vitiated, as is obvious all through, by the assumption of one imaginary cause to all social evils, and an equally imaginary cure. In the cultivation of habits of correct reasoning, I would certainly, in the first place, earnestly advise young men to submit themselves for a season, after the old Platonic recipe, to a system of thorough mathe- matical training. This will strengthen the binding power of the mind, which is necessary for all sorts of reasoning, and teach the inex- perienced really to know what necessary de- THE INTELLECT. 1 7 pendence, unavoidable sequence, or pure caus- ality means. But they must not stop here ; for the reasonings of mathematics being founded on theoretical assumptions and conditions which, when once given, are liable to no vari- ation or disturbance, can never be an adequate discipline for the great and most important class of human conclusions, which are founded on a complexity of curiously acting and react- ing facts and forces liable to various disturbing influences, which even the wisest sometimes fail to calculate correctly. On political, moral, and social questions, our reasonings are not less certain than in mathematics ; they are only more difficult and more comprehensive ; and the great dangers to be avoided here are one- sided observation, hasty conclusions, and the distortion of intellectual vision, caused by per- sonal passions and party interests. The poli- tician who fails in solving a political problem, fails not from the uncertainty of the science, but either from an imperfect knowledge of the facts, or from the action of passions and inter- ests, which prevent him from making a just ap- preciation of the facts. V. At this point I can imagine it is not un- likely that some young man may be inclined to ask me whether I should advise him, with the 1 8 THE CULTURE OF view of strengthening his reasoning powers, to enter upon a formal study of logic and meta- physics. To this I answer, By all means, if you have first, in a natural way, as opposed to mere scholastic discipline, acquired the general habit of thinking and reasoning. A man has learned to walk first by having legs, and then by using them. After that he may go to a drill-sergeant and learn to march, and to perform various tac- tical evolutions, which no experience of mere untrained locomotion can produce. So exactly it is with the art of thinking. Have your thinking first, and plenty to think about, and then ask the logician to teach you to scrutinize with a nice eye the process by which you have arrived at your conclusions. In such fashion there is no doubt that the study of logic may be highly beneficial. But as this science, like mathematics, has no real contents, and merely sets forth in order the universal forms under which all thinking is exercised, it must always be a very barren affair to attempt obtaining from pure logic any rich growth of thought that will bear ripe fruit in the great garden of life. One may as well expect to make a great patriot — a Bruce or a Wallace — of a fencing master, as to make a great thinker out of a mere logi- cian. So it is in truth with all formal studies. Grammar and rhetoric are equally barren, and THE INTELLECT. 1 9 bear fruit only when dealing with materials given by life and experience. A meagre soul can never be made fat, nor a narrow soul large, by studying rules of thinking. An intense vi- tality, a wide sympathy, a keen observation, a various experience, is worth all the logic of the schools ; and yet the logic is not useless ; it has a regulative, not a creative virtue ; it is useful to thinking as the study of anatomy is useful to painting ; it gives you a more firm hold of the jointing and articulation of your framework ; but it can no more produce true knowledge than anatomy can produce beautiful painting. It performs excellent service in the exposure of error and the unveiling of sophis- try ; but to proceed far in the discovery of im- portant truth, it must borrow its' moving power from fountains of living water, which flow not in the schools, and its materials from the facts of the breathing universe, with which no mu- seum is furnished. So it is likewise with meta- physics. This science is useful for two ends, first — to acquaint ourselves with the necessary limits of the human faculties ; it tends to clip the wings of our conceit, and to make us feel, by a little floundering and flouncing in deep bottomless seas of speculation, that the world is a much bigger place than we had imagined, and our thoughts about it of much less signifi- 20 * THE CULTURE OF cance. A negative result this, you will say, but not the less important for that ; the knowledge of limits is the first postulate of wisdom, and it is better to practice walking steadily on the solid earth to which we belong, than to usurp the function of birds, like Icarus, and achieve a sorry immortality by baptizing the deep sea with our name. The other use of metaphysics is positive ; it teaches us to be familiar with the great fundamental truths on which the fab- ric of all the sciences rests. Metaphysics is not, like logic, a purely formal science ; it. is, on the contrary, the science of fundamental and essential reality, of that which underlies all appearances, as the soul of a man underlies his features and his fleshly framework, and sur- vives all changes as their permanent type. It is that which we come to when we get behind the special phenomena presented by individual sciences ; it is neither botany, nor physiology, nor geology, nor astronomy, nor chemistry, nor anthropology, but those general, all-pervading, and all-controlling powers, forces, and essences, of which each special branch of knowledge is only a single aspect or manifestation ; it is the common element of all -existence ; and as all existence is merely a grand evolution of self- determining reason (for, were it not for the in- dwelling reason the world would be a chaos THE . INTELLECT. 21 and not a cosmos), it follows that metaphysics is the knowledge of the absolute or cosmic reason so far as it is knowable by our limited individualized reason, and is therefore, as Aris- totle long ago remarked, identical with theol- ogy. 1 Indeed, the idea of God as the absolute self-existent, self-energizing, self-determining Reason, is the only idea which can make the world intelligible, and has justly been held fast by all the great thinkers of the world, from Pythagoras down to Hegel, as the alone key- stone of ail sane thinking. By all means, therefore, let metaphysics be studied, especially in this age and place, where the novelty of a succession of brilliant discoveries in physical science, coupled with a one-sided habit of mind, swerving with a strong bias towards what is outward and material, has led some men to imagine that in mere physics is wis- dom to be found, and that the true magician's wand for striking out the most important re- sults is induction. This is the very madness of externalism ; for, on the one hand, the funda- mental and most vital truths from which the possibility of all science hangs, assert them- selves before all induction ; and, on the other, the physical sciences merely describe se- 1 rpla yevT) tosv dewp-qriKcov iirKTTTj/xav ^vcritt)}, fia9r}fj.ariKi] t deoXoyiici}. — Metaph. x. 7. 22 THE CULTURE OF quences, which the superficial may mistake for causes. Their so-called laws are merely meth- ods of operation ; and the operator, of whom, without transgressing their special sphere, they can take no account, is always and everywhere the absolute, omnipresent, all-plastic Reason, which we call God, whose offspring, as the pious old Greek poet sung, we all are, and in whom, as the great apostle preached, we live, and move, and have our being. An essentially reasonable theology, and an essentially reverent speculation, are the metaphysics which a young man may fitly commence to seek after in the schools, but which he can find only by the ex- perience of a truthful and a manly life ; and he will then know that he has found it, when, like King David and the noble army of Hebrew psalmists, he can repose upon the quiet faith of it, like a child upon the bosom of its mother. VI. The next function of the mind which re- quires special culture is the Imagination. I much fear neither teachers nor scholars are suf- ficiently impressed with the importance of a proper training of this faculty. Some there may be who despise it altogether, as having to do with fiction rather than with fact, and of no value to the severe student who wishes to ac- quire exact knowledge. But this is not the THE INTELLECT. 2$ case. It is a well-known fact that the highest class of scientific men have been led to their most important discoveries by the quickening power of a suggestive imagination. Of this the poet Goethe's original observations in botany and osteology may serve as an apt witness. Imagination, therefore, is the enemy of science only when it acts without reason, that is, arbi- trarily and whimsically ; with.reason, it is often the best and the most indispensable of allies. Besides, in history, and in the whole region of concrete facts, imagination is as necessary as in poetry ; the historian, indeed, cannot invent his facts, but he must mould them and dispose them with a graceful congruity ; and to do this is the work of the imagination. Fairy tales and fictitious narratives of all kinds, of course, have their value, and may be wisely used in the culture of the imagination. But by far the most useful exercise of this faculty is when it buckles itself to realities ; and this I advise the student chiefly to cultivate. There is no need of going to romances for pictures of hu- man character and fortune calculated to please the fancy and to elevate the imagination. The life of Alexander the Great, of Martin Luther, of Gustavus Adolphus, or any of those notable characters on the great stage of the world, who incarnate the history which they create, 24 THE CULTURE OF is for this purpose of more educational value than the best novel that ever was written, or even the best poetry. Not all minds delight in poetry ; but all minds are impressed and elevated by an imposing and a striking fact. To exercise the imagination on the lives of great and good men brings with it a double gain ; for by this exercise we learn at a single stroke, and in the most effective way, both what was done and what ought to be done. But to train the imagination adequately, it is not enough that elevating pictures be made to float pleasantly before the fancy ; from such mere passiveness of mental attitude no strength can grow. The student should formally call upon his imaginative faculty to take a firm grasp of the lovely shadows as they pass, and not be content till — closing the gray record — he can make the whole storied procession pass before him in due order, with appropriate badges, attitude, and expression. As there are persons who seem to walk through life with their eyes open, seeing nothing, so there are others who read through books, and perhaps even cram themselves with facts, without car- rying away any living pictures of significant story which might arouse the fancy in an hour of leisure, or gird them with endurance in a moment of difficulty. Ask yourself, therefore, THE INTELLECT. 2$ always when you have read a chapter of any notable book, not what you saw printed on a gray page, but what you see pictured in the glowing gallery of your imagination. Have your fancy always vivid, and full of body and color. Count yourself not to know a fact when you know that it took place, but then only when you see it as it did take place. VII. The word imagination, though denoting a faculty which in some degree may be re- garded as belonging to every human being, seems more particularly connected with that class of intellectual perceptions and emotions which, for want of a native term, we are accus- tomed to call aesthetical. A man may live, and live bravely, without much imagination, as a house may be well compacted to keep out wind and rain, and let in light, and yet be ugly. But no one would voluntarily prefer to live in an ugly house if he could get a beautiful one. So beauty, which is the natural food of a healthy imagination, should be sought after by every one who wishes to achieve the great end of- existence — that is, to make the most of him- self. If it is true, as we have just remarked, that man liveth not by books alone, it is equally true that he liveth not by knowledge alone. " It is always good to know something," was 26 THE CULTURE OF the wise utterance of one of the wisest men of modern times ; but by this utterance he did not mean to assert that mere indiscriminate knowing is always good ; what he meant to say was that it is wise for a man to pick up care- fully, for possible uses, whatever may fall under his eye, even though it should not be the best. The best, of course, is not always at command ; and the bad, on which we frequently stumble, is not without its good element, which one should not disdain to secure in passing ; but what the young man ought to set before him, as a worthy object of systematic pursuit, is not knowledge in general, or of anything indiffer- ently, but knowledge of what is great and beau-, tiful and good ; and this, so far as the imagi- nation is concerned, can be attained only by some special attention paid to the aesthetical culture of the intellect. In other words, poe- try, painting, music, and the fine arts generally, which delight to manifest the sublime and the beautiful in every various aspect and attitude, fall under the category, not of an accidental accomplishment, but of an essential and most noble blossom of a cultivated soul. A man who knows merely with a keen glance, and acts with a firm hand, may do very well for the rough work of the world, but he may be a very un- gracious and unlovely creature withal ; angular, THE INTELLECT. 2/ square, dogmatical, persistent, pertinacious, pug- nacious, blushless, and perhaps bumptious. To bevel down the corners of a character so con- stituted by a little aesthetical culture, were a work of no small benefit to society, and a source of considerable comfort to the creature himself. Let a young man, therefore, commence with supplying his imaginative faculty with its nat- ural food in the shape of beautiful objects of every kind. If there is a fine building recently erected in the town, let him stand and look at it ; if there are fine pictures exhibited, let him never be so preoccupied with the avocations of his own special business that he cannot afford even a passing glance to steal a taste of their beauty ; if there are dexterous riders and ex- pert tumblers in the circus, let him not imagine that their supple somersets are mere idle tricks to amuse children ; they are cunning exhibi- tions of the wonderful strength and litheness of the human limbs, which every wise man ought to admire. In general, let the young man, ambitious of intellectual excellence, culti- vate admiration ; it is by admiration only of what is beautiful and sublime that we can mount up a few steps towards the likeness of what we admire ; and he who wonders not largely and habitually, in the midst of this magnificent uni- verse, does not prove that the world has nothing 28 THE CULTURE OF great in it worthy of wonder, but only that his own sympathies are narrow, and his capacities small. The worst thing a young man can do, who wishes to educate himself aesthetically, ac- cording to the norm of nature, is to begin crit- icising, and cultivating the barren graces of the nil admtrari. This maxim may be excusable in a worn-out old cynic, but is intolerable in the mouth of a hopeful young man. There is no good to be looked for from a youth who, having done no substantial work of his own, sets up a business of finding faults in other people's work, and calls this practice of finding fault criticism. The first lesson that a young man has to learn, is not to find fault, but to perceive beauties. All criticism worthy of the name is the ripe fruit of combined intellectual insight and long experience. Only an old sol- dier can tell how battles ought to be .fought. Young men of course may and ought to have opinions on many subjects, but there is no rea- son why they should print them. The pub- lished opinions of persons whose judgment has not been matured by experience can tend only to mislead the public, and to debauch the mind of the writer. I have said that the sublime and the beautiful in nature and art are the natural and healthy food of the aesthetical faculties. The comical and THE INTELLECT. 29 humorous are useful only in a subsidiary way. It is a great loss to a man when he cannot laugh ; but a smile is useful specially in enabling us lightly to shake off the incongruous, not in teaching us to cherish it. Life is an earnest business, and no man was ever made great or good by a diet of broad grins. The grandest humor, such as that of Aristophanes, is valuable only as the seasoning of the pudding or the spice of the pie. No one feeds on mere pepper or vanilla. Let a young man furnish his soul richly, like Thorwaldsen's Museum at Copen- hagen, with all shapes and forms of excellence, from the mild dignity of our Lord and the Twelve Apostles to the playful grace of Grecian Cupids and Hippocampes ; but let him not deal in mere laughter, or corrupt his mind's eye with the habitual contemplation of distortion and caricature. There is no more sure sign of a shallow mind than the habit of seeing always the ludicrous side of things ; for the ludicrous, as Aristotle remarks, is always on the surface. If the humorous novels and sketches of character in which this country and this age are so fruitful, are taken only as an occasional recreation, like a good comedy, they are to be commended ; but the practice and study of the Fine Arts offer a more healthy variety to severe students than the converse with ridiculous sketches of a trifling 30 THE CULTURE OF or contemptible humanity ; and to play a pleas- ant tune on the piano, or turn a wise saying of some ancient sage into the terms of a terse English couplet, will always be a more profitable way of unbending from the stern work of pure science, than the reading of what are called amusing books — an occupation fitted specially for the most stagnant moments of life, and the most lazy-minded of the living. VIII. The next faculty of the mind that demands special culture is Memory. It is of no use gathering treasures if we cannot store them ; it is equally useless to learn what we cannot retain in the memory. Happily, of all mental faculties this is that one which is most certainly improved by exercise ; besides there are helps to a weak memory such as do not exist for a weak imagination or a weak reason- ing power. The most important points to be attended to in securing the retention of facts once impressed on the imagination, are — (i) The distinctness, vividness, and intensity of the original impression. Let no man hope to re- member what he only vaguely and indistinctly apprehends. A multitude of dim and weak im- pressions, flowing in upon the mind in a hur- ried way, soon vanish in a haze, which veils all things, and shows nothing. It is better for the THE INTELLECT. 3 1 memory to have a distinct idea of one fact of a great subject, than to have confused ideas of the whole. (2) Nothing helps the memory so much as order and classification. Classes are always few, individuals many ; to know the class well is to know what is most essential in the character of the individual, and what least burdens the memory to retain. (3) The next important matter is repetition : if the nail will not go in at one stroke, let it have another and another. In this domain nothing is denied to a dogged pertinacity. A man who finds it difficult to remember that Deva is the Sanskrit for a God, has only to repeat it seven times a day, or seven times a week, and he will not forget it. The less tenacious a man's memory naturally is, the more determined ought he to be to complement it by frequent inculcation. Our faculties, like a slow beast, require flogging occasionally, or they make no way. (4) Again, if memory be weak, causality is perhaps strong ; and this point of strength, if wisely used, may readily be made to turn an apparent loss into a real gain. Persons of very quick memory may be apt to rest content with the faculty, and exhibit with much applause the dexterity only of an intellectual parrot ; but the man who is slow to remember without a reason, searches after the casual connection of the facts, and, 32 THE CULTURE OF when he has found it, binds together by the bond of rational sequences what the constitution of his mind disinclined him to receive as an arbitrary and unexplained succession. (5) Arti- ficial bonds of association may also sometimes be found useful, as when a schoolboy remembers that Abydos is on the Asiatic coast of the Hellespont, because both Asia and Abydos commence with the letter A ; but such tricks suit rather the necessities of an ill-trained governess than the uses of a manly mind. I have no faith in the systematic use of what are called artificial mnemonic systems ; they fill the fancy with a set of arbitrary and ridiculous symbols which interfere with the natural play of the faculties. Dates in history, to which this sort of machinery has been generally applied, are better recollected by the causal dependence, or even the accidental contiguity of great names, as when I recollect that Plato was twenty-nine years old when Socrates drank the hemlock ; and that Aristotle, the pupil of this Plato, was himself the tutor of that famous son of Philip .of Macedon, who with his conquering hosts caused the language of Socrates and Plato to shake hands with the sacred dialect of the Brahmanic hymns on the banks of the Indus. (6) Lastly, whatever facilities of memory a man may possess, let him not despise the sure aids THE INTELLECT. 33 so amply supplied by written record. To speak from a paper certainly does not strengthen, but has rather a tendency to enfeeble the memory ; but to retain stores of readily available matter, in the shape of written or printed record, enables a man to command a vast amount of accumu- lated materials, at whatever moment he may require them. In this view the young student cannot begin too early the practice of inter- leaving certain books, and making a good index to others, or in some such fashion tabulating his knowledge for apt and easy reference. Our preachers would certainly much increase the value of their weekly discourses if they would keep interleaved Bibles and insert at apposite and striking texts such facts in life, or anecdotes from books, as might tend to their illustration. They might thus, even with a very weak natural memory, learn to bring forth from their treasury things new and old, with a wealth of practical application in those parts of their spiritual addresses which are at present generally the most meagre and the most vague. By political students Aristotle's " Politics " might be ben- eficially interleaved in the same way, and the mind thus preserved from that rigidity and one- sidedness which a familiarity with only the most modern and recent experience of public life is so apt to engender. 3 34 THE CULTURE OF IX. A most important matter, not seldom neglected in the scholastic and academical training of young men, is the art of polished, pleasant, and effective expression. I shall therefore offer a few remarks here on the for- mation of Style, and on Public Speaking. Man is naturally a speaking animal ; and a good style is merely that accomplishment in the art of verbal expression which arises from the improvement of the natural faculty by good training. The best training for the formation of style is of course familiar intercourse with good speakers and writers. A man's vocabu- lary depends very much always, and in the first stages perhaps altogether, on the company he keeps. Read, therefore, the best composi- tions of the most lofty-minded and eloquent men, and you will not fail to catch something of their nobility, only let there be no slavish imitation of any man's manner of expression. There is a certain individuality about every man's style, as about his features, which must be preserved. Also, be not over anxious about mere style, as if it were a thing that could be cultivated independently of ideas. Be more careful that you should have something weighty and pertinent to say, than that you should say things in the most polished and skillful way. There is good sense in what Socrates said to THE INTELLECT. 35 the clever young Greeks in this regard, that if they had something to say they would know how to say it ; and to the same effect spoke St. Paul to the early Corinthian Christians, and in these last times the wise Goethe to the German students, — " Be thine to seek the honest gain, No shallow-sounding fool ; Sound sense finds utterance for itself, Without the critic's rule ; If to your heart your tongue be true, Why hunt for words with much ado ? " But with this reservation you cannot be too diligent in acquiring the habit of expressing your thoughts on paper with that combination of lucid order, graceful ease, pregnant signifi- cance, and rich variety, which marks a good style. But for well-educated men, in this country at least, and for normally-constituted men in all countries I should say, writing is only a step to speaking. Not only professional men, such as preachers, advocates, and poli- ticians, but almost every man in a free country, may be called upon occasionally to express his sentiments in public ; and unless the habit be acquired early, in later years there is apt to be felt a certain awkwardness and difficulty in the public utterance of thought, which is not the less real because it is in most cases artificial. The great thing here is to begin 36 THE CULTURE OF early, and to avoid that slavery of the paper, which, as Plato foresaw, 1 makes so many cul- tivated men in these days less natural, in their speech, and x less eloquent, than the most un- tutored savages. Young men should train themselves to marshal their ideas in good order, and to keep a firm grip of them without the help of paper. A card, with a few leading words to catch the eye, may help the memory in the first place ; but it is better, as often as possible, to dispense with even this assistance. A speaker should always look his audience directly in the face, which he cannot do when he is obliged to cast a side glance into a paper. In order to acquire early this useful habit, I need scarcely say that there is no better train- ing school than the debating societies which have long been a strong point of the Scottish universities. Practice will produce dexterity ; dexterity will work confidence ; and the bash- fulness and timidity so natural to a young man when first called upon to address a public meeting, so far as it lames and palsies his utterance, will disappear ; that it should dis- appear altogether is far from necessary. For- wardness and pertness are a much more serious fault in a young speaker than a little nervous bashfulness. A public speaker should 1 See the PJuedrus. THE INTELLECT. 37 never wish to shake himself free from that • feeling of responsibility which belongs to his position as one whose words are meant to influence, and ought to influence, the senti- ments of all ranks of his fellow beings ; but that this feeling of reverential respect for the virtue of the spoken word may not degenerate into a morbid anxiety, and a pale concern for tame propriety, I would advise him not to think of himself at all, but to go to the pulpit or platform with a thorough command of his subject, with an earnest desire to do some good by his talk, and to trust to God for the utterance. Of course this does not imply that in respect of distinct and effective utterance a man has nothing to learn from a professed master of elocution ; it is only meant that mere intelligible speaking is a natural thing, about which no special anxiety is to be felt. Accomplished speaking, like marching or dan- cing, is an art, for the exercise of which, in many cases, a special training is necessary. X. I said under the first head that the foun- tains of true wisdom are not books ; neverthe- less, in the present stage of society, books play, and must continue to play, a great part in the training of young minds ; and therefore I shall here set down some points in detail with regard 38 THE CULTURE OF to the choice, and the use of Books. Keep in mind, in the first place, that though the library shelves groan with books, whose name is legion, there are in each department only a few great books, in relation to which others are but aux- iliary, or it may be sometimes parasitical, and,_ like the ivy, doing harm rather than good to the bole round which they cling. How many thousands, for instance, and tens of thousands, of books on Christian theology have been writ- ten and published in the world since the first preaching of the Gospel, which, of course con- tain nothing more and nothing better than the Gospel itself, and which, if they were all burnt to-morrow, would leave Christianity in the main, nothing the worse, and in some points essentially the better. There is fully as much nonsense as sense in many learned books that have made a noise in their day ; and in most books there is a great deal of superfluous and useless talk. Stick therefore to the great books, the original books, the fountain-heads of great ideas and noble passions, and you will learn joyfully to dispense with the volumes of acces- sory talk by. which their virtue has been as fre- quently obscured as illuminated. For a young theologian it is of far greater importance that he- should have the Greek New Testament by heart than that he should be able to talk glibly THE INTELLECT. 39 about the last volume of sermons by Dr. Kerr or Stopford Brooke. All these are very well, but they are not the one thing needful ; for the highest Christian culture they may lightly be dispensed with. Not so the Bible. Fix there- fore in your eye the great books on which the history of human thought and the changes of human fortunes have turned. In politics look to Aristotle; in mathematics to Newton; in philosophy to Leibnitz ; in theology to Cud- worth ; in poetry to Shakspeare ; in science to Faraday. Cast a firm glance also on those notable men, who, though not achieving any valuable positive results of speculation, were useful in their day, as protesting against wide- spread popular error, and rousing people into trains of more consistent thinking and acting. To this class of men belonged Voltaire amongst the French, and David Hume in our country. But, of course, while you covet earnestly a familiar acquaintance with all such original thinkers and discoverers in the world of thought and action, you will feel only too painfully that you cannot always lay hold of them in the first stage of your studies ; you will require steps to mount up to shake hands with these Celestials ; and these steps are little books. Do not there- fore despise little books ; they are for you the necessary lines of approach to the great fortress 40 THE CULTURE OF of knowledge, and cannot safely be overleapt. On the contrary, take a little grammar, for in- stance, when learning a language, rather than a big one ; and learn the fundamental things, the anatomy, the bones and solid framework, with strict accuracy, before plunging into the complex tissue of the living physiology. This may appear harsh at first, but will save you trouble afterwards. But, while you learn your little book thoroughly, you must beware of reading it by the method of mere Cram. Some things, no doubt, there are that must be appro- priated by the process of cram ; but these are not the best things, and they contain no culture. Cram is a mere mechanical operation, of which a reasoning animal should be ashamed. But cramming, however often ^practised, is seldom necessary ; it is resorted to by those specially who cannot, or who will not, learn to think. I advise you, on the contrary, whenever possible, to think before you read, or at least while you are reading. If you can find out for yourself by a little puzzling why the three angles of a triangle not only are, but, in the very nature of the thing must be, equal to two right * angles, you will have done more good to your reason- ing powers than if you had got the demonstra- tions of the whole twelve books of Euclid by heart according to the method of cram. The THE INTELLECT. 41 next advice I give you with regard to books is that you should read as much as possible sys- tematically and chronologically. Without order things will not hang together in the mind, and the most natural and instructive order is the order of genesis and growth. Read Plutarch's great Lives, for instance, from Theseus down to Cleomenes and Aratus, in chronological se- quence, and you will have a much more vital sort of Greek history in your memory than either Thirl wall or Grote can supply. But of course neither this nor any other rule can be applied in all cases without exception. The ex- ception to systematic reading is made by pre- dilection. If you feel a strong natural tendency towards acquainting yourself with any particu- lar period of history, by all means make that acquaintance ; only do it accurately and thor- oughly. One link in the chain firmly laid hold of, will by and by through natural connec- tion lead to others. As you advance from fa- vorite point to point, you will find the neces- sity of binding them together by some strict chronological sequence. For general informa- tion a sort of random reading may be allowed occasionally ; but this sort of thing has to do only with the necessary recreation or the useful furnishing of the mind, and is utterly destitute of training virtue ; and such reading, to which 42 THE CULTURE OF there is great temptation in these times, is rather prejudicial than advantageous to the mind. The great scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had not so many books as we have, but what they had they made a grand use of. Reading, in the case of mere miscellaneous readers, is like the racing of some little dog about the moor, snuffing everything and catching nothing ; but a reader of the right sort finds his prototype in Jacob, who wrestled with an ^ angel all night, and counted himself the better for the bout, though the sinew of his thigh shrank in consequence. XI. A few remarks may be useful on strictly Professional Reading, as opposed to reading with the view of general culture. There is a natural eagerness among young men to com- mence without delay their special professional work — what the Germans very significantly call Brodstudien ; but there cannot be a doubt that in the unqualified way that young men take up this notion, it is a great mistake, as the experience of professional men and the history of professional eminence has largely proved. For, in the first place, a little reflection will teach a thoughtful youth, that what in his present stage he may be disposed to regard as useless ornaments, or even incumbrances, THE INTELLECT. 43 are often the most valuable aids and Ihe most serviceable tools to his future professional ac- tivity. This is peculiarly the case with lan- guages, which seem in the first place to stand in the way of a firm grasp of things, but which become more necessary to a man the more he extends the range and fastens the roots of his professional knowledge. If languages have been often overvalued, it is only when they have been looked on as an end in themselves. Their value as tools, in the hands of an intelligent thinker, can scarcely be overrated. Again, the merely professional man is always a narrow man ; worse than that, he is in a sense an artificial man, a creature of technicalities and specialties, . re- moved equally from the broad truth of nature and from the healthy influence of human con- verse. In society the most accomplished man of mere professional skill is often a nullity ; he has sunk his humanity in his dexterity ; he is a leather-dealer, and can talk only about leather ; a student, and smells fustily of books, as an in- veterate smoker does of tobacco. So far from rushing hastily into merely professional studies, a young man should rather be anxious to avoid the engrossing influence of what is popularly called Shop. He will soon enough learn to know the cramping influence of purely profes- 44 THE CULTURE OE sional occupation. Let him flap his wings lus- tily in an ampler region while he may ; " Der Jiingling soil die Flugel regen In Lieb und Hass gewaltig sich bewegen."' But if a man will fix his mind on merely pro- fessional study, and can find no room for gen- eral culture in his soul, let him be told that no professional studies, however complete, can teach a man the whole of his profession ; that the most exact professional drill will omit to teach him the most interesting and the most important part of his own business — that part, namely, where the specialty of the profession comes directly into contact with the generality of human notions and human sympathies. Of this the profession of the law furnishes an ex- cellent example : for, while there is no art more technical, more artificial, and more removed from a fellow-feeling of humanity, than law in many of its branches, in others it marches out into the- grand arena of human rights and lib- erties, and deals with large questions, in the handling of which it is often of more conse- quence that a pleader should be a complete man than that he should be an expert lawyer. In the same Way, medicine has as much to do with a knowledge of human nature and of the human soul as with the virtues of cunningly mingled drugs, and the revelations of a techni- THE INTELLECT. 45 cal diagnosis ; and theology is generally then least human and least evangelical when it is most stifly orthodox and most nicely profes- sional. Universal experience, accordingly, has proved that the general scholar, however ap- parently inferior at the first start, will, in the long run, beat the special man on his own fa- vorite ground ; for the special man, from the small field of his habitual survey, can neither know the principles on which his practice rests, nor the relation of his own particular art to general human interests and general human intelligence. The best preservatives against the cramping force of merely professional study are to be found in the healthy influences of so- ciety, in travel, and in cultivating a familiarity with the great writers — specially poets and historians — whose purely human thoughts " make rich the blood of the world," and en- large the platform of sympathetic intelligence. XII. I will conclude this chapter of intel- lectual culture with some remarks on a subject with regard to which, considering my profes- sional position, people will naturally be inclined to expect, and willing to receive advice from me — I mean the study of Languages. The short rules which I will set down in what appears to me their order of natural succession, are the 4.6 THE CULTURE OF result of many years' experience, and may be relied on as being of a strictly practical char- acter. (i.) If possible always start with a good teacher. He will save you much time by clear- ing away difficulties that might otherwise dis- courage you, and preventing the formation of bad 'habits of enunciation, which must after- wards be unlearned. (2.) The next step is to name aloud, in the language to be learned, every object which meets your eye, carefully excluding the inter- vention of the English : in other words, think and speak of the objects about you in the lan- guage you are learning from the very first hour of your teaching ; and remember that the lan- guage belongs in the first place to your ear and to your tongue, not to your book merely and to your brain. (3.) Commit to memory the simplest and most normal forms of the declension of nouns, such as the us and a declension in Latin, and the a declension in Sanskrit. (4.) The moment you have learned the nom- inative and accusative cases of these nouns take the first person of the present indicative of any common verb, and pronounce aloud some short sentence according to the rules of syntax be- longing to active verbs, as — opw rbv "HAioj/, I see the sun. THE INTELLECT. 47 (5.) Enlarge this practice by adding some epithet to the substantive, declined according to the same noun, as — op tov Xajx-npov *HAiov, / see the bright sun. (6.) Go on in this manner progressively, committing to memory the whole present in- dicative, past and future indicative, of simple verbs, always making short sentences with them, and some appropriate nouns, and al- ways thinking directly in the foreign language, excluding the intrusion of the English. In this essential element of every rational system of linguistic training there is no real, but only an imaginary difficulty to contend with, and, in too many cases, the pertinacity of a perverse practice. (7.) When the ear and tongue have acquired a fluent mastery of the simpler forms of nouns, verbs, and sentences, then, but riot till then, should the scholar be led, by a graduated proc- ess, to the more difficult and complex forms. (8.) Let nothing be learned from rules that is not immediately illustrated by practice ; or rather, let the rules be educed from the prac- tice of ear and tongue, and let them be as few and as comprehensive as possible. (9.) Irregularities of various kinds are best learned by practice as they occur ; but some anomalies, as in the conjugation of a few irreg- 48 THE CULTURE OF ular verbs, are of such frequent occurrence, and are so necessary for progress, that they had better be learned specially by heart as soon as possible. Of this the verb to be, in almost all languages, is a familiar example. (10.) Let some easy narrative be read, in the first place, or better, some familiar dialogue, as, in Greek, Xenophon's Anabasis and Memora- bilia, Cebetis Tabula, and Lucian's Dialogues ; but reading must never be allowed, as is so generally the case, to be practiced as a substi- tute for thinking and speaking. To counteract this tendency, the best way is to take objects of natural history, or representations of inter- esting objects, and describe their parts aloud in simple sentences, without the intervention of the mother tongue. (n.) Let all exercises of reading and de- scribing be repeated again and again and again. No book fit to be read in the early stages of language-learning should be read only, once. (12.) Let your reading, if possible, be always in sympathy with your intellectual appetite. Let the matter of the work be interesting, and you will make double progress. To know some- thing of the subject beforehand will be an im- mense help. For this reason, with Christians who know the Scriptures, as we do in Scotland, THE INTELLECT. 49 a translation of the Bible is always one of the best books to use in the acquisition of a foreign tongue. (13.) As you read, note carefully the differ- ence between the idioms of the strange lan- guage and those of the mother tongue ; under- score these distinctly with pen or pencil, in some thoroughly idiomatic translation, and after a few days translate back into the original tongue what you have before you in the Eng- lish form. (14.) To methodize, and, if necessary, cor- rect your observations, consult some systematic grammar so long as you may find it profitable. But the grammar should, as much as possible, follow the practice, not precede it. (15.) Be not content with that mere method- ical generalization of the practice which you find in many grammars, but endeavor always to find the principle of the rule, whether belong- ing to universal or special grammar. (16.) Study the theory of language, the or- ganism of speech, and what is called com- parative philology or Glossology. The princi- ples there revealed will enable you to prosecute with a reasoning intelligence a study which would otherwise be in a great measure a la- borious exercise of arbitrary memory. (17.) Still, practice is the main thing; lan- 4 50 THE CULTURE OF guage must, in the first place, be familiar ; and this familiarity can be attained only by constant reading and constant conversation. Where a man has no person to speak to he may declaim to himself; but the ear and the tongue must be trained, not the eye merely and the under- standing. In reading, a man must not confine himself to standard works. He must devour everything greedily that he can lay his hands on. He must not merely get up a book jvith accurate precision ; that is all very well as a special task ; but he must learn to live largely in the general element of the language ; and minute accuracy in details is not to be sought before a fluent practical command of the gen- eral currency of the language has been at- tained. Shakespeare, for instance, ought to be read twenty times before a man begins to oc- cupy himself with the various readings of the Shakesperian text, or the ingenious conjectures of his critics. (18.) Composition, properly so called, is. the culmination of the exercises of speaking and reading, translation and re-translation, which we have sketched. In this exercise the essen- tial thing is to write from a model, not from dictionaries or phrase-books. Choose an au- thor who is a pattern of a particular style — say Plato in philosophical dialogue, or Lucian in THE INTELLECT. 51 playful colloquy — steal his phrases, and do something of the same kind yourself, directly, without the intervention of the English. After you have acquired fluency in this way you may venture to put more of yourself into the style, and learn to write the foreign tongue as grace- fully as Latin was written by Erasmus, Wytten- bach, or Ruhnken. Translation from English classics may also be practiced, but not in the first place ; the ear must be tuned by direct imitation of the foreign tongue, before the more difficult art of transference from the mother tongue can be attempted with success, ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. "The glory of a young man is his strength." Solomon. ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. I. It is a patent fact, as certain as anything in mathematics, that whatever exists must have a basis on which to stand, a root from which to grow, a hinge on which to turn, a something which, however subordinate in it- self with reference to the complete whole, is the indispensable point of attachment from which the existence of the whole depends. No house can be raised except on a foundation, a substructure which has no independent virtue, and which, when it exists in the greatest per- fection, is generally not visible, but rather loves to hide itself in darkness. Now this is exactly the sort of relation which subsists be- tween a man's thinking faculty and his body, between his mental activity and his bodily health ; and it is obvious that, if this analogy be true, there is nothing that a student ought to be more careful about than the sound con- dition of his flesh and blood. It is, however, a well-known fact that the care of their health, 56 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. or, what is the same thing, the rational treat- ment of their own flesh and blood, is the very last thing that students seriously think of ; and the more eager the student, the more apt is he to sin in this respect, and to drive himself, like an unsignaled railway train, to the very brink of a fatal precipice, before he knows where he stands. It is wise, therefore, to start in a studious life with the assured conviction which all experience warrants, that sedentary occupations generally, and specially sedentary habits combined with severe and persistent brain exercise, are more or less unhealthy, and, in the case of naturally frail constitutions, such as have frequently a tendency to fling them- selves into books, tend directly to the enfee- bling of the faculties and the undermining of the frame. After this warning from an old student, let every man consider that his blood shall be on his own head if he neglect to use, with a firm purpose, as much care in the pres- ervation of his health as any good workman would do in keeping his tools sharp, or any good soldier in having his powder dry. Mean- while I will jot down, under a few heads, some of the most important practical suggestions with which experience has furnished me in this matter. ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 57 II. The growth and vigorous condition of every member of the body, as, in fact, of every function of existence in the universe, depends on Exercise. All life is an energizing or a working ; absolute rest is found . only in the grave ; and the measure of a man's vitality is the measure of his working power. To pos- sess every faculty and function of the body in harmonious working order is to be healthy ; to be healthy, with a high degree of vital force, is to be strong. A man may be healthy with- out being strong ; but all health tends, more or less, towards strength, and all disease is weakness. Now, any one may see in nature, that things grow big simply by growing ; this growth is a constant and habitual exercise of vital or vegetative force, and whatever checks or diminishes the action of this force — say, harsh winds or frost — will stop the growth and stunt the production. Let the student therefore bear in mind, that sitting on a chair, leaning over a desk, poring over a book, can- not possibly be the way to make his body grow. The blood can be made to flow, and the muscles to play freely, only by exercise ; and, if that exercise is not taken, Nature will not be mocked. Every young student ought to make a sacred resolution to move about in the open air at least two hours every day. If 58 ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. he does not do this, cold feet, the clogging of the wheels of the internal parts of the fleshly frame, and various shades of stomachic and cerebral discomfort, will .not fail in due season to inform him that he has been sinning against Nature, and, if he does not amend his courses, as a bad boy he will certainly be flogged ; for Nature is never, like some soft-hearted human masters, over merciful in her treatment. But why shoul a student indulge so much in the lazy and unhealthy habit of sitting ? A man may think as well standing as sitting, often not a little better ; and as for reading in these days, when the most weighty books may be had cheaply, in the lightest form, there is no necessity why a person should be bending his back, and doubling his chest, merely because he happens to have a book in his hand. A man will read a play or a poem far more natu- rally and effectively while walking up and down the room, than when sitting sleepily in a chair. Sitting, in fact, is a slovenly habit, and ought not to be indulged. But when a man does sit, or must sit, let him at all events sit erect, with his back to the light, and a full free projection of the breast. Also, when studying languages, or reading fine passages of poetry, let him read as much as possible aloud ; a practice recommended by Clemens ON PHYSICAL CULTURE. 59 of Alexandria, 1 and which will have the double good effect of strengthening that most im- portant vital element the lungs, and training the ear to the perception of vocal distinct- ions, so stupidly neglected in many of our public schools. There is, in fact, no necessary connection, in most cases, between the knowl- edge which a student is anxious to acquire, and the sedentary habits which students are so apt to cultivate. A certain part of his work, no doubt, must be done amid books ; but if I wish to know Homer, for instance, thoroughly, after the first grammatical and lexicographical drudgery is over, I can read him as well on the top of Ben Cruachan, or, if the day be blasty, amid the grand silver pines at Inverawe, as in a fusty study. A man's enjoyment of an ^Eschylean drama or a Platonic dialogue will not be diminished, but sensibly increased, by the fragrant breath of birches blowing around him, or the sound of mighty waters rushing near. As for a lexi- con, if you make yourself at the first reading a short index of the more difficult words, you can manage the second reading more comfort- ably without it. What a student should spe- cially see to, both in respect of health and of 1 iroWois 5e ex ocros Sokci, TO \OY)(TTOV rj kolkov yzv£ Plato. ON MORAL CULTURE. I. We are now come to the most important of the three great chapters of self-culture. The moral nature of man supplies him both with the motive and the regulative power, being in fact the governor, and lord, and legitimate master of the whole machine. Moral excellence is therefore justly felt to be an indispensable ele- ment in all forms of human greatness. A man may be as brilliant, as clever, as strong, and as broad as you please ; and with all this, if he is not good, he may be a paltry fellow ; and even the sublime which he seems to reach, in his most splendid achievements, is only a brilliant sort of badness. The first Napoleon, in his thunderous career over our western world, was a notable example of superhuman force in a human shape, without any real human great- ness. It does not appear that he was naturally what we should call a bad man ; but, devoting himself altogether to military conquest and po- litical ascendency, he had no occasion to exer- j6 ON MORAL CULTURE. cise any degree of that highest excellence which grows out of unselfishness, and so, as a moral man, he lived and died very poor and very small. But it is not only conquerors and politicians that, from a defect of the moral ele- ment, fail to achieve real greatness. "Noth- ing," says Hartley, " can easily exceed the vain- glory, self-conceit, arrogance, emulation, and envy, that are to be found in the eminent pro- fessors of the sciences, mathematics, natural philosophy, and even divinity itself." 1 Nor is there any reason to be astonished at this. The moral nature, like everything else, if it is to grow into any sort of excellence, demands a special culture ; and, as our passions, by their very nature, like the winds, are not easy of con- trol, and our actions are the outcome of our passions, it follows that moral excellence will in no case be an easy affair, and in its highest grades will be the most arduous, and, as such, the most noble achievement of a thoroughly accomplished humanity. It was an easy thing for Lord Byron to be a great poet ; it was merely indulging his nature ; he was an eagle, and must fly ; but to have curbed his willful hu- mor, soothed his fretful discontent, and learned to behave like a reasonable being and a gentle- man, that was a difficult matter, which he does 1 Obiei"vatiom on Man. London, 1749. Vol. ii. p. 255. ON MORAL CULTURE. Jf not seem ever seriously to have attempted. His life, therefore, with all his genius, and fits of occasional sublimity, was, on the whole, a terrible failure, and a great warning to all who are willing to take a lesson. Another flaring beacon of rock, on which great wits are often wrecked for want of a little kindly culture of unselfishness, is Walter Savage Landor, the most finished master of style, perhaps, that ever used the English tongue ; but a person at the same time, so imperiously willful, and so majestically cross-grained, that, with all his pol- ished style and pointed thought, he was con- stantly living on the verge of insanity. Let every one, therefore, who would not suffer ship- wreck on the great voyage of life, stamp seri- ously into his soul, before all things, the great truth of the Scripture text, — " One thing is needful." Money is not needful ; power is not needful ; cleverness is not needful ; fame is not needful ; liberty is not needful ; even health is not the one thing needful : but character alone — a thoroughly cultivated will — is that which can truly save us ; and, if we are not saved in this sense, we must certainly be damned. There is no point of indifference in this matter, where a man can safely rest, say- ing to himself, If I don't get better, I shall cer- tainly not get worse. He will unquestionably ?8 . ON MORAL CULTURE. get worse. The unselfish part of his nature, if left uncultivated, will, like every other neg- lected function, tend to shrink into a more meagre vitality and more stunted proportions. Let us gird up our loins, therefore, and quit us like men ; and, having by the golden gift of God the glorious lot of living once for all, let us endeavor to live nobly. II. It may be well, before entering into any detail, to indicate, in a single word, the con- nection between morality and piety, which is not always correctly understood. A certain school of British moralists, from Jeremy Ben- tham downwards, have set themselves to tabu- late a scheme of morals without any reference to religion, which, to say the least of it, is a very unnatural sort of divorce, and a plain sign of a certain narrowness and incompleteness in the mental constitution of those who advocate such views. No doubt a professor of wisdom, like old Epicurus, may be a very good man, as the world goes, and lead a very clean life, be- lieving that all the grand mathematical struct- ure of this magnificent universe is the product of a mere fortuitous concourse of blind atoms ; as, in these days, I presume, there are few more virtuous men than some who talk of laws of Nature, invariable sequence, natural selection, ON MORAL CULTURE. 79 favorable conditions, happy combination of ex- ternal circumstances, and other such reasonless phrases as may seem to explain the frame of the universe apart from mind. But to a healthy human feeling there must always be something very inadequate, say rather something abnor- mal and monstrous, in this phasis of morality. It is as if a good citizen in a monarchy were to pay all the taxes conscientiously, serve his time in the army, and fight the battles of his coun- try bravely, but refuse to take off his hat to the queen when she passed. If we did not note such a fellow altogether with a black mark, as a disloyal and disaffected subject, we should feel a good-natured contempt for him, as a crotchety person and unmannerly. So it is ex- actly with atheists, whether speculative or prac- tical ; they are mostly crotchet-mongers and puzzle-brains ; fellows who spin silken ropes in which to strangle themselves ; at most, mere reasoning machines, utterly devoid of every noble inspiration, whose leaden intellectual fir- mament has no heat and no color, whose whole nature is exhausted in fostering a prim self- contained conceit about their petty knowledges, and who can, in fact, fasten their coarse feelers upon nothing but what they can finger, and classify, and tabulate, and dissect. But there is something that stands above all fingering, 80 OAT MORAL CULTURE. all microscopes, and all curious diagnosis, and that is, simply, Life ; and life is simply ener- gizing Reason, and energizing Reason is only another name for God. To ignore this su- preme fact is to attempt to conceive the steam- engine without the intellect of James Watt ; it is to make a map of the aqueducts that sup- ply a great city with water, without indicating the fountain-head from which they are supplied ; it is to stop short of the one fact which renders all the other facts possible ; it is to leave the body without the head. By no means, there- fore, let a young man satisfy himself with any of those cold moral schemes of the present age of reaction, which piece together a beggarly ac -sunt of duties from external induction. The fountain of all the nobler morality is moral inspiration from within ; and the feeder of this fountain is God. III. I will now specialize a few of those virtues the attainment of which should be an object of lofty ambition to young men desirous of making the most of the divine gift of life. Every season and every occasion makes its own imperious demand, and presents its pecul- iar opportunity of glorious victory or ignoble defeat in the great battle of existence. Prim- roses grow only in the spring ; and certain ON MORAL CULTURE. 8 1 virtues, if they do not put forth vigorous shoots in youth, are not likely to show any luxuriant leafage in after age. IV. First, there is Obedience. There is a great talk in these days about liberty ; and no doubt liberty is a very good thing, and highly estimated by all healthy creatures ; but it is necessary that we should understand exactly what this thing means. It means only that in the exercise of all natural energies, each crea- ture shall be free from every sort of conven- tional, artificial, and painful restriction. Such liberty is unquestionably an unqualified good, but it does not bring a man very far. It fixes only the starting-point in the race of life. It gives a man a stage to play on, but it says nothing of the part he has to play, or of the style in which he must play it. Beyond this necessary starting-point, all further action in life, so far from being liberty, is only a series of limitations. All regulation is limitation ; and regulation is only another name for rea- soned existence. And, as the regulations to which men must submit are not always or generally those which they have willingly laid down for themselves, but rather for the most part those which have been laid down by others for the general good of society, it follows, that 6 82 ON MORAL CULTURE. whosoever will be a good member of any social system must learn, in the first place, to Obey. The law, the army, the church, the state ser- vice, every field of life, and every sphere of action, are only the embodied illustrations of this principle. Freedom, of course, is left to the individual in his own individual sphere. To leave him no freedom were to make him a mere machine, and to annihilate his human- ity ; but, so far as he acts in a social capacity, he cannot be free from the limitations that bind the whole into a definite and consistent unity. He may be at the very top of the social ladder, but, like the Pope — servus servorum — only the more a slave for that. The brain can no more disown the general laws of the organism than the foot can. The royal obedience of each member is at once its duty and its safety. St. Paul, with his usual force, fervor, and sagacity, has grandly illustrated this text ; and if you ever feel in- clined fretfully to kick against your special function in the great social organism, I advise you to make a serious reading of I Cor. xii. 14-31. Every random or willful move is a chink opened in the door, which, if it be taught tc gape wider, will in due season let in chaos. The Roman historian records it as a notable trait in the great Punic captain's character, ON MORAL CULTURE. 83 that he knew equally well to obey and to command, — " Nunquam ingenium idem ad res diversissimas, parendum atque imperandum habilius ficit" Opposite things, no doubt, obedience and command are ; but the one, nevertheless, is the best training-school for the other; for he who has been accustomed only to command will not know the limita- tions by which, for its own beneficial exercise, all authority is bound. Let the old Roman submission to authority be cultivated by all young men as a virtue at once most charac- teristically social, and most becoming in un- ripe years. Let the thing commanded by a superior authority be done simply because it is commanded, and let it be done with punc- tuality. Nothing commends a young man so much to his employers as accuracy and punc- tuality in the conduct of business. And no wonder. On each man's exactitude in doing his special best depends the comfortable and easy going of the whole machine. In the complicated tasks of social life no genius and no talent can compensate for the lack of obe- dience. If the clock goes fitfully, nobody knows the time of day ; and, if your allotted task is a necessary link in the chain of an- other man's work, you are his clock, and he ought to be able to rely on you. The great- 84 ON MORAL CULTURE. est praise that can be given to the member of any association is in these terms : — This is a man who always does what is. required of him, and who always appears at the hour when he is expected to appear. v v V. The next grand virtue which a young man should specially cultivate is Truthful- ness. I believe, with Plato, that a lie is a thing naturally hateful both to gods and men ; and young persons specially are naturally truthful ; but fear and vanity, and various in- fluences, and interests affecting self, may check and overgrow this instinct, so as to produce a very hollow and worthless manhood. John Stuart Mill, in one of his political pamphlets, told the working classes of England that they were mostly liars ; and yet he paid them the compliment of saying that they were the only working class in Europe who were inwardly ashamed of the baseness which they practiced. A young man in his first start of life should impress on his mind strongly that he lives in a world of stern realities, where no mere show can permanently assert itself as sub- stance. In his presentment as a member of society he should take a sacred care to be more than he seems, not to seem more than he is. Ov yap Sok€?v apicrros dAA' eti/ai 0£kti. Who- ON MORAL CULTURE. 85 ever in any special act is studious to make an outward show, to which no inward substance corresponds, is acting a lie, which may help him out of a difficulty perhaps for the occa- sion, but, like silvered copper, will be found out in due season. Plated work will never stand the tear and wear of life like the genu- ine metal ; believe this. What principally in- duces men to act this sort of social lie is, with persons in trade, love of gain ; but with young men, to whom I now speak, either lazi- ness, vanity, or cowardice ; and against these three besetting sins, therefore, a young man should set a special guard. Lazy people are never ready with the right article when it is wanted, and accordingly they present a false one, as when a schoolboy, when called upon to translate a passage from a Greek or Latin author, reads from a translation on the op- posite page. What is this but a lie ? The teacher wishes to know what you have in your brain, and you give him what you take from a piece of paper, not the produce of your brain at all. All flimsy, shallow, and super- ficial work, in fact, is a Lie, of which a man ought to be ashamed. Vanity is another pro- vocative of lies. From a desire to appear well before others, young men, who are naturally ignorant and inexperienced, will sometimes be 86 ON MORAL CULTURE. tempted to pretend that they know more than they actually do know, and may thus get into a habit of dressing up their little with the air and attitude of much, in such a manner as to convey a false impression of their own im- portance. Let a man learn as early as pos- sible honestly to confess his ignorance, and he will be a gainer by it in the long run ; otherwise the trick by which he veils his ig- norance from others may become a habit by which he conceals it from himself, and learns to spend his whole life in an element of de- lusive show, to which no reality corresponds. But it is from deficiency of courage rather than from the presence of vanity that a young man may expect to be most sorely tried. Con- ceit, which is natural to youth, is sure to be pruned down ; the whole of society is in a state of habitual conspiracy to lop the over^ weening self-estimate of any of its members ; but a little decent cowardice is always safe ; and those who begin life by being afraid to speak what they think, are likely to end it by being afraid to think what they wish. Moral courage is unquestionably, if the most manly, certainly the rarest of the social virtues. The most venerated traditions and institutions of society, and even some of the kindliest and most finely-fibred affections, are in not a few ON MORAL CULTURE. 8/ cases arrayed against its exercise ; and in such cases to speak the truth boldly requires a com- bination of determination and of tact, of which not every man is capable. Neither, indeed, is it desirable always to speak all the truth that a man may happen to know ; there is no more offensive thing than truth, when it runs counter to certain great social interests, asso- ciations, and passions ; and offence, though it must sometimes be given, ought never to be courted. To these matters the text applies, " Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves." Nevertheless there are occasions when a man must speak boldly out, even at the risk of plucking the beard of fair authority some- what rudely. If he does not do so he is a coward and a poltroon, and not the less so because he has nine hundred and ninety-nine lily-livered followers at his back. « VI. I don't know a better advice to a young man than never to be idle. It is one of those negative sort of precepts that impart no motive force to the will • but though negations seem barren to keep out the devil by a strong bolt, they may prove in the end not the worst receipt for admitting the good spirit into con- fidence. A man certainly should not circum- scribe his activity by any inflexible fence of 88 ON MORAL CULTURE. rigid rules ; such a formal methodism of con- duct springs from narrowness, and can only end in more narrowness ; but it is of the utmost importance to commence early with an econom- ical use of time, and this is only possible by means of order and system. No young person can go far wrong who devotes a certain amount of time regularly to a definite course of work ; how much that portion of time should be, of course depends on circumstances ; but let it, at all events, be filled up with a prescribed con- tinuity of something ; one hour a day per- sistently devoted to one thing, like a small seed, will yield a' large increase at the year's end. Random activity, jumping from one thing to another without a plan, is little better, in re- spect of any valuable intellectual result, than absolute idleness. An idle man is like a house- keeper who keeps the doors open for any burg- lar. It is a grand safeguard when a man can say, I have no time for nonsense ; no call for unreasonable dissipation ; no need for that sort of stimulus which wastes itself in mere titilla- tion- ; variety of occupation is my greatest pleas- ure, and when my task is finished I know how to lie fallow, and with soothing rest prepare myself for another bout of action. The best preventive against idleness is to start with the deep-seated conviction of the earnestness of ON MORAL CULTURE. 89 life. Whatever men say of the world, it is certainly no stage for trifling ; in a scene where all are at work idleness can lead only to wreck and ruin: " Life is short, art long, op- portunity FLEETING, EXPERIMENT SLIPPERY, judgment difficult." These are the first words of the medical aphorisms of the wise Hippocrates ; they were set down as a signif- icant sign at the porch of the benevolent sci- ence of healing more than 500 years before the Christian era ; and they remain still, the wisest text which a man can take with him as a direc- tory into any sphere of effective social activity. VII. If we look around us in the world with a view to discover what is the cause of the sad deficiency of energy often put forth in the best of causes, we shall find that it arises generally from some sort of Narrowness. A man will not help you in this or that noble, undertaking simply because he has no sympathy with it. Not a few persons are a sort of human lobsters ; they live in a hard shell formed out of some professional, ecclesiastical, political, or classical crust, and cautiously creep their way within certain beaten bounds, beyond which they have no desires. The meagre and unexpansive life of such persons teaches us what we want in order to attain to a wider and a richer range of 90 ON MORAL CULTURE. social vitality. The octogenarian poet-philos- opher Goethe, when sinking into the darkness of death, called out with his last breath, More light ! What every young man should call out daily, if he wishes to save himself from the narrowing crust of professional and other lim- itations, is, More love ! Men are often clever enough, but they don't know what to do with their cleverness ; they are good swordsmen, but they have no cause to fight for, or prefer fight- ing in a bad cause. What these men want is Love. The precept of the great Apostle, " Weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice^ if it were grandly carried out would make every man's life as rich in universal sympathy as Shakespeare's imagination was in universal imagery. Every man cannot be a poet ; but every man may give himself some trouble to cultivate that kindly and genial sensibility on which the writing and the ap- preciation of poetry depends. To live poetry, indeed, is always better than to write it ; better for the individual, and better for society. Now a poetical life is just a life opposed to all same- ness and all selfishness ; eagerly seizing upon the good and beautiful from all quarters, as on its proper aliment. Let a young man, therefore, above all things, beware of shutting himself up within a certain narrow pale of sympathy, and ON MORAL CULTURE. 9 1 fostering unreasonable hatreds and prejudices against others. An honest hater is often a better fellow than a cool friend ; but it is better not to hate at all. A good man will as much as possible strive to be shaken out of himself, and learn to study the excellences of persons and parties to whom he is naturally opposed. It was an admirable trait in the character of the late distinguished head of the utilitarian school of ethics, who was brought up according to the strictest sect of a narrow and unsympathetic school, that he could apply himself in the spirit of kindly recognition to comprehend two such antipodal characters as Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Never allow yourself to indulge in sneering condemnations of large classes and sections of your fellow be- ings ; that sort of talk sounds big, but is in fact puerile. Never refuse to entertain a man in your heart because all the world is talking against him, or because he belongs to some sect or party that everybody despises ; if he is universally talked against, as has happened to many of the best men in certain circumstances, there is only so much the more need that he should receive a friendly judgment from you. " Honor all men " is one of the many texts of combined sanctity and sapience with which the New Testament abounds ; but this you cannot 92 ON MORAL CULTURE. do unless you try to know all men ; and you know no man till you have looked with the eye of a brother into the best that is . in him. To do this is the true moral philosophy, the best human riches ; a wealth which, when you have quarried, you can proceed, as a good social architect, to build up the truth in love, with regard to all men, and make your deeds in every point as genuine as your words. (/ ^ VIII. There is a class of young men in the present age on whose face one imagines that he sees written Nil Admirari. This is not at all a lovable class of the " youth-head" of our land ; and, unless the tone of not wondering which characterizes their manner be a sort of juvenile affectation destined soon to pass away, rather a hopeless class. Wonder, as Plato has it, is a truly philosophic passion ; the more we have of it, accompanying the reverent heart, of course with a clear open eye, so much the better. That it should be specially abundant in the opening scenes of life is in the healthy course of nature ; and to be deficient in it argues either insensibility, or that indifference, selfish- ness, and conceit, which are sometimes found combined with a shallow sort of cleverness that, with superficial observers readily passes for true talent. In opposition to this most un- ON MORAL CULTURE. 93 natural, ungenial habitude of mind, we say to every young man, cultivate Reverence. You will not see much of this virtue, perhaps, in the democratic exhibitions in which the present age delights ; -but it is the true salt of the soul for all that. " We live by admiration, hope, and love." We are small creatures, the biggest of us, and our only chance of becoming great in a sort is by participation in the greatness of the universe. St. John, in a beautiful passage of his First Epistle, has finely indicated the philosophy of this matter. " Beloved, now are we the sons of God ; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be ; but we know that when He shall ap- pear, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see Him as He is ; " — that is to say, to look with admiring rapture on a type of perfect excellence is the way to become assimilated to that excel- lence ; -what the uncorrupted man sees in such cases he admires ; and what he admires he imitates. The chief end of man, according to the Stoics, was, — " Spectare et imitari mun- dum ! " — a fine thought, and finely expressed. But how shall a man see when he has no admiring faculty which shall lead him to see, and how shall he imitate what he does not know ? All true appreciation is the result of keen insi'ght and noble passion ; but the habit 94 ON MORAL CULTURE. of despising things and persons, and holding them cheap, blinds the one factor which belongs to the complete result, and strangles the other. IX. In morals there are principles of inspi- ration and principles of regulation : love and reverence, of which we have been speaking, be- long to the former ; Moderation, of which we are now to speak, belongs to the latter. It is a virtue of which young men generally have no conception, and for deficiency in which they are lightly pardoned ; but it is a virtue not the less necessary for that, and if they will not learn it in what medical men call the prophylactic way, — that is, timeously, before the touch of danger, — they will have to learn it at no very long date from perilous experience. To hot young blood it is an admonition which sounds as cheap as it is distasteful, to beware of excess ; but hot young blood, which knows well enough how to dash full gallop into a forest of bristling spears, is no judge of that caution which is not less neces- sary than courage to the issue of a successful campaign. The coolest and most practical thinker of all antiquity, and at the same time the man of the widest range of accurate knowl- edge, Aristotle, whose name is almost a guar- anty for right opinion in all things, laid it down as the most useful rule to guide men in ON MORAL CULTURE. 95 the difficult art of living, that virtue or wise action lies in the mean between the two ex- tremes of too little and too much. Those who are just starting in the career of life, however fond they may be of strong phrases, strong passions, unbridled energies, and exuberant demonstrations of all kinds, may rely on it, that as they grow in true manhood they will grow in all sorts of moderation, and learn to recognize the great truth that those are the strongest men, not who the most wantonly in- dulge, but who the most carefully curb their activities. What is called " seediness," after a debauch, is a plain proof that Nature has been outraged, *and will have her penalty. All de- bauch is incipient suicide ; it is the unseen current beneath the house which sooner or later washes away the foundations. So it is with study. Long-continued intense mental exercise, especially in that ungrateful and ungenial form of the acquisition of knowledge called Cram, weakens the brain, disorders the stomach, and makes the general action of the whole organism languid and unemphatic. Be warned, therefore, in time ; violent methods will certainly produce violent results ; and a vessel that once gets a crack, though it may be cunningly mended, will never stand such rough usage as a whole one. Wisdom is a good thing ; but it is not good 96 ON MORAL CULTURE. even to be wise always. " Be not wise over- much : Why shouldst thou die before thy time ?" Remember who said that. X. If Great Britain be unquestionably the richest country in the world, — so much so in- deed that Sidney Smith, always witty and always wise, felt himself justified in saying, that it is " the only country in which poverty is a crime," then certainly it is of paramount impor- tance that every young man, when starting in the race of life in this country, should stamp into his soul the fundamental principle of all moral philosophy, that the real dignity of a man lies not in what he has, but in what he is. " The kingdom of heaven is within you," — not with- out. Beware, therefore, of being infected by the moral contagion which more or less taints the atmosphere of every rich trading and manu- facturing community, — the contagion which breeds a habit of estimating the value of men by the external apparatus of life rather than by its internal nobility. A dwarf, perched upon a lofty platform, looks over the heads of the mul- titude, and has no doubt this advantage from his position. So it is with the rich man who is merely rich ; he acquires a certain social posi- tion, and from this, perhaps, gets M. P. tagged to his name ; but, take the creature down from ON MORAL CULTURE. 97 his artificial elevation, and look him fairly in the face, and you will find that he is a figure too insignificant to measure swords with. Fix this, therefore, in your minds, before all things, that there are few things in social life more contemptible than a rich man who stands upon his riches. By the very act of placing so high a value on the external, he has lapsed from the true character of his kind, and inverted the poles of human value. Have money, — by all means, — as much as to enable you to pay your tailor's bill, and, if possible, have a comfortable glass of claret or port to help you to digest your dinner ; but never set your heart on what they call making a fortune. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and St. Paul (1 Tim. vi. 9), all agree in stating, with serious emphasis, that money- making is not an ennobling occupation, and that he who values money most values himself least. Stand strictly on your moral and intel- lectual excellence, and you will find in the long run, when the true value of things comes out, that there is not a duke or a millionaire in the land who can boast himself your superior. XI. I have no intention of running through the catalogue of the virtues, — you must go to Aristotle for that ; but one grace of character, which is an essential element of moral great- 98 ON MORAL CULTURE. ness, and a sure pledge of all kinds of success, I cannot omit, and that is Perseverance. I never knew a man good for anything in the world, who, when he got a piece of work to do, did not know how to stick to it. The poet Wordsworth, in his " Excursion," when the sky began to look cloudy, gives, as a reason for go- ing on with his mountain perambulation, that though a little rain might be disagreeable to the skin, the act of giving up a fixed pur- pose, in view of a slight possible inconvenience, is dangerous to the character. There is much wisdom here. We do not live in a world in which a man can afford to be discouraged by trifles. There are real difficulties enough, with which to fight is to live, and which to conquer is to live nobly. A friend of mine, making the ascent of Ben Cruachan, when he had reached what he imagined to be the top, found that the real peak was two miles farther on to the west, and that the road to it lay along a rough stony ridge not easy for weary feet to tread on. But this was a small matter. The peak was being enveloped in mist, and it was only an hour from sunset. He wisely determined to take the nearest way down ; but what did he do next day ? He ascended the Ben again, and took his dinner triumphantly on the topmost top, in order, as he said, that the name of this most ON MORAL CULTURE. 99 beautiful of Highland Bens might not forever be associated in his mind with bafflement and defeat. This sort of a man, depend upon it, will succeed in everything he undertakes. Never boggle at a difficulty, especially at the commencement of a new work. Aller Anfang ist schwer, — all beginnings are difficult, as the German proverb says ; and the more excellent the task the greater the difficulty. XaAeTra T a koX*. Difficult things, in fact, are the only things worth doing, and they are done by a de- termined will and a strong hand. In the world of action will is power ; persistent will, with circumstances not altogether unfavorable, is victory ; nay, in the face of circumstances alto- gether unfavorable, persistency will carve out a way to unexpected success. Read the life of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and you will understand what this means. Fortune never will favor the man who flings away the dice- box because the first throw brings a low num- ber. I will now conclude with a few remarks on some of the best methods of acquiring moral excellence. XII. The first thing to be attended to here is to have it distinctly and explicitly graved 100 ON MORAL CULTURE. into the soul, that there is only one thing that can give significance and dignity to human life — viz. Virtuous Energy; and that this energy is attainable only by energizing. If you imagine you are to be much helped by books, and reasons, and speculations, and learned disputations, in this matter, you are altogether mistaken. Books and discourses may indeed awaken and arouse you, and per- haps hold up the sign of a wise finger-post to prevent you from going astray at the first start, but they cannot move you a single step on the road ; it is your own legs only that can perform the journey ; it is altogether a matter of doing. Finger-posts are very well where you find them ; but the sooner you can learn to do without them the better ; for you will not travel long, depend upon it, before you come into regions of moor, and mist, and bog, and far waste solitudes ; and woe be to the way- farer, in such case, who has taught himself to travel only by finger-posts and milestones ! You must have a compass of sure direction in your own soul, or you may be forced to depend for your salvation on some random saviour, who is only a little less bewildered than your- self. Gird up your loins therefore, and prove the all-important truth, that as you learn to walk only by walking, to leap by leaping, and ON MORAL CULTURE. IOI to fence by fencing, so you can learn to live nobly only by acting nobly on every occasion that presents itself. If you shirk the first trial of your manhood, you will come so much the weaker to the second ; and if the next occasion, and the next again, finds you unprepared, you will infallibly sink into baseness. A swimmer becomes strong to stem the tide only by fre- quently breasting the big waves. If you prac- tice always in shallow waters, your heart will assuredly fail you in the hour of high flood. General notions about sin and salvation can do you no good in the way of the blessed life. As in a journey, you must see milestone after mile- stone fall into your rear, otherwise you remain stationary : so, in the grand march of a noble life, one paltriness after another must disap- pear, or you have lost your chance. XI II. Richter gives it as one excellent anti- dote against moral depression, to call up in our darkest moments the memory of our brightest ; so, in the dusty struggle and often tainted atmosphere of daily business, it is well to carry about with us the purifying influence of a high ideal of human conduct, fervidly and powerfully expressed. Superstitious persons carry amulets externally on their breasts : carry you a select store of holy texts within, and you will be much 102 ON MORAL CULTURE. more effectively armed against the powers of evil than any most absolute monarch behind a bristling body-guard. Such texts you may find occurring in many places, from the Kalidasas and Sakyamunis of the East, to Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus, in the West ; but if you are wise, and above the seduction of showy and pretentious novelties, you will store your memory early in youth with the golden texts of the Old and New Testaments ; and, as the Bible is a big book, — not so much a book, indeed, as a great literature in small bulk, — perhaps I could not do better in this place than indicate for you a few books or chapters which you will find it of inestimable value to graft into your soul deeply before you come much into contact with those persons of coarse moral fibre, low aspirations, and lukewarm temperament, commonly called men of the world. First, of course, there is the Sermon on the Mount, then the 13th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corin- thians ; then the Gospel of John ; then the General Epistle of James ; the two Epistles to Timothy ; the 8th chapter of the Romans ; the 5 th and 6th chapters of the Ephesians ; and the same chapters of the Galatians. In the Old Testament every day's experience will reveal to you more clearly the profound wisdom of the Book of Proverbs. As a guide through life it ON MORAL CULTURE. 103 is not possible to find a better directory than this book ; and I remember the late Principal Lee, who knew Scotland well, saying with em- phasis, that our country owed no small part of the practical sagacity for which it is so famed, to an early familiarity with this body of prac- tical wisdom, which, in old times, used to be printed separately, and found in every man's pocket. For seasons of devout meditation, of course, the Psalms of the great minstrel monarch are more to be commended ; and among them I should recommend specially, as calculated to infuse a spirit of deep and catholic piety into the souls of the young, — Psalms i. viii. xix. xxiv. xxxii. xxxvii. xlix. li. liii. lxxiii. xc. ciii. civ. cvii. cxxi. cxxxi. cxxxiii. And these Psalms ought not only to be frequently read, till they make rich the blood of the soul with a genial and generous piety, but they ought to be sung to their proper music till they create round us a habitual atmosphere of pure and elevated sentiment, which we breathe as the breath of our higher life. This is the sort of emotional drill which that grand old heathen Plato enjoins with such eloquence in some of the wisest 1 chapters of his lofty-minded polity, but a drill which we British Christians, with all our pre- tensions, in these latter times seem somewhat backward to understand, 104 ON MORAL CULTURE. XIV. Perhaps even more important towards the achievement of a noble life than a memory well stored with sacred texts, is an imagination well decorated with heroic pictures ; in other words, there is no surer method of becoming good, and it may be great also, than an early familiarity with the lives of great and good men. So far as my experience goes, there is no kind of sermon so effective as the example of a great man. Here we see the thing done before us, — actually done, — a thing of which we were not even dreaming ; and the voice speaks forth to us with a potency like the voice of many waters, " Go thou and do likewise!' Why not ? No doubt, not every man is a hero ; and heroic opportunities are not given every day ; but if you cannot do the same thing, you may do something like it ; if you are not planted on as high or as large a stage, you can show as much manhood, and manifest as much virtuous persistency, on a small scale. Every man may profit by the example of truly great men, if he is bent on making the most of him- self and his circumstances. It is altogether a delusion to measure the greatness of men by the greatness of the stage on which they act, or the volume of the sound with which the world loves to. reverberate their achievements. A Moltke in council, on the eve of a great battle ON MORAL CULTURE. 105 which is to shift the centre of gravity of our western political system, is only acting on a maxim of practical wisdom that requires to be applied with as much discrimination, tact, and delicacy, by the provost of a provincial town planning a water-bill or a tax for the improve- ment of the city. Nay, that moral heroism is often greatest of which the world says least, and which is exercised in the humblest spheres, and in circles the most unnoticed. Let us therefore turn our youthful imaginations into great picture-galleries and Walhallas of the heroic souls of all times and all places ; and we shall be incited to follow after good, and be ashamed to commit any sort of baseness in the direct view of such " a cloud of witnesses. " Would you know what faith means, leave Cal- vinists and Arminians to split straws about points of doctrine ; but do you read and digest that splendid eleventh chapter of the Hebrews, and you will escape forever from the netted snares of theological logomachy. In this sub- lime chapter the great Apostle is merely giv- ing a succinct summation of the method of teaching by concrete examples, with which the Scriptures are so richly studded, and of which our modern sermons are mostly so destitute. When I see our young men lolling on sofas, and grinning over those sorry caricatures of 106 ON MORAL CULTURE, humanity with which the pages of Thackeray and other popular novelists are filled, I often wonder what sort of a human life can be ex- pected to grow up from that early habit of learning to sneer, or at best, to be amused, at an age when seriousness and devout admira- tion are the only seeds out of which any future nobleness can be expected to grow. For my- self, I honestly confess that I never could learn anything from Thackeray ; there is a certain feeble amiability even about his best characters, which, if it is free from the depressing in- fluence of his bad ones, is certainly anything but bracing. One of the best of Greek books, once in everybody's hands, now, I fear, fallen considerably into the shade, is Plutarch. 1 Here you have, whether for youth or manhood, in the shape of living examples of the most rich and various type, the very stuff from which human efficiency must ever be made. Our accurate critical historians have a small educational value when set against that fine instinct for all true human greatness, and that genial sympathy with all human weakness, which shine out so conspicuously in the classical picture-gallery of that rare old Boeotian. Let therefore our young men study to make themselves familiar, 1 " I read with great delight Langhorne's translation of Plutarch. " — J. S. Mill, Autobiography, ON MORAL CULTURE. 10/ not with the fribbles, oddities, and monstrosities of humanity, set forth in" fictitious narratives, but with the real blood and bone of human heroism which the select pages of biography present. An Athenian Pericles, with noble magnanimity, telling his servant to take a lamp and show a scurrilous reviler politely the way home ; a German Luther, having his feet shod with the gospel of peace, and the sword of the Spirit in his hands, marching with cheerful confidence against an embattled array of kai- sers and cardinals ; a Pastor Oberlin in a remote mountain parish of Alsace, flinging be- hind him the bland allurements of metropolitan preferment, and turning his little rocky, diocese into a moral and physical paradise, — these are great stereotyped Facts, which should drive themselves like goads into the hearts of the young.' No man can contradict a fact ; but the best fictions, without a deep moral significance beneath, are only iridescent froth, beautiful now, but which a single puff of air blows into nothingness. XV. Better, much better, than even the mir- ror of greatness in the biographies of truly great men, is the living influence of such men when you have the happiness of coming in contact with them. The best books are only a 108 ON MORAL CULTURE. clever machinery for stirring the nobler nature, but they act indirectly and feebly ; they may be remote also, dry and dusty upon the library shelves, not even on your table, and very far from your heart. But a living great man, com- ing across your path, carries with him an elec- tric influence which you cannot escape — that is, of course if you are capable of being affected in a noble way, for the blind do not see, and the dead do not feel ; and there is a class of people — very reputable people perhaps in their way — in whose breasts the epiphany of a Christ will only excite the remark, " He hath a devil!" Supposing, however, that you are not one of the Scribes and Pharisees, but a young man starting on the journey of life with a reverential receptiveness and a delicate sen- sibility, such as belong to well-conditioned youth, in this case the greatest blessing that can happen to you is to come directly into contact with some truly great man, and the closer the better ; for it is only the morally noble, and not the intellectually clever, in whom greater intimacy always reveals greater excellences. To have felt the thrill of a fervid humanity shoot through your veins at the touch of a Chalmers, a Macleod, or a Bunsen, is to a young man of a fine susceptibility worth more than all the wisdom of the Greeks, all the ON MORAL CULTURE. 109 learning of the Germans, and all the sagacity of the Scotch. After such a vivific influence, the light witlings may sneer as they please, and the grave Gamaliels may frown ; but you know in whom you have believed, and you believe because you have seen, and you grow with a happy growth, and your veins are full of sap, because you have been engrafted into the stem of a true vine. And if it be not your good for- tune to come under the direct genial expansive virtue of some great moral sun, you are not altogether left to chance in the moral influ- ences with which you are surrounded. If you cannot always avoid the contagion of low com- pany, you may at all events ban yourself from voluntarily marching into it. There are few situations in life where you may not have some power of choosing your companions ; and re- member that moral contagion, like the infec- tious power of physical diseases, borrows half its strength from the weakness of the subject with which it comes in contact. If you were only half as pure as Christ, you might go about with harlots and be nothing the worse for it. As it is, however, and considering the weak- ness of the flesh, and the peculiar temptations of puberty, the best thing you can do is to make a sacred vow, on no occasion and on no account to keep company with persons who 110 ON MORAL CULTURE. will lead you into haunts of dissipation and de- bauchery. No amount of hilarious excitement or momentary sensuous lustihood can compen- sate for the degradation which your moral na- ture must suffer by associating, on familiar and tolerant terms with the most degraded and abandoned of the human species. There can be no toleration for vice. We may, yea and we ought, to weep for the sinner, but we must not sport with the sin. Remember in this re- gard what happened to Robert Burns. He knew very well how to preach, but his practice was a most miserable performance, reminding us at every step of the terrible sarcastic sen- tence of Pliny, " There is nothing more proud or more paltry than Man." Have you care that you do not follow the example of that mis- chanceful bard, without having his hot blood and high-pressure vitality to excuse or to pal- liate your follies. Let your company be always, where possible, better than yourself; and when you have the misfortune to move amongst your inferiors, bear in mind this seriously, that if you do not seize the apt occasion to draw them up to your level — which requires wisdom as well as love — they will certainly not be slow to drag you down to theirs. XVI. " Men may try many things," said the ON MORAL CULTURE. Ill wise old bard of Weimar ; " only not live at random ; " and if you would not live at random, it will be necessary for you to fix set times for calling yourself to account. In commercial transactions it is found a great safeguard against debt, to pay for everything, as much as possible, in cash, and, where that is not possible, not to run long accounts, but to strike clear balances at certain set seasons. Exactly so in our ac- counts with God and with our souls. The best charts and the most accurate compasses will bring no profit to the man who does not get into the habit of regularly using them. In this view the illustrious practice of the old Pytha- goreans (who were a church as much as a school) presents a good model for us. " Let not soft sleep usurp oblivious sway Till thrice you've told the deeds that mark'd the day ; Whither thy steps ? what thing for thee most fitted Was aptly done ? and what good deed omitted ? And when you've summed the tale, wipe out the bad With gracious grief, and in the good be glad ! " No man, in my opinion, will ever attain to high excellence in what an excellent old divine calls " the life of God in the soul of man," without cultivating stated periods of solitude, and using that solitude for the important purpose of self- knowledge and self-amelioration. " Commune with your own heart on your bed, and be still," said the Psalmist. 112 ON MORAL CULTURE. " Who never ate with tears his bread, And through the long-drawn midnight hours Sat weeping on his lonely bed, He knows you not, ye heavenly Powers ! " are the well-known words of a poet who cer- tainly cannot be accused of being either Metho- distical in his habits or mawkish in his tone. " Let not the sun go down upon your wrath," said St. Paul ; — all which utterances plainly imply the utility of such stated seasons of moral review as the Pythagorean verses prescribe, and as we see now in most European countries in the institution of the Christian Sabbath waiting to be utilized. No doubt the Jewish Sabbath was originally instituted simply for the rest of the body ; and it was most wise and politic that this Christian's " Lord's-day," set apart for a purely religious purpose, should have adopted this hygienic element also into its composition ; but with such a fair arena of enlargement opened periodically, bringing perfect freedom from the trammels of engrossing professions, he is not a wise man who does not devote at least one part of the Christian Sabbath to the serious work of moral self-review. Not a few severe criticisms have been made by foreigners on what has been called the " bitter observance " of the Sunday by the Scotch ; but these hasty critics ought to have reflected how much of the ON MORAL CULTURE. J13 solidity, sobriety, and general reliability of the Scottish character is owing to their serious and thoughtful observance of these recurrent periods of sacred rest. The eternal whirl and fiddle of life, so characteristic of our gay Celtic neigh- bors across the Channel, is apt to beget an excitability and a frivolity in the conduct of even, the most serious affairs, which is incom- patible with true moral greatness. If we Scotch impart somewhat of an awful character to our piety by not singing on Sunday, the French certainly would march much more steadily, and more creditably, on the second day of the week, if they cultivated a more sober tone on the first. XVII. In connection with the delicate func- tion of moral self-review, it occurs naturally to mention Prayer. In this scientific age, when everything is analyzed, and anatomized, and tabulated, there is a tendency to talk of knowl- edge as a power to which all things are subject. But the maxim that knowledge is power is true only where knowledge is the main thing wanted. There are higher things than knowledge in the world ; there are living energies ; and in the moral world, certainly, it is not knowledge but aspiration that is the moving power, and the wing of aspiration is prayer. Where aspiration 114 0N MORAL CULTURE. is wanting, the soul creeps ; it cannot fly ; it is at best a caged bird, curiously busy in count- ing and classifying the bars of its own confine- ment. Of course, we do not mean that any person should be so full of his own little self, and so ignorant of the grandeur of the universe, as to besiege the ear of Heaven with petitions that the laws of the universe shall be changed any moment that may suit his convenience. We do not pray that we may alter the Divine decrees, but that our human will may learn to move in harmony with the Divine will. How far with regard to any special matter, not irrevocably fixed in the Divine concatenation of possibilities, our petition may prevail, we never can tell ; but this we do know, that the most natural and the most effectual means of keeping our own noblest nature in harmony with the source of all vital nobleness, is to hold high emotional communion with that source, and to plant ourselves humbly in that attitude of devout receptiveness which is the one be- coming attitude in the created towards the Creator. Practically, there is no surer test of a man's moral diathesis than the capacity of prayer. He, at least in" a Christian country, must be an extremely ignorant man, who could invoke the Divine blessing day after day, on acts of manifest turpitude, falsehood, or folly. In ON MORAL CULTURE. 115 the old heathen times, a man in certain circum- stances might perhaps, with a clear conscience, have prayed to a Dionysus or an Aphrodite to consecrate his acts of drunkenness or de- bauchery ; but, thanks to the preaching of the Galilean fishermen, we have got beyond that now ; and universal experience declares the fact that genuine private prayer (for I do not speak of course of repeating routine formularies), which is the vital element of a noble moral nature, is to the coarse, sensual, and selfish man, an atmosphere which he cannot breathe. Take, therefore, young man, the apostolic maxim with you — Pray without ceasing. Keep yourself always in an attitude of rever- ential dependence on the Supreme Source of all good. It is the most natural and speediest and surest antidote against that spirit of shallow self-confidence and brisk impertinence so apt to spring up with the knowledge without charity which puffeth up and edifieth not. What a pious tradition has taught us to do daily before our principal meal, as a comely ceremony, let us learn to do before every serious act of our life, not as a cold form, but as a fervid reality. Go forth to battle, brave young man, like David, with your stone ready, and your sling well poised ; but be sure that you are fighting the battle of the God of Israel, Il6 ON MORAL CULTURE. not of the devil. Whether you have a sword or a pen in your hand, wield neither the one nor the other in a spirit of insolent self-reliance or of vain self-exhibition ; and, not less in the hour of exuberant enjoyment than in the day of dark despondency and despair, be always ready to say, — " Bless me, even me also, O my Father! " A BOOK WORTH READING. BLACKIE'S FOUR PHASES OF MORALS: SOCRATES, ARISTOTLE, CHRISTIANITY, AND UTILITARIANISM. BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE, F. R. S. E. PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. One volume, i2mo, $1.50. Selecting Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, and Utilitarianism as the four great types, Prof. Blackie shows how the theories of the ancient schools intersect the activities of every-day life, and where they fall short of meeting the demands and necessities of the human soul. The volume is remarkably clear and incisive in style, and vigorous and stimulating in thought. CRITICAL NOTICES. From the Boston Daily Advertiser. The Professor succeeds in bringing out with great perspicacity the salient and distinguishing features of the four most remarkable phases or schools of moral science which have had and still have influence in determining the speculative opinions and practical conduct of the present civilized peoples. The style of these lectures is for the most part plain and always directed to the thought. From the Boston Watchman and Reflector. We regard this book of Prof Blackie's as containing by far the ablest vin- dication of the divinity of Christianity which the year has produced. In the wide sweep of its thought it takes in all those principles which underlie the various forms not only of ancient error but of modern unbelief. The spirit of finest scholarship, of broadest charity, and of a reverent faith, pervades the entire book. From the New York Christian A dvocate. The author is eminently orthodox, both philosophically and theologically. .... It is a thoughtful work, and must prove highly suggestive of thought to all who may read it appreciatively. From the New York Examiner and Chronicle. His style is very readable, often beautiful. — at once adorning and illus- trating his themes by varied allusions to the best ancient and modern lit- erature. From the New York Evangelist. The volume shows a large acquaintance with the subject, and is uniforml clear and often eloquent. Sent £ost-p>aid upon receipt of price by SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG, & CO. 654 Broadway, New York. ANOTHER GREAT HISTORICAL WORK. B>$p IjJiskFg of CffFFrF, By Prof. Dr, ERNST CURTIUS. Translated by ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, M.A., Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, Prof, of History in Owen's College, Manchester. To be completed in four or five vols., crown 8vo, at $2.50 per volume* Printed upon Tinted Paper, Uniform with Mommsen's History of Rome, and the Library Edition of Froude's History of England. VOLS. I., II., AND III., NOW READY. Curtius' History of Greece is similar in plan and purpose to Mommsen's History of Rome, with which it deserves to rank in every respect as one of the great masterpieces of historical literature. Avoiding the minute details which overburden other similar works, it groups together in a very picturesque manner all the important events in the history of this kingdom, which has exercised such a wonderful influence upon the world's civilization. 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A Monument of Modern Scholarship -+~++~ oIdfMY ISifllopps of JPlafo, <$. THE DIALOGUES OF PLATO. Translated into English, with Analysis and Introductions, by B. JowEyrr, M.A., Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and Regius Professor of Greek. Four Volumes Crown 8vo, $12.00 per set, in Cloth, or ONE HALF THE PRICE OF THE ENGLISH EDITION. CRITICAL ESTIMATES. From the New York Tribune. The present work of Professor Jowett will be welcomed with profound interest aa the only adequate endeavor to transport the most precious monument of Grecian thought among the familiar treasures of English literature. The noble reputation of Professor Jowett both as a thinker and a scholar, it may be premised, however, is a valid guarantee for the excellence of his performance. 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