UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 LORD PLAYFAIR 
 CANON BROWNE 
 MR. GOSCHEN 
 MR. JOHN M.O'RLEY 
 SIR JAMES PAGET 
 PROF. MAX MULLER 
 DUKE OF ARGYLL 
 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 PROFESSOR J EBB 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 Chap. LTH 
 Shelf ^ £ 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 ^-^nX^aXtLkx«L^x^ 
 
 q UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
 JOSEPH MCDONOUGH 
 RARE BOOKS 
 
 ALBANY - NY. 
 
ASPECTS OF MODEEN STUDY 
 
 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
C^aSooC JxHis^A. C^M ( 
 
 ASPECTS 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN STUDY 
 
 BEING 
 
 UNIVEBSITY EXTENSION ADDKESSES 
 
 BY LORD PLAYFAIE, CANON BROWNE, MR. GOSCHEN, 
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY, SIR JAMES PAGET, 
 
 PROFESSOR MAX MULLER, THE DUKE OF ARGYLL, 
 
 THE BISHOP OF DURHAM, AND 
 
 PROFESSOR JEBB 
 
 / 
 
 )> 
 
 Hotttfcm 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1894 
 
 V 
 
 All rights reser, 
 

 28878 
 
l/. 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The Addresses included in this volume were delivered 
 to the students of the London Society for the Exten- 
 sion of University Teaching at the Annual Meetings 
 held in the Mansion House from year to year by the 
 courtesy of the Lord Mayor. These gatherings were 
 first instituted in 1886, the tenth year of the Society's 
 existence. By means of them the Council of the 
 London Society sought to attain two chief ends. On 
 the one hand they hoped through the medium of 
 Addresses by men of distinction to hold before the 
 students a high ideal of educational purpose, and on 
 the other to promote and foster a sense of corporate 
 educational life among the workers from the various 
 Extension Centres in different parts of London. The 
 importance of these objects will be readily acknow- 
 ledged. Men and women desirous of carrying on 
 studies in which they are interested, but unable to 
 give their whole time to education, find at the Univer- 
 sity Extension Lectures stimulus, guidance, and oppor^ 
 
vi UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 trinities for intellectual training which the conditions 
 of adult life render it impossible for them to seek at 
 a College. The Annual Meetings have brought these 
 scattered workers together, and have helped them to 
 realise that they are taking part in a great movement. 
 That the opportunity of hearing the Addresses was 
 highly valued could not be doubted by any one who 
 witnessed the crowded state of the hall on each occa- 
 sion, and the Council hope by the publication of this 
 volume to extend the inspiring and helpful influence 
 of the Addresses to a larger audience and over a 
 wider area. 
 
 The growth and development of the University 
 Extension movement, since it was inaugurated by the 
 University of Cambridge twenty-one years ago, has 
 been remarkable, and its history is peculiarly interest- 
 ing and instructive. The purpose of the originators 
 was to promote the development of student life side 
 by side with business life — to create a new type of 
 students, carrying on into mature years their higher 
 education concurrently with the occupations of every- 
 day life. The members of the London Society are 
 able to recall with satisfaction that the foundation of 
 that Society in 1876 was the first step taken outside 
 Cambridge to follow the lead of that University in 
 this new sphere of educational activity. Two years 
 
PREFACE vil 
 
 later similar work was undertaken by the University 
 of Oxford, and since then other Universities in the 
 United Kingdom, notably Yictoria, have followed in 
 the same path. England is now covered with a net- 
 work of Centres, and something has been done in the 
 same direction in other parts of the kingdom. The 
 movement has been introduced into English-speaking 
 countries all over the world, and has aroused great 
 interest on the Continent of Europe, where schemes 
 are being started on similar lines. This rapid pro- 
 gress proves that the system is well adapted to meet 
 certain pressing educational needs of the time. At 
 the present moment educational interest in London 
 gathers largely around the proposed Teaching Univer- 
 sity. Had London possessed a Teaching University 
 in 1876 the formation of the London Society would, 
 in all probability, have been unnecessary, as the work 
 would doubtless have been undertaken by the Univer- 
 sity itself. As it was the University of London did 
 all that was possible under its constitution by consent- 
 ing, in conjunction with the Universities of Oxford 
 and Cambridge, to appoint a Universities' Joint Board 
 to co-operate with the Council of the Society in carry- 
 ing on the work. The Council look to the eventual 
 establishment of a University which will have power 
 to take up and carry on into higher stages of efficiency 
 
vm UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 and perfection this work, the necessity for which 
 their operations during eighteen years have abundantly 
 proved. They feel that the results of the educational 
 experiments of the last two decades in the extension 
 of University Teaching amply justify a belief in the 
 possibility of an active trained intellectual life for all 
 who are willing to pursue it, without question of age, 
 social position, or condition of life, and they regard 
 the development of adequate educational opportunities 
 for evening students as a matter of prime national 
 importance. 
 
 The Addresses, with the exception of those by Lord 
 Playfair and Canon Browne, are arranged in chrono- 
 logical order. These two, unlike the others, deal with 
 the University Extension movement itself rather than 
 with special aspects of study, and it has, therefore, 
 seemed natural to place them together at the beginning 
 of the volume. 
 
 ElTD! " EOBEETS, 
 
 Secretary of the London Society for the 
 Extension of University Teaching. 
 
 Charterhouse. London, E.C. 
 tth June 1894. 
 
lY 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 The Evolution of University Extension as a part of 
 Popular Education. By the Right Hon. Lord Play- 
 fair, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. 1894 . 1 
 
 The Future of University Extension in London. By 
 
 the Rev. Canon Browne. 1892 . . .' .17 
 
 Hearing, Reading, and Thinking. By the Right Hon. 
 
 G. J. Goschen, D.C.L., M.P. 1886 . . .39 
 
 The Study of Literature. By the Right Hon. John 
 
 Morley, M.P. 1887 . . . . .57 
 
 Scientific Study. By Sir James Paget, Bart., F.R.S. 
 
 1888 84 
 
 Some Lessons of Antiquity. By Professor F. Max 
 
 Muller, LL.D. 1889 . ' . . . .102 
 
 The Application of the Historical Method to Economic 
 Science. By His Grace the Duke of Argyll, K.G. 
 1890 . . . . . • • 123 
 
 Ideals. By the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Westcott). 1891 154 
 
 The Influence of the Greek Mind on Modern Life. 
 
 By Professor Jebb, Litt.D., M.P. 1893 . . 168 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF UNIVERSITY EXTEN- 
 SION AS A PAET OF POPULAR EDUCA- 
 TION 
 
 / 
 By the Right Hon. Lord Playfair, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. 
 
 1894 
 
 Recently the London University Commission, of 
 which I was a member, has made its report, and 
 during its sitting we received much evidence in favour 
 of the University Extension Scheme, as well as some 
 evidence hostile to it. I think the opposition arose 
 from a misunderstanding of its origin and purposes, 
 and upon these I should like to address you. The 
 extension of University knowledge and educational 
 methods to the people who are unable to attend 
 University courses during the day, is one of the pro- 
 cesses of evolution of popular education which has 
 been trying to organise itself for about a century. 
 
 Universities in former times used to be more 
 largely attended than now. Bologna University was 
 said to be attended by 20,000 students, and Paris 
 and Oxford by 30,000. These numbers are open to 
 doubt, though, as there were few grammar schools, and 
 
 B 
 
2 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 as students entered at ten and eleven years of age, 
 the Universities were no doubt more frequented than 
 they are now, and by a poorer class of students, who 
 often begged their way to the University from mon- 
 astery to monastery. Chaucer alludes to this when he 
 says : — 
 
 Busily gan for the souls to pray 
 
 Of them that gave him wherewith to scolay. 
 
 Education, in the sense we are now considering it, 
 as attainable by the people at large in their hours of 
 leisure after their day's work, is the product of the 
 present century. Let us consider the conditions under 
 which the demands for it arose. 
 
 Up to the last quarter of the eighteenth century 
 the learned class and the working class were separated 
 by a high impassable wall, because each spoke in a 
 language that the other could not understand. For 
 about two thousand years the learned class spoke, 
 thought, and talked in Latin, and for about two 
 centuries Greek had been raised as a second wall of 
 separation between the learned and the people. No 
 doubt the people were creating knowledge of another 
 kind by enlarging their conception of things, while the 
 learned were dealing with literature and philosophy 
 through words. I do not allude to the early days 
 when Borne and Greece spoke their own vernacular, and 
 when their writers and philosophers largely recruited 
 themselves from the people. The learned class were 
 then the sons of citizens, and were in possession of 
 the accumulated experiences of the people. I refer 
 to a much later period, after the dark ages, when the 
 light gradually illuminating the darkness was the 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 3 
 
 borrowed light of Borne and Greece. It was then 
 that the learned linked themselves to the past, and 
 separated themselves from the present. Then it was 
 that they adopted the ancient languages as the expres- 
 sion of their thoughts and teaching, while the people 
 went on their way without caring for the pedants 
 whose very language was incomprehensible to them. 
 
 Among the people the industries were growing by 
 experience, and modern science was being evolved as 
 an outcome of their enlarged conceptions. Working 
 men then made journeys to enlarge these experiences, 
 and the memory of the old habit still survives in the 
 industries under such familiar names as "journeyman 
 carpenter," "journeyman blacksmith," and so on; for 
 the tyro was a mere apprentice until he graduated to 
 his full position as a working man by an education 
 not got at school but obtained in journeys, which en- 
 larged his experiences and knowledge. When I was 
 a student in Germany in 1838, I recollect constantly 
 meeting parties of these journeymen on the way from 
 one town to another. An old German saying, freely 
 translated, explains how technical education was 
 attained in this way : — 
 
 Who shall pupil be ? Every one. 
 
 Who shall craftsman be ? Who good work has done. 
 
 Who shall master be 1 He whose thought has won. 
 
 By the end of the fifteenth century most of our 
 present industries were fairly established in this way. 
 During that century the printing press was introduced, 
 and knowledge was ultimately widely spread as well 
 as conserved. In the sixteenth century newspapers 
 were published in the vernacular, and the people got a 
 
4 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 powerful means of recording their mental conceptions, 
 which were chiefly those of developing science. - In 
 England, however, newspapers did not fully establish 
 themselves till the period of the Civil war, and then 
 they were poor in quality. They scarcely came into 
 the life of the nation till the reign of Queen Anne, 
 during Marlborough's victories. The learned class 
 still adhered to their Latin and Greek, and kept them- 
 selves outside these great movements. Latin was, in 
 fact, the universal language for learning, being a sort 
 of glorified volapuk. Sometimes a treatise was written 
 in the vernacular, as when Bacon wrote in English 
 The Advancement of Learning, though he asked his 
 friend Dr. Playfair to translate it into Latin, because, he 
 says, " The privateness of the language, wherein it is 
 written, limits my readers," and its translation into 
 Latin " would give a second birth of that work." So 
 also when Bacon sends his Be Augmentis Scientiarum 
 to the Prince of Wales, he says it is in Latin, " as a 
 book which will live and be a citizen of the world, as 
 English books are not." The vernacular was, however, 
 being introduced into our schools, though it was not 
 generally used till the close of the eighteenth centur}^. 
 Learned papers and discourses were now published in 
 English, although at first they were duplicated into 
 Latin. A general use of the vernacular made a 
 common road on which both the learned classes and the 
 working classes could again travel, as they had done in 
 the grand old days of Greece and Eome, when Plato 
 and Aristotle and Cicero and Horace spoke and wrote 
 and thought in the common languages of the people. 
 
 Now began the desire for popular education, of 
 which University Extension is one of the signs. Let 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 5 
 
 us see how that form of popular education became 
 evolved in this movement among the people, who 
 were shut out from the possibility of attending colleges 
 of learning. "Working men know that one of their 
 two hands must always be employed in earning their 
 daily bread, but they have another hand with which 
 they could work for their own improvement, and for 
 that of the community, if they only had the opportunity 
 and knew how to employ it. Before the age of printing- 
 books were necessarily costly, so the ancient method of 
 obtaining knowledge was to attend public lectures or 
 discourses, and they became the chief mode of higher 
 education. It was so in classical times, when people 
 flocked to the market-place in Athens to hear Socrates, 
 and to the groves of Academus to hear Plato, or 
 joined the Peripatetics in the walks of the Lyceum to 
 listen to the scientific teaching of Aristotle. So it con- 
 tinued in every country where learning was cared for 
 at all, and poor students went, begging on the way, to 
 listen to lectures by Abelard in France, Chrysoloras in 
 Italy, or Erasmus in Oxford and then at Cambridge. 
 When printing presses multiplied books, knowledge 
 could be acquired by those who could read, and was 
 no longer confined to the few who could discourse. 
 Public libraries for the people are, however, only 
 inventions of our own day, and at the beginning of 
 this century did not exist. 
 
 The people readily co-operated with Birkbeck and 
 others in founding institutes of their own where they 
 could read and hear lectures. One of the earliest of 
 these exists in the City under the well known name of 
 the "Birkbeck Institute," which has now a new lease 
 of active life as a systematic school of science and 
 
6 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 commerce. The people in the early part of the century 
 were only groping in the dark for the kind of higher 
 education which they desired. The Mechanics' Insti- 
 tutes supplemented small and defective libraries by 
 single and unconnected lectures. In fact, the associ- 
 ated members of these institutes scarcely knew what 
 they wanted. Some joined the institutes for amuse- 
 ment, some for instruction. Both were proper objects 
 of desire, but were difficult to amalgamate, so a 
 strange mixture was made, often not very wisely, by 
 the inexperienced managers of the New Mechanics' 
 Institutes. One of the most prosperous of them asked 
 me to give a single lecture on Chemistry, in the year 
 1846, and sent me its programme for the preceding 
 year. It was as follows : " Wit and Humour, with 
 Comic Songs — Women Treated in a Novel Manner — 
 Legerdemain and Spirit-rapping — The Devil (with 
 illustrations) — The Heavenly Bodies and the Stellar 
 System — Palestine and the Holy Land — Speeches by 
 Eminent Friends of Education, interspersed with 
 Music, to be followed by a Ball. Price to the whole, 
 2 s. 6d. Eefreshments in an Anteroom." Compare 
 your programme of sound work with this motley 
 assemblage of Professors, Ventriloquists, Conjurors, and 
 Musicians, and you will see how much the scheme of 
 University Extension has moulded the demand for 
 knowledge among the people, and turned it into 
 channels which will refresh and irrigate the various 
 districts through which it passes. The Mechanics' 
 Institutions where they still exist have altered them- 
 selves into systematic schools, either scientific, technical, 
 or artistic, but they have still left outside the people 
 who have not been trained to use schools. 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 7 
 
 The "universities associated to supply this want. 
 In the universities there are always a number of 
 zealous graduates who desire to extend to others the 
 knowledge possessed by themselves. They are ani- 
 mated by the spirit of the famous Loup de Ferrie-res, 
 who, a thousand years ago, wrote to Charles the Bold : 
 " I desire to teach what I have learned and am daily 
 learning." This spirit led to the scheme of University 
 Extension. Gradually, not yet completely, but surely, 
 the people who demand your courses of lectures appre- 
 ciate and follow them because they are systematic and 
 in proper sequence ; and because the lecturer also 
 becomes the tutor to each student who really desires 
 to understand and profit by the subject taught. In 
 ordinary popular lectures the lecturer treats his 
 audience as a mass, throwing his information broadcast 
 over it, ignorant as to where it may fall, and careless 
 as to whether the seed falls on fertile soil or on stony 
 places, where it can take no root. When the lecturer 
 acts also as a tutor he looks upon his audience as indi- 
 viduals, he drills his seed into productive soil, taking care 
 that the ground is prepared to receive it, and that each 
 seed gets its proper proportion of food-giving manure. 
 The minds of the teacher and the taught get into an 
 intellectual grapple, and as the former should be the 
 stronger man, he is enabled to drag the mind of the 
 student from the dark holes in which it may lurk into 
 the broad light of day. In a college or technical 
 school a tutorial system ought always to be combined 
 with the lectures. Under your system of peripatetic 
 lectures it is more difficult of application, but you do 
 much by the weekly exercises and final examination as 
 well as by making the courses consequential in series. 
 
8 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 The examiners for the certificates, who are not the 
 lecturers, testify by their University experience to the 
 good results which are attained. 
 
 To understand the object of the promoters of 
 University Extension it is important neither to exag- 
 gerate these results nor to depreciate the value of the 
 system. The main purpose is not to educate the 
 masses, but to permeate them with the desire for 
 intellectual improvement, and to show them methods 
 by which they can attain this desire. Every man, 
 who acquires a taste for learning and is imbued 
 with the desire to acquire more of it, becomes more 
 valuable as a citizen, because he is more intelligent and 
 perceptive. As Shakespeare says : — 
 
 Learning is but an adjunct to ourself . . . 
 It adds a precious seeing to the eye. 
 
 It is this addition of " a precious seeing to the eye " 
 which produces progress in science. Of the five gate- 
 ways of knowledge, the " eye gate " is not opened in- 
 differently to all. The range of vision of the bat and 
 of the eagle is very different. The most familiar 
 objects to man, like air and water, are nothing more 
 to the untutored intellect of man than the primrose 
 was to Peter Bell : — 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 Before the mind of man learns to question Nature, 
 he is apt to look for the explanations of phenomena to 
 the intellectual conceptions of his own untutored mind. 
 When he knows how to put an experimental question 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 9 
 
 to Nature lie is on the high road to knowledge — 
 prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae est. 
 
 Thales, who flourished in the seventh century before 
 Christ, was among the first philosophers to speculate 
 upon the constitution of the universe. He thought 
 everything was made out of water. The sun dipped in 
 the evening below the western wave, and rose out of 
 the ocean in the east mightily refreshed by its huge 
 drink — so the sun was made out of water. Water, as 
 the river Nile, overflowed the land of Egypt and crops 
 grew in luxuriance — so plants were made out of water. 
 The ocean, when it was stormy, was engaged in the 
 manufacture of earth, and the proof is that after a 
 storm new sand and pebbles are heaped on the shore. 
 The real nature of water was only discovered at the 
 end of last century. 
 
 How little our ancestors knew about air, and how 
 little we yet know about it in the nineteenth century ! 
 Yet, if mere observation could suffice to know a thing, 
 air should be better understood than anything in the 
 world. When the first man drew his first breath, he 
 began his familiarity with air. In each phase of his 
 life man meets it at every turn. It fans him with gentle 
 breezes, and it buffets him with storms. It is never 
 absent from every act of his existence, and the last act 
 of his life is his inability to respire it. The first philoso- 
 pher who studied air in a scientific way w T as Anaximenes. 
 He lived 548 years before Christ, and men have been 
 studying air ever since, and have laboriously brought 
 up our knowledge to our present position. Aristotle 
 brought his shrewd powers of observation upon air, 
 and established that it was a material and not a spirit. 
 A wonderful Saracen, called Alhazen, found that it had 
 
10 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 weight, and showed that it was heavier at the bottom 
 of a mountain than at its top. Galileo again took up 
 the study of air in 1630, and made important dis- 
 coveries which led Torricelli and others to the dis- 
 covery of the barometer. It is scarcely more than a 
 century since mankind gave up air as an element, and it 
 is only during my lifetime that we have been taught the 
 true chemical nature of air, and that its relations to the 
 great phenomena of vegetable and animal life have been 
 explained. When I was first a student of chemistry, 
 air consisted of nitrogen and oxygen with watery 
 vapour. During my life carbonic acid, ammonia, 
 nitric acid, ozone, and the wide range of bacteria and 
 like organisms have been discovered. We now know 
 that all the foulness of the living and the products 
 of the dead pass into air, and are changed into the 
 food of plants, so that the great abounding atmosphere 
 becomes the grave of organic death and the cradle of 
 organic life. Plants and animals mutually feed on 
 each other, and the death and dissolution of one 
 generation is needful for the growth of a succeeding 
 one. 
 
 You see how slowly intellectual conceptions of the 
 most common object gather round it. When we give 
 a lecture to an ignorant audience on such subjects as 
 air and water, we treat them from the platform of our 
 own times — the nineteenth century. But our audience 
 is not yet on that plane. In my old professorial days, 
 in lecturing to classes of working men, I sometimes 
 put myself on the platform on which Anaximenes 
 stood 548 years before Christ, and argued as he did 
 for the theory of the nature of air, and then mounted 
 the ladders, taking my hearers with me, from platform 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 11 
 
 to platform of discovery, till I reached that of the 
 present day. This historical mode of illustration gave 
 the working men a better notion of the methods of 
 scientific discovery, and taught them more completely 
 that science consists of conceptions obtained by a slow 
 but steady questioning of Nature. In ancient times 
 there was little science, because philosophers put the 
 questions to their own minds and not to Nature. The 
 rapid progress of science in recent times is due to our 
 questioning Nature by means of experiment. This is 
 the true foundation of science, as well expressed by 
 Wordsworth : — 
 
 ... To the solid ground 
 Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye. 
 
 This need of experimental inquiry does not apply to 
 mathematics, which was a product of the opening of 
 Greek civilisation, and the achievements of the Greek 
 geometers, Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius are still 
 admirable at the present day. 
 
 If the untutored senses be sufficient to appreciate 
 and understand what you see with your own eyes, and 
 hear with your own ears, it would not have required 
 many thousand years for mankind to acquire our 
 present imperfect knowledge about air or water. In 
 explaining to our students the knowledge of to-day, 
 I think it would often be useful to show how it has 
 been attained, and how our crude faculties have 
 become tutored faculties by close thinking, observation, 
 and experiment upon the most familiar objects about 
 us. Theories of the past have fallen as the leaves of 
 trees fall, but while they existed they drew nutriment 
 to the parent stem of knowledge. The theory of 
 
12 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 to-day is the error of to-morrow. Error in science is 
 nothing but a shadow cast by the strong light of truth. 
 Theories, as they arise, are an absolute necessity for 
 the progress of science, because they collect in a com- 
 mon focus all the light which is shed upon a subject at 
 a particular period. The descriptions of and arguments 
 for the old theories I found very useful as ladders let 
 down from the nineteenth century platform, which 
 enabled my uneducated audience to mount to it by 
 graduated steps, until they came to the same level of 
 the science which I was trying to expound to them. 
 
 The world is still young, and science is never 
 old. It is sheer vanity for any generation to suppose 
 that their state of knowledge represents the final 
 triumph of truth. I think it is always useful in 
 educating in modern science to show how much we 
 owe to our ancestors by their laborious efforts to build 
 it up. We have inherited so much from the past. 
 Eoger Bacon, writing so long ago as 1267, said : " The 
 ancients have committed all the more errors just be- 
 cause they are the ancients, for in matters of learning 
 the youngest are in reality the oldest ; modern genera- 
 tions ought to surpass their predecessors because they 
 inherit their labours." This thought, three centuries 
 later, Francis Bacon put into his famous apothegm — 
 Antiquitas Seculi, Juveniles Mundi. 
 
 It is no small object in view that your purpose is 
 to permeate the mass of people with the desire for 
 knowledge. It is chiefly among them that great dis- 
 coverers in science and great inventors in industry 
 arise. I would refer you, as an illustration, to the 
 past discoverers who have adorned the lecture table of 
 the Eoyal Institution in Albemarle Street. With 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 13 
 
 scarcely an exception they have sprung directly from 
 the people. The original founder was Benjamin 
 Thompson, afterwards Count Eumford, a provincial 
 schoolmaster from New England ; and the Institution 
 has had as successive professors Sir Humphry Davy, 
 the son of a wood-carver; Young, illustrious in 
 optics, the son, I think, of a yeoman ; Faraday, a news- 
 boy ; and Tyndall, who was of humble origin. All of 
 these men sprang from the people. Among inventors 
 this origin from the people is still more marked. 
 Watt was an instrument maker ; Wheatstone, who in- 
 vented our telegraphs, was a maker of musical instru- 
 ments ; and Bell, who added the telephone, was a 
 teacher of deaf mutes ; Stephenson, the inventor of 
 locomotives, an engine-tender at a colliery ; Arkwright, 
 who revolutionised the cotton industry, was a barber. 
 These instances might be multiplied indefinitely both 
 from modern and ancient history. 
 
 The great humanising movements of the world have 
 sprung from the people. The Founder of our religion 
 did not disdain to be called the son of Joseph the 
 carpenter, and He took His disciples from among the 
 working men around Him. Paul the tentmaker and 
 Peter the fisherman found time to earn their daily 
 bread and to diffuse the religion of Christ. The 
 growth of philosophy in Greece depended upon men 
 who were using one hand to win their daily bread, 
 and the other to mould humanity. Socrates was a 
 sculptor; Plato and Zeno were actively engaged in 
 commerce ; Aristotle was the son of a physician. 
 They founded schools of thought, but they themselves 
 were the products of Athens and Corinth when they 
 were active seats of industrial activity. 
 
14 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 I hope I have made myself intelligible when I 
 argue that the University Extension Movement is 
 doing work of its own kind most valuable, not as an 
 education of the people but as a means of permeating 
 the people with a desire to be educated, and by giving 
 them methods and subjects which they can use in. 
 continuing their education. Your opponents still 
 object to the need of doing this, because they quote 
 cases, such as I have mentioned, like Faraday, Watt, 
 and Stephenson, where men of the people, even in the 
 absence of schools, educated themselves without aid 
 from others and became great discoverers ; so they 
 say it is much more easy now to do likewise when 
 technical schools are covering the country, I have 
 spent a large portion of my life in helping to found 
 these technical schools, and, therefore, I fully ap- 
 preciate their importance, but they do not even touch 
 the ground covered by your movement. Such schools 
 look to the education of the man for his daily work, 
 and only give what the Germans call b7vdtstuclien, 
 while the University Extension Movement professes to 
 give mental culture, or what the Germans might call 
 verstandniss-stuclien. No doubt one of your triumphs 
 will be that the University Extension Scheme will 
 tend largely to feed schools of science and technical 
 schools with students incited to learn through your 
 permeating influence in creating a taste for knowledge. 
 This is as it should be. 
 
 During my life I have enjoyed the friendship of 
 many men who have risen by their own. great talents, 
 such as Dalton, Faraday, Stephenson, Wheatstone, and 
 Livingstone. I knew the great African discoverer, 
 when he rested his book on a spinning-jenny, snatch- 
 
LORD PLAYFAIR 15 
 
 ing sentence after sentence as he passed it at work ; 
 and I attended the evening classes with him in 
 Glasgow, and saw him pay the pennies he had saved 
 during the day as a cotton-spinner. As I am recall- 
 ing old memories, I may say that three companions 
 studied together in those days. One was James 
 Young, a carpenter ; Livingstone, a cotton-spinner ; and 
 myself, the son of a physician. Young the carpenter 
 established a new industry, and became very rich. 
 His purse was always open to Livingstone for his 
 African explorations; and, although he would never 
 acknowledge it, my election committees never lacked 
 funds from some mysterious donor, who I always 
 believed was my old friend, for the contributions 
 ceased at his death. Were my old friends now alive, 
 I would call them all as witnesses as to how much 
 trouble and suffering would have been saved to them, 
 had they been able when young to enjoy the advan- 
 tages which you now offer to the youth of this 
 country by giving them the materials and methods of 
 education. It is quite true that men of genius will 
 cut out steps for themselves in the toilsome ascent of 
 knowledge. The mistake of the argument is obvious. 
 All the dwellers in a plain do not surmount the moun- 
 tain which frowns upon them at the end of the valley. 
 A few daring spirits may reach the summit unaided 
 and pass into the world beyond, but the great mass of 
 men remain in the lowlands where they were born. 
 We can induce many of these to make excursions 
 which will brighten their existence, by making roads 
 and showing them how to use the roads. Perchance 
 in doing so we may come upon a genius and put him 
 on his way, and wish him God-speed ! The case 
 
16 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 should not be argued by contrasting a heaven-born 
 talent with ordinary ability. All systems of education 
 try to draw out the mental abilities of the scholar, but 
 they do not profess to give the gifts of God, or to 
 create special abilities in man. Such great men as 
 I have mentioned are discoverers of new truths in 
 science, and the bulk of mankind must be content to 
 live on a lower plane, but their life is made the 
 happier, more graceful and dignified, by helping them 
 to acquire some of that knowledge which shows them 
 how the world has advanced and how society has 
 been improved by the advances made in science, litera- 
 ture, and philosophy. 
 
 In our own time science has been the great civilis- 
 ing agency. Within my own memory, I have seen 
 the origin of five inventions, which have had more 
 profound effect than revolutions in altering the con- 
 dition of kingdoms and nations throughout the world. 
 I allude to steam locomotion, telegraphy, telephony, 
 photography, electric lighting, and electric locomotion. 
 The discoverers in science are the artisans of civilisa- 
 tion, their laboratories are the workshops, and their 
 instruments of precision and experiment are the tools 
 with which they perform their world labour. By the 
 system which you pursue the people are made to take 
 an intelligent interest in these modes of civilisation. 
 The most intelligent nation will in future be the greatest 
 nation, and your work is do your part in permeating 
 the people with this general intelligence, which is so 
 necessary for their prosperity in the competition of 
 the world. 
 
THE FUTURE OF UNIVERSITY EXTENSION 
 IN LONDON 
 
 ' By the Rev. Canon Browne 
 
 1892 
 
 My subject is, " The Future of University Extension in 
 London." Before we come to the future, and before 
 we deal specially with London, let us consider what 
 we mean by " University Extension." 
 
 In the first place, it is not a phrase used originally 
 by those who created the thing. That, at least, is my 
 recollection. When my friend Professor Stuart per- 
 suaded Dr. Lightfoot and Dr. Westcott, and two or 
 three other Cambridge men, to join with him in de- 
 veloping the system which he had devised, we called 
 it by a name analogous to that of another system which 
 we were working. We had local examinations, and 
 we called Professor Stuart's system Local Lectures. 
 
 There was a special fitness in this resemblance of 
 name. The Universities had for some years been 
 engaged in holding examinations at a number of places 
 in various parts of the kingdom, for such students as 
 entered for examination at these local centres. The 
 question then came, Cannot the University teach at 
 
 c 
 
18 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 local centres, and not examine only ? As the function 
 of the old Universities was specially to teach, within 
 their own walls, and only as a subsidiary work to 
 examine, it was evident that the request for teaching 
 at local centres, and not examination only, came to us 
 with much to recommend it. It is a matter of history 
 how rapidly the desire grew, how one body and another 
 took up the idea and worked it out. It is a matter of 
 common knowledge how large the work now is, how 
 many able men it has enlisted in its service, how many 
 thousands of men and women are its attached and 
 grateful supporters. 
 
 Now note, if you please, two points. The teaching 
 was to be of a University type. It was not to be 
 a set of popular lectures, delivered by a lecturer or 
 lecturers whose work ended when the last sentence of 
 the lecture was spoken. The sort of work which was 
 done in a college lecture-room was to be the type, — 
 that is to say, a lecture of a solid kind, on scientific 
 principles, conveying definite information on some 
 special point or points, and accompanied by some 
 endeavour on the part of the lecturer to ascertain how 
 far the class had followed him, and how far they had 
 got hold of the point or points to which he had 
 addressed himself. The audience were expected to 
 work quite as hard as the lecturer. The difference 
 between this and a popular lecture, however able, is 
 one not of degree but of kind. This is no attack 
 upon the popular lecture, which is an institution excel- 
 lent in its place and for popular audiences ; it is merely 
 an assertion of the fact that the University local lecture 
 from the first professed to be something of another 
 kind. Often not nearly so attractive in itself as a 
 
CANON BROWNE 19 
 
 popular lecture, often not nearly so well delivered as 
 by a popular lecturer, often attended by a few scores 
 only, in a room which the popular lecture would crowd 
 with as many hundreds, it still stuck to its principle 
 of solid information on a scientific method, and main- 
 tained that for students it was a more valuable, if often 
 a less brilliant thing, than the popular lecture. It 
 was what the student wanted, and what the student 
 ought to want, and for the student it was meant. 
 
 The other point is this. There was no use coming 
 to the University to ask for able men to be sent down 
 to local centres, to teach subjects taught already in the 
 schools of the place, or dealt with by a system of 
 private tuition. I have seen it remarked that we do 
 not teach Latin and Greek, Euclid and Algebra. The 
 simple reason is, that, as from the first it was our aim 
 to teach on a method different from that adopted in 
 ordinary lectures, so we determined that it was not our 
 business to handle subjects for the teaching of which 
 provision was already made in the place. That there 
 shall be the means of acquiring a knowledge of these 
 subjects, easily accessible to the students who may 
 desire to remedy their deficiencies in these respects, 
 will, I think, in the course of time, become a care of 
 the local committees in important districts. Many of 
 us, no doubt, have taken part in work of the kind. I 
 always remember with great pleasure a class of working 
 men which I had for some two or three years in French, 
 — men most of them connected with a great print- 
 ing business. And there is plenty of room for a great 
 deal of such work. But I have no doubt that the 
 central managing bodies have been wise in their prac- 
 tice of not themselves providing the teaching. You 
 
20 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 must be careful, however, to see, that when it is said 
 that Latin and Greek, and French and German, and 
 Euclid and Algebra, have practically no place in our 
 system, it is clearly understood what the real position 
 of the statement is. 
 
 And for whom was this higher type of teaching 
 intended ? The simple answer is, for all who wished 
 for teaching of the higher type, and could not get it 
 elsewhere. As a fact, I believe that the first calls 
 came from a group of ladies in a great town — now a 
 city — in the north-west of England ; from co-operators 
 at a great industrial centre ; and from workmen at a 
 great focus of railway works. I think that among 
 those who took a lead in the first of these calls, now 
 quite twenty years ago, one was foremost whose loss 
 the cause of women's education all over the world is 
 now mourning, at whose funeral, with its unique and 
 striking accompaniments, I was officiating a fortnight 
 ago at this hour, — I mean Miss Anne Clough, of Newn- 
 ham. Women have since that time worked out the 
 problem of their highest education in a very remark- 
 able manner indeed, and their educational zeal and 
 success in direct University work are one of the 
 features of the age. But those who have managed the 
 local lectures have found that there is no limit of 
 sex, age, occupation, or position, among those who 
 invoke their aid for the supply of guidance and in- 
 struction in study of an earnest character. They have 
 found, too, that the rise in the standard of elementary 
 education, and the many means young people have now 
 of carrying their elementary education further, have very 
 largely increased the numbers of those who can profit 
 by the system of University Extension. 
 
CANON BROWNE 21 
 
 We come, then, to this, that the local lectures were 
 an extension of the University in two respects. First, 
 in geographical area — we took our University methods 
 into all parts of the kingdom to which we were- asked 
 to take them; and, secondly, in the kind of persons 
 taught — we extended University teaching to whole 
 classes of persons who were altogether outside the 
 classes from which most of our resident University 
 students were drawn. 
 
 But it soon became evident that there was to be 
 yet another meaning in University Extension. I have 
 said that we did not teach such things as Latin and 
 Greek, Euclid and Algebra, the ordinary basis of educa- 
 tion of the higher kind, because it was for others to do 
 that. But was it impossible to apply what I have 
 called University methods to subjects which did not 
 ordinarily form part of the studies of the University ? 
 The three sets of people whom I have mentioned, as 
 making the first calls for University Extension, or 
 Local Lectures as I always called the system officially, 
 and as my University still officially calls it, asked, I 
 think, for lectures in Astronomy, Political Economy, 
 and Mechanics. Those were all of them subjects of 
 University study, and able men were found willing to 
 go. But a large number of those who invoked our 
 help begged for assistance in studying subjects which 
 were scarcely or not all included among what were 
 called University subjects. Now I have seen since 
 my undergraduate days a very remarkable extension 
 in the number and character of University subjects — 
 subjects, that is, whose study is encouraged and re- 
 warded at the Universities. When I went up to 
 Cambridge, Latin and Greek and Mathematics were 
 
22 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 the great subjects, the only subjects in which degrees 
 in honours could be taken ; and for men who were not 
 ambitious of intellectual honours there were added, to 
 a modicum of the subjects mentioned, Evidences of 
 Christianity, and some simple Moral Philosophy, and 
 some parts of the Old and New Testaments. It is 
 forty years since I first became a member of the 
 University, and in those forty years the following sub- 
 jects have been added to those in which men can take 
 a degree in honours : — Moral Sciences, Natural Sciences, 
 Theology, Law, History, Semitic Languages, Indian 
 Languages, Mediaeval and Modern Languages. That 
 is, I suppose, a much larger area of University Exten- 
 sion, within the University itself, than all the previous 
 history of the University can show. And for men 
 who are not ambitious of intellectual honours as the 
 result of their Cambridge course, there are many 
 avenues to a degree, when once the common require- 
 ments of Latin, Greek, Euclid, Algebra, and Mechanics 
 have been met, which were not open to men when I 
 was an undergraduate. Indeed, many of them date 
 from very recent times. The man who does not 
 read for honours can now devote the second and 
 larger part of his three years to any one of the follow- 
 ing subjects, by any one of which he can proceed to 
 the ordinary B.A. degree, and not one of which was 
 open to men at the time I speak of : — Theology, Logic, 
 Political Economy, History, Chemistry, Geology, Botany, 
 Zoology, Physiology, Mechanism and Applied Science, 
 Music, Modern Languages. There are, besides, other 
 avenues to the ordinary degree — Mathematics, Classics, 
 Law. Thus we have in all, in place of the two triposes 
 for honour men, and the one common poll examina- 
 
CANON BROWNE 23 
 
 tion for all poll men, of forty years ago, no less than 
 ten triposes, and fifteen avenues to the ordinary B.A. 
 degree. 
 
 Nor does this exhaust the Extension to which I am 
 calling your attention. Many of the tripos examina- 
 tions have become themselves a sort of nest of triposes. 
 The old classical tripos, for instance, was an examina- 
 tion in scholarship. But now the scholar is invited, 
 after having given proof of the sufficiency of his 
 scholarship, to specialise in one of five branches of 
 study, namely, Pure Scholarship, the Philosophy of 
 Greece and Eome, the History of Greece and Eome, the 
 Archaeology of Greece and Eome, the Language of 
 Greece and Eome. And in any of these branches the 
 able student can obtain the highest honours the 
 University can bestow. And so I might go through 
 one and another of the ten triposes, and show what a 
 hydra - headed thing the three - legged creature has 
 become. 
 
 That is a marvellous University Extension, within 
 the walls of the University itself; and who shall say 
 that we have reached finality ? It is true that in each 
 case we demand from the student evidence that he has 
 acquired knowledge to a certain extent of Latin and 
 Greek and Mathematics — and the minimum standard 
 is not so low as it is sometimes supposed to be — but 
 we allow the student to give this evidence at the very 
 beginning of his University course, or before he has 
 entered upon his course at all, and we regard the 
 honour student as spending practically the whole of 
 his course, and the poll student as spending quite half 
 his course, in studying that one of the many other 
 branches which he selects. University Extension, as 
 
24 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 we use the phrase in our society, becomes pregnant 
 with the possibility of meanings, when we regard it in 
 the light of such considerations as the recent history of 
 the Universities themselves afford. He would be a 
 bold man who would venture to say that University 
 Extension has not large developments yet in store for 
 us or our successors. To go no further than the pre- 
 sent, in my own University they are considering the 
 establishment of a Physical Sciences and Mechanical 
 Sciences tripos, in principal connection with the School 
 of Engineering. And I need not tell you with what 
 valour and pungency a number of our friends are 
 demanding that English literature shall be treated by 
 the universities as an educational subject of the 
 highest value, its scientific study worthy of the best 
 encouragement and reward they can give. 
 
 It is as well to remark, in passing, that it is not 
 every English University that requires from all its 
 students a preliminary knowledge of all these sub- 
 jects, Latin, Greek, Euclid, and Algebra. With us, in 
 Cambridge, I daresay the requirement indicates the 
 sort of men we wish to have as students within our 
 walls, rather than suggests that, in our opinion, a man 
 cannot be a serious student, worthy of being recognised 
 as such, who has not a preliminary knowledge of all 
 of those four branches of learning. For myself, I 
 hope that we shall not cease to require this from the 
 students who come to Cambridge to prepare for a 
 degree. But that does not in the least interfere with 
 the respect I feel for the earnest student whose school- 
 days gave him no opportunity for learning what other 
 boys of his age learned as a mere matter of course. 
 He turns, as an adult man, to the study of that which 
 
CANON BROWNE 25 
 
 is within his reach, no doubt often with the wish 
 that his reach were wider ; and he turns to the study 
 with a zest and a success which I heartily wish those 
 others showed a little more than they sometimes do. 
 
 There is yet another sense in which experience has 
 taught us that " University Extension " may be taken. 
 In the resident Universities men come to us for three 
 years, take their degree, and go. The great mass of 
 them have no further connection with the University, 
 so far as study is concerned. Now I take it that a 
 considerable number of those who attend a course of 
 University Extension lectures desire to continue to 
 attend such courses, and see no reason why they 
 should not for years go on attending them. Some, I 
 know, regard attendance at these lectures as the most 
 interesting feature in their lives, a feature of increas- 
 ingly satisfactory interest. What a delightful mean- 
 ing of " University Extension " it would be, that 
 students extended the time during which they attended 
 teaching of a University type from three years to six, 
 from six years to nine; that students regarded this steady 
 intellectual work not as the work of three years, to be 
 followed by a degree and then abandoned for practical 
 life, but as the constant companion of practical life ; 
 not as a happy memory of the past, but as a fresh and 
 living integral part of a happy fruitful present. That, 
 I know, is the meaning that many a University 
 Extension student has found in the phrase University 
 Extension. 
 
 And now as to our future in London. What can 
 we hope for, what do we deserve ? 
 
 We have a right to feel certain of the approval of 
 the statesman. I suppose that among the objects and 
 
26 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 aims of the true statesman, in these days of cheap 
 newspapers- and of free discussion, this must rank 
 high, — that his countrymen should be able to form 
 true judgments as to the bearing of the facts and the 
 arguments which they read and hear. Do not 
 imagine that I suggest that the true statesman will 
 wish, as a matter of course, to neutralise the effects of 
 a cheap press and free discussion. I am making no 
 reference whatever to the character of that w T hich 
 people read and hear. I simply mean what I say, 
 that the man who has the interests of his country at 
 heart will wish that the people should be so trained as 
 to be able to form fairly sound judgments on facts and 
 arguments put before them. Now, as I cast my eye 
 down the long lists of subjects in the reports on your 
 work, I find a large number of subjects which are just 
 such as are serviceable from this point of view. I 
 suggested at the outset that if we are to understand 
 the present of University Extension, and to prepare for 
 its future, it is well to have an eye to the facts and 
 the lessons of the past. I need not say that in no 
 part of the work of your society is greater interest 
 taken than in the history of special periods of our 
 own national life ; and I have observed that when a 
 centre becomes practised in the study of such history, 
 there arises a desire for some knowledge of compara- 
 tive history. Classes who have studied the history of 
 Elizabeth's time in England form a wish to study the 
 contemporary history of the Low Countries ; at a later 
 date they desire to know something of the reign of 
 Louis XIV. I feel sure that a real statesman would 
 earnestly desire to see these two branches of history, 
 our own history and comparative European history, 
 
CANON BROWNE 27 
 
 carefully studied by as many as possible of those for 
 whose welfare he labours : — our own history, that they 
 may realise the ceaseless drift, the continuous move- 
 ment, of the nation's life; comparative history, that 
 they may learn of how many combining influences ex- 
 ternal to ourselves the statesman has to take account. 
 
 And, apart from the subject of study, the fact of 
 study should ensure for us the sympathetic help of 
 men who are — to whatever party in the State they 
 incline — worthily in a position of authority and 
 power. There are nations in Europe where the 
 students are a body liable to dangerous explosions of 
 political feeling. There are places nearer home where 
 the students keep in fairly active habits of body and 
 mind the officials who attend to their disciplinary 
 well-being. But the students whom the statesman 
 sees, when he glances our way, are men and women 
 who spend the little leisure they have from their work 
 in life in quiet, peaceful study ; students whose studies 
 predispose them to orderliness, students who in times 
 of disturbance would be found a nucleus of staidness ; 
 students who can look beyond the excitement of the 
 moment and analyse the forces that produce it, and 
 estimate the mischief it will work; students who to 
 the warning lessons of history have added the civilis- 
 ing, softening charms of the noblest literature in the 
 world. Not only so, but another of the most attract- 
 ive and successful branches of your work should 
 appeal strongly to the instincts of the statesman — I 
 mean the work in natural science — work which is done 
 on the University principle of making clear the 
 reasons for observed facts, rather than centring the 
 interest upon a description of the facts. When we 
 
28 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 hear so much as we have to hear of industries in 
 which we were pre-eminent falling gradually into the 
 hands of other nations ; when we hear of the inven- 
 tions and applications of inventions which enable 
 other nations to meet us in the open market ; when 
 we think of what it would mean to the destinies and 
 to the civilising work of our Empire, if it fell behind in 
 the material race, — I cannot conceive anyone, who 
 understands the interests of the Empire, being indiffer- 
 ent to the fact that at scores of centres, to hundreds 
 and thousands of men and women, we teach from a 
 scientific standpoint the elements of the natural sciences. 
 
 We have a right to feel certain of the approval of 
 the philanthropist. Very early in the experience of 
 those who managed the first attempt at University 
 Extension, it became evident that we were doing 
 much more than an intellectual work. We were 
 giving an interest in life, and an interest of a worthy 
 kind, to many and many a one who sorely needed 
 something outside and different from the ordinary 
 routine of life. We were brightening existence to 
 them. And many a solitary student, who had none to 
 sympathise with his work, none to guide him, none to 
 lead him to higher effort, came forth from his solitari- 
 ness, and found companionship in study, found guid- 
 ance, found breadth. Pleasant as are many of the 
 evidences of real usefulness which abound in the 
 experience of all who have helped on this work 
 through a series of years, none have been to me more 
 pleasant than the assurance that in doing a work 
 educational, intellectual, we have done a work of true 
 philanthropy. 
 
 We have a right to claim the approval and support 
 
CANON BROWNE 29 
 
 of all who are versed in educational work, and take a 
 broad view of the possibilities of such work. Here, in 
 London, we present to the consideration of such 
 persons a problem quite different from that of Oxford 
 and Cambridge, quite different from that of any non- 
 University town, however large. We offer for his 
 consideration the existence of thousands of earnest 
 students, living the ordinary course of their lives 
 within the area of what we call London, not living 
 here because they are students, but students because 
 they live here. This is an adjunct to the ordinary 
 work of a University such as no other University 
 possesses. It has grown up of itself, without en- 
 couragement, grown to its present dimensions by the 
 sheer force of the principle which is its life. To what 
 it may not grow if it is encouraged, systematised, who 
 shall say ? Who shall venture to impose a limit 
 upon its growth, upon its possibilities ? Of this I 
 feel sure, that no important educational step, affecting 
 the higher education of and in London, will be taken 
 successfully, which does not in some way or other 
 make use of this great means. And if the time 
 should ever come when men rise to a really bold 
 conception of a great educational system for London, 
 which shall unite for the common end the many 
 educational institutions now in existence here, shall 
 unite them without interfering with the individuality 
 of any one of them — for that alone is a reasonable 
 union, — I take it as certain that in that great compre- 
 hensive system, laid on lines that allow for develop- 
 ments, dim as yet in the distant future, this system of 
 yours will play — it may be a subordinate — but it will 
 be an integral part. 
 
30 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 It is, of course, the aspiration of such of you as are 
 continuous students, that in some way or other a 
 crown should be set upon your work. If you are true 
 students, study itself is your aim, study itself is your 
 reward. But taking, as I will in your name, that 
 highest ground, it is a legitimate aspiration that some 
 public recognition should be accessible to you. Who 
 would venture to say that young men would flock in 
 hundreds and thousands as they now do to Oxford and 
 Cambridge, if those Universities offered only, as an 
 inducement to come there and study, the charms of a 
 studious life, the attractions of able teachers ? They 
 are degree-giving bodies, as well as teaching bodies, 
 and the two functions, the two ideas, have become 
 inseparably connected in men's minds. It was not 
 always so. In the early middle ages, when we read 
 of very large numbers of persons attending the 
 Universities, a large majority of them did not contem- 
 plate proceeding to a degree. They came for a time 
 to attend the teaching of some man of great reputa- 
 tion ; and then they passed on. But now, there are 
 very few cases of men coming with any more transient 
 purpose than to get a degree. Are we, then, to limit 
 our meaning in the phrase " University Extension " to 
 one of the two great functions of a University, the most 
 important, no doubt, from an intellectual point of view, 
 but still only one of the two ? That, I understand, is 
 a question that is exercising the minds of many of you. 
 It is a question which it is impossible to avoid when 
 we give even a very slight amount of thought to the 
 future of University Extension. 
 
 I feel fairly clear as to the answer. But I am not 
 at all so clear as to the answer, which the facts of the 
 
CANON BROWNE 31 
 
 case telegraph to me, being an answer which will be 
 wholly satisfactory to you. This is not a case where 
 you would proceed in a bargaining spirit, asking for 
 more than you really aim at, in the hope of at least 
 getting what you want. It is emphatically a case for 
 facing the position frankly, and formulating your hope, 
 wish, request, demand, — call it what you will, — in 
 accordance with the result of that frank consideration. 
 
 To put first the extreme demand, it would be this, 
 that those who pursue for a certain period, with 
 success, your course of study, should be able, on that 
 course of study, to obtain in the end the degree of 
 Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science. And that 
 without fulfilling the conditions which are in ordinary 
 cases attached to candidature for those degrees, in the 
 way of preliminary examination in other subjects 
 specified by the University. 
 
 Now I am not at all prepared to say that an excel- 
 lent training cannot be obtained without a knowledge 
 of those preliminary subjects. It may well be that as 
 time goes on, University Extension may lead to an 
 extension of the University idea, so that there may 
 come about a University curriculum which differs 
 largely in the character of its common requirements 
 from those which now prevail. I could understand, 
 for instance, a University in a great centre of popula- 
 tion taking a position essentially different from that 
 of the old Universities. They draw their students 
 from other places, and educate them apart from the 
 great busy centres, in subjects which, as they believe, 
 are best calculated to draw out the highest powers of 
 the intellect, in those who have the leisure to give the 
 whole day to such work, and have the preliminary 
 
32 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 acquirements which are given in schools of the highest 
 grade. I could understand this, while still believing 
 that for those who could resort to that other teaching 
 it would continue to be the best of all. And if any 
 such development should occur in our time, I regard 
 it as certain that what we call University Extension 
 would find that its time of full recognition had indeed 
 come. But so long as the University idea remains 
 what it has now for some considerable time been, I am 
 inclined to deprecate the demand that the degrees 
 given on the well known and understood principles 
 which now prevail, should be given equally on 
 principles quite different, — quite different, though, as 
 many think, much better suited to the circumstances 
 of many students than the others are. And I happen 
 to know this, that the Council of the Society deprecates 
 such a demand. 
 
 Another method is to have some special degree 
 devised, to be conferred upon those who go through 
 your course with success. It has never seemed to me 
 that this would be a satisfactory method. The degree 
 would not compete on equal terms with the degrees 
 whose reputation is already established. It would be 
 regarded as meaning less than they, though no doubt 
 in some cases it would mean more. The intention 
 would be only to denote by it something different from 
 the other degrees ; in public acceptance this would be 
 misunderstood, and it would be supposed to be not 
 different only, but inferior. And I feel sure that if 
 earnest, determined students, such as many of you are, 
 once got such a degree, they would never rest till they 
 got what people would call the real thing. And this 
 in itself would belittle the special degree. 
 
CANON BROWNE 33 
 
 I would not ask for a degree on easier terms than 
 other people. I would not ask for a degree inferior 
 to other people. I would ask for a fitting recognition 
 of worthy work. My own idea would be that an 
 arrangement of this kind might be made. It should 
 be possible for you, on fulfilling some stringent condi- 
 tions as to continuity and sequence and blending of 
 study, to obtain some such title as Associate of a 
 University. The conditions should be such that 
 persons who understand what higher education is and 
 means should be able to recognise them as securing 
 attainment sufficient for a degree, so far as it goes, but 
 not sufficient in so far as it does not reach the pre- 
 liminary subjects, without which a degree is not given. 
 
 If that could be arranged, if the breadth and depth 
 of the work done were such as to be really worthy of 
 this recognition, this Associateship would be a highly- 
 prized achievement, and would be recognised as such. 
 The man or woman would be marked as a person of 
 attainments and culture, would be entitled to regard 
 himself or herself as a serious student, a successful 
 student ; and nothing could be more likely than that 
 to make of him or her that which I so much desire 
 to see many men and women made, — a continuous 
 student, one who does not know what it is to talk of 
 education being finished, but, on the contrary, only 
 finds each new pleasure of knowledge an incitement 
 to yet another entry upon that boundless field. 
 
 Beyond this Associateship there would be one 
 simple step to the degree. The associate would have 
 to qualify in the preliminary subjects common to all 
 candidates for a degree. He would earn his degree 
 by his University Extension work. That would be his 
 
 D 
 
34 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 honours. He would proceed to his degree by the quali- 
 fying process of passing the preliminary requirements. 
 That would be his poll. 
 
 There would be one great gain to you in federation 
 under some comprehensive educational system. It is 
 your difficulty, it is your privilege, to be self-sup- 
 porting. The fees paid by the students, low as they 
 are, have to provide for the payment of the lecturers, 
 low as it is. If you look at the accounts published 
 last December, you will see how very curiously close 
 the relation is between the amount that is paid in fees 
 and the amount that is paid, directly on your account, 
 to lecturers, examiners, and printers. The receipts 
 for lecture fees, examinations, and syllabuses are 
 £2076:18:6; and the payments to lecturers, ex- 
 aminers, and printers are £2077:2:6, being an 
 excess over receipts of four shillings. All the rest 
 of the numerous expenses, for management, general 
 printing, and so on, are met by voluntary contri- 
 butions. This is much about the state of things in 
 Cambridge also ; that is to say, the receipts from those 
 attending the lectures do not meet the expenses of 
 central management, and funds for those expenses 
 have to be found elsewhere. So when we say that 
 the system is self-supporting, we only mean, that, 
 roughly speaking, the receipts from students and local 
 committees about cover the payments to the lecturers 
 and examiners. Now it is clear that the fees of 
 students must play an important part in this adjust- 
 ment ; and this means that the students, each of whom 
 pays a very small fee, must be numerous. What does 
 that in its turn mean ? It means that the subjects 
 must be such as draw and interest a considerable 
 
CANON BROWNE 35 
 
 number of people. That every lecture should be 
 interesting to those who are studying the subject of 
 the lecture, I hold to be of the greatest importance ; 
 but it is a very serious thing that in consequence of 
 financial pressure you must, as a rule, have subjects 
 which are interesting to a considerable number of 
 people. What is to be done for the more advanced 
 students, who desire to push on to subjects, or parts 
 of subjects, which choke off, and ought to choke off, 
 those who are not sufficiently advanced to attend the 
 lectures with profit ? How, that is, are you, con- 
 sistently with the two conditions — that the fee is to be 
 low and that the lectures are to be self-supporting — 
 how are you to procure lectures in subjects which appeal 
 to only a few ? As far as I can see, only by federa- 
 tion. If you were part of a great educational system, 
 with its hands upon the whole of London and its 
 mind open to your wants, we should soon have centres 
 for the delivery of lectures on what I may call as a 
 matter of definition non-paying subjects. To these 
 centres advanced and determined students, scattered 
 in twos and threes at points round the circumference, 
 could converge in sufficient numbers to float the 
 lectures. In that way, and only in that way, I think, 
 you could have courses of lectures in subjects rising 
 in difficulty as your preparedness rises. But while 
 that device might answer, the fact is that, to have this 
 worked properly, you very much need to have access 
 to some central institution. You want some important 
 body which has a life of its own, independent of you 
 to lend itself, or a part of itself, to the furtherance 01 
 your higher interests as advanced students. Some 
 four years ago it fell to my lot to return thanks, in 
 
36 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 the Mercers' Hall, for the Governors of St. Paul's 
 School, of whom I have for some years had the honour 
 of being one. And I should like to remark that the 
 full share in the management given by the Mercers 
 to their University colleagues, the full weight given to 
 the views of the University governors, render my 
 governorship of that magnificent school one of the 
 very pleasantest educational offices I hold. On that 
 occasion I ventured to call the attention of a dis- 
 tinguished company of guests to the problem which 
 we have been discussing this afternoon ; and I ventured 
 still further to. name the institution which, as it seemed 
 to me, was marked out by its conditions and principles 
 in a very singular manner for putting itself at the 
 head of this educational work. It was the Gresham 
 College. If you could have Sir Thomas Gresham 
 standing among you this afternoon, I cannot but think 
 that he would find in you the kind of students for 
 whom he exercised so much forethought and liberality. 
 If it were possible that, besides the educational 
 apparatus at the command of the Gresham Grand 
 Committee, a great site in the city could be secured, 
 which is to be vacated by one of our great schools, 
 with a noble hall, which it will be a scandal to London 
 for London to lose, with residential blocks of buildings 
 erected in the foreground, arranged as homes for 
 advanced students from all the scores of active local 
 centres which are dotted thickly about the suburbs, 
 homes for such of them as can do the daily work of 
 their life as well from one lodging as from another, 
 with it may be a Gresham professor, or a Gresham 
 lecturer, or a Gresham assistant lecturer — for when 
 you once begin to develop you must build your ideal 
 
CANON BROWNE 37 
 
 system large — living in each block, then, I think, your 
 system would be complete, and London would be 
 doing a work of University Extension in the fullest 
 sense of the word such as no other city in Europe, as 
 far as I know, is doing. 
 
 What should your present attitude be, in view 
 of the rumours which are floating about somewhat 
 anxiously in the educational world ? I think it should 
 be one of quiet hopeful expectancy. If I may pre- 
 sume to offer counsel at so grave a conjuncture as 
 this, the counsel I would give is this, that you should 
 insure the future by your good use of the present, and 
 should have the faith and confidence that come of such 
 insurance. Take care that at whatever time the 
 judicious eye of the educationally-disposed statesman 
 falls upon your work, you are seen to be a compact 
 body of earnest students ; students for study's sake ; 
 students moving on, moving up, in the path of study ; 
 resolute, self-respecting, and self-denying. If that is 
 what the judicious eye sees, be sure the judicious mind 
 will give you a worthy place in his system. You 
 have not buildings, appliances, endowments, to put at 
 his disposal; silver and gold you have none. But 
 you have that to give him which he will most value — 
 a stout and stalwart and numerous band of students 
 ready equipped. As I am addressing University 
 Extension students, and not University students, I can 
 assume an acquaintance on your part with English 
 literature. Do you remember the wager that Allan 
 M'Aulay made when he was shown the massive silver 
 candelabra of the Musgraves down in England ? He 
 bet two hundred merks that he had more candlesticks, 
 and better candlesticks, in his own castle at home in 
 
38 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 Perthshire than were ever lighted in a hall in Cumber- 
 land. When the English went north and tested his 
 grounds for the wager, they found behind each chair 
 in the banquet-room a tall Highlander fully armed, 
 bearing a blazing pine torch. " Those," M'Aulay said, 
 " those are my candlesticks." The wager was clearly 
 won. Men, and such men, were worth more than 
 silver. 
 
HEAKING, BEADING, AND THINKING 1 
 
 By the Eight Hon. G.^.'Goschen, D.C.L., M.P. 
 
 1886 
 
 Having undertaken to address you on "Hearing, 
 Eeading, and Thinking," I must begin by denning 
 my terms. By " hearing " I mean the process of taking 
 in intellectual food by the ear ; by " reading " that of 
 taking it in by the eye ; and by " thinking " a form of 
 mental activity which sometimes accompanies hearing 
 and reading, and which can also be set at work separ- 
 ately, but which, I fear, listeners and readers do not 
 always summon to their aid. Honestly, I must say 
 I believe that a vast number of readers do not 
 allow what I may call the frenzied current of their 
 eyes, as they read, to be stopped for even a moment 
 of calm reflection or thought. Outside the charmed 
 circle of students who are studying under the auspices 
 of our Society, and as to whose habit of following the 
 lectures with reasoning and continuous thought, I 
 would not venture to breathe a doubt, I expect there 
 are a great many who will not go through the fatigue, 
 the great fatigue, of giving a continuous critical 
 
 1 This address was delivered extempore, and is therefore more collo- 
 quial and less carefully expressed than most of the addresses of this 
 series. — G. J. G. 
 
40 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 accompaniment of thinking to the words of the 
 lecturers to whom they listen. 
 
 I shall say something about " thinking " by and 
 by. In the first instance I wish to give you my reasons 
 for believing that those of you who come to our 
 lectures, derive benefits from hearing which you 
 could not derive from reading. Of course we must 
 compare like with like, a good book with a good 
 lecture, an indifferent book with indifferent oral 
 instruction. Now in the latter case I am not 
 sure that the balance of advantage lies with the 
 lecture. For with a dull book you have, at any rate, 
 the remedy in your hands. You can put on the pace. 
 But, oh ! the penance of having to sit out a dull lecture, 
 or, indeed, a dull oral performance of any kind, when 
 you can apply neither whip nor spur, but must listen to 
 the end. On the other hand, I shall claim, when you 
 come to compare excellence with excellence, that the 
 excellence of the spoken teaching offers delights which 
 the perusal of written teaching will scarcely ever afford. 
 
 The particular form of hearing to which, in 
 addressing an audience largely composed as this is 
 of University Extension students, I naturally direct 
 attention, is the hearing of lectures. The word 
 " lecture," it is interesting to note, means, literally, a 
 reading, or rather a reading out ; and you may regard 
 it from two points of view — substance and form. In 
 substance, a lecture is primarily a condensation. It 
 represents in brief space the final result of a vast 
 amount of study on the lecturer's part. It is his 
 business to collect from the number of books dealing 
 with his subject the salient facts and ideas, and to 
 present them in the manner most suitable to his 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 41 
 
 hearers. The lecturer is thus primarily a condensing 
 machine. Or, if I may be allowed, in deference to the 
 fairer portion of my audience, a more pleasing simile, 
 the lecturer presents you with a bouquet of cut 
 flowers ; he plucks the flowers for you and blends the 
 colours. But, alas ! for my simile, cut flowers die 
 soon, and crammed facts fade rapidly from the memory. 
 Perhaps, therefore, I may take another simile, more 
 complimentary and more appropriate. Let me rather 
 put it that the lecturer is a herbalist, who collects 
 the perfume and the strength of a variety of herbs and 
 flowers, and condenses them into a phial, where they may 
 be preserved, and whence they can be taken in small 
 doses and in such a manner as to vivify and to 
 strengthen the constitution of those who appropriate 
 the results of his labours. But whatever simile you 
 adopt, you will see that the first function of the 
 lecturer is to bring together, in a short form, that 
 which it would be a great difficulty for you to collect, 
 if you had to do the work entirely" for yourselves. 
 
 But I have not only to speak of the lecture as a form 
 of literary work ; I have to establish the claim of the 
 lecturer to be heard rather than read. Would it not 
 be shorter, simpler, and less troublesome if his lectures 
 were simply printed and circulated ? What do you 
 gain by coming to lectures, instead of reading them ? 
 You gain some advantages which are independent of 
 the character of the lecturer. The first is the stimulus 
 of intellectual companionship. There is an incentive 
 to study in the mere knowledge that others are study- 
 ing with you ; the search after truth becomes easier 
 when you have comrades on the road. In reading a 
 book you are alone ; in hearing a lecture you are one 
 
42 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 of an intellectual company. And then there is the 
 infectious excitement of a large audience. Besides, 
 the mere regularity of the lecture, once a week or 
 as often as it may be, is of great advantage. " What is 
 the good of going to a lecture," people say, " when we 
 could read a book which would tell us just the same 
 things ? " You could read a book, no doubt ; but the 
 question is, would you ? In this desultory and distract- 
 ing age the compulsion of a weekly lecture — a compul- 
 sion which is self-imposed, it is true, but which might 
 not be forthcoming if there were no lecture to go to — 
 is of itself a great aid to serious and systematic study. 
 These advantages are, I say, more or less independ- 
 ent of the lecturer. But, beyond these, the spoken 
 lecture has, if the lecturer be a master of his art, the 
 following advantages over the lecture which is merely 
 read. In a well-delivered lecture you find, first of all, 
 light and shade. The voice and manner of the 
 lecturer will do more than can be done by any arts of 
 style. Emphasis is better than italics. The human 
 voice can recall the wandering attention, while the 
 printed word has no such means of self-assertion. I 
 know there are people whose intellectual appreciation is 
 so keen and fine, that reading affords them a luxurious 
 enjoyment which the finest speech or lecture cannot give. 
 Some musical people, I am told, by reading the score 
 of an opera, can taste the full joy of its performance by 
 an orchestra. To some people reading brings so rich 
 a store of intellectual association, such a " corona " of 
 clear thought, that they do not need inflection of voice 
 and change of manner to realise the full force of the 
 meaning to be conveyed. But these are exceptions. 
 To most men, even intellectual men, how ^reat a 
 
 o 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 43 
 
 contrast there is between reading ten lines of Shake- 
 speare and hearing them delivered by a first-rate actor ! 
 I appeal to the experience of any man, however 
 intellectual, whether, when he takes up his Shakespeare 
 and reads a passage of ten or twenty lines, he sees 
 the thoughts that cluster around them as vividly as 
 when he hears those lines recited by a master of 
 the dramatic art, and whether, when he hears them so 
 recited, he does not find that Shakespeare had put 
 into them infinitely more than is ever dreamed of by 
 the reading student. 
 
 These advantages of hearing over reading are not 
 confined to great dramatic performances. I say, without 
 fear of being challenged, that, when you read, you cannot 
 get the whole of what is spoken. Besides the active 
 language of the lecture, sermon, or speech, a vast deal 
 is conveyed in emphasis, — in what I may call the rallen- 
 tando and the crescendo of the speaker, — which cannot 
 be understood by any other means than by listening. 
 I remember hearing an excellent sermon upon the 
 text, " How old art thou ? "—in which the preacher 
 modulated this phrase in every possible way, so as to 
 adapt it to every illustration which he gave. Some- 
 times he put the accent upon " old " — " How old art 
 thou ? " At the most striking times he put the 
 accent upon " thou," and, addressing himself to each of 
 his hearers, he asked — " How old art thou ? " I would 
 defy the most skilful of the reporters sitting at the 
 table before me so to have reported that sermon as 
 to convey to the readers of it the same ideas which 
 the speaker conveyed to the congregation. Again, 
 let me give you an illustration from the House of 
 Commons. A member makes an apology to another, 
 
44 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 and the latter says : " I accept the apology in the 
 spirit in which it was made." Now, according to 
 the inflection of the voice, that sentence may be 
 either a genial compliment, or an ironical insinnation, 
 or a ferocions insult. It depends upon the voice, 
 and what could even the reporters, who accomplish 
 marvels in the way of reproducing the most slip- 
 shod speeches, make of cases such as this ? It 
 has happened to me that a friend who was passing 
 out of the House of Commons, said, " I will not 
 wait to hear you speak ; I will read you to-morrow." 
 No, he will not read me; he will read my speech. 
 He will know my thoughts to a certain extent, but he 
 will not know in a hundred ways the impression I 
 intended to convey, for there are tones, pauses, 
 innuendoes, gestures, forms of inflection of mind and of 
 thought, which can be rendered in a speech but cannot 
 be rendered in a report, however able and accurate. 
 
 If it is said that this applies more to political 
 speeches than to lectures, no doubt it is true. But, 
 in the presence possibly of one or two lecturers — 
 I am not criticising them — let me express the hope 
 that the lecturers imitate public speakers at least 
 to this extent, that they avail themselves to the full 
 of those advantages which the power of addressing 
 audiences vivd voce gives them. I would, on the 
 other hand, express the hope to public speakers that 
 they will imitate lecturers by packing more thought 
 and substance into their speeches. Let public speakers 
 remember how strenuously lecturers work in order 
 to secure that condensed substance of which I have 
 spoken, to their hearers, while I repeat that lecturers 
 will increase the interest of their lectures the more 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 45 
 
 they remember the power possessed by voice and 
 delivery to excite and maintain the interest of those 
 whom they are addressing. I wish the majority of 
 political speeches were more like lectures in wealth of 
 thought, and the majority of lectures more like good 
 political speeches in effectiveness of delivery. 
 
 Now, these physical advantages of voice and man- 
 ner may attach, if not to the full extent, to a written 
 lecture simply read out by the lecturer. But the 
 lecturer may claim another advantage, if he is sufficiently 
 self-confident, if he is sufficiently master of his subject, 
 and sufficiently ready of speech to rely for his expres- 
 sions, to some extent, on the inspiration of the moment. 
 I am not saying anything against the most careful 
 preparation. I believe in the coining of phrases by 
 care. I believe in the most careful arrangement of 
 the subject. But while I believe in arrangement and 
 in the careful choice of phrases, the lecturer must not 
 be the slave of either. He should be able to adapt him- 
 self to the understanding and humour of the audience ; 
 to expand, when they are slow of comprehension ; to 
 illustrate, when they are dull ; to curtail or omit — a 
 most important object — when they have had enough of 
 a particular point. 
 
 Further, the lecturer — if he has the necessary 
 gift — has a third advantage, that of exciting interest 
 in, and enthusiasm for, his subject by his inspiring 
 personality. True, a book may have a similar effect, 
 but personal contact is more likely to produce it. 
 Inspiring writing is rarer than inspiring speech. There 
 are more men who can interest you in their subject 
 by talking about it than who can do so by writing 
 about it. Of course it is not every one who has the 
 
46 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 former gift; but I claim that many of our lecturers 
 do possess this inspiring personality, and excite your 
 interest and arouse your enthusiasm, not only by 
 what they say, but also by what they are themselves. 
 At any rate I hold that lecturers have not fulfilled 
 their full functions unless they impress their hearers 
 by establishing a strong personal influence over their 
 intellectual sympathies. 
 
 If this is true of all lectures, it is especially 
 true of our University Extension lectures. For 
 they are not, primarily, lectures on what I have 
 elsewhere called bread-winning subjects. In the case 
 of such studies the art of the lecturer is of less 
 moment, because the interest is already supplied by 
 the necessity of winning a livelihood. But with 
 lectures which are directed to culture, it is of the 
 highest importance that the lecturer should be able to 
 inspire enthusiasm in his subject. And, besides, the 
 amount of time which our students — many of whom 
 are busily engaged all day — can spend in these lectures 
 is so short, that unless they carry away such an 
 interest as will lead them to study on their own 
 account, they will not benefit much. There are two 
 kinds of teaching — the teaching which simply conveys 
 information, and the teaching which, besides conveying 
 information, supplies the impetus and the means to 
 self - improvement. You will see the drift of my 
 meaning if I compare these two kinds of teaching with 
 two kinds of charity. The former kind of instruction 
 is like the charity that is content with a dole. It 
 supplies, for the moment, a mental need, fills the mind 
 for a time, and there is an end of it. It resembles the 
 charity which fills the stomach for the time, but then 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 47 
 
 leaves its recipient as it found him. The higher kind 
 of instruction not only supplies information but stimu- 
 lates interest, and points the way by which the 
 student may develop himself and become self-reliant. 
 It resembles the charity which gives tools, or teaches a 
 new trade, or finds new means of employment — which 
 aims, not merely at alleviating want, but at creating 
 independence. I hope our lecturers will be able to 
 supply our students, not with mere doles, but with 
 tools by which they themselves will become workmen 
 in the cause of education, in the cause of culture, 
 and, therefore, in the cause of civilisatioD. The aim 
 of our teaching is to increase the number of self-reliant 
 workmen. 
 
 " Hearing," in the case of our lectures, ought, there- 
 fore, to lead to " reading " ; and with regard to reading, 
 you may ask two questions, What to read ? and how 
 to read ? I do not mean to discuss what to read to- 
 day. I will only remind you that if you read well, 
 you will not be able to read over -much. Sir John 
 Lubbock has lately given a list of the Best Hundred 
 Books, and many different authorities have criticised 
 him. Perhaps the best criticism was that which was 
 sent to the Pall Mall Gazette by a leader of thought 
 at Oxford (Mr. Jowett), to this effect : " I don't think I 
 can improve on Sir J. Lubbock's list. Neither have 
 I any objection to make to it, except that it is too long." 
 " Too long ! " I think I hear you exclaim : " Why, we 
 all of us read far more than a hundred books — novels 
 of course included — every two or three years." Yes, 
 that is just the great danger to genuine study in 
 our time. We all read, in a way, far more than we 
 can read properly. The mere multiplicity of books 
 
48 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 threatens to kill reading. It is not the multiplicity 
 itself which is the evil. On the contrary, when the 
 books are good, it is an advantage. The evil lies in 
 the idea that one must read everything, especially all 
 the new books that come out. " Have you read such 
 and such a book ? " " No." " Then order it from the 
 library at once." This is the course that people con- 
 stantly take. They do not ask, " How does the book 
 fit into a course of systematic reading ? " Besides, 
 they think they have read that book when they merely 
 cast their eyes over its pages. I presume they read 
 it in a fashion ; but • do they think at all of what they 
 read ? I would very earnestly put it to our students 
 that it is not necessary to read everything that comes 
 out ; that systematic reading will give more enjoyment 
 and secure more profit, than this desire to read every- 
 thing. Do not imitate the practice which prevails at 
 German tables dlidte, where the guests partake of every 
 dish that is offered, and go through the whole, however 
 long it may be. I would rather say — order your 
 books, as you may dine, a la carte, in such quantities 
 as you wish, and of such quality as you wish, and 
 do not go through a long list of books merely because 
 it is the fashion to read them. 
 
 This multiplicity of books, joined to the belief that 
 you must read so much, leads, in the first place, to 
 excessive condensation on the part of authors. As 
 people's powers of reading are limited, and still they 
 want to read everything, the condensing process is at- 
 tempted more and more. Formerly, we had Quarterly 
 reviews which criticised and analysed books, and 
 gathered together all the current literature on any 
 subject, and many people thought, when they had 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 49 
 
 read an article in a Quarterly, that they had done 
 enough, and need not read the books themselves at 
 all. The articles in the Quarterlies extend to thirty 
 or more pages, but thirty pages is now too much. 
 So we witness a further condensing process, and we 
 have the Fortnightly and the Contemporary, which 
 reduce thirty pages to fifteen pages, so that you 
 may read a larger number of articles in a shorter 
 time and in a shorter form. As if this last con- 
 densing process were not enough, the condensed 
 articles of these periodicals are further condensed 
 by the daily papers, which will give you a summary 
 of the summary of all that has been written about 
 everything. This appears to me to have a very dele- 
 terious effect od serious reading in many ways. In 
 the first place, it tends to destroy the taste for it. 
 Those who are dipping into so many subjects, and 
 gathering information in a summary and superficial 
 form, lose the habit of settling down to great works 
 which, while they might not give them so much con- 
 temporary information, would do much to lift them 
 out of their daily lives, and give them access to the 
 high and noble thoughts which have been uttered by 
 the chief authors of all countries. Ephemeral literature 
 is driving out the great classics of the present and the 
 past. That is one evil, and another is the inevitable 
 hurry. Hurried reading can never be good reading. 
 Yet we are all tempted to hurry, in reading as in 
 everything else, not only because the pace of life is 
 actually greater, but because it has become the fashion 
 to hurry. If the Lord Mayor were now to ask all 
 those in this hall who were habitually in a hurry, to 
 hold up their hands, how many of us — if we were 
 
 E 
 
50 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 candid — would be in a position to keep our hands 
 down ? Why, even young ladies, with plenty of time 
 on their hands, gallop through novels as if they had 
 as little time as a Cabinet Minister. There must 
 always be a few people who are really much engaged ; 
 but there is no reason at all why the rest of us should 
 hurry, simply to avoid being regarded as out of the 
 swim. 
 
 But you may say to me, " You tell us a great deal 
 about how not to read, but you do not tell us how to 
 read." It would be as reasonable to complain, if I 
 had been commenting on unwholesome methods of 
 eating, that I did not explain how to eat. The 
 answer in both cases is simple, and is the same with 
 regard to mental as with regard to bodily nourishment : 
 Do not bolt your food. Eead with thought, and 
 slowly enough to take in all in your author that is best. 
 But, on the other hand, do not be too dainty and merely 
 pick a bit here and there. A good, healthy appetite, 
 nourished on good, substantial food, leisurely taken — 
 that is the way to thrive on books. For, after all, 
 what do you read for ? Is it for wisdom ? Then, 
 how can you profit by what you do not digest ? Or 
 is it for enjoyment ? Even from that point of view, 
 I say a perpetual scamper is not the best form of 
 amusement. What class has most enjoyment from the 
 society of their friends — those who visit few people 
 and manage to know them, or those who rush in and 
 out upon a great number, just to exchange platitudes ? 
 Well, you will best enjoy your books, as your friends, 
 by a long tete-a-tete. We are sacrificing real enjoyment 
 to hurry in every department of life. This hurry has 
 further affected one of the most enjoyable things in 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 51 
 
 reading — style. Just as with the fast travelling of 
 modern days, nobody has time to look closely at the 
 more delicate beauties of scenery, so with the fast 
 reading of modern days, nobody looks closely enough 
 to appreciate the more delicate beauties of expression. 
 Some people, it is true, in reaction against the pre- 
 vailing tendency, make a specialty of niceties of 
 expression ; but the work of these literary aesthetes is, 
 again, rather an exaggeration. In the main, style is 
 neglected, and, as demand affects supply, and readers 
 no longer care about a good style, authors seldom 
 produce one. Speaking generally, first-class style is 
 being neglected owing to the extraordinary pace at 
 which everybody is anxious to read. 
 
 But this habit of haste, which is fatal to sound 
 reading, and fatal to style, is no less fatal to thinking — 
 the most important of the three intellectual processes 
 to which my title refers. As I said, thinking may 
 be carried on simultaneously with hearing or reading, 
 or, again, as a separate process. Consider it as an 
 accompaniment to reading. There are some persons 
 who disagree with everything they read. At all 
 events, they think, and so far that is to the good. 
 A larger number — a much larger number — agree 
 with everything they read. If that agreement is 
 really an intellectual assent as the result of thinking 
 when they are reading, then I have nothing to 
 say against it. But the largest class of all probably 
 consists of those who read without thinking at all, 
 who allow themselves to be carried on, possibly 
 remembering a portion of what they read, but not 
 really carrying on any intellectual process during the 
 operation. And if this is the case when you read, 
 
52 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 what is the case when you do not read, and when you 
 come to original, spontaneous thought ? I am sorry 
 to say I think it one of the great faults of the age, 
 extending almost to all departments of industry and 
 of life, that really sustained and continuous thought 
 is going very much out of fashion, and that people 
 think less and less. At present how few of us ever 
 think for ourselves at all ? It is so much easier and 
 pleasanter to drift, and then there are such handy ways 
 all round us of getting our opinions ! We have only 
 to read the newspapers and we find them ready-made 
 for us ! 
 
 We are glad to avail ourselves of these substitutes, 
 because thinking is a very difficult process. I mean 
 original, constructive thought — the thought which 
 creates its own materials — not that which, having 
 materials before it, picks holes in them or pieces them 
 together. There is negative thinking — criticism, a 
 process which many people enjoy very much. That is 
 not so difficult. You have your materials before you, 
 and you begin to work upon them. But the difficulty 
 is to create your materials. It is there that you find 
 much mental indolence. Men do not like to set to 
 work to think out a difficult problem. That is one of 
 the mental operations which more than any other tries 
 a man. One of the most difficult forms of thinking is 
 to make a plan. Suppose any one is going to read an 
 essay, or to make a speech, to deliver an address, or to 
 write a sermon. The great difficulty is to construct 
 what I may call the backbone of the work. Many 
 men will enjoy sitting down to write some beautiful 
 passages, — they will enjoy coining some striking 
 phrases ; but they dislike to sit down and think 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 53 
 
 out a plan — to make a backbone. I am sure all the 
 clergy and all the public speakers who are present 
 here, will admit that, above all, it is essential in every 
 speech and in every sermon to have a backbone — a 
 line marked out along which you are going. I know of 
 some Oxford tutors who will never allow their pupils to 
 sit down to write an essay without having beforehand 
 settled in their minds what the general outline and 
 arrangement are to be. That is the right plan, but it is 
 very unlike what most of us do. What is the ordinary 
 form of thinking ? We do not choose the line of 
 thought ; we drift from point to point ; we allow our- 
 selves to be carried down the stream; and then we 
 seek to excuse our drifting by a complimentary word, 
 — the word " suggestive." " This is a most suggestive 
 remark." What does that mean ? Not that you are 
 thinking out the problem, but that something is 
 suggested to you by something else — that creation 
 has to come from association, and not from any form 
 of original and spontaneous thought. How many men 
 ever sit down to think out a problem ? How many 
 men sit down, for instance, to probe to the bottom how 
 any of those great social questions which now crowd 
 upon us are to be solved ? There, again, we have 
 that superfluity and handiness of materials to which 
 I have before alluded. Instead of thinking, men rush 
 to the newspapers to see what other men have said, or 
 open the cupboard where they keep their pamphlets. 
 They gather what has been written by others on the 
 subject. And, instead of careful thought from stage to 
 stage, a man makes his mind a summary of other men's 
 thoughts, and his results a digest instead of a creation. 
 And why ? It is so extremely difficult to think. 
 
54 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 Again, there are many who cannot work without 
 pen and paper. A leading statesman once told me 
 that unless he had pen and paper, he could 
 not fairly think out a subject. Why not ? I 
 suppose in consequence of want of concentration ; 
 the use of pen and paper — mechanical appliances — 
 supplied a stronger impulse than any of the living 
 intellectual forces in him. This is a strange pheno- 
 menon, to my mind not an entirely satisfactory 
 phenomenon, although I am hound to say — and I 
 say it to my shame — I myself can better think 
 out a problem with pen and paper than I can 
 without them. Another man, again, will tell you, 
 " If I want to think out a subject, I get a friend, — 
 I talk to him, and he talks to me, and so we work it 
 out between us." But he does not like to work it out 
 by himself. Why riot ? Because, if he does, he has to 
 do double work — to think of the objections as well as 
 the arguments in favour, of the pros as well as the cons. 
 So' in his indolence he calls in a friend, who has to 
 do the cons while he does the pros — to submit the objec- 
 tions to a proposition while he may find arguments in 
 its favour. That is not the way in which the great 
 thinkers of former days have laboured to produce the 
 results which are the heritage of the present generation. 
 If we are to hand down to other generations similar 
 productions, away with that indolence which is content 
 with the reflex action of other men's minds instead 
 of the original results of our own ! Some men's minds 
 are like flints, from which you cannot get a spark 
 unless you strike them one against the other. I 
 have cross - examined acquaintances on their powers 
 of continuous, satisfactory thought. I have asked — 
 
MR. GOSCHEN 55 
 
 and it is a good test — Can yon, on a long rail- 
 way journey, think ont a problem on a great social 
 subject ? Will yon begin to think ont that problem 
 when you have before yon two hours in a rail- 
 way carriage ? One friend, indeed, told me that if 
 he wanted to write some fine passage in a book 
 which he was producing, he would get into an 
 express train, because its motion helped his thoughts ; 
 but he was an exception. Most men have told me 
 that they cannot think in these circumstances — I 
 am not speaking entirely of ordinary men ; I am 
 thinking of intellectual men — and that when they 
 have finished their daily or weekly paper, they then 
 find themselves reading anything they can lay 
 hands on, rather than embark upon any intellectual 
 problem at all. This is simply a form of mental 
 indolence ; they cannot concentrate themselves and 
 bring their thoughts sufficiently together, to do spon- 
 taneous work. This again is partly due to their not 
 giving themselves time ; thus they lose the habit of 
 steady thought, and so are unable to dwell long upon 
 one subject. 
 
 I bespeak, therefore, for reading and for thinking 
 greater deliberation, more careful choice of material, 
 more consecutiveness and continuity, and, above all, no 
 haste, no hurrying through anything, whether it be 
 lecture, or book, or problem. We of this Society 
 hope that we carry into its Centres habits of thorough 
 study, of more leisurely study, of study more cal- 
 culated than the hasty reading I have described, to 
 secure both benefit and amusement. Amusement is 
 not to be found in scampering through books, any more 
 than in scampering through a country, but you will 
 
56 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 find more intellectual amusement the more you devote 
 yourselves to thorough and continuous exploration. 
 We hope that our lecturers and our courses of lectures 
 may lead you on in this process. We believe in the 
 talents of our lecturers to inspire you with that 
 enthusiasm of which I have spoken; and if their 
 lectures be suggestive — suggestive in a better sense 
 than that to which I alluded — if they are not only 
 sign-posts pointing towards the direction in which you 
 ought to go, but guides to see you safely started on 
 your journey, they will take you to wider fields of 
 literature and new worlds of thought. If we succeed 
 in producing these results, we shall believe it has not 
 been in vain that we have founded this Society, 
 members of which you are, and the members of which, 
 both present and absent, will, I trust, look to the 
 Society as a link which has created for them some 
 of the most pleasant associations of their intellectual 
 lives. 
 
THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 
 By the Eight Hon. John Morley, M.P. 
 
 1887 
 
 When iny friend Mr. Goschen invited me to discharge 
 the duty which has fallen to me this afternoon, I 
 confess that I complied with very great misgivings. 
 He desired me to say something, if I could, on the 
 literary side of education. Now, it is almost im- 
 possible — and I think those who know most of 
 literature will be readiest to agree with me — to say 
 anything new in recommendation of literature in a 
 scheme of education. But, as taxpayers know, when 
 the Chancellor of the Exchequer levies a contribution, 
 he is not a person to be trifled with. I have felt, 
 moreover, that Mr. Goschen has worked with such 
 extreme zeal and energy for so many years on behalf 
 of this good cause, that anybody whom he considered 
 able to render him any co-operation owed it to him 
 in its fullest extent. The Lord Mayor has been kind 
 enough to say that I am especially qualified to speak 
 on English literature. I must, however, remind the 
 Lord Mayor that I have strayed from literature into 
 the region of politics ; and I am not at all sure that 
 
58 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 such a journey conduces to the soundness of one's 
 judgment on literary subjects, or adds much to the 
 force of one's arguments on behalf of literary study. 
 Politics are a field where action is one long second- 
 best, and where the choice constantly lies between 
 two blunders. Nothing can be more unlike in aim, 
 in ideals, in method, and in matter, than are literature 
 and politics. I have, however, determined to do the 
 best that I can ; and I feel how great an honour it is 
 to be invited to partake in a movement which I do 
 not scruple to call one of the most important of all 
 those now taking place in English society. 
 
 What is the object of the movement ? What do 
 the promoters aim at ? I take it that what they aim 
 at is to bring the very best teaching that the country 
 can afford, through the hands of the most thoroughly 
 competent men, within the reach of every class of the 
 community. Their object is to give to the many that 
 sound, systematic, and methodical knowledge which 
 has hitherto been the privilege of the few who can 
 afford the time and money to go to Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge ; to diffuse the fertilising waters of intellectual 
 knowledge from their great and copious fountain-heads 
 at the Universities by a thousand irrigating channels 
 over the whole length and breadth of our busy indomi- 
 table land. Gentlemen, this is a most important point. 
 Goethe said that nothing is more frightful than a 
 teacher who only knows what his scholars are intended 
 to know. We may depend upon it that the man who 
 knows his own subject most thoroughly is most likely 
 to excite interest about it in the minds of other people. 
 We hear, perhaps more often than we like, that we 
 live in a democratic age. It is true enough, and I 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 59 
 
 can conceive nothing more democratic than such a 
 movement as this, nothing which is more calculated 
 to remedy defects that are incident to democracy, more 
 thoroughly calculated to raise democracy to heights 
 which other forms of government and older orderings 
 of society have never yet attained. No movement 
 can be more wisely democratic than one which seeks 
 to give to the northern miner or the London artisan 
 knowledge as good and as accurate, though he may 
 not have so much of it, as if he were a student at 
 Oxford or Cambridge. Something of the same kind 
 may be said of the new frequency with which scholars 
 of great eminence and consummate accomplishments, 
 like Jowett, Lang, Myers, Leaf, and others, bring all 
 their scholarship to bear, in order to provide for those 
 who are not able, or do not care, to read old classics 
 in the originals, brilliant and faithful renderings of 
 them in our own tongue. Nothing but good, I am 
 persuaded, can come of all these attempts to connect 
 learning with the living forces of society, and to make 
 industrial England a sharer in the classic tradition of 
 the lettered world. 
 
 I am well aware that there is an apprehension that 
 the present extraordinary zeal for education in all its 
 forms — elementary, secondary, and higher — may bear 
 in its train some evils of its own. It is said that 
 nobody in England is now content to practise a handi- 
 craft, and that every one seeks to be at least a clerk. 
 It is said that the moment is even already at hand 
 when a great deal of practical distress does and must 
 result from this tendency. I remember years ago 
 that in the United States I heard something of the 
 same kind. All I can say is that this tendency, if it 
 
60 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 exists, is sure to right itself. In no case can the 
 spread of so mischievous a notion as that knowledge 
 and learning ought not to come within reach of handi- 
 craftsmen be attributed to literature. There is a 
 famous passage in which Pericles, the great Athenian, 
 describing the glory of the community of which he was 
 so far-shining a member, says, "We at Athens are 
 lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes ; we 
 cultivate the mind without loss of manliness." But 
 then remember that after all Athenian society rested 
 on a basis of slavery. Athenian citizens were able to 
 pursue their love of the beautiful, and their simplicity, 
 and to cultivate their minds without loss of manliness, 
 because the drudgery and hard work and rude service 
 of society were performed by those who had no share 
 in all these good things. With us, happily, it is very 
 different. We are all more or less upon a level. Our 
 object is — and it is that which in my opinion raises 
 us infinitely above the Athenian level — to bring the 
 Periclean ideas of beauty and simplicity and cultivation 
 of the mind within the reach of those who do the 
 drudgery and the service and rude work of the world. 
 And it can be done — do not let us be afraid — it can 
 be done without in the least degree impairing the skill 
 of our handicraftsmen or the manliness of our national 
 life. It can be done without blunting or numbing 
 the practical energies of our people. 
 
 I know they say that if you meddle with literature 
 you are less qualified to take your part in practical 
 affairs. You run a risk of being libelled a dreamer 
 and a theorist. But, after all, if we take the very 
 highest form of all practical energy — the governing of 
 the country — all this talk is ludicrously untrue. I 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 61 
 
 venture to say that in the present Government, from 
 the Prime Minister downwards, there are three men 
 at least who are perfectly capable of earning their bread 
 as men of letters. In the late G-overnment, besides 
 the Prime Minister, there were also three men of 
 letters, and I have never heard that those three were 
 greater simpletons than their neighbours. There is a 
 Commission now at work on a very important and 
 abstruse subject. I am told that no one there dis- 
 plays so acute an intelligence of the difficulties that 
 are to be met, and the important arguments that are 
 brought forward, and the practical ends to be achieved, 
 as the Chairman of the Commission, who is not what 
 is called a practical man, but a man of study, litera- 
 ture, theoretical speculation, and University training. 
 Oh no, gentlemen, some of the best men of business in 
 the country are men who have had the best collegian's 
 equipment, and are the most accomplished bookmen. 
 
 It is true that we cannot bring to London with 
 this movement the indefinable charm that haunts 
 the gray and venerable quadrangles of Oxford and 
 Cambridge. We cannot take you into the stately halls, 
 the silent and venerable libraries, the solemn chapels, 
 the studious old-world gardens. We cannot surround 
 you with all those elevated memorials and sanctifying 
 associations of scholars and poets, of saints and sages, 
 that march in glorious procession through the ages, 
 and make of Oxford and Cambridge a dream of music 
 for the inward ear, and of delight for the contemplative 
 eye. We cannot bring all that to you ; but I hope, 
 and I believe, it is the object of those who are more 
 intimately connected with the Society than I have 
 been, that every partaker of the benefits of this Society 
 
62 UNIVEKS1TY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 will feel himself and herself in living connection with 
 those two famous centres, and feel conscious of the 
 links that bind the modern to the older England. 
 One of the most interesting facts mentioned in your 
 Eeport this year — and I am particularly interested in 
 it for personal reasons — is that last winter four prizes 
 of £10 each were offered in the Northumberland 
 mining district, one each to the male and female 
 student in every Term who should take the highest 
 place in the examination, in order to enable them to 
 spend a month in Cambridge in the Long Vacation for 
 the purpose of carrying on in the laboratories and 
 museums the work in which they had been engaged 
 in the winter at the local centre. That is not a step 
 taken by our Society ; but Cambridge University has 
 inspired and worked out the scheme, and I am not 
 without hope that from London some of those who 
 attend these classes may be able to go and have a 
 taste of what Oxford and Cambridge are like. I like 
 to think how poor scholars three or four hundred 
 years ago used to flock to Oxford, regardless of cold, 
 privation, and hardship, so that they might satisfy 
 their hunger and thirst for knowledge. I like to 
 think of them in connection with this movement. I 
 like to think of them in connection with students like 
 those miners in Northumberland, whom I know well, 
 and who are mentioned in the Eeport of the Cambridge 
 Extension Syndicate as, after a day's hard work in the 
 pit, walking four or five miles through cold and dark- 
 ness and rough roads to hear a lecture, and then 
 walking back asrain the same four or five miles. You 
 must look for the same enthusiasm, the same hunger 
 and thirst for knowledge, that presided over the 
 
MR, JOHN MORLEY 63 
 
 foundation of the Universities many centuries ago, 
 to cany on this work, to strengthen and stimulate 
 men's faith in knowledge, their hopes from it, and 
 their zeal for it. 
 
 The progress of the Society has been most re- 
 markable. In 1876 there were, I find, five centres 
 and seven courses. This year there are thirty-one 
 centres and sixty courses. But to get a survey of 
 this movement, you must look not only at London, 
 but at Oxford and Cambridge. You find there that 
 Oxford has twenty -two centres and twenty -nine 
 courses, and Cambridge has fifty centres and eighty 
 courses. I say that the thought of all this activity, 
 and all the good of every kind, social, moral, and 
 intellectual, which is being done by means of it, is in 
 the highest degree encouraging, and not only en- 
 couraging, but calculated to inspire in every man who 
 has ever felt the love and thirst for knowledge the 
 deepest interest in the movement and the warmest 
 wishes for its further success. 
 
 Speaking now of the particular kind of knowledge 
 of which I am going to say a few words — how does 
 literature fare in these important operations ? Last 
 term out of fifty -seven courses in the Cambridge 
 scheme there were ten on literature ; out of thirty-one 
 of our courses, seven were on literature. Well, I am 
 bound to say I think that that position for literature 
 in the scheme is very reasonably satisfactory. I have 
 made some inquiries, since I knew that I was going 
 to speak here, in the great popular centres of industry 
 in the North and in Scotland as to the popularity of 
 literature as a subject of teaching. I find very much 
 what I should have expected. The professors all tell 
 
64 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 very much the same story. This is, that it is ex- 
 tremely hard to interest any considerable number of 
 people in subjects that seem to have no direct bearing 
 upon the practical work of everyday life. There is a 
 disinclination to study literature for its own sake, or 
 to study anything which does not seem to have a 
 visible and direct influence upon the daily work of 
 life. The nearest approach to a taste for literature is 
 a certain demand for instruction in history with a 
 little flavour of contemporary politics. In short, the 
 demand for instruction in literature is strictly moderate. 
 That is what men of experience tell me, and we have 
 to recognise it. I cannot profess to be very much 
 surprised. Mr. Goschen, when he spoke — I think in 
 Manchester — some years ago, said there were three 
 motives which might induce people to seek the higher 
 education. First, to obtain greater knowledge for 
 bread-winning purposes. From that point of view 
 science would be most likely to feed the classes. 
 Secondly, the improvement of one's knowledge of 
 political economy, and history, and facts bearing upon 
 the actual political work and life of the day. Thirdly, 
 — and I am quite content to take Mr. Goschen 's 
 enumeration — was the desire of knowledge as a luxury 
 to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very much 
 afraid that, in the ordinary temper of our people, and 
 the ordinary mode of looking at life, the last of these 
 motives savours a little of self-indulgence, and senti- 
 mentality, and other objectionable qualities. There is 
 a great stir in the region of physical science at this 
 moment, and it is, in my judgment, likely to take a 
 chief and foremost place in the field of intellectual 
 activity. After the severity with which science was 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 65 
 
 for so many ages treated by literature, I cannot 
 wonder that science now retaliates, now mightily exalts 
 herself, and thrusts literature down into the lower 
 place. I only have to say on the relative claims of 
 science and literature what the great Dr. Arnold said: 
 " If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then 
 wish that my children might be well versed in physical 
 science, but in due subordination to the fulness and 
 freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This, 
 however, I believe cannot be ; wherefore, rather 
 than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, 
 I would gladly have him think that the sun went 
 round the earth, and that the stars were so many 
 spangles set in the bright blue firmament." * I am 
 glad to think that one may know something of these 
 matters, and yet not believe that the sun goes round 
 the earth. But of the two, I for one am not pre- 
 pared to accept the rather enormous pretensions that 
 are nowadays sometimes made for physical science 
 as the be-all and end-all of education. 
 
 Next to this we know that there is a great stir on 
 behalf of technical and commercial education. The 
 special needs of our time and country compel us to 
 pay a particular attention to this subject. Here 
 knowledge is business, and we shall never hold our in- 
 dustrial pre-eminence, with all that hangs upon that pre- 
 eminence, unless we push on technical and commercial 
 education with all our might. But there is — and now 
 I come nearer my subject — a third kind of knowledge 
 which, too, in its own way is business. There is the 
 cultivation of the sympathies and imagination, the 
 quickening of the moral sensibilities, and the enlarge- 
 
 1 Stanley's Life of Arnold, ii. 31. 
 F 
 
66 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 ment of the moral vision. The great need in modern 
 culture, which is scientific in method, rationalistic in 
 spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to find some 
 effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal. 
 That is, I take it, the business and function of litera- 
 ture. Literature alone will not make a good citizen ; 
 it will not make a good man. History affords too 
 many proofs that scholarship and learning by no 
 means purge men of acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, 
 of a murderous tenacity about trifles. Mere scholar- 
 ship and learning and the knowledge of books do not 
 by any means arrest and dissolve all the travelling 
 acids of the human system. Nor would I pretend for 
 a moment that literature can be any substitute for life 
 and action. Burke said, " What is the education of 
 the generality of the world ? Eeading a parcel of 
 books ? No ! Eestraint and discipline, examples of 
 virtue and of justice, these are what form the educa- 
 tion of the world." That is profoundly true ; it is life 
 that is the great educator. But the parcel of books, 
 if they are well chosen, reconcile us to this discipline ; 
 they interpret this virtue and justice ; they awaken 
 within us the diviner mind, and rouse us to a con- 
 sciousness of what is best in others and ourselves. 
 
 As a matter of rude fact, there is much to make us 
 question whether the spread of literature, as now 
 understood, does awaken the diviner mind. The 
 figures of the books that are taken out from public 
 libraries are not all that we could wish. I am not 
 going to inflict many figures on you, but there is one 
 set of figures that distresses book-lovers, I mean the 
 enormous place that fiction occupies in the books taken 
 out. In one great town in the North prose fiction 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 67 
 
 forms 76 per cent of all the books lent. In another 
 great town prose fiction is 82 per cent; in a third 84 
 per cent ; and in a fourth 6 7 per cent. I had the 
 curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the 
 United States ; and there — supposing the system of 
 cataloguing and enumeration to be the same — they 
 are a trifle more serious in their taste than we are ; 
 where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place 
 like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent. In Scot- 
 land, too, it ought to be said that they have what I 
 call a better average in respect to prose fiction. There 
 is a larger demand for books called serious than in 
 England. And I suspect, though I do not know, that 
 one reason why there is in Scotland a greater demand 
 for the more serious classes of literature than fiction, is 
 that in the Scotch Universities there are what we have 
 not in England — well-attended Chairs of Literature, 
 systematically and methodically studied. Do not let 
 it be supposed that I at all underrate the value of 
 fiction. On the contrary, I think when a man has 
 done a hard day's work, he can do nothing better than 
 fall to and read the novels of Walter Scott or Miss 
 Austen, or some of our living writers. I am rather a 
 voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, therefore, 
 point to it as a reproach or as a source of discourage- 
 ment, that fiction takes so large a place in the objects 
 of literary interest. I only insist that it is much too 
 large, and we should be better pleased if it sank to 
 about 40 per cent, and what is classified as general 
 literature rose from 13 to 25 per cent. 
 
 There are other complaints of literature as an 
 object of interest in this country. I was reading the 
 other day an essay by the late head of my old 
 
68 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 College at Oxford — a very learned and remarkable 
 man — Mark Pattison, who was a book-lover if ever 
 there was one. Now, he complained that the book- 
 seller's bill in the ordinary English middle class family 
 is shamefully small. He thought it monstrous that a 
 man who is earning £1000 a year should spend less 
 than £1 a week upon books — that is to say, less than 
 a shilling in the pound per annum. Well, I know 
 that Chancellors of the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 
 6d. in the pound, and I am not sure that they always 
 use it as wisely as if they left us to spend it on books. 
 Still, a shilling in the pound to be spent on books by 
 a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, 
 or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is 
 rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected. 
 I do not believe for my part that a man really needs 
 to have a very great many books. Pattison said that 
 nobody who respected himself could have less than 1000 
 volumes. He pointed out that you can stack 1000 
 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 ft. by 
 1 ft., and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that 
 space at disposal. Still the point is not that men 
 should have a great many books, but that they should 
 have the right ones, and that they should use those 
 that they have. We may all agree in lamenting that 
 there are so many houses — even some of considerable 
 social pretension — where you will not find a good 
 atlas, a good dictionary, or a good cyclopaedia of 
 reference. What is still more lamentable, in a good 
 many more houses where these books are, they are 
 never referred to or opened. That is a very discredit- 
 able fact, because I defy anybody to take up a copy 
 of the Times newspaper — and I speak in the presence 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 69 
 
 of gentlemen well up in all that is going on in the 
 world — and not come upon something in it upon which, 
 if their interest in the affairs of the day were active, 
 intelligent, and alert, as it ought to be, they would 
 consult an atlas, dictionary, or cyclopaedia of reference. 
 I do not think for a single moment that everybody 
 is born with the ability for using books, for reading 
 and studying literature. Certainly not everybody is 
 born with the capacity of being a great scholar. All 
 people are no more born great scholars like Gibbon 
 and Bentley, than they are all born great musicians like 
 Handel and Beethoven. What is much worse than 
 that, many are born with the incapacity of reading, 
 just as they are born with the incapacity of distin- 
 guishing one tune from another. To them I have 
 nothing to say. Even the morning paper is too much 
 for them. They can only skim the surface even of 
 that. I go further, and I frankly admit that the habit 
 and power of reading with reflection, comprehension, 
 and memory all alert and awake, does not come at 
 once to the natural man any more than many other 
 sovereign virtues come to that interesting creature. 
 What I do submit to you and press upon you with 
 great earnestness is, that it requires no preterhuman 
 force of will in any young man or woman — unless 
 household circumstances are unusually vexatious and 
 unfavourable — to get at least half an hour out of a 
 solid busy day for good and disinterested reading. 
 Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the 
 first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be 
 those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I 
 cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a 
 quarter. Now, in half an hour I fancy you can read 
 
70 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 fifteen or twenty pages of Burke ; or yon can read one 
 of Wordsworth's masterpieces — say the lines on Tin tern; 
 or say, one-third — if a scholar, in the original, and if 
 not, in a translation — of a book of the Iliad or the iEneid. 
 I am not filling the half hour too full. But try for 
 yourselves what you can read in half an hour. Then 
 multiply the half hour by 365, and consider what 
 treasures you might have laid by at the end of the 
 year ; and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they 
 would have given you for a lifetime. 
 
 I will not take up your time by explaining the 
 various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful 
 study. They are not to be despised by those who 
 would extract the most from books. Many people 
 think of knowledge as of money. They would like 
 knowledge, but cannot face the perseverance and 
 self-denial that go to the acquisition of it, as they go 
 to the acquisition of money. The wise student will do 
 most of his reading with a pen or a pencil in his hand. 
 He will not shrink from the useful toil of making 
 abstracts and summaries of what he is reading. Sir 
 William Hamilton was a strong advocate for under- 
 scoring books of study. " Intelligent underlining," he 
 said, " gave a kind of abstract of an important work, 
 and by* the use of different coloured inks to mark a 
 difference of contents, and discriminate the doctrinal 
 from the historical or illustrative elements of an argu- 
 ment or exposition, the abstract became an analysis 
 very serviceable for ready reference." 1 This assumes, 
 as Hamilton said, that the book to be operated on is 
 your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of 
 perfection for most of us. Again, some great men — 
 
 1 Yeitch's Life of Hamilton, 314, 392. 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 71 
 
 Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and 
 the great Lord Strafford was a third — always before 
 reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the 
 questions which they expected to be answered in it, 
 the additions to be made to their knowledge, and 
 whither it would take them. 1 I have sometimes tried 
 that way of steadying and guiding attention; I have 
 never done so without advantage ; and I commend it to 
 you. I need not tell you that you will find that most 
 books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and — 
 what is most important of all — the masterpieces of 
 literature are worth reading a thousand times. It is 
 a great mistake to think that because you have read a 
 masterpiece once or twice, or ten times, therefore you 
 have done with it. Because it is a masterpiece, you 
 ought to live with it, and make it part of your daily 
 life. Another practice which I commend to you is that 
 of keeping a common-place book, and transcribing into 
 it what is striking and interesting and suggestive. 
 And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you 
 will put every entry under a head, division, or sub- 
 division. 2 This is an excellent practice for concen- 
 
 1 "After glancing ray eye," says Gibbon, "over the design and 
 order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the 
 task of self-examination ; till I had resolved in a solitary walk all that 
 I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work 
 or of some particular chapter : I Avas then qualified to discern how 
 much the author added to my original stock ; and if I was sometimes 
 satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition 
 of our ideas" (Dr. Smith's Gibbon, i. 64). 
 
 2 " If I would put anything in my Common-place Book, I find 
 out a head to which I may refer it. Each head ought to be some 
 important and essential word to the matter in hand " (Locke's Works, 
 iii. 308, ed. 1801). This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth 
 while to go further and make a title for the passage extracted, indicat- 
 ing its pith and purport. 
 
72 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 trating your thought on the passage and making you 
 alive to its real point and significance. 
 
 Various correspondents have asked me to say 
 something about those lists of a hundred books that 
 have been circulating through the world within the 
 last few months. I have examined some of these lists 
 with considerable care, and whatever else may be said 
 of them — and I speak of them with great deference 
 and reserve, because men for whom I have a great 
 regard have compiled them — they do not seem to me 
 to be calculated either to create or satisfy a wise taste 
 for literature in any very worthy sense. To fill a man 
 with a hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps from 
 the Ifahabharata, and the Slicking, down to Pickwick 
 and White's Selborne, may pass the time, but I don't 
 think it would strengthen or instruct or delight. For 
 instance, it is a mistake to think that every book that 
 has a great name in the history of books or of thought 
 is worth reading. Some of the most famous books are 
 least worth reading. Their fame was due to their 
 doing something that needed in their day to be done. 
 The work done, the virtue of the book expires. Again, 
 I agree with those who say that the steady working- 
 down one of these lists would end in the manufacture 
 of that obnoxious product — the prig. A prig has been 
 defined as an animal that is overfed for its size. I 
 think that these bewildering miscellanies would lead 
 to an immense quantity of that kind of overfeeding. 
 The object of reading is not to dip into everything 
 that even wise men have ever written. In the words 
 of one of the most winning writers of English that 
 ever existed — Cardinal Newman — the object of litera- 
 ture in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to 
 
MR. JOHN MOELEY 73 
 
 refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its 
 knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, 
 application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, 
 sagacity, address, and expression. These are the 
 objects of that intellectual perfection which a literary 
 education is destined to give. I will not venture on 
 a list of a hundred books, but will recommend you to 
 one book well worthy of your attention. Those who 
 are curious as to what they should read in the region 
 of pure literature will do well to peruse my friend 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison's volume, called The Choice of 
 Books. You will find there as much wise thought, 
 eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume of its 
 size and on its subject, whether it be in the list of a 
 hundred or not. 
 
 Let me pass to another topic. We are often asked 
 whether it is best to study subjects, or authors, or 
 books. Well, I think that is like most of the stock 
 questions with which the perverse ingenuity of man- 
 kind torments itself. There is no universal and 
 exclusive answer. It is idle. My own answer is a very 
 plain one, and it is this. It is sometimes best to 
 study books, sometimes authors, and sometimes sub- 
 jects ; but at all times it is best to study authors, 
 subjects, and books in connection with one another. 
 Whether you make your first approach from interest 
 in an author or in a book, the fruit will be only half 
 gathered if you leave off without new ideas and clearer 
 lights both on the man and the matter. One of the 
 noblest masterpieces in the literature of civil and 
 political wisdom is to be found in Burke's three perform- 
 ances on the American War — his speech on Taxation 
 in 1774, on Conciliation in 1775, and his letter to the 
 
74 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESS ES 
 
 Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. I can only repeat to yon 
 what I have been saying in print and out of it for a 
 good many years, and what I believe more firmly as 
 observation is enlarged by time and occasion, that 
 these three pieces are the most perfect manual in all 
 literature for the study of great affairs, whether for 
 the purpose of knowledge or action. " They are an 
 example," as I have said before now, " an example 
 without fault of all the qualities which the critic, 
 whether a theorist or an actor, of great political 
 situations should strive by night and by day to possess. 
 If their subject were as remote as the quarrel between 
 the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between 
 Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which 
 the world owes the opportunity of the most important 
 of political experiments, we should still have every- 
 thing to learn from the author's treatment ; the vigorous 
 grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumina- 
 tion from great principles of human experience, the 
 strong and masculine feeling for the two great political 
 ends of justice and freedom, the large and generous 
 interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, 
 the noble temper." No student worthy of the name 
 will lay aside these pieces, so admirable in their 
 literary expression, so important for history, so rich in 
 the lessons of civil wisdom, until he has found out 
 something from other sources as to the circumstances 
 from which such writings arose, and as to the man 
 whose resplendent genius inspired them. There are 
 great personalities like Bnrke who march through 
 history with voices like a clarion trumpet and some- 
 thing like the glitter of swords in their hands. They 
 are as interesting as their work. Contact with them 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 75 
 
 warms and kindles the mind. You will not be 
 content, after reading one of these pieces, without 
 knowing the character and personality of the man 
 who conceived it, and until you have spent an hour 
 or two — and an hour or two will go a long way with 
 Burke still fresh in your mind — over other composi- 
 tions in political literature, over Bacon's civil pieces, 
 or Machiavelli's Prince, and others in the same order 
 of thought. That is my auswer to the question 
 whether you should study books, subjects, or authors. 
 
 This points to the right answer to another question 
 that is constantly asked. We are constantly asked 
 whether desultory reading is among things lawful and 
 permitted. May we browse at large in a library, as 
 Johnson said, or is it forbidden to open a book without 
 a definite aim and fixed expectations ? I am for a 
 compromise. If a man has once got his general point 
 of view, if he has striven with success to place himself 
 at the centre, what follows is of less consequence. If 
 he has got in his head a good map of the country, he 
 may ramble at large with impunity. If he has once 
 well and truly laid the foundations of a methodical, 
 systematic habit of mind, what he reads will find its 
 way to its proper place. If his intellect is in good 
 order, he will find in every quarter something to 
 assimilate and something that will nourish. 
 
 Now I am going to deal with another question, 
 with which perhaps I ought to have started. What 
 is literature ? It has often been defined. Emerson 
 says it is a record of the best thoughts. " By litera- 
 ture," says another author, I think Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke, " we mean the written thoughts and feelings 
 of intelligent men and women arranged in a way that 
 
76 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 shall give pleasure to the reader.'' A third account is 
 that " the aim of a student of literature is to know the 
 best that has been thought in the world." Definitions 
 always appear to me in these things to be in the 
 nature of vanity. I feel that the attempt to be com- 
 pact in the definition of literature ends in something 
 that is rather meagre, partial, starved, and unsatis- 
 factory. I turn to the answer given by a great French 
 writer to a question not quite the same, viz. " What is 
 a classic ? " Literature consists of a whole body of 
 classics in the true sense of the word, and a classic, as 
 Sainte Beuve defines him, is an "author who has 
 enriched the human mind, who has really added to its 
 treasure, who has got it to take a step farther ; who 
 has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or pene- 
 trated to some eternal passion, in that heart of man 
 where it seemed as thouoh all were known and 
 explored ; who has produced his thought, or his 
 observation, or his invention under some form, no 
 matter what, so it be great, large, acute, and reason- 
 able, sane and beautiful in itself ; who has spoken to 
 all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself 
 the style of everybody, — in a style that is at once 
 new and antique, and is the contemporary of all the 
 ages." At a single hearing you may not take all that 
 in ; but if you should have any opportunity of recurring 
 to it you will find this a satisfactory, full, and instruc- 
 tive account of what is a classic, and will find in it a 
 full and satisfactory account of what those who have 
 thought most on literature hope to get from it, and 
 most would desire to confer upon others by it. 
 Literature consists of all the books — and they are 
 not so many — where moral truth and human passion 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 77 
 
 are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and 
 attraction of form. My notion of the literary student 
 is one who through books explores the strange voyages 
 of man's moral reason, the impulses of the human 
 heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken 
 human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and 
 manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions 
 of truth and virtue. Poets, dramatists, humorists, 
 satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the 
 character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political 
 orators — they are all literature in so far as they teach 
 us to know man and to know human nature. This 
 is what makes literature, rightly sifted and selected 
 and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling that 
 it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be, but a 
 proper instrument for a systematic training of the 
 imagination and sympathies, and of a genial and varied 
 moral sensibility. 
 
 From this point of view let me remind you that 
 books are not the products of accident and caprice. 
 As Goethe said, if you would understand an author, 
 you must understand his age. The same thing is just 
 as true of a book. If you would comprehend it, you 
 must know the age. There is an order ; there are 
 causes and relations. There are relations between 
 great compositions and the societies from which they 
 have emerged. I would put it in this way to you, 
 that just as the naturalist strives to understand and 
 to explain the distribution of plants and animals over 
 the surface of the globe, to connect their presence or 
 their absence with the great geological, climatic, and 
 oceanic changes, so the student of literature, if he be 
 wise, undertakes an ordered and connected survey 
 
78 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 of ideas, of tastes, of sentiments, of imagination, of 
 humour, of invention, as they affect and as they are 
 affected by the ever-changing experiences of human 
 nature, and the manifold variations that time and 
 circumstances are incessantly working in human 
 society. 
 
 It is because I am possessed, and desire to see 
 others possessed, by that conception of literary study, 
 that I watch with the greatest sympathy and admira- 
 tion the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, 
 I hope, so successfully, to bring the systematic and 
 methodical study of our own literature, in connection 
 with other literatures, among subjects for teaching and 
 examination in the Universities of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge. I regard those efforts with the liveliest 
 interest and sympathy. Everybody agrees that an 
 educated man ought to have a general notion of the 
 course of the great outward events of European history. 
 So, too, an educated man ought to have a general 
 notion of the course of all those inward thoughts and 
 moods which find their expression in literature. I 
 think that in cultivating the study of literature, as I 
 have rather laboriously endeavoured to define it, you 
 will be cultivating the most important side of history. 
 Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to 
 character. It furnishes a view of the ground we stand 
 on. It builds up a solid backing of precedent and 
 experience. It teaches us where we are. It protects 
 us against imposture and surprise. 
 
 Before closing I should like to say one word upon 
 the practice of composition. I have suffered, by the 
 chance of life, very much from the practice of com- 
 position. It has been my lot, I suppose, to read 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 79 
 
 more unpublished work than any one else in this 
 room, and, I hope, in this city. There is an idea, 
 and I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, 
 that you cannot have a taste for literature unless 
 you are yourself an author. I make bold entirely to 
 demur to that proposition. It is practically most 
 mischievous, and leads scores and even hundreds of 
 people to waste their time in the most unprofitable 
 manner that the wit of man can devise, on work in 
 which they can no more achieve even the most 
 moderate excellence than they can compose a Ninth 
 Symphony or paint a Transfiguration. It is a terrible 
 error to suppose that because you relish " Wordsworth's 
 solemn -thoughted idyll, or Tennyson's enchanted 
 reverie," therefore you have a call to run off to write 
 bad verse at the Lakes or the Isle of Wight. I 
 beseech you not all to turn to authorship. I will go 
 further. I venture, with all respect to those who are 
 teachers of literature, to doubt the excellence and 
 utility of the practice of over-much essay -writing and 
 composition. I have very little faith in rules of style, 
 though I have an unbounded faith in the virtue of 
 eultivatiDg direct and precise expression. But you 
 must carry on the operation inside the mind, and not 
 merely by practising literary deportment on paper. 
 It is not everybody who can command the mighty 
 rhythm of the greatest masters of human speech. But 
 every one can make reasonably sure that he knows 
 what he means, and whether he has found the right 
 word. These are internal operations, and are not 
 forwarded by writing for writing's sake. I am strong 
 for attention to expression, if that attention be exer- 
 cised in the right^way. It has been said a million 
 
80 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 times that the foundation of right expression in speech 
 or writing is sincerity. It is as true now as it has 
 ever been. Eight expression is a part of character. As 
 somebody has said, by learning to speak with precision, 
 you learn to think with correctness ; and the way to 
 firm and vigorous speech lies through the cultivation 
 of high and noble sentiments. I think, as far as my 
 observation has gone, that men will do better if 
 they seek precision by studying carefully and with an 
 open mind and a vigilant eye the great models of 
 writing, than by excessive practice of writing on their 
 own account. 
 
 Much might here be said on what is one of the most 
 important of all the sides of literary study. I mean 
 its effect as helping to preserve the dignity and the 
 purity of the English language. That noble instru- 
 ment has never been exposed to such dangers as those 
 which beset it to-day. Domestic slang, scientific 
 slang, pseudo-aesthetic affectations, hideous importations 
 from American newspapers, all bear down with horrible 
 force upon the glorious fabric which the genius of our 
 race has reared. I will say nothing of my own on 
 this pressing theme, but will read to you a passage of 
 weight and authority from the greatest master of 
 mighty and beautiful speech. 
 
 " Whoever in a state," said Milton, " knows how wisely to 
 form the manners of men and to rule them at home and in war 
 with excellent institutes, him in the first place, above others, I 
 should esteem worthy of all honour. But next to him the man 
 who strives to establish in maxims and rules the method and habit 
 of speaking and writing received from a good age of the nation, 
 and, as it were, to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, 
 the daring to overleap which let a law only short of that of 
 Romulus be used to prevent. . . . The one, as I believe, 
 
MR. JOHN MOKLEY 81 
 
 supplies noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy 
 invading the territory. The other takes to himself the task of 
 extirpating and defeating, by means of a learned detective 
 police of ears, and a light band of good authors, that barbarism 
 which makes large inroads upon the minds of men, and is a 
 destructive intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it to be con- 
 sidered of small consequence what language, pure or corrupt, a 
 people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in 
 speaking it. . . . For, let the words of a country be in part 
 unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by 
 wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by 
 no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an 
 indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared 
 for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have 
 never heard that any empire, any state, did not at least flourish 
 in a middling degree as long as its own liking and care for its 
 language lasted." 1 
 
 The probabilities are that we are now coming to 
 an epoch, as it seems to me, of a quieter style. There 
 have been in our generation three great giants of prose 
 writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was 
 Macaulay, and there is Mr. Buskin. These are all 
 giants, and they have the rights of giants. But I do 
 not believe that a greater misfortune can befall the 
 students who attend classes here, than that they should 
 strive to write like any one of these three illustrious 
 men. I think it is the worst thing that can happen 
 to them. They can never attain to it. It is not 
 everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and 
 most men only do themselves a mischief by trying to 
 bend it. We are now on our way to a quieter style. 
 I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. Milton's 
 phrase ever lingers in our minds as one of imperishable 
 beauty — where he regrets that he is drawn by I 
 
 1 Letter to Bonraattei, from Florence, 1638. 
 G 
 
82 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 know not what, from beholding the bright countenance 
 of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies. 
 Moderation and judgment are more than the flash and 
 the glitter even of the greatest genius. I hope that 
 your professors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate 
 that golden art — the steadfast use of a language in 
 which truth can be told ; a speech that is strong by 
 natural force, and not merely effective by declamation ; 
 an utterance without trick, without affectation, without 
 mannerisms, and without any of that excessive ambi- 
 tion which overleaps itself as much in prose writing as 
 it does in other things. 
 
 Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will detain you no 
 longer. I hope that I have made it clear that we 
 conceive the end of education on its literary side to 
 be to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a 
 citizen and not a book of elegant extracts. Literature 
 does not end with knowledge of forms, with in- 
 ventories of books and authors, with finding the key 
 of rhythm, with the varying measure of the stanza, 
 or the changes from the involved and sonorous periods 
 of the seventeenth century down to the staccato of the 
 nineteenth century, or all the rest of the technicalities 
 of scholarship. Do not think I contemn these. They 
 are all good things to know, but they are not ends in 
 themselves. The intelligent man, says Plato, will 
 prize those studies which result in his soul getting 
 soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less 
 value the others. Literature is one of the instruments, 
 and one of the most powerful instruments, for forming 
 character, for giving us men and women armed with 
 reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfast- 
 ness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit 
 
MR. JOHN MORLEY 83 
 
 and public virtue of which it has been well said that 
 they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man. 
 Bacon is right, as he generally is, when he bids us 
 read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and 
 take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to 
 weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh and 
 to consider. In the times before us that promise or 
 threaten deep political, economical, and social con- 
 troversy, what we need to do is to induce our people 
 to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate 
 energy without impatience, activity without restless- 
 ness, inflexibility without ill -humour. I am not 
 going to preach to you any artificial stoicism. I am 
 not going to preach to you any indifference to money, 
 or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the 
 esteem and good-will of our neighbours, or to any 
 other of the consolations and the necessities of life. 
 But, after all, the thing that matters most, both for 
 happiness and for duty, is that we should habitually 
 live with wi^ thoughts and right feelings. Literature 
 helps us more than other studies to this most blessed 
 companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings, 
 and so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly 
 commending it to your interest and care. 
 
SCIENTIFIC STUDY 
 
 By Sir James Paget, Bart., F.RS. 
 
 1888 
 
 The subject of scientific study in its full range would 
 be far beyond my power and your patience. I shall 
 believe, therefore, that I may speak of only some parts 
 of the study, and of these only as they may be pur- 
 sued within the range and in the manner designed by 
 this Society, and as they may be followed by the 
 majority of those who attend the lectures and the 
 classes. Moreover, I can have no choice but to select 
 my illustrations from the parts of scientific study with 
 which I have myself been occupied. In comparison 
 with the whole field, these parts are very small, but 
 they may serve well for supplying examples of what 
 I chiefly wish to speak of, namely, the utility of 
 scientific study for the education of some portions of 
 the mind; its utility, not only for the teaching of 
 truth, but for the teaching of the methods by which 
 truth has been attained. = 
 
 I should like, first, to meet an objection which I 
 have often heard made to the teaching that is given by 
 the Society, and which is summed up in what is 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 85 
 
 regarded as a very wise proverb — that " a little know- 
 ledge is a dangerous thing." As with most of the 
 merely popular proverbs, the very opposite, if stated 
 unconditionally, would be quite as true and quite as 
 false ; but in the present instance the objection may 
 be met by observing that, in the Society's teaching, 
 they who will may learn far more than can fairly be 
 called a little knowledge. As I looked through the 
 syllabus of such subjects as I can estimate, I could see 
 that the amount of teaching in each of them is enough 
 for a good beginning for some who may intend to make 
 that subject a chief study for their lives, and enough to 
 form an important part in the teaching of any one who 
 wishes to be, in the fairest sense, generally well educated. 
 
 But, really, as for the proverb, any one observing 
 facts may often see that, in all practical life, a little 
 knowledge is far less dangerous thanks complete ignor- 
 ance. Whether either of them be dangerous depends 
 on a man's temper and general character, not on his 
 intellect ; it depends on whether he is habitually rash 
 or prudent, humble or conceited ; and seeing that, as a 
 rule, none have so few doubts as they that are quite 
 ignorant, and as their ignorance includes a total want 
 of self-knowledge, so there are none more dangerously 
 rash than the very ignorant are apt to be. 
 
 Now, scientific study may be so pursued as to help 
 to the acquirement of self-knowledge as well as of the 
 knowledge of other facts. Its utility is, at least, two- 
 fold : direct, in the facts and general principles which 
 may be learned ; and indirect, in the cultivation and 
 refreshment of the mind. 
 
 As for the use of knowing the chief facts of 
 science, or of any branch of it, this may seem to be 
 
86 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 proved in every hour that we live. For the practical 
 applications of science extend into every occupation of 
 life ; into the provision of every kind of food ; into the 
 management of the air we breathe, and of the light 
 and heat in which we are to work ; they are so 
 influential in every form of business, in every art and 
 manufacture, that it might seem impossible to live in 
 safety without some scientific knowledge. It may, 
 indeed, be said, and often with much truth, that all 
 these applications of science are best left to those who 
 have studied them as the chief business of their lives, 
 and who must know best about them. This is often 
 true ; but even experts can best guide those who know 
 something of their language, and they may- best be 
 controlled and assisted and most safely trusted by 
 those who know the real value of scientific study and 
 of the truths to which it can attain ; by those who, 
 while studying the facts of science, have studied also, 
 as I have said, the methods by which the facts have 
 been acquired and made sure. 
 
 Now I will speak of four chief portions of this 
 education of the mind ; but let me say that they are 
 only a part of all that may be gained. They are 
 educations (1) in the power of observing ; (2) in 
 accuracy ; (3) in the difficulty of ascertaining truth ; 
 (4) in proceeding from the knowledge of what is 
 proved to the thinking of what is probable ; and for 
 all these ends I shall try to illustrate the value and 
 the need of very careful study by showing their diffi- 
 culties. The glories and the triumphs of science are 
 often celebrated ; some of its failures and difficulties 
 may better illustrate the necessity for earnest study by 
 those who would be successful in it. 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 87 
 
 (1) By education in the power of observing, I mean 
 not only the power of seeing things, but that of seeing 
 and observing them in their various relations to things 
 around them. Many suppose that this is easy ; really 
 it is very difficult, and few overcome the difficulty 
 except those who are either naturally endowed with 
 an unusual power of observing accurately, or have 
 been carefully trained and are constantly training 
 themselves. 
 
 The difficulty of observing is proved by nearly 
 every discovery ; for, in nearly every instance, the dis- 
 covery is made by the accurate observation of facts 
 which have been within the reach of many, but have 
 been overlooked by all except the discoverers. 
 
 In my own profession, with its hundreds of careful 
 observers, not a year passes, scarcely a month or a 
 week, in which there is not made known some form of 
 disease, or some symptom of disease, previously un- 
 observed ; and when it is thus made known it is at 
 once evident to many who had overlooked it ; they 
 may have seen it, they did not observe it. And the 
 same might be said, I think, of nearly every scientific 
 pursuit, in natural history, in chemistry, and physics. 
 Look at the proceedings of any scientific society ; 
 see the new facts of which they tell. Could not 
 many of them have been observed long ago ? Obvious 
 as the facts are now, why were they not sooner ascer- 
 tained ? Because observation is really very difficult 
 even to those who are keen and watchful and ambi- 
 tious of discovery, and many of whom have been well 
 trained. 
 
 This is equally evident in the study of the works of 
 those who have been most successful, and whom we 
 
88 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 justly count amongst the greatest observers. Look at 
 the works of Darwin ; and here let me say that every 
 scientific study should include the reading, not only of 
 the best manuals, but of some of the works of at least 
 one great master ; for even if the facts he tells have 
 become part of popular knowledge, yet the method of 
 his work may be a lesson for all ages. I say, read 
 Darwin's works or his life ; see the constant repeated 
 looking for facts that they might be observed again 
 and again ; the looking for them in all changing cir- 
 cumstances ; the tests applied ; the doubts that would 
 have made a less patient man nearly hopeless ; and 
 from all these things reckon how great must be the 
 difficulty of accurate observation, how great the need 
 of careful cultivation of all the power of observing 
 which we may possess. And you may note that a 
 large part of Darwin's observations were made on 
 things that nearly every one could have seen. Any one 
 of his contemporaries might have studied the work of 
 earth-worms, say in Hyde Park, when again and again 
 we could see the heaps of mould thrown up by them, 
 and themselves crawling about in the mornings after 
 showers. We saw them, but no more observed them, 
 no more thought of them, than we did of the drifting 
 clouds or of the dust-carts. 
 
 I mention this facility of opportunities for observa- 
 tion, because many are prone to think that for 
 scientific study you must have laboratories and costly 
 apparatus and hours every day to spare, and that 
 these things are impossible to the vast majority of the 
 students in this Society's classes. The city of London 
 is a very good place in which, by one of many 
 examples, to disprove this. You know Sir John 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 89 
 
 Lubbock and his charming scientific works on Ants 
 and Bees, and in a wide range of natural history. It 
 would be hard to find a better naturalist in this range 
 of study ; but it would be just as hard to find a 
 better man of business, or one more earnest in political 
 life, or in the kindly social purposes in which he uses 
 all its opportunities ; and it would be hard to find one 
 more ready to promote by his own efforts all that is 
 good in social and scientific work. Eemember his 
 example when you have to listen to the nonsense 
 talked about the study of science being incompatible 
 with a life in business. 
 
 And this reminds me to say that an intimate 
 association of science with business may be very 
 useful if it makes it more clear to some men of 
 science that, by carrying on their researches till they 
 attain an immediate practical utility, they may vastly 
 increase the means for acquiring more knowledge. It 
 is strange how often, and with what heavy loss, at 
 least for a time, scientific men, as if for want of 
 enterprise, have stopped short of this. Some years 
 ago I studied and wrote on the history of the dis- 
 covery of anaesthetics. 1 It is too long to tell now, but 
 it shows that before the discovery was made, it was, 
 as we may say, within reach of Sir Humphry Davy, 
 Faraday, and others among the best. men of science of 
 their time. It was really made by such as may be 
 called practical men using scientific facts. I can 
 briefly tell another instance of such stopping short 
 which may seem yet more remarkable. It was told 
 to me by my brother, Sir George Paget, who, more 
 than fifty years ago, attended the lectures on chemistry 
 
 1 Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1879. 
 
90 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 at Cambridge by Professor Gumming. The Professor, 
 when describing to his class the discovery by (Ersted 
 of the power of an electric current to deflect a 
 magnet, used to say — " Here, then, are the elements 
 which would excellently serve for a system of tele- 
 graphy " ; and yet neither he nor any of the active 
 and cultivated men who heard him moved onward 
 to the discovery and invention by which not only the 
 use, but the knowledge of electric science has been so 
 increased. 1 
 
 All these things may show the difficulty of observa- 
 tion and the need of earnestness and watchfulness in 
 observing. Of course it cannot be learned without 
 practice, and you may ask, Where can we practise 
 scientific observation here in London ? I might 
 answer, anywhere — even in natural history, you may 
 study the habits of the London wild birds ; there are 
 many besides the sparrows ; or you may study the 
 wild plants on any piece of ground left undisturbed 
 for two or three years. Long ago, when I studied 
 botany, there was such a piece of ground, scarcely 
 bigger than this hall, near my father's house in Yar- 
 mouth, and there I found more than fifty species. 
 The origin of such plants, whether from seeds in the 
 ground or from those in the air, how far one can 
 exclude another, the influence of London atmosphere, 
 their attraction of insects, and many other things, 
 would be worth observing. At least, in these and the 
 like things you may learn how to observe, and then you 
 will love to observe, and then some srood will come of it. 
 
 1 In the Home Life of Sir David Brewster, 1869, is an account of a 
 method of electric telegraphy used in 1753 by Mr. Morison of Greenock, 
 and published in the Scots Magazine of that year. 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 91 
 
 (2) Let me speak now of that second advantage of 
 scientific study : its teaching of accuracy — accuracy not 
 only in observing, but in recording, remembering, and 
 arranging facts. 
 
 I hardly need say that accuracy is essential both 
 to the maintenance and to the progress of knowledge. 
 All would hold this, but different persons have very 
 different standards of what they would call accuracy, 
 and many have a very low standard of it. Here then, 
 again, I would urge you to study and imitate the 
 work of some true master in science. The works in 
 exact science or in mathematics would, I suppose, be 
 best ; but of these I cannot speak, and I hope it is 
 with no foolish pride in what has been best in my own 
 studies if I believe that, in all the sciences of observa- 
 tion, there is nothing more accurate than is the 
 description of the human body in the chief books on 
 human anatomy. There is not a part visible to the 
 naked eye, and within reach of the most minute 
 dissection, which is not so exactly described that the 
 description can bear the tests of close examination 
 again and again repeated every year, in every ana- 
 tomical school. And even beyond this, the minute 
 parts of every structure have been examined with the 
 highest powers of the microscope, and accurately de- 
 scribed and drawn. Take this as the standard of 
 accuracy to which you should try to attain. 
 
 And I think I can be nearly sure that a great part 
 of this accuracy is due to the habit which many 
 anatomists have of writing descriptions of what they 
 observe while the objects are before them. I have 
 had so much experience of this in the making of 
 museum catalogues that I cannot doubt its utility. 
 
92 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 Looking and writing, looking and writing, looking and 
 correcting again and again ; thus at length may come 
 an accurate description. And, surely, this is only 
 after the custom of every good painter of scenery or 
 portraits. He may make clever sketches of what he 
 remembers to have seen, but for a complete likeness 
 he looks, may be, twenty times at everything, and 
 paints exactly what he sees. So should all who 
 would be accurate in scientific records ; science should 
 not be less accurate than art can be. 
 
 I think this scientific cultivation of accuracy can- 
 not be too strongly urged. It may be one of the 
 happiest means of teaching accuracy in speaking, and 
 in thinking, and in designing new lines in which to 
 continue one's course of study. And it may be very 
 useful in ordinary life. Look at its opposite in the 
 boundless mischiefs of inaccuracy, and these not 
 always from dishonest people, but from the careless, 
 the inconsiderate, the prejudiced. Do we not all 
 know people, good people too, who would not for their 
 lives tell a lie, but seem as if they could not for their 
 lives tell the truth ? 
 
 (3) All this may fairly lead to my speaking of the 
 utility of learning in scientific study the difficulty of 
 ascertaining truth. This difficulty is shown in all the 
 facts I have been speaking of; yet in many of the 
 ordinary affairs of life it is assumed to be trivial, or, 
 more remarkably, there are very wide differences of 
 custom due to different estimates of this difficulty. 
 Any newspaper will illustrate these differences. See, 
 first, what is done to ascertain truth in courts of law, 
 say for a case of theft or in an action for slander. 
 Every one who is to state the facts is examined on his 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 93 
 
 oath; then he may be cross-examined, to detect wilful 
 errors, lapses of memory, or any other inaccuracy. 
 Facts on both sides must be thus heard. Then there 
 follow pleadings for both sides, and each side may say 
 the best it can for itself, the worst it can for the 
 other; then comes a careful recital of the evidence 
 and an impartial summing-up by the judge ; and then 
 the deliberation of twelve men deemed fit to decide 
 what is true, and who have sworn on oath that they 
 will do so if they can. Thus they decide, and yet 
 there may be an appeal, and the whole question may 
 be raised again. 
 
 Now no reasonable person would desire less care 
 than this for finding what is true when justice is to be 
 done, especially when, on one side or the other, there 
 may be attempts to conceal the truth or to tell un- 
 truths. But surely the contrast is too great between 
 this just care and the carelessness with which, under 
 other conditions, statements are accepted as true. I 
 might draw the contrast from any mere private reports 
 of slander, or from any other part of a newspaper, 
 say the report of a contested election, in which one 
 may read how the opposite views as to matters of fact 
 as well as of opinion are maintained by vehemently 
 opponent pleadings, and then without any cool dis- 
 passionate summing-up, without much deliberation, 
 each side is positive that it has the truth, and that 
 even on matters of fact it is right and the other is 
 utterly wrong. But I need not multiply instances; 
 let any one only think of the grounds on which he is 
 ready to accept as true any ordinary statement, and 
 compare these with what would be required if that 
 statement were to be tested in a court of law. 
 
94 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 Of course we cannot apply these legal tests to all 
 the things that come before us, but at least we should 
 educate ourselves towards the wish for similar accu- 
 racy, towards the habit of judging of probabilities 
 according to the care given to find the truth. And 
 this is just what scientific study may do for us, by 
 showing us how truth is only reached by repeated 
 observations, by experiments and tests, by records and 
 revisions, by discussions in societies, in journals, in 
 reviews, by all the means that may detect fallacies 
 and bring out the mere truth. 
 
 It is thus that science may justify itself in claiming 
 credit for encouraging the love of truth ; and I think 
 it may fairly do so ; for the desire for truth in one 
 department of the mind will usually tend to increase 
 the desire for it in other parts, and the love of scientific 
 truth does, I believe, sustain and increase the love of 
 moral truth. 
 
 But the having spoken of the attainment of truth 
 in courts of law suggests to me to remind you that 
 the oath makes a witness promise to tell the truth, the 
 whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and in large 
 ranges of science, though the truth and nothing but 
 the truth may be attained, yet the whole truth very 
 seldom can be. This is especially the case with the 
 sciences that have to do with living things ; for in 
 these everything is in relation with so many and 
 variable conditions that it is very hard to arrive at an 
 unconditional conclusion. Few things are absolute. 
 A distinguished French surgeon used to say that there 
 were two words that a surgeon should never use, 
 namely, " jamais " and " toujours." The same prin- 
 ciple is maintained, I think, by Mr. Gilbert in H.M.S. 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 95 
 
 Pinafore, " Never ? what never ? well, hardly ever." 
 Certainly it is illustrated in biology. 
 
 Nothing might seem more constant than the like- 
 ness of offspring to their parents ; but the likeness is 
 with difference, and we know not why. The rule of 
 likeness between the two lateral halves of many animals 
 and leaves of plants is very general ; but the likeness 
 is very rarely exact, and we know not why. In the 
 organic world nature is not mathematically exact — 
 not uniformly constant — at least in so far as we can 
 yet see ; and we do not know the reasons of the 
 deviations. 
 
 Now, it is well to bear all this in mind, and to feel 
 that when we talk of exceptions and chances and the 
 like, though we are very apt to persuade ourselves 
 that we are talking of just and final conclusions, yet 
 really we may be only shifting away from the con- 
 fession of the imperfection of our knowledge ; we may 
 be wrongly persuading ourselves that we have not 
 only the truth, but the whole truth. Scientific study 
 will teach you that exceptions to admitted laws are 
 really examples of other laws not yet accurately ascer- 
 tained ; and that the events which we refer to chance, 
 as if it were a determiuing force, are only some of 
 those of which we have not traced the precedents. 
 Exceptions, chances, and such like words, relate en- 
 tirely to things of which we have as yet very imperfect 
 knowledge or none at all ; our hope must be that the 
 number of such things will be diminished by scientific 
 study. 
 
 (4) And now let me say something of that last 
 method of education of the mind by scientific study, 
 which may teach it how to proceed from the knowledge 
 
96 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 of what is proved to the thinking of what is probable. 
 I shall not discuss the values or rules of safe induc- 
 tion or deduction from facts ; it should be done in the 
 language of logic, but that is a language which I can- 
 not speak ; and I suspect you may learn the rules 
 better in the lives or works of some of the great 
 masters in science. Say, again, if you like, of Darwin, 
 or, if you have time, in such a book as Whe well's 
 History of the Inductive Sciences. If you read 
 Darwin, observe the immense quantity of facts he 
 gathered before he enunciated his induction as to the 
 law of natural selection, the doubts he felt and then 
 slowly dispersed, the suspicions of error which pre- 
 ceded his conviction of the truth. And then study 
 his caution as to what might be deduced from it ; his 
 anxiety for facts which might test his belief or his 
 guesses ; how different from the confidence with which 
 some people seem to think it easy to explain every- 
 thing. 
 
 I am sure I cannot too strongly urge you thus to 
 study the difficulties of scientific thinking before you 
 venture to practise it. I love to quote a saying of the 
 greatest of all scientific workers in my profession — 
 John Hunter. He used to say to his pupils, " Don't 
 think : try." He meant, " Don't think that you can 
 safely decide that, because you know some things to 
 be true, therefore some others must be true ; ' try ' 
 whether they are, test them, watch them ; do not be 
 ready to say positively, ' From this it follows,' or any- 
 thing of that kind ; ' try ' whether it does." And the 
 whole history of science proves his wisdom ; for, 
 though it is a glorious history of progress in know- 
 ledge, yet every page is disfigured by the examples of 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 97 
 
 hindrances of that progress by errors ; and the vast 
 majority of these are errors, not of observation, but of 
 thinking. Men have said that knowledge is power, 
 and they have tried too soon to grasp it ; and they 
 have grasped at the shadows of it, at the shadows cast 
 by themselves while by their erroneous thinking they 
 obstructed the light of truth. 
 
 Now, you may ask, what is to be the reward of all 
 this study ? Would not some other knowledge, in the 
 pursuit of which there is less risk of error, less need 
 of all these cautions, serve as well ? I do not believe 
 there is ? I do not believe there is one more useful 
 or more happy -making than is scientific study. I 
 have read the admirable address on the study of 
 literature given here last year by Mr. John Morley, 
 but it has not converted me. I must hold still to the 
 preference for the teaching of science and to its utility 
 for every part and manner of life. Surely there is no 
 one in any calling who may not be the better for 
 having studied and practised careful observation and 
 accuracy, and the habit of ascertaining truth and of 
 thinking cautiously ; and in science all these and many 
 other of the best mental qualities may be cultivated 
 even while we are gaining the power and happiness 
 of knowledge. And scientific knowledge is power. 
 Think of the telegraph and telephone ! look, when you 
 leave this hall, at those wires overhead, and think of 
 those underground ; think of the incessant talking and 
 writing that is going on along those wires — the carry- 
 ing of questions and answers on all the interests of 
 life over hundreds of miles in a few seconds — the 
 bringing near of the minds of thousands who are far 
 apart — the inestimable aids to happiness and utility. 
 
 H 
 
98 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 It was the power of scientific knowledge that did 
 this. 
 
 Think of the abolition of pain by anaesthetics, or of 
 all the utilities of photography in its profoundest 
 scientific researches, in historic records, in the domestic 
 happiness that even the poorest may have while they 
 can see around them the memorial portraits of those 
 that are far off. It was the power of scientific know- 
 ledge that did this. 
 
 Nay, look anywhere ; see if you can find a place in 
 all this land where there is not evidence that scientific 
 knowledge is power for the welfare of men. And 
 though we may not become of the number of those by 
 w T hom great discoveries are made, yet it is no trivial 
 thing to be members of the same class with them, to 
 know their language, to be able to admire their power 
 and skill and victorious work, even as it is a just 
 pride to be among the people of a mighty nation, 
 though we may add nothing to its power. 
 
 And scientific knowledge is happiness. Every one 
 who possesses any fair share of it and uses it well will 
 tell you so, and for those who are engaged in various 
 daily occupations it may be the truest and best mental 
 recreation ; for recreation is not mere idleness, not 
 mere absolute rest after work ; the best recreation is a 
 willing, active occupation in something quite unlike the 
 ordinary business of one's life. And I think it may 
 be said of scientific study that it is remarkably fit for 
 satisfying some of the natural desires of the mind 
 which are least likely to be satisfied in the regular 
 business of life, or are only satisfied by being misused. 
 There is the natural love of novelty, the desire for the 
 satisfaction of curiosity. It is hard to satisfy them in 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 99 
 
 ordinary routine; very easy to do so in gossip and 
 credulity ; much better, surely, to do so in the un- 
 bounded stores and progress of science. 
 
 And there is the love of wonders ; it is hard to 
 satisfy it with anything, however marvellous and 
 admirable, with which every day's work makes one 
 familiar. We must all, I think, have seen this when 
 we have been looking at some marvellous machinery, 
 some machine working with such precision, such cal- 
 culated accuracy, such definite purpose, that we might 
 imagine the mind of its inventor to be dwelling in it. 
 We have stood still in wonder, and yet the workman 
 feels none; to him every movement is foreseen, the 
 purpose is well known, there is no happiness of 
 novelty, no strange sight, no thought of wonder. 
 
 To the scientific student there are new wonders 
 everywhere. Let me tell the last that I observed. 
 Mademoiselle Janotha was so good as to play on the 
 piano, at my request, one of the swiftest pieces of 
 music known to her, a presto by Mendelssohn. The 
 time it occupied was taken, and the number of notes 
 was counted. She played 5995 notes in four minutes 
 and three seconds — rather more than twenty -four 
 notes per second. We may from this estimate, ap- 
 proximately, the number of what we may call nervous 
 vibrations transmitted during a given time from and 
 to the brain ; from the brain to the muscles ; and 
 from the muscles and the organs of hearing and of 
 touch to the brain. Each note required at least two 
 voluntary movements of a finger, — the bending down 
 and the raising up ; and besides these there were a 
 very large number of lateral movements to and fro of 
 the fingers, as well as many and various movements of 
 
100 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDB.ESSES 
 
 the wrists, elbows, shoulders, and feet. It was not 
 possible to count these, but I think I can be sure that 
 they were not less than at the rate of one movement 
 for each note, making, altogether, not less than three 
 voluntary movements for each note, even if we allow 
 for the chords in which several notes were struck at 
 the same instant. Certainly there were not less than 
 seventy-two distinctive variations in the currents of 
 nerve-force transmitted from the brain to muscles in 
 each second, and each of these variations was deter- 
 mined by a distinct effort of the will. And observe, 
 for herein may seem a chief wonder, each of these 
 movements was directed by the will to a certain place, 
 with a certain force and a certain speed, at a certain 
 time; and each touch was maintained for a certain 
 length of time. Thus there were, as we may say, 
 five distinct and designed qualities in each of the 
 seventy-two movements in each second. 
 
 Moreover, each of these movements, determined by 
 the will and exactly effected by transmission of nerve- 
 force from the brain along nerve-fibres to the muscles 
 — each of these movements was associated with con- 
 sciousness of the very position of each finger, each 
 hand, each arm, and each foot, before it was moved 
 and while moving it, and with consciousness of the 
 sound of each note and of the force of each touch. 
 Thus, there were at least four conscious sensations for 
 each of the twenty-four notes in each second; that is, 
 there were at the rate of ninety-six transmissions of 
 force from the ends of nerve-fibres, along their course 
 to the brain, in each of the same seconds during which 
 there were seventy-two transmissions going out from 
 the brain along other nerve-fibres to the muscles. 
 
SIR JAMES PAGET 101 
 
 And then, add to all this, that during the time, in 
 each second of which the mind was conscious of at 
 least ninety-six sensations, and directed not less than 
 seventy-two movements, it was also remembering each 
 note to be played in its due time and place, and was 
 exercised, with the judgment, in the comparison of the 
 playing of this evening with those of times before, and 
 with some of the sentiments which the music was 
 intended to express. It was played from memory, but 
 Mademoiselle Janotha assures me that she could have 
 played it as swiftly at sight, though this would have 
 added another to the four sensations associated with 
 each note. 
 
 Surely, it is impossible to imagine what goes on in 
 a brain thus occupied ; I think it is most impossible, 
 if that may be said, to one who has seen a brain and 
 has carefully examined it. Eeally, it is inconceivable ; 
 and here I will end, for here is a lesson for the most 
 serious thoughts. In facts such as these science 
 achieves the knowledge of the reality of things more 
 wonderful than the imagination can conceive; it 
 sustains the faith which holds that many things that 
 are inconceivable are yet surely true. 
 
SOME LESSONS OE ANTIQUITY 
 
 By Professor IV^Max Muller, LL.D. 
 
 1889 
 
 A well-known student once expressed his admiration 
 for Oxford by saying that it would be Paradise 
 Eegained if only the long vacation lasted the whole 
 year. But remember, he was not an idle Fellow, but 
 one of those who construe vacare with a dative, when it 
 means to be free from all interruptions for the pursuit 
 of study. Well, this peaceful sanctuary of Oxford was 
 suddenly changed last summer into a perfect bee-hive. 
 The colleges, the libraries, the gardens, the streets, the 
 river were all swarming with visitors. As the clock 
 struck, from ten in the morning till five in the after- 
 noon, streams of gentlemen and ladies were seen 
 coming out and going back to the lecture -rooms. 
 Every lecture-room was as full as it could hold, and 
 the eager faces and the quick-moving pens and pencils 
 showed that the students had come on earnest busi- 
 ness bent. It was, in fact, a realised dream of what a 
 University might be, or what it ought to be, perhaps 
 what it will be again, when the words of our President 
 are taken to heart that " man needs knowledge, not 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 103 
 
 only as a means of livelihood, but as a means of 
 life." 
 
 This sudden metamorphosis of Oxford was due to 
 the first meeting of students under the University 
 Extension system. They had been invited to reside in 
 Oxford for the first ten days in August. Nearly a 
 thousand availed themselves of this invitation, of 
 whom about seven hundred were University Extension 
 students from the Oxford, Cambridge, and London 
 Centres. Sixty-one lectures were delivered during the 
 ten days on Literature, History, Economics, and Science. 
 Besides these lectures, conferences were held for dis- 
 cussing questions connected with Extended University 
 teaching. All these lectures and conferences were 
 remarkably well attended from beginning to end, and 
 yet there was time for afternoon excursions and social 
 gatherings. The antiquities of Oxford, the Colleges, 
 Libraries, and Chapels were well explored, generally 
 under the guidance of the Head or the Fellows of 
 each college. The success of the whole undertaking, 
 thanks very much to the exertions of Mr. Sadler 
 and Mr. Hewins, was so brilliant that at the end of 
 the meeting it was unanimously decided to repeat 
 the experiment next year. 
 
 To my mind that gathering at Oxford, though it 
 was but little noticed by the outer world, was an 
 historical event, the beginning of a new era in the 
 history of national education. And I rejoiced that 
 this new growth should have sprung from the old 
 Universities, because it had thus secured a natural soil 
 and an historical foundation on which to strike root, 
 to grow, and to flourish. 
 
 There is no doubt a strong feeling abroad that the 
 
104 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 instruction which is given by the old Universities is 
 antiquated and useless in the fierce struggle for exist- 
 ence. We are told that we teach dead languages, dead 
 literatures, dead philosophy, as if there could be such 
 a thing as a dead language, a dead literature, a dead 
 philosophy. Is Greek a dead language ? It lives not 
 only in the spoken Greek, it runs like fire through the 
 veins of all European speech. Is Homer, is iEschylos, 
 is Sophocles a dead poet ? They live in Milton, 
 Eacine, and Goethe, and I defy any one to under- 
 stand and enjoy even such living poets as Tennyson 
 or Browning without having breathed at school or at 
 the Universities the language and thought of those 
 ancient classics. Is Plato a dead philosopher ? It is 
 impossible for two or three philosophers to gather 
 together without Plato being in the midst of them. 
 
 I should say, on the contrary, that all living 
 languages, all living literatures, all living philosophy 
 would be dead, if you cut the historical fibres by which 
 they cling to their ancient soil. What is the life- 
 blood of French, Italian, and Spanish, if not Latin ? 
 You may call French an old and wizened speech, not 
 Latin. You may call Comte's philosophy effete, but 
 not that of Aristotle. You may see signs of degeneracy 
 in the mushroom growth of our modern novels, not in 
 the fresh and life-like idylls of Nausikaa or Penelope. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. I do not want 
 everybody to be a classical scholar or antiquarian, but 
 I hold that it is the duty of all University teaching 
 never to lose touch with the past. It seems to me the 
 highest aim of all knowledge to try to understand 
 what is, by learning how it has come to be what it is. 
 That is the true meaning of history, and that seems to 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 105 
 
 me the kind of knowledge which schools and Universities 
 are called upon to cultivate and to teach. I believe 
 it is in the end the more useful knowledge also. It 
 is safe and sound, and by being safe and sound, it not 
 only enriches the intellect, but it forms and strengthens 
 the character of a man. A man who knows what 
 honest and thorough knowledge means, in however 
 small a sphere, will never allow himself to be a mere 
 dabbler or smatterer, whatever subject he may have to 
 deal with in later life. He may abstain, but he will 
 not venture in. 
 
 What is the original meaning of all instruction ? 
 It is tradition. It was from the beginning the handing 
 over of the experience of one generation to the other, 
 the establishment of some kind of continuity between 
 the past, the present, and the future. This most 
 primitive form of education and instruction marks 
 everywhere the beginning of civilised life and the very 
 dawn of history. 
 
 History begins when the father explains to his son 
 how the small world in which he has to live came to 
 be what it is ; when the present generation accepts the 
 inheritance of the past, and hands down a richer heir- 
 loom to the future ; when, in fact, the present feels 
 itself connected and almost identified with the future 
 and the past. It is this solidarity, as the French call 
 it, this consciousness of a common responsibility, which 
 distinguishes the civilised and historical from the un- 
 civilised and unhistorical races of the world. 
 
 There are races for whom the ideas of the past and 
 the future seem hardly to exist. We call them un- 
 civilised races, savages, ephemeral beings that are born 
 and die without leaving any trace behind them. The 
 
106 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES • 
 
 only bond which connects them with the past is their 
 language, possibly their religion, and a few customs 
 and traditions which descend to their successors with- 
 out any effort on either side. 
 
 But there were other races — not many — who cared 
 for the future and the past, who were learners and 
 teachers, the founders of civilised life, and the first 
 makers of history. Such were the Egyptians and the 
 Babylonians, and those who afterwards followed their 
 example — the Persians, Greeks, and Eomans. To us it 
 seems quite natural that the ancient Egyptians and 
 Babylonians should have erected monuments of an 
 almost indestructible character, and covered them with 
 inscriptions to tell, not only the next generation, but 
 all generations to come, what they had achieved during 
 their short sojourn on earth. Why should they and 
 they alone have conceived such an idea ? The common 
 answer is, because they possessed the art of writing. 
 But the truer answer would be that they invented 
 and perfected the art of writing because they had some- 
 thing to say and something to write, because they 
 wished to communicate something to their children, 
 their grandchildren, and to generations to come. 
 
 They would have carried out their object even 
 without hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic alphabets. 
 Eor we see that even among so-called savage tribes, 
 in some of the Polynesian islands, for instance, a desire 
 to perpetuate their deeds manifests itself in a kind of 
 epic or historical poetry. These poems tell of wars, of 
 victories and defeats, of conquests and treaties of peace. 
 As writing is unknown in these islands, these poems 
 are commited to memory and entrusted to the safe 
 keeping of a separate caste, who are, as it were, the 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 107 
 
 living archives of the island. They are the highest 
 authorities on questions of disputed succession, on the 
 doubtful landmarks of tribes, and the boundaries of 
 families. And these poems are composed according 
 to such strict rules and preserved with such minute 
 care, that when they have to be recited as evidence on 
 disputed frontiers any fraudulent alteration would 
 easily be detected. Mere prose evidence is regarded 
 as no evidence at all ; it must be poetical, metrical, 
 and archaic. 
 
 Whenever this thought springs up in the human 
 mind, that we live not only for ourselves, but that we 
 owe a debt to the future for what we have received 
 from the past, the world enters upon a new stage; it 
 becomes historical. The work which was begun 
 tentatively in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt 
 was carried on in the cuneiform records of Babylon, 
 in the mountain edicts of Darius and Xerxes, till it 
 reached Greece and Eome, and there culminated in 
 the masterworks of such historians as Herodotus and 
 Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus. 
 
 It may seem to you that these early beginnings of 
 tradition and history are far removed from us, and that 
 the knowledge which we possess and which we wish 
 to hand down to future generations in schools and 
 Universities is of a totally different character. But 
 this is really not the case. We are what we are, we 
 possess what we possess even in the very elements of 
 our knowledge, thanks to the labours of the ancient 
 Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, Persians, to say 
 nothing of Greeks and Eomans. 
 
 What should we be without our ABC, without 
 being able to write ? Mere illiterate savages, knowing 
 
108 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES " 
 
 nothing of the past except by hearsay, caring little for 
 the future except for our own immediate posterity. 
 Now whenever we read a book or write a letter we 
 ought to render thanks in our heart to the ancient 
 scholars of Egypt who invented and perfected writing, 
 and whose alphabetic signs are now used over the 
 whole civilised world, with the exception of China. 
 Yes, whenever you write an a or a b or a c you write 
 what was originally a hieroglyphic picture. Your 
 L is the crouching lion, your F the cerastes, a serpent 
 with two horns; your H the Egyptian picture of a 
 sieve. 
 
 There is no break, no missing link between our 
 ABC and the hieroglyphic letters as you see them 
 on the obelisk on the Thames Embankment and on 
 the much older monuments in Egypt. The Egyptians 
 handed their letters to the Phoenicians, the Phoenicians 
 to the Greeks, the Greeks to the Eomans, the Eomans 
 to us. All the Semitic alphabets also, as used in 
 Persian and Arabic, and the more important alphabets 
 of India, Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam, all come in the 
 end from Phoenicia and Egypt. The whole of Asia, 
 except that part of it which is overshadowed by 
 Chinese influence, Europe, America, Africa, and 
 Australia, so far as they write at all, all write Egyptian 
 hieroglyphics. The chain of tradition has never been 
 broken, the stream of evolution is more perfect here 
 than anywhere else. 
 
 Pleading and writing, therefore, have come to us 
 from ancient Egypt. But whence did we get our 
 arithmetic? When I say our arithmetic I do not 
 mean our numerals only, or our knowledge that two 
 and two make four. That kind of knowledge is 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 109 
 
 home-grown, and can be traced back to that common 
 Aryan home from which we derive our language, that 
 is to say, our whole intellectual inheritance. I mean 
 our numerical figures. There are many people who have 
 numerals, but no numerical figures like our own. 
 There are others, such as the Chiquitos in Columbia, 
 who count with their fingers, but have no numerals 
 at all ; at least we are told so by the few travellers 
 who have visited them. 1 There are others, again, who 
 have a very perfect system of numerals, but who for 
 numerical notation depend either on an abacus or on 
 such simple combinations of strokes as we find in 
 Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylon, China, India, and even 
 among the redskins of America. There are others, 
 again, like the Greeks and the Hindus, who under 
 certain circumstances use letters of their alphabet 
 instead of figures. 
 
 You may imagine that with such contrivances 
 arithmetic could never have advanced to its present 
 stage of perfection, unless some one had invented our 
 numerical figures. Whence then did we get our 
 figures ? "We call them Arabic figures, and that tells 
 its own tale. But the Arabs call them Indian figures, 
 and that tells its own tale likewise. Our figures came 
 to us from the Arabs in Spain, they came to them 
 from India, and if you consider what we should be 
 without our figures from one to nine, I think you will 
 admit that we owe as much gratitude to India for our 
 arithmetic as to Egypt for our reading and writing. 
 When I am sometimes told that the Hindus were 
 mere dreamers, and never made any useful discovery, 
 
 1 Brett, History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4th ed., 
 London, 1887. 
 
110 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 such as our steam-engines and electric telegraphs, I 
 tell my friends they invented that without which 
 mechanical and electric science could never have 
 become what they are, that without which we should 
 never have had steam-engines or electric telegraphs — 
 they invented our figures from 1 to 9 ; and more than 
 that, they invented the nought, the sign for nothing — 
 one of the most useful discoveries ever made, as all 
 mathematicians will tell you. 
 
 Let us remember then the lessons which we have 
 learnt from antiquity. We have learnt reading and 
 writing from Egypt, we have learnt arithmetic from 
 India. So much for the famous three E's. 
 
 But that is not all. If we are Egyptians whenever 
 we read and write, and Indians whenever we do our 
 accounts, we have only to look at our watches to see 
 that we are Babylonians also. We must go to the 
 British Museum to see what a cuneiform inscription 
 is like ; but it is a fact, nevertheless, that every one of 
 us carries something like a cuneiform inscription in 
 his waistcoat pocket. For why is our hour divided 
 into sixty minutes, each minute into sixty seconds, 
 and so forth ? Simply and solely because in Babylonia 
 there existed, by the side of the decimal system of 
 notation, another system, the sexagesimal, which 
 counted by sixties. Why that number should have 
 been chosen is clear enough, and it speaks well for the 
 practical sense of those ancient Babylonian merchants. 
 There is no number which has so many divisors as 
 sixty. 
 
 The Babylonians divided the sun's daily journey 
 into 24 parasangs or 720 stadia. Each parasang or 
 hour was subdivided into 60 minutes. A parasang 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 111 
 
 is about a German mile, and Babylonian astronomers 
 compared the progress made by the sun during one 
 hour at the time of the equinox to the progress made 
 by a good walker during the same time, both accom- 
 plishing 1 parasang. The whole course of the sun 
 during the 24 equinoctial hours was fixed at 24 
 parasangs or 720 stadia, or 360 degrees. This system 
 was handed on to the Greeks, and Hipparchus, the 
 great Greek philosopher, who lived about 150 B.C., 
 introduced the Babylonian hour into Europe. Ptolemy, 
 who wrote about 150 A.D., and whose name still lives 
 in that of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, gave 
 still wider currency to the Babylonian way of reckoning 
 time. It was carried along on the quiet stream of 
 traditional knowledge through the Middle Ages, and, 
 strange to say, it sailed down safely over the Niagara 
 of the French Eevolution. For the French, when 
 revolutionising weights, measures, coins, and dates, 
 and subjecting all to the decimal system of reckoning, 
 were induced by some unexplained motive to respect 
 our clocks and watches, and to allow our dials to 
 remain sexagesimal, that is, Babylonian, each hour 
 consisting of 60 minutes. Here you see again the 
 wonderful coherence of the world, and how what we 
 call knowledge is the result of an unbroken tradition, 
 of a teaching descending from father to son. Not 
 more than about a hundred arms would reach from us 
 to the builders of the palaces of Babylon, and enable 
 us to shake hands with the founders of the oldest 
 pyramids, and to thank them for what they have done 
 for us. 
 
 And allow me to point out what I consider most 
 important in these lessons of antiquity. They are not 
 
112 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 mere guesses or theories ; they are statements resting 
 on historical facts, on evidence that cannot be shaken. 
 Suppose five thousand years hence, or, let us be more 
 merciful and say fifty thousand years hence, some 
 future Schliemann were to run his shafts into the 
 ruins of what was once called London, and discover 
 among the dSbris of what is now the British Museum 
 charred fragments of newspapers, in which some 
 Champolion of the future might decipher such names 
 as centimetre or millimetre. On the strength of such 
 evidence every historian would be justified in asserting 
 that the ancient inhabitants of London — we ourselves 
 — had once upon a time adopted a new decimal 
 system of weights and measures from the French, 
 because it was in French, in primeval French only, 
 that such words as centimetre or millimetre could 
 possibly have been formed. We argue to-day on the 
 strength of the same kind of evidence, on the evidence 
 chiefly of language and inscriptions, that our dials 
 must have come from the Babylonians, our alphabets 
 from Egypt, our figures from India. We indulge in 
 no guesses, no mere possibilities, but we go back step 
 by step from the Times of to-day till we arrive at the 
 earliest Babylonian inscription and the most ancient 
 hieroglyphic monuments. What lies beyond we leave 
 to the theoretic school, which begins its work where 
 the work of the historical school comes to an end. 
 
 I could lay before you many more of these lessons 
 of antiquity, but the Babylonian dial of my watch 
 reminds me that my parasang, or my German mile, or 
 my hour, is drawing to an end, and I must confine 
 myself to one or two only. You have heard a great 
 deal lately of bi-metallism. I am not going to inflict 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 113 
 
 on this audience a lecture on that deeply interesting 
 subject, certainly not in the presence of our chairman, 
 the Lord Mayor, and with the fear of the Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer before my eyes. But I may just 
 mention this, that when I saw that what the bi- 
 metallists were contending for was to fix and main- 
 tain in perpetuity a settled ratio between gold and 
 silver, I asked myself how this idea arose ; and being 
 of an historical turn of mind, I tried to find out 
 whether antiquity could have any lessons to teach us 
 on this subject. Coined money, as you know, is not 
 a very ancient invention. There may have been a 
 golden age when gold was altogether unknown, and 
 people paid with cows, not with coins. When precious 
 metals, gold, silver, copper, or iron began to be used 
 for payment, they were at first simply weighed. Even 
 we still speak of a pound instead of a sovereign. The 
 next step was to issue pieces of gold and silver 
 properly weighed, and then to mark the exact weight 
 and value on each piece. This was done in Assyria 
 and Babylonia, where we find shekels or pounds of 
 gold and silver. The commerce of the Eastern nations 
 was carried on for centuries by means of these weights 
 of metal. It was the Greeks, the Greeks of Phocsea 
 in Ionia, who in the seventh century B.C. first con- 
 ceived the idea of coining money, that is, of stamping 
 on each piece their city arms, the phoca or seal, thus 
 giving the warranty of their State for the right weight 
 and value of those pieces. From Phocsea this art of 
 coining spread rapidly to the other Greek towns of 
 Asia Minor, and was thence transplanted to iEgina, the 
 Peloponnesus, Athens, and the Greek colonies in Africa 
 and in Italy. The weight of the most ancient gold 
 
 I 
 
114 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 coin in all these countries was originally the same as 
 that of the ancient Babylonian gold shekel, only stamped 
 with the arms of each country, which thus made itself 
 responsible for its proper weight. And this gold 
 shekel or pound, in spite of historical disturbances, 
 has held its own through centuries. The gold coins 
 of Croesus, Darius, Philip, and Alexander have all 
 about the same weight as the old Babylonian gold 
 shekel, sixty of them going to one mina of gold ; and 
 what is stranger still, our own sovereign, or pound, or 
 shekel, has nearly the same weight, sixty of them 
 going to an old Babylonian mina of gold. In ancient 
 times twenty silver drachmas or half-shekels went to 
 a gold shekel, just as with us twenty silver shillings 
 are equivalent to a sovereign. This ancient shilling 
 was again subdivided into sixty copper coins, sixty 
 being the favourite Babylonian figure. 
 
 Knowing, therefore, the relative monetary value of 
 a gold and silver shekel or half- shekel, knowing how 
 many silver shekels the ancient nations had to give 
 for one gold shekel, it was possible by merely weigh- 
 ing the ancient coins to find out whether there was 
 then already any fixed ratio between gold and silver. 
 Thousands of ancient coins have thus been tested, and 
 the result has been to show that the ratio between 
 gold and silver was fixed from the earliest times with 
 the most exact accuracy. 
 
 That ratio, as Dr. Brugsch has shown, was 1 to 12J 
 in Egypt; it was, as proved by Dr. Brandis, 1 to 13J 
 in Babylonia and in all the countries which adopted 
 the Babylonian standard. There have been slight 
 fluctuations, and there are instances of debased coinage 
 in ancient as well as in modern times. But for 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 115 
 
 international trade and tribute, the old Babylonian 
 standard was maintained for a very long time. 
 
 These numismatic researches, which have been 
 carried on with indefatigable industry by some of the 
 most eminent scholars in Europe, may seem simply 
 curious, but like all historical studies they may also 
 convey some lessons. 
 
 They prove that, in spite of inherent difficulties, 
 the great political and commercial nations of the 
 ancient world did succeed in solving the bi-metallic 
 problem, and in maintaining for centuries a fixed 
 standard between gold and silver. 
 
 They prove that this standard, though influenced, 
 no doubt, by the relative quantity of the two metals, 
 by the cost of production, and by the demand for 
 either silver or gold in the markets of the ancient 
 world, was maintained by the common sense of the 
 great commercial nations of antiquity, who were anxious 
 to safeguard the interests both of their wholesale and 
 retail traders. 1 
 
 They prove, lastly, that though a change in the 
 ratio between gold and silver cannot be entirely pre- 
 vented, it took place in ancient time by very small 
 degrees. From the sixteenth century B.C., or, at all 
 events, if we restrict our remarks to coined money, from 
 the seventh century B.C. to nearly our own time, the 
 appreciation of gold has been no more than 1^, 
 
 1 Some monometallist scholars have denied these facts, but I 
 doubt whether they have read Dr. Brandis' learned work, "Das 
 Miinzwesin" or whether they have really taken the trouble of 
 weighing once more the thousands of gold and silver coins which he 
 has weighed, I knew the late Dr. Brandis, and I know that he was a 
 careful and truthful scholar. Those who venture to differ from him 
 must produce facts, not fads. 
 
116 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 namely, from 13 J to 15. If now, within our own 
 recollection, it has suddenly risen from 15 to 20, 
 have we not a right to ask whether this violent dis- 
 turbance is due altogether to natural causes, or whether 
 what we are told is the effect, is not to a certain 
 extent the cause of it — I mean the sudden resolution 
 of certain Governments to boycott for their own pur- 
 poses the second precious metal of the world. 
 
 But I must not venture farther on this dangerous 
 ground, but shall invite you, in conclusion, to turn 
 your eyes from the monetary to the intellectual 
 currency of the world, from coins to what are called 
 the counters of our thoughts. 
 
 The lessons which antiquity has taught us with 
 regard to language, its nature, its origin, its growth, 
 and decay are more marvellous than any we have 
 hitherto considered. 
 
 What is the age of Alexander and Darius, of the 
 palaces of Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, com- 
 pared with the age of language, the age of those very 
 words which we use every day, and which, forsooth, 
 we call modern ? There is nothing more ancient in 
 the world than every one of the words which you hear 
 me utter at present. 
 
 Take the two words " there is," and you can trace them 
 step by step from English to Anglo-Saxon, from Anglo- 
 Saxon to Gothic; you can trace them in all the 
 Teutonic, Celtic, Slavonic languages, in the languages 
 of Darius and Cyrus, in the prayers of Zoroaster, finally 
 in the hymns of the Eig Veda. Instead of there is, 
 the old Vedic poets said tatra asti. It is the same coin, 
 it has the same weight, only it has suffered a little 
 by wear and tear during the thousands of years that 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 117 
 
 it has passed from hand to hand or from mouth to 
 mouth. Those two words would suffice to prove that 
 all the languages of the civilised races of Europe, the 
 languages of Persia and India also, all sprang from one 
 source ; and if you place before your imagination a map 
 of Europe and Asia, you would see all the fairest por- 
 tions of these two continents, all the countries where 
 you can discover historical monuments, temples, 
 palaces, forums, churches, or houses of parliament, 
 lighted up by the rays of that one language which we 
 are speaking ourselves, the Aryan language, the classical 
 language of the past, the living language of the present, 
 and in the distant future the true Volapiik, the 
 language of the world. 
 
 I have no time to speak of the other large streams 
 of historical speech, — the Semitic, the Ugro-Altaic, the 
 Chinese, the Polynesian, the African, and American. 
 But think what a lesson of antiquity has here been 
 thrown open to us. We learn that we are bound 
 together with all the greatest nations of the world by 
 bonds more close, more firm and fast than flesh, or 
 bone, or blood could ever furnish. For what is flesh, 
 or bone, or blood compared to language ? There is no 
 continuity in flesh, and bone, and blood. They come 
 and go by what we call birth and death, and they 
 change from day to day. In ancient times, in the 
 struggle of all against all, when whole tribes were 
 annihilated, nations carried away into captivity, slaves 
 bought and sold, and the centres of civilised life 
 overwhelmed again and again by a deluge of barbarian 
 invasions, what chance was there of unmixed blood in 
 any part of the world ? But language always remained 
 itself, and those who spoke it, whatever their blood 
 
118 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 may have been, marched in serried ranks along the 
 highroad of history as one noble army, as one spiritual 
 brotherhood. "What does it matter whether the same 
 blood runs in our veins and in the veins of our dark 
 fellow-men in India ? Their language is the same, 
 and has been the same for thousands of years, as our 
 own language ; and whoever knows what language 
 means, how language is not only the vestment, but the 
 very embodiment of thought, will feel that to be of the 
 same language is a great deal more than to be of the 
 same flesh and blood. 
 
 With the light which the study of the antiquity of 
 language has shed on the past, the whole world has 
 been changed. We know now not only what we are, 
 but whence we are. We know our common Aryan 
 home. We know what we carried away from it, and 
 how our common intellectual inheritance has grown 
 and grown from century to century till it has reached 
 a wealth, unsurpassed anywhere, amounting in English 
 alone to 250,000 words. What does it matter whether 
 we know the exact latitude and longitude of that 
 Aryan home, though among reasonable people there 
 is, I believe, very little doubt as to its whereabouts 
 "somewhere in Asia." The important point is that 
 we know that there was such a home, and that we 
 can trace the whole intellectual growth of the Aryan 
 family back to roots which sprang from a common 
 soil. And we can do this not by mere guesses only, 
 or theoretically, but by facts, that is, historically. 
 Take any word or thought that now vibrates through 
 our mind, and we know now how it was first struck in 
 countries far away, and in times so distant that hardly 
 any chronology can reach them. If anywhere it is 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 119 
 
 in language that we may say, We are what we have 
 been. In language everything that is new is old, and 
 everything that is old is new. That is true evolution, 
 true historical continuity. A man who knows his 
 language, and all that is implied by it, stands on a 
 foundation of ages. He feels the past under his feet, 
 and feels at home in the world of thought, a loyal 
 citizen of the oldest and widest republic. 
 
 It is this historical knowledge of language, and not 
 of language only, but of everything that has been 
 handed down to us by an uninterrupted tradition from 
 father to son, it is that kind of knowledge which I 
 hold that our Universities and schools should strive to 
 maintain. It is the historical spirit with which they 
 should try to inspire every new generation. As we trace 
 the course of a mighty river back from valley to valley, 
 as we mark its tributaries, and watch its meanderings 
 till we reach its source, or, at all events, the watershed 
 from which its sources spring, in the same manner the 
 historical school has to trace every current of human 
 knowledge from century to century back to its fountain- 
 head, if that is possible, or at all events as near to it 
 as the remaining records of the past will allow. The 
 true interest of all knowledge lies in its growth. The 
 very mistakes of the past form the solid ground on 
 which the truer knowledge of the present is founded. 
 Would a mathematician be a mathematician who had 
 not studied his Euclid ? Would an astronomer be an 
 astronomer who did not know the Ptolemaic system of 
 astronomy, and had not worked his way through its errors 
 to the truer views of Copernicus ? Would a philosopher 
 be a philosopher who had never grappled with Plato and 
 Aristotle ? Would a lawyer be a lawyer who had 
 
120 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 never heard of Eoman law ? There is but one key to 
 the present — that is the past. There is but one way 
 to understand the continuous growth of the human 
 mind and to gain a firm grasp of what it has achieved 
 in any department of knowledge — that is to watch its 
 historical development. 
 
 No doubt it will be said, there is no time for all 
 this in the hurry and flurry of our modern life. 
 There are so many things to learn that students must 
 be satisfied with results, without troubling themselves 
 how these results were obtained by the labours of 
 those who came before us. This really would mean 
 that our modern teaching must confine itself to the 
 surface, and keep aloof from what lies beneath, that 
 knowledge must be what is called cut and dry, if it 
 is to prove serviceable in the open market. 
 
 My experience is the very opposite. The cut-and- 
 dry knowledge which is acquired from the study of 
 manuals or from so-called crammers is very apt to 
 share the fate of cut flowers. It makes a brilliant 
 show for one evening, but it fades and leaves nothing 
 behind. The only knowledge worth having, and 
 which lasts us for life, must not be cut and dry, 
 but, on the contrary, must be living and growing 
 knowledge, knowledge of which we know the begin- 
 ning, the middle, and the end, knowledge of which we 
 can produce the title-deeds whenever they are called 
 for. That knowledge may be small in appearance, 
 but, remember, the knowledge required for life is 
 really very small. 
 
 We learn, no doubt, a great many things, but what 
 we are able to digest, what is converted in succum et 
 sanguinem, into our very life-blood, and gives us 
 
PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 121 
 
 strength and fitness for practical life, is by no means 
 so much as we imagine in our youth. There are 
 certain things which we must know, as if they were 
 part of ourselves. But there are many other things 
 which we simply put into our pockets, which we can 
 find there whenever we want them, but which 
 we do not know as we must know, for instance, the 
 grammar of a language. It is well to remember this 
 distinction between what we know intuitively, and 
 what we know by a certain effort of memory only, for 
 our success in life depends greatly on this distinction 
 — on our knowing what we know, and knowing what 
 we do not know, but what nevertheless we can find, if 
 wanted. 
 
 It has often been said that we only know 
 thoroughly what we can teach, and it is equally true 
 that we can only teach what we know thoroughly. I 
 therefore congratulate this Society for the Extension of 
 University teaching, that they have tried to draw their 
 teachers from the great Universities of England, and 
 that they have endeavoured, to engage the services of 
 a large number of teachers, so that every single 
 teacher may teach one subject only, his own subject, 
 his special subject, his hobby, if you like — anyhow, a 
 subject in which he feels perfectly at home, because he 
 knows its history from beginning to end. The Univer- 
 sities can afford to foster that race of special students, 
 but the country at large ought to be able to command 
 their services. If this Society can bring this about, if 
 it can help to distribute the accumulated but often 
 stagnant knowledge of University professors and tutors 
 over the thirsty land, it will benefit not the learners 
 only, but the teachers also. It will impart new life 
 
122 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 to the Universities, for nothing is so inspiriting to 
 a teacher as an eager class of students, — not students 
 who wish to be drilled for an examination, but 
 students who wish to be guided and encouraged in 
 acquiring real knowledge. And nothing is so delight- 
 ful for students as to listen to a teacher whose whole 
 heart is in his subject. Learning ought to be joy and 
 gladness, not worry and weariness. When I saw the 
 eagerness and real rapture with which our visitors at 
 Oxford last summer listened to the lectures provided 
 for them, I said to myself, This is what a University 
 ought to be. It is what, if we may trust old 
 chronicles, Universities were in the beginning, and 
 what they may be once more if this movement, so 
 boldly inaugurated by the Universities of Cambridge, 
 Oxford, and London, and so wisely guided by Mr. 
 Goschen and his fellow-workers, becomes what we all 
 hope it may become, a real and lasting success. 
 
THE APPLICATION OF THE HISTOEICAL 
 METHOD TO ECONOMIC SCIENCE 
 
 yf By His Grace the Duke of Argyll, K.G. 
 
 &,.. ig9o ^U^^briff, 
 
 The subject on which I have to address you to-day 
 is one so very large, so immensely wide, viz. — the 
 connection between history and economic science — 
 that I must say a few words in explanation of the 
 very limited aspect in which alone it is possible to 
 regard it in a single address, and for this purpose I 
 wish to remind you of a few facts, not always, perhaps, 
 borne in mind. It is now, my Lord Mayor, little 
 more than a hundred years — I think exactly one 
 hundred and fourteen years — since my illustrious 
 countryman, Adam Smith, published the Wealth of 
 Nations. During that hundred years, at least fifty 
 years of it was an uphill contest, as you know, 
 between the doctrines of economic science and the 
 long -established practice of this and of all other 
 countries. It was not, I think it may be said, until 
 the year 1847 that the doctrines of free trade — or 
 free exchange, as perhaps it ought properly to be 
 called, which were taught and inculcated by Adam 
 
124 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 Smith — secured a practical triumph at the time of 
 the potato failure and the abolition of the Corn Laws 
 by Sir Eobert Peel. Since that period the doctrines 
 of free trade have been promulgated and defended 
 by a series of eminent writers. Those writers, my 
 Lord Mayor, like all other writers of that class, have 
 established for themselves a great authority, and have 
 built up a great body of doctrine quite apart from the 
 question of free trade. In dealing with that single 
 question of free trade, they have incidentally treated 
 much larger questions connected with economic 
 science, and their authority derived from their 
 advocacy of free trade has extended to all the other 
 doctrines which, in the course of controversy, they 
 came to promulgate or defend. 
 
 Now, it always happens under such circumstances 
 that a body of men acquiring an authority of this 
 kind are very apt to carry that authority into 
 doctrines which are not as sound as those with which 
 they were principally charged. The consequence is 
 that, during the last few years, there have arisen a 
 great number of writers — I should say within the last 
 twenty years — who have found great fault with the 
 conclusions of those older authors, and who have 
 published most interesting works, inveighing, in some 
 cases, in strong language against their doctrines. 
 When I speak of the great economic writers of the 
 last hundred years, you know very well the principal 
 names and persons to whom I refer. Adam Smith 
 stands almost alone. Hardly anybody attacks him, 
 because he had a great practical object in view, and 
 although in promoting that object he may have said a 
 few things which were not correct, and promulgated a 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 125 
 
 few abstract opinions which will not stand investi- 
 gation, yet the simplicity of his work — its great 
 influence and great success — has earned for him a 
 reputation in which he stands absolutely alone. But 
 the writers that have followed him are such as these. 
 First of all there was James Mill, then there was 
 David Eicardo (a great authority, especially in 
 London), then there was the better known son of 
 James Mill — John Stuart Mill — who lived on, as you 
 know, to our own time, and died not many years ago. 
 In much later years there was — not so much as an 
 original investigator as a systematiser and teacher — 
 our late friend, Professor Fawcett. These great 
 names constitute a sort of apostolic succession in 
 the authority of economic science. They are often 
 spoken of now as " the orthodox Economists." The 
 writers who have sprung up within the last ten or 
 twenty years are, some of them, much less generally 
 known. They cannot be said to form a school, for 
 they differ widely from each other, but they are, many 
 of them, very able men. It so happens that, about 
 thirty or forty years ago, I read, I think, as much 
 political economy as is good for any human being to 
 read. I had become a confirmed free trader, and I 
 swallowed much of the other doctrines of the school 
 without much criticism and without much resistance. 
 Occasionally, in reading them, I could not help seeing 
 that there were some things said which did not appear 
 to be well founded in observation or experience, and 
 there were occasionally things which were ambiguous 
 or obscure. But it is a laborious work to investigate 
 these questions of abstract thought, and I accepted 
 them upon authority. About three or four years ago 
 
126 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 it happened to me to see a very elaborate theory, 
 which I perceived clearly to be quite erroneous, pro- 
 pounded and defended by quotations from some of 
 these writers. This induced me to look back into 
 some of these old obiter dicta which had caught my 
 passing attention in former years, and I soon found by 
 the application of the ordinary processes of verbal 
 analysis — which I recommend strongly to all young 
 men and young women who desire to know the truth 
 — I found by a little close attention and verbal 
 analysis that some of the obiter dicta of these great 
 writers were obvious fallacies, — at least, such they 
 seemed to me. I only wish to refer to the general 
 fact. This, again, induced me to look more closely 
 into the younger school of political economy, and 
 there I was surprised to find my views of the 
 erroneousness of many of those doctrines strongly 
 supported by a great number of younger men who 
 have arisen since the death of John Stuart Mill. 
 
 I will mention some of the authors to whom I refer. 
 It is quite natural, I must say, and we need not be 
 surprised that in such a complicated and enormous 
 subject as economic science, when new questions arise 
 they should be viewed from a new point of view, and 
 that errors should be discovered in the abstract 
 doctrines of the older writers. The later writers to 
 whom I particularly refer — I will name four or five to 
 show how representative they are — are such as Professor 
 Jevons (of the University of London), Professor Thorold 
 Eogers (of the University of Oxford), Professor Nicol- 
 son (of the University of Edinburgh), and last but not 
 least, the distinguished author of the article in the 
 last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 127 
 
 " Political Economy," Mr. Ingram, of Dublin. So you 
 thus have eminent men from London, Oxford, Edin- 
 burgh, and Dublin all engaged in assailing many of 
 the dogmas and dicta which had fallen from the older 
 writers. Time would fail me to quote more than a 
 very few sentences, but I want to show you how very 
 strong indeed the language of this younger school is 
 in regard to the fallacies taught by the older school. 
 Take Professor Jevons, connected eminently with the 
 University of London. Professor Jevons not merely 
 dissents, but he is vehement in his denunciations of 
 many of the old writers. He says : " The only hope 
 of attaining a true system of economics is to fling 
 aside, once and for ever, the mazy and preposterous 
 assumptions of the Eicardian school." Again he says : 
 " Our English economists have been living in a fools' 
 paradise." Again, " That able but wrong-headed man, 
 Dr. Eicardo, shunted the car of economic science on to 
 the wrong line, a line along which it was further urged 
 towards confusion by his equally able and wrong-headed 
 admirer, John Stuart Mill." Once more, he says, " It 
 will be a work of labour to pick up the fragments of a 
 shattered science and to start anew ; but it is a work 
 from which they must not shrink who wish to see any 
 advance in economic science." I think these quotations 
 are quite sufficient to show you I am not speaking 
 without book when I say that the older writers have 
 been in recent years assailed by eminent men, and 
 assailed in language which means the most emphatic 
 denunciation of many of their fundamental doctrines. 
 I do not mean to say that there is any very definite 
 school of teaching represented by these men. Some 
 of them attack one doctrine, some another. They are 
 
128 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 not all of them united in what they would substitute 
 for the abandoned doctrines, but they are all agreed 
 that the older writers, on many subjects, fell into the 
 most serious errors. Then they say, " Whence came 
 all these errors ? " The common explanation is that 
 the " method " of the orthodox economists was a wrong 
 one — that it was a method fallacious because it was 
 " too abstract " ; that Eicardo, James Mill, John Stuart 
 Mill, and all the rest, were "too abstract" in their 
 treatment of the science. Let me say at once that I 
 do not agree that this is the source of error, if error 
 there has been. Pray let us remember that abstract 
 ideas are the meat and drink of our daily life. It is 
 not merely that all science is founded on abstract 
 ideas ; it is that in all the transactions of common life 
 we deal, every day and every moment of our lives, 
 with purely abstract ideas. Justice and injustice, truth 
 and untruth, error and unbelief — all these words, and 
 a thousand more, are representative of purely abstract 
 ideas, and we do not go materially wrong in using 
 these abstract terms as expressive of our abstract ideas. 
 I do not believe that this, by itself, was a source of 
 error at all. In economic science we have to deal in 
 like manner with abstract terms — with wealth, with 
 value, with wages, with labour, with capital, with 
 instruments of production, and with phrases such as 
 these. Well, these are abstract terms, and it is quite 
 true, in my opinion, that the older writers, in dealing 
 with these fundamental conceptions of economic science, 
 have been full of errors. But the cause lay not in the 
 fact that their ideas were abstract, but that they were 
 bad abstracts — that their analysis of facts has been 
 bad and incomplete. As has been said by Adam 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 129 
 
 Smith himself — this is one of the few quotations with 
 which I will trouble you, — " Gross sophistry has scarce 
 ever had any influence upon the opinions of mankind 
 except in matters of speculation and philosophy, and in 
 these it has frequently had the greatest ; mere sophisms 
 which had no other foundation but inaccuracy and 
 ambiguity of common language." That is a strong 
 expression from Adam Smith, but it fully explains the 
 errors found in the older school. Before I pass from 
 this question whether the method has erred in being 
 too abstract, let me repeat that it is not from being too 
 abstract, but from making bad abstracts, that errors 
 have arisen. If you make a bad abstract of compli- 
 cated facts — if you make an incomplete analysis of 
 any substance in chemistry, you have a wrong result. 
 And so you will find that the error of these old writers 
 is not that they have been too abstract, but that they 
 have constantly forgotten certain all-important elements 
 in their consideration of the questions they had in 
 hand. In dealing with wealth and wages, and all 
 these abstract terms, they have forgotten many elements 
 in the consideration, and that has been due to the 
 enormous complication of the elements with which we 
 have to deal in all these subjects. The younger school 
 say, " Let us have a new method. There has been 
 something wrong with the old methods ; these errors 
 could not have arisen with a good method." It is now 
 a very common thing to say, "Let us go in for history." 
 Let us take the " historical method," and so that is the 
 subject about which I propose to address you to-night. 
 The suggestion is that all the difficulties of economic 
 science will be solved, and all the errors refuted by 
 reading history. I wish to say very shortly that I 
 
 K 
 
130 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 entirely agree in the importance of history as helping 
 us to the solution of the great problems of economic 
 science. Yes ! but history on one condition. You 
 will never solve these problems if you do not apply 
 to the facts of history the same powers of careful 
 classification and analysis which are absolutely 
 required in interpreting the phenomena of your own 
 day. Do not suppose that by a careless reading of 
 history you can solve any of these problems. You 
 require just as much in the days gone by as in the 
 days in which you are now living — not merely to 
 collect facts, but to collate them and concentrate them 
 in the light of thought ; just as scientific men have 
 made all their discoveries by looking at the facts of 
 Nature, not in a haphazard way, but in the light of 
 genius, and in the light, very often, of some pre- 
 conception which may possibly have been in itself 
 erroneous — just as they have made those discoveries 
 by looking at external Nature through the faculties of 
 reasoning, ay, and of imagination, too ; so, if you are 
 to profit by history, you must read history in the spirit 
 of careful analysis, of weighing and comparing the 
 facts as well as ascertaining them. You know where 
 it is said, " The kingdom of Heaven is within you." 
 Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and the kingdom of Nature 
 is within us, too. Professor Jevons says the ultimate 
 laws of political economy are " known to us instinct- 
 ively by intuition." This is not, I think, literally 
 true. It is much too broadly stated. But at all 
 events, the elements of political economy are there. 
 You have to deal with the phenomena of society, and 
 society is made of individuals ; and it is in the analysis 
 of your own thoughts and of your own instincts that 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 131 
 
 you will best find the ultimate solution of the diffi- 
 culties which assail you both in the history of the 
 past and in the complicated transactions of your own 
 life. If we cannot analyse the present we shall not 
 be able to analyse the past. Therefore, let me give 
 you warning, that when you come to history you must 
 study it with all the care with which you study 
 existing facts. But there is one great advantage in 
 history, and that is this, that in regard to many of the 
 facts of your existing life you get rid of what is 
 temporary, accidental ; you see human life in other 
 conditions than those with which you are yourself 
 familiar — sometimes so widely different, that the whole 
 world seems to have been other than it is to you. That, 
 no doubt, is an advantage, a great advantage, if you take 
 due care of it ; but observe, your business in correcting 
 past errors of economic science will not be in being- 
 less abstract, but in making better abstracts, both for 
 the present and for the future. 
 
 And now let me give also a few words of warning 
 as to the difficulties of dealing with history, with a 
 view to the solution of economic problems. In the 
 first place you must remember this : that history, 
 properly so called, carries you a very short way back in 
 the account of human society. All history is lost, and 
 lost very soon indeed, in the prehistoric. We know 
 nothing of the first beginnings of anything, unless — 
 of course, I am not speaking of that — unless we 
 accept the Biblical narrative of Creation. But I am 
 talking about it now as a matter of science, and I 
 must remind you that from history, properly so called 
 — that is to say, from contemporary historic records — 
 we know nothing of the origin of human society. We 
 
132 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 may dislike to look that fact in the face, and many of 
 us so dislike it that we forget it altogether, and put it 
 out of sight. But it is a fact that we know nothing in 
 the light of history of the origin of human society. 
 Man has kept no journal of his own early days. We 
 must trust to other authorities for anything we can 
 know of that. This is not an insignificant fact, for 
 pray remember, ladies and gentlemen, that the most 
 important problems of social science find their ultimate 
 difficulty in determining what has been the origin of 
 man. Has man arisen from a single pair ? Is it so, 
 or is it not ? Having had some personal acquaintance 
 with Charles Darwin, I wrote to him some years ago, 
 — and no man ever applied to Charles Darwin without 
 having a candid and truthful reply, so far as his 
 knowledge carried him — I wrote to him and said : 
 " My dear Mr. Darwin, — In your theory you assume 
 that man originated at some one place, and in a single 
 pair. Will you be kind enough to tell me on what 
 you base that assumption, assuming that you do not 
 accept the Biblical account as in itself conclusive ? " 
 He wrote back to say : " I have no other ground for 
 assuming it " (he did assume it), " but the doctrine of 
 chances, for it is inconceivable to me that so 
 highly-organised a being as man could have arisen 
 except in one spot and from one pair." I do not 
 now raise any question whether his reasoning is 
 safe or not. I only wish to point out that in this 
 matter the speculations of Darwin and the authority 
 of Moses are at one. Man began with a single pair. 
 That fact being admitted, let us look at the light 
 it casts on one of the great problems of economic 
 science. People talk about "instruments of produc- 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 133 
 
 tion," and some modern theorists say that the instru- 
 ments of production ought to belong to society. 
 What instruments of production were there when man 
 consisted of one or two or three families ? The whole 
 of the instruments of production were once in the head 
 and in the brain and in the heart and in the hands of 
 one man and of his family. The whole of the instru- 
 ments of production were their personal property. 
 Does this cast no light upon the nature of human 
 society ? Is it not true now, as in the days of Adam, 
 that the ultimate instruments of production in all 
 human industry *are the human head, the human heart, 
 and the human hands ; and does not the theory which 
 asserts that all the instruments of production should 
 be placed in the hands of what men call society come 
 to this — the doctrine, the horrible doctrine of negro 
 slavery in America some thirty years ago — that man 
 was made to be the property of his neighbour ? Does 
 not this follow inevitably, if that fact be admitted, 
 that all the original instruments of production belong 
 to the individual man, the individual brain, the 
 individual hand, and the human spirit ? Well, then, 
 let us remember another thing. Talk of solving the 
 difficulties of human society by history. Do you 
 remember what are the things that are prehistoric ? 
 The invention of language — if I may use the word 
 invention — the origin of language, the origin of writ- 
 ing, the origin of artificial fire, the origin of domestic 
 animals, the origin of the cereal grasses — all these things 
 are hid in the night of the prehistoric. History casts 
 no light whatever on the origin of language. Why, 
 gentlemen, the philosophers of language can give us 
 nothing but a series of childish and almost grotesque 
 
134 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 suggestions. We know nothing ; it came down from 
 heaven and from the instincts with which heaven 
 invested our species ; and amongst the first and 
 greatest was the faculty of conceiving abstract 
 ideas, and giving to those ideas a habitation and a 
 name. 
 
 Now, looking back to history properly so-called, 
 leaving the prehistoric in the obscurity from which 
 we cannot lift it, it seems to me there are three 
 great facts which are of great interest in economic 
 science. First of all, that there has been great 
 progress in our command over the resources of 
 Nature, our own nature being included in the term. 
 The second is, that this progress has not been 
 continuous, but has been very fitful; and the third 
 is, that it has been locally often retrogressive. 
 Human society has sometimes gone backward as well 
 as forward. The question naturally arises here : Is it 
 true that there are any laws of birth, growth, and 
 death in nations as there are in individuals ? That 
 is a question not very, often put, and I have never 
 seen it grappled with or handled. I was, however, 
 much surprised the other day to get a book on 
 political economy from America, a country which has 
 now developed a very powerful school of economic 
 science, owing to the contest going on on our old 
 subject of free trade — I was very much surprised to 
 get a book from America which assumed, as an 
 unquestionable fact, that among nations, as among 
 individuals, there is a law of birth, of growth, of 
 maturity, and of death. I was very much surprised 
 to see that in ,an American book, because America is 
 a young society. It is full of life, full of its own 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 135 
 
 conscious energy — and I might almost apply to it the 
 famous lines of Wordsworth : — 
 
 A simple child 
 
 That lightly draws its breath, 
 
 And feels its life in every limb ; 
 "What should it know of death ? 
 
 And yet this writer in America, looking at the history 
 of the world, sees distinctly that there is a law of 
 birth, of growth, of maturity, and of decay in 
 nations. Now there is no question whatever of 
 this, that a great part of the world — some of the most 
 interesting parts of the world — are covered with 
 the ruins of ancient civilisations which have passed 
 away. This is unquestionable. We may make of that 
 fact what we like. We may say that the causes of 
 their decay are no longer causes in operation; but 
 when we come nearer our own time we see that even 
 in Europe the relative positions of the nations has 
 greatly altered since comparatively recent times. It 
 would be invidious if I were to mention names, but it 
 will recur to all of you that there are nations now in 
 Europe which no longer occupy the place they did 
 occupy in the scale of nations even a century — and 
 still more clearly a few centuries — ago; and it is 
 quite possible that such changes may be owing to 
 those laws of decay which the American writer says 
 prevail over the whole world. But what I would 
 wish to point out to you is this : that as when we 
 stand on the sea-shore we are often unable to say 
 whether the ripples of the tide are advancing or 
 receding, so it is very difficult for us to decide whether 
 any given nation is waxing or waning. But if there 
 is even a doubt on this point, it should make us pause 
 
136 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 and think, because many writers of our time assume 
 that all movement is not only progress, but progress 
 in the right direction. Now I do not profess 
 to have not made up my mind whether there is 
 any law by which modern nations pass through the 
 periods of birth, decay, and death ; but I am sufficiently 
 doubtful to look with great circumspection on all 
 movements, and to test them whether they are really 
 movements of progress by other considerations than 
 the mere fact that they are movements of some kind 
 or another. And this, I think, is a most necessary 
 caution. 
 
 There is one other universal fact connected with 
 past history, to which, for a few minutes, I wish to 
 attract your attention, and it is this : that man, ever 
 since we have any record of him, has been a fighting 
 animal. Let not my fair friends, whom I have the 
 honour to address, think I am bringing before them 
 something which belongs to a coarse philosophy. Let 
 us look facts in the face. In all science we have to 
 deal with facts, and we ought not to put them aside 
 for the sake of fancy or sentiment. It is unquestion- 
 ably true that war and conquest have been universal 
 facts in the history of the world. I believe I am 
 correct in saying that there is not a single nation of 
 any power now existing in the world that has not 
 been founded in war and conquest. We are apt to 
 forget this, because here in England, and over the 
 whole of the British Isles, we are the descendants both 
 of the conquerors and of the conquered ; but we ought 
 to remember that the earliest conquering race we 
 know of in Britain was that with which I have myself 
 the honour to be connected, I believe, by a continuous 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 137 
 
 descent, and that is the Celts. The Celtic invaders 
 of Britain unquestionably found there an aboriginal 
 population. They did not come into an empty country. 
 They seized Britain when it had been already occupied 
 by some older race, of which we know nothing except 
 from a few palaeolithic implements found in the 
 mounds and caves of the country ; and they founded 
 this nation on war and conquest, reducing that early 
 race to the conditions of slavery. So it has been all 
 over the world, and it is so at the present moment. 
 We are even now perpetually seizing and occupying 
 countries which have a native population, and whom 
 we do not actually conquer only because they are too 
 weak to fight. The world in this respect has not 
 changed, ladies and gentlemen, — not one whit. I know 
 nothing more curious in recent history than the fact 
 that, in the great war between Germany and France, 
 when France was defeated, Germany seized a little 
 bit of her territory — Alsace, and she was severely 
 blamed for doing so. I said to all my friends at that 
 time, "Do you think the world has so completely 
 changed : that great wars and great conquests are to 
 go on, and that the conquering nation is never to take 
 what all other nations have hitherto taken — portions 
 of territory for their own possession ? " There was 
 no answer to that. But at the same time it does 
 show a very curious change in public sentiment, if it 
 be really expected that there may be great wars and 
 conquests without annexation and possession. My 
 own belief is that there is much of the same kind 
 yet before us. At all events, in the general history of 
 the world, the fact has been that all great countries 
 have been founded by invasion, by conquest, and on 
 
138 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 permanent military possession. I do not think it 
 looks very much as if this universal fact of humanity 
 is one that is going to cease. What is the state of 
 Europe now? I believe there are four great military 
 monarchies with certainly not less than between six 
 and eight millions of men under arms, besides a very 
 large number that might be called out of the reserves. 
 I am speaking in the presence of my Right Honourable 
 friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he must 
 know, as we all know, that he is obliged to put his 
 hand into our pockets for a very large sum of money 
 to support a comparatively small army. It is well to 
 look this fact in the face, and I believe you will find 
 it full of instruction in an economic point of view. 
 There are many aspects in which we may regard war ; 
 there are three especially. There is the terror and 
 the suffering of war; there is the triumph and the 
 glory of war ; and, lastly, there are the blessings and 
 the benefits which have been secured by war. Now, 
 we have very eloquent expressions in various authors 
 upon all these aspects of war. I will mention three 
 of them to you. You know those magnificent words 
 — they are familiar to all of us : " Every battle of the 
 warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in 
 blood." That is a picture, and a powerful picture, of 
 the terror and the suffering of war. Well, then, on 
 the triumph of war we have the lines — I think the 
 too bitter lines — addressed by Lord Byron to Napoleon, 
 after his fall, in which he said, — 
 
 The triumph and the vanity, the rapture and the strife, 
 The earthquake voice of victory ! To thee the breath of life. 
 
 There is the feeling of triumph ; and now let me read 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 139 
 
 to you a few lines, very striking, I think, as coming 
 from a Quaker poet — for you know it is a doctrine of 
 the Quakers that war is almost in all cases unlawful, 
 yet Whittier, the great American poet, who is a 
 member of the Society of Friends, has lived to see the 
 blessings which only war could confer upon the world, 
 and he says, speaking of " Nature," — 
 
 She knows the seed lies safe below 
 
 The fires that blast and burn, 
 For all the tears of blood we sow, 
 
 She waits the rich return. 
 
 She sees with clearer eyes than ours 
 
 The good of suffering born, 
 The hearts that blossom like her flowers, 
 
 And ripen like her corn. 
 
 "Well, what are the blessings of war ? Is it not a 
 universal feeling, the popularity of soldiers ? Never 
 shall I forget the scene which I saw in this city when 
 Garibaldi came to it after he had secured the inde- 
 pendence of Italy. There is only one other scene in 
 my memory to compare to it — very different as it was 
 in many of its conditions — and that was the scene 
 close to us which surrounded the coffin of the Duke 
 of Wellington as it sank under the pavement of St. 
 Paul's. Now, why is this popular admiration, almost 
 worship, given to soldiers — to great soldiers ? Well, 
 there are many reasons ; but depend upon it, it is not 
 this — it is not mere animal courage that you admire. 
 Animal courage is the commonest of all virtues in the 
 lowest men and in the lowest animals. It is not this 
 that you admire in soldiers ; it is the feeling that in a 
 great soldier — in a really great soldier — you have a 
 
140 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 representative, an embodiment of the very highest 
 human gifts. No man has been a great soldier with- 
 out having the very highest human gifts in the furniture 
 of his mind. The magnetic influence of man over 
 man — that is what we see and what we admire. War 
 brings forth kingly men, and we see in them the 
 emblems of the foundation of all human society, and 
 of all human possessions. 
 
 But there is another essential which belongs to 
 war, not one of mere sentiment, and one which is 
 immediately connected with our science ; and that is, 
 that to war, as I have already said, all countries owe 
 the possession of all that they enjoy. Now, here we 
 come upon a very curious feature of economic science. 
 I took the trouble some two or three years ago to look 
 out all the definitions of wealth which could be found 
 in the older economists, and strange to say, I found 
 one element entirely and absolutely wanting. I do 
 not mean to say that if you had asked those writers, 
 " Don't you mean to include ' possession ' in wealth," 
 they would not say, " Yes, of course " ; but it is exactly 
 those elements of which men say, " Of course," that 
 they forget, and they do not put into their definitions. 
 There are plenty of definitions of the things you must 
 possess to have wealth, but the idea of possession as 
 in itself a necessary element in the very idea of 
 wealth is rarely thought of. I know only one perfect 
 definition of wealth, and that is in the New Testa- 
 ment. In a few words, it is perfect : " A man's life 
 consisteth not in the abundance of the things which 
 he possesseth." The whole sentence falls upon the 
 word "possesseth." Possession is the foundation, the 
 necessary condition, of all wealth ; and that is why 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 141 
 
 you admire the soldier ! That is the inner source of 
 the human instinct which has been planted in you by 
 the great Creator. You are translating into your own 
 inmost thoughts the facts of nature and the funda- 
 mental conditions of all human society when you 
 admire the successful soldier as the emblem of that on 
 which, originally, all your civilisation has been founded. 
 But here again, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to point 
 out to you that we are met with great difficulties. 
 War, undoubtedly, has been the source of all our 
 wealth. There is no doubt about it. It is a question 
 of historical fact which no man can dispute ; but there 
 are many conditions under which war has been a 
 great curse to mankind, and the definition I should 
 give of all war which is useless and injurious is this 
 — war that is not for possession, but for some other 
 object — mere lust of conquest, pride, devotion to 
 barbarous and savage deities, and all other causes 
 which lead men to make war into a pursuit by itself 
 without reference to its objects. Now, we have a very 
 curious illustration of this, which has often struck me 
 very much in the history of mediaeval Europe. As 
 we know the Eoman Empire was a great military 
 empire. In the height of its glory, property was 
 secured, civilisation and industry — such industry as 
 existed in those days — were secured, because there 
 was a great empire to defend it, and to enforce the 
 recognised obligations and duties of mankind. But 
 when the Boman Empire broke up, and semi-barbarous 
 tribes took possession of Europe, then there arose war 
 of another kind, and under new conditions. There 
 was no great empire — nothing but inter-tribal wars, 
 and inter- tribal wars do not give security — permanent 
 
142 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 security — for the growth of wealth. There was a very 
 curious result of this. We have very tolerable accounts 
 of the state of agriculture in this country at the close 
 of the Eoman Empire and in the first centuries of the 
 Christian era. It is a curious fact, but I will venture 
 to assert it on evidence I have carefully examined, that 
 I believe there was no progress in agriculture, and, of 
 course, no progress in wealth, for nearly eleven hundred 
 years from the close of the Eoman Empire till the dawn 
 of improvement in our own grandfathers' time. The 
 agriculture of Scotland, for example, was, during those 
 long centuries, in a retrograde condition. Why was this ? 
 Because there was perpetual war — war between tribes, 
 not between great nations, but between tribes fighting 
 each other across glen, or mountain, or river ; and in 
 the perpetual feuds of families, which lasted for 
 centuries — they invaded each other's territory, murder- 
 ing each other's people, carrying off each other's cattle, 
 or burning each other's houses. War did not give 
 what it ought to give, secure possession. Look at the 
 effect of that on political economy. I daresay many 
 of you have not realised the fact that the whole of 
 Europe was, up to very recent times, and a great part 
 of Europe even now is, inhabited by men living in 
 villages called village communities. There is a great 
 deal of modern sentiment got up in favour of village 
 communities, and against individual property. Why 
 did they live in these villages? Because they were 
 obliged to defend each other. They could not live in 
 single houses or scattered farms, and preserve their 
 crops or cattle ; they must live in communities, and 
 under the protection of military chiefs. Now it is a 
 very curious fact that these village communities are at 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 143 
 
 last being rapidly dissolved even in Eussia, and in the 
 eastern parts of Europe where they still exist, through 
 the natural economic forces of our own age, — the rail- 
 road and the steamboat doing a great deal more than 
 armies or parliaments could do. The young women 
 of these villages, seeing railways and the possibility of 
 getting fine dresses in the great centres of civilisation, 
 go into the towns and get higher wages. The young 
 men are under similar inducements. So gradually 
 those villages are being given up. They were the 
 result of bad and insecure conditions which kept back 
 the civilisation of Europe more than a thousand years, 
 and now they are gradually giving way. 
 
 There was another effect of these village com- 
 munities with regard to improvements, and that 
 was the influence of custom. You have no idea how 
 impossible it is to get people living in a village system 
 like that to adopt or believe in anything new. They 
 walk, as it were, in the ruts of custom, and their 
 system is such that any individual member of their 
 community introducing a new system commits an 
 injury on his neighbours. Unless they have divisions, 
 they cannot have good crops nor improved breeds of 
 stock. But dividing and enclosing is one of the 
 greatest crimes and sins against the community. The 
 result is that the whole community is kept down to 
 the very lowest level of the stupidest customs of 
 ancient times. The other day a very interesting 
 speech was made by the Archbishop of Odessa to the 
 Eussians in that city. He sees numbers of poor Germans 
 going in and buying lands to a great extent in the 
 southern parts of Eussia, and they were all thriving 
 on the individual system, each having his own crop 
 
144 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 and owning his own farm. The old Eussian system 
 is giving way, and the Archbishop says to the Eussians, 
 " Go and look at the German villages ; see how nice 
 and clean and tidy and prosperous they are, and com- 
 pare them with your own dirty houses and slovenly 
 agriculture." Yes; but the Archbishop forgot that 
 these poor men could not improve. Until the village 
 system is broken up, the individual mind of man is 
 never brought into contact with the fertility of the 
 soil and the resources of modern civilisation. Another 
 very important feature in illustration of what the 
 instincts of man point to, with regard to individual 
 property in land, is to be seen in our colonies. You 
 know our colonies have enormous quantities of land 
 to dispose of. Not at all from theory of any kind or 
 sort, but simply from the instincts of these communities, 
 the first thing they do is to advertise to the whole 
 world that their land is to be sold in individual plots. 
 I saw this very morning in the papers a statement, 
 that our various colonies had within a limited number 
 of recent years sold to individuals some ninety million 
 acres. There is a colony in Western Australia, 
 numbering little more than forty thousand people, who 
 have demanded from our Government here — and I 
 believe it has been conceded — that they shall have the 
 exclusive right of disposing of territory larger than the 
 whole of Europe. What do these colonies invariably 
 do? When they get the lands, they immediately 
 advertise their readiness to sell them or let them to 
 individual men, each purchaser resting, of course, upon 
 the security that has been obtained through their 
 connection with our great military Empire. Our 
 colonists know instinctively that the individual mind 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 145 
 
 must be brought into contact with the soil and with 
 modern means of improvement. Let me illustrate this 
 by a very * curious case, which attracted my attention 
 a very short time ago. You know, probably, that 
 there is a Society in this country for the exploration 
 of the Holy Land ; it is called the Palestine Explora- 
 tion Society. I earnestly recommend the publications 
 of that Society to the consideration and attention of 
 all young men and women who wish to know the 
 bearings of history bn some of the many aspects of 
 economic science. The result of the operations of 
 that Society is this, that the whole country between 
 the Mediterranean and the Euphrates is being completely 
 and scientifically examined by men of the highest 
 education as historians and engineers. Well, I hope 
 you will remember what that country is : it is a narrow 
 strip of the world ; it seems a mere fragment of the 
 terrestrial surface ; but it is by "far the most interesting 
 historical area on the surface of our planet. A narrow 
 margin of territory of some five or six hundred miles 
 between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates is the 
 seat of the greatest and most ancient civilisations of 
 the world. They are all now in absolute desolation. 
 Great mounds cover the site of Babylon and the site 
 of Mneveh ; and nearer to our own Holy Land, in 
 Bashan and the east of the Jordan, a country rich in 
 natural resources, and so late as the Boman Empire 
 full of populous cities, is all now nearly absolutely 
 desolate ! Why ? We cannot help asking ourselves, 
 Why have these countries become desolate ? Is it in 
 virtue of a law of death operating among all nations, 
 or can we trace special causes ? Yes ; we can trace 
 the causes. I have spoken of the blessings of war; 
 
 L 
 
146 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 I have spoken of the triumphs of war ; I have spoken 
 of the poetry of war ; but go to these countries and 
 see the curse of war. There can be no doubt what- 
 ever that these countries have been desolated by a 
 cruel and a wicked passion for war, wholly independent 
 of the purposes of possession, which are legitimate 
 objects and purposes of war. We have recovered, in 
 our time, written on enduring monuments of stone, the 
 inscriptions of the great monarchs of Babylon and of 
 Assyria setting forth the methods by which they con- 
 ducted war. We find in them a perfect confirmation 
 of all that is told us by the Jewish writers of the 
 cruelties and desolation which they inflicted. Allow 
 me to read to you two inscriptions which I have copied 
 for the purpose, to show you what was the nature of 
 war as conducted by those great monarchies. We 
 have inscriptions extending over many hundred years, 
 and there are two especially of two monarchs who 
 are mentioned in the book of Kings, and other books 
 of the Old Testament. Tigleth Pilesar I. (b.c. 1130 
 circ.) says : " The country of Kasizara I passed through. 
 With their 20,000 men and their five kings I engaged. 
 I defeated them. Their carcases covered the valleys. 
 I cut off their heads ; of the battlements of their cities 
 I made heaps like mounds of earth ; their movables, 
 their wealth, and their valuables I plundered to a 
 countless amount. Six thousand of their warriors, who 
 fled before my servants and accepted my yoke, I took 
 and gave over to the men of my own territory as 
 slaves." Nearly four hundred years later we have 
 Tigleth Pilesar II. repeating even more savagely the 
 same savage boasts : " The City of Amilatu I captured, 
 the people and children I carried off. Bitschalli, 
 
DUKE OF AKGYLL 147 
 
 through its extent like a whirlwind I overspread. 1 laid 
 waste its districts. The groves of palms I cut down, 
 I did not leave one. Its forests I threw down. Its 
 enclosures I threw down." There we have, together 
 with later devastations down to the Saracenic, the 
 whole secret of the desolation of those countries. War 
 with these monarchies was a passion, a lust of blood, 
 no doubt under the impulse of superstitious ideas with 
 regard to that which pleased their bloody gods. Now 
 turn to the language and read it with a new eye, and 
 listen to it with a new ear — turn to the magnificent 
 denunciations of the prophets of Israel against the 
 wickedness of those days. Here is an instance — I 
 think, perhaps, the most awful denunciation in the 
 whole compass of the Old Testament. The infernal 
 regions are represented as in haste to swallow up those 
 cruel and wicked monarchies. " Hell from beneath 
 is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming, . . . 
 Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise 
 of thy viols : the worm is spread under thee, and the 
 worms cover thee. . . . They that see thee shall narrowly 
 look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the 
 man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake 
 kingdoms ; that made the world as a wilderness, and 
 destroyed the cities thereof ? " This is the history 
 of the desolation of that country. One monarch 
 after another given up to the worship of false gods, 
 caring for nothing but war and desolation for the mere 
 lust of the eyes and the pride of life. Will these 
 countries ever revive again ? The explorations of the 
 Palestine Fund give us hope that they will. And 
 how will they revive ? A German gentleman, an 
 engineer, named Schumacher, went the other day 
 
148 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 across the Jordan to find a city mentioned in the Old 
 Testament — Abila — as coming in the way of one of 
 these expeditions of Tigleth Pilesar, and in later ages 
 as one of the cities of the Decapolis. He wanted to 
 see if he could find the site indicated in the Old 
 Testament book of Kings, and which it was well 
 known was situated somewhere about fifteen or twenty 
 miles to the east of the Sea of Tiberias. Mr. 
 Schumacher went to the place and found an old Arab 
 sheikh presiding over a village there. He told him 
 that he had come to see ruins and antiquities. The 
 Arabs always think you are going to seek for treasure. 
 They never believe in historic interest, and are very 
 shy about showing anything. However, at last, after 
 a long conversation, the sheikh took Mr. Schumacher 
 to a place which he found covered with the broken 
 stones of magnificent ruins — -the site of a great city. 
 The old sheikh took him to a height where he saw a 
 great extent of fine arable land, fairly well cultivated, 
 and apparently prosperous. The sheikh turned to him 
 and said, " My son, look at all those fields, they are 
 all mine ; but I have sowers (or tenants) and cul- 
 tivators under me, and they pay to me one-fifth of the 
 produce." There we have a picture of society beginning, 
 and all the theories of Eicardo about the nature and 
 origin of rent may be sent to the winds, not as too 
 abstract, but as entirely fallacious when you read the 
 simple narrative of that man's story. For how did 
 these fields become his ? Why was it that his " sowers" 
 owed and paid rent to him ? I will tell you. He 
 was a poor Arab, not richer, apparently, than his 
 neighbours, but he had in him — in his head — that 
 power of commanding influence over other men which, 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 149 
 
 as I have told you, constitutes the soldier. The nomad 
 Arabs always hate the settled Arabs, and there is no 
 possibility of cultivating land there because of the 
 incursions of the nomadic tribes. This man said to a 
 number of neighbours, " Why don't we all come to- 
 gether ? I will lead you, and set up the standard. 
 You follow me. Beat off these vagrant Arabs and we 
 will have a bit of country for ourselves." They agreed ; 
 they saw he was in his own little way a king of men, 
 and they followed him, and after desperate encounters 
 for several years they established their power, and now 
 the vagrant Arabs dare not touch them. There you 
 see society beginning — there is possession, the source of 
 all wealth, once more established — beginning with the 
 soldier, with war for the legitimate purpose of securing 
 possession and founding, I hope, a civilisation which, 
 when the Turkish Empire is no more, will fill again 
 those lands with population and with culture. 
 
 Before I sit down I have only one other considera- 
 tion with which to trouble you. Pray remember, when 
 talking of history, that we are enacting history in our 
 own time. Everything is history except the fleeting 
 moment of the present. It is history since you entered 
 this room. It is history since you did your business 
 on the Exchange to-day. Everything really belongs 
 to the past that we can fully grasp or understand, 
 and I ask you to think of the history which attaches 
 to every day's transactions in this vast centre of civilisa- 
 tion. Pray remember that London contains a popula- 
 tion of, I suppose, now four millions of human souls — 
 a population greater than that of many powerful states 
 which have made great figures in history. I ask you 
 now to remember one thing about it, and that is the 
 
150 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 commissariat of London. You know that the Duke of 
 Wellington used to say he knew very few officers who 
 could take twenty thousand men into Hyde Park and 
 bring them out again in good order. You know also that 
 the commissariat of great armies is one of the most 
 difficult things great commanders have to encounter, even 
 when they have at command all the resources of the 
 country in which they may be fighting. The com- 
 missariat of a great army is a matter of extreme diffi- 
 culty, requiring the highest powers of thought and 
 organisation. But what is that to the commissariat 
 of four millions of people, and how is this commissariat 
 provided ? Let any of you go out in the early morning 
 — some of us have done it from the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment — when a summer morning is just breaking, and 
 the streets of London seem almost deserted, the very 
 houses seem asleep. Let us think of London as it 
 was seen by Wordsworth, standing on Westminster 
 Bridge, when he said — 
 
 And all this mighty heart is lying still. 
 
 Yes, yes ; but think of who are providing for you ; 
 think of the millions of hands on all sides of the globe, 
 from those who are hunting for furs in the Siberian 
 wilds to those who are cultivating sugar in the torrid 
 zone, and tea in China and India ; think of all the 
 hands working for you, of all the ships ploughing the 
 ocean for you, to bring your daily food to this vast 
 city, and I would ask you one question — How is this 
 done ? Who does it ? Is it your municipality ? 
 'No ! my Lord Mayor ; not you, with all your council- 
 lors, could do it for an hour. What is the tie — what 
 is the connecting link — between this vast demand and 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 151 
 
 this world-wide supply? Individual interest; each 
 man working for himself and for his own family. 
 Individual interest is the tie, and the only tie, which 
 provides the enterprise, the capital, the skill, the 
 knowledge, and everything else that feeds this mighty 
 population. Is not that a great lesson in economic 
 science ? Is it wonderful that the older economists 
 thought of nothing but this : " Don't you interfere with 
 these mighty automatic forces ; hands off ! Let them 
 alone ! They will do it better than you by your 
 interference ; " and hence the doctrine of laissez /aire. 
 Now there is a reaction against laissez faire. Well, 
 gentlemen, there are limits to laissez faire as well as to 
 other things. We must never run away with an 
 abstract idea without looking to its limitations. There 
 are limitations to the beneficent operation of in- 
 dividual interest. There are certain things which can 
 only be done by the community : the maintenance of 
 confidence and order by your police ; the protection of 
 property by your armed forces ; — all these things can 
 only be done by the community. In the city of 
 Glasgow the municipality has brought water from the 
 mountains at a great distance to supply the city. 
 Such things as these very often can only be done by 
 the community, and the great question of our day is 
 this — whether there may not be other branches of 
 economic operation which the community may bene- 
 ficially undertake — whether there may not be evils 
 creeping up from time to time which can only be dealt 
 with by the higher will and higher conscience of a 
 Christian community. That is one of the great ques- 
 tions of our time. I recommend it to the young 
 men and the young women of this generation as 
 
152 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 one of the most difficult, as it may be one of the 
 most fruitful of all the investigations in which they 
 can engage. We must always remember this, that 
 we have to deal with tendencies and dispositions 
 in human nature which are corrupt. You cannot 
 legislate for humanity on the supposition that it is 
 virtuous, that its instincts are unperverted. No one 
 asserts more strongly than John Stuart Mill the fact 
 that human nature' is corrupt. We are too apt to 
 think that this is a mere dogma for the pulpit, and to 
 leave it to the clergyman. Alas ! it is an economic 
 truth with the most tremendous economic consequences. 
 John Stuart Mill said, " Most criminal actions are, to 
 a being like man, not more unnatural than most 
 virtues." If this be true, we have hard work to do in 
 guiding human society through the constant dangers 
 which beset it. In conclusion, let me entreat you 
 not to think that economic science is what my old 
 friend Carlyle called "the dismal science." It has 
 been made dismal by bad methods. Economic science 
 includes all the questions which affect our nature. 
 Let us return to the old definition of wealth. Do you 
 see what it is ? Look at the word and examine it, 
 and you will see what wonderful power these two 
 letters " th " have at the end of a word in the English 
 language : strong, strength ; long, length ; weal, wealth. 
 By means of these two letters you pass from the con- 
 crete to the abstract. Look what the economists have 
 done for you. They have degraded the word " wealth " 
 into the possession of lumps of matter. They say that 
 wealth must be something material. Well, the meaning 
 of the word " weal " was once the same as in the word 
 "commonweal." It is our business and duty not to 
 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 153 
 
 look merely at material things, but it is part of our 
 economic science, I maintain, to look at all that con- 
 stitutes the weal of human society. You may ex- 
 patiate, as you like, in all the fields of human thought 
 that bear upon the. welfare of the human family, and 
 do not let the economist tell you you are going out of 
 your field and out of your science in so doing. It is 
 all part of your science. Given that idea of it and 
 you will find it wide enough to exercise the richest 
 imagination and the acutest intellect. And remember 
 this — you young men and young women who are 
 studying these subjects — remember that you have to 
 deal with facts, and with eternal laws, and that the 
 best motto, alike for your method and for your hope, 
 is in the noble line of Wordsworth — 
 
 Painstaking thought, and truth its dear reward. 
 

 IDEALS 
 
 By the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Westcott) 
 1891 
 
 Many of us remember the splendid myth in which 
 Plato connects the position of men in their earthly life 
 with their experience in an earlier existence. There 
 are, he says, festivals in heaven, when Zeus, followed by 
 the divine hosts, goes forth to the outer boundary of 
 the universe, and, during its revolution, gazes on the 
 supramundane realms of absolute being. The spectacle 
 is the food of the heavenly nature, and gods and 
 heroes fill themselves with it to the full in serene 
 and untroubled tranquillity. Other unembodiecl souls 
 follow in the celestial train, struggling to share the 
 life-giving vision. Some with grievous effort catch 
 more or less transitory glimpses of righteousness and 
 beauty and moral order, and so retain for another 
 period their lofty state. Others, bafned and beaten 
 down, fail to gain the glorious sight, and, falling to 
 earth, are forthwith confined in mortal frames. But 
 since they still remember something of the truth which 
 they have formerly seen, they cannot on their first 
 embodiment sink below the state of man, and their 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 155 
 
 place among men is determined by the measure of 
 their remembrance. He who has seen and remembered 
 most is born a philosopher. He who has seen and 
 remembers least is born a despot. 
 
 Now, without discussing in detail the remarkable 
 hierarchy of classes which Plato sketches between 
 these extremes, or entering on any philosophical 
 speculation, we can notice two central thoughts, 
 two central truths, I will venture to call them, 
 vividly expressed in this great picture. That which 
 makes us men is the capacity for regarding the 
 eternal. That which fixes our position in the scale 
 of humanity is the energy of the eternal within 
 and upon us, by which we are freed more or less from 
 the dominion of material and selfish aims. Or, to 
 express the teaching in popular language, man is a 
 being who fashions ideals, and the worth of man 
 in relation to his fellows depends upon the ideals 
 which he cherishes. 
 
 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. 
 
 I wish, then, to say a few words now, necessarily 
 most fragmentary and imperfect, upon ideals re- 
 garded in this aspect. I wish to show, if there 
 is need to show it, that ideals are the very soul 
 of life ; that the characteristic spirit of University 
 teaching, which this Society desires to bring within the 
 reach of all, tends to quicken, to sustain, to perfect the 
 loftiest ideals ; that the circumstances of the time 
 give peculiar importance to this aspect of the work of 
 University Extension. 
 
 Ideals are, I say, the soul of life. The simplest 
 human act is directed to an end, and life, a series of 
 
156 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 unnumbered acts, must answer to some end, some 
 ideal, mean or generous, seen by the eye of the heart, 
 and pursued consciously or often unconsciously, which 
 gives a unity and a clue to the bewildering mazes of 
 human conduct. The word progress is unmeaning 
 without reference to an ideal. And I would say of 
 ideals that which was said here of abstract thoughts 
 by a distinguished scholar and statesman, that they 
 " are the meat and drink of life." They support us, and, 
 still more, they rule us. 
 
 It is, then, momentous that we should pause from 
 time to time to regard our ideals. They exercise their 
 influence upon us insensibly. We grow like the object 
 of our desire perhaps before we have distinctly realised 
 its true nature ; and so we may find ourselves like some 
 of the souls at the close of Plato's Eepublic, involved 
 in unexpected calamities through a heedless choice. 
 At the same time, the effort to give distinctness to our 
 ideals brings with it a purifying power. For, after all, 
 there is but one ideal in which we can find rest — that 
 which answers to the truth of things. To this alone 
 the name ideal properly belongs. It remains when all 
 illusions pass away. By us " who are but parts " it is 
 seen in parts, but it is one. It exists already. And 
 we were born to seek it, to find it, to recognise it, to 
 show it. " It is not," as has been nobly said, " the 
 creation, but the gradual discovery of the human in- 
 tellect." Yes ; the best will be done ; is on the 
 divine side done now. There is an order in which all 
 fragments will find their due place — 
 
 On the earth the broken arcs : in the heaven a perfect round. 
 This conviction that there is an order in things 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 157 
 
 which we do not make, but can discern and interpret, is 
 the inspiration of the man of science and of the artist, 
 no less than of the man of affairs. The man of science 
 dimly perceives that after which he is feeling. Pheno- 
 mena speak to him with a voice which others cannot 
 hear, because he has known in some degree their vital 
 coherence, and he trusts to the perfection of the 
 harmony of which he has found the first promise. To 
 the artist outward things are signs rather than copies. 
 He uses them to suggest to others what he discerns 
 behind them. His work is not an end in itself, but a 
 revelation of that which is beyond. And for the 
 statesman ideals are the adequate support of resolute 
 and unwearied patience. 
 
 It was said, I think, of Michael Angelo that he 
 often hewed the marble before him without a model, 
 as one who was setting free a figure imprisoned in the 
 block, clear to his artist eye. The image is a just 
 representation of the work of life. Our work in life 
 is to set free from manifold encumbrances that which 
 is present about us, good and true and lovely. But 
 we must first see the ideal which we desire to bring 
 to view, and the vigour of action depends upon the 
 clearness of our sight, and such clearness comes through 
 discipline. Every prospect on which we look is for 
 us as we are. The phenomena are the material which 
 are offered to us to use and interpret, and as the 
 quickened soul realises their meaning and their 
 relations, seeing becomes beholding, and the partial 
 apprehension of the ideal by which and towards which 
 we have been guided. 
 
 So to keep the ideal before us in the midst of our 
 common occupations, to guard the conviction that there 
 
158 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 is an ideal, is to preserve the first freshness of our 
 early impressions of the mysterious beauty of the world. 
 Poets tell us that in the pilgrimage of life we shall 
 watch the glory fade away from the things of earth. 
 But if it be so, the fault lies with us. It will be 
 because with the growth of things we have not grown 
 to match. The halo still encircles the bush in the 
 wilderness when we have learnt to study the material 
 elements by themselves, only it is found to come by 
 the gift of Heaven. The sunshine which floods the 
 whole landscape at mid-day is the same as that which 
 was seen as a star of dawn when, it lighted the solitary 
 mountain peak, only it is infinitely vaster, and there- 
 fore harder to comprehend in its fulness. 
 
 But while this is so, the conditions of living tempt 
 or constrain us more and more to regard phenomena 
 in relation to our own needs, and we come to forget 
 their larger meaning. I have somewhere seen that 
 an American writer has recorded how, when he was 
 engaged as a pilot on the Mississippi, he was at first 
 filled with adoring wonder at the magnificence of the 
 sunsets, and then in the course of his work came to 
 regard them as useful weather signs. But while we 
 welcome the utilitarian interpretation we need not 
 acquiesce in it. This itself points to something greater 
 by emphasising one of the harmonies of creation. 
 Here, as elsewhere, the part enables us to rise to a 
 fuller conception of the whole, if only the thought of 
 the whole is present with us. So, moving from frag- 
 ment to fragment, we learn to give distinctness to our 
 ideal, and to feel the unity and grandeur of the sum 
 of being through our own experience. If the past 
 shows no attainment, it shows many advances and 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 159 
 
 points to the hoped-for end. Tracing by intelligible 
 marks how things have come to be, as far as they fall 
 within the range of our powers, we look forward with 
 a prophetic trust. We make the power of poetry our 
 own, which a poet has defined to be " the feeling of a 
 former world and of a future one." We come into 
 contact with what has been truly called " the collective 
 thought," and are kindled by the spirit of humanity, 
 that humanity which is " a man that lives and learns 
 for ever." Exceptional occurrences, oppositions in 
 thought, material phenomena, transcending all concep- 
 tion in their necessary conditions, take their place in 
 our view as indications of a larger order. Man, society, 
 nature, are seen to be instinct with one life, and 
 regarded, even as we can now regard them, inspire the 
 spectator with patience at once and hope. 
 
 Such a temper, which answers to the highest ideal 
 of man and of his dwelling-place, is intensely practical. 
 It is not for intellectual indulgence : it is a spur to 
 action. It enforces a thought — a fragment of the 
 ideal — till the thought is recognised as a principle, 
 and in due course the principle is embodied as a fact. 
 Thoreau has said well, " If you have built castles in 
 the air your labour need not be lost; that is where 
 they should be. Now put the foundations under 
 them." 
 
 The temper is practical and it is attainable. I am 
 inclined to say it is necessary for every human life. 
 The average man, the man of business, the artisan, 
 the miner require the vision of the ideal, and they are 
 capable of it. The vision of the ideal guards monotony 
 of work from becoming monotony of life. The simplest 
 home finds a place for it. And no problem is pressed 
 
160 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 upon us now with more continuous urgency than how 
 that place shall be rightly filled. The University 
 Extension Movement is one important help towards 
 the solution of the problem. 
 
 University teaching tends, I believe, with ever 
 accumulating force and directness to quicken and to 
 sustain ideals. It is characteristically structural, 
 catholic, equalising, chastening, historical, personal, 
 spiritual. Let me, in the fewest possible words, en- 
 deavour to explain and justify this formidable list of 
 epithets. To every University man each word will, 
 I think, recall a debt which must grow with the 
 growth of life. 
 
 University teaching is, I say, structural. It aims, 
 I mean, at giving a sense of the whole and pre- 
 serving the proportion of the parts. It insists on a 
 general training and a special training. It brings 
 intelligent sympathy with all studies, and guides to 
 the mastery of some one. It provides that the physical 
 student shall understand the aims, the resources, the 
 achievements of literature ; and that the scholar shall 
 understand the methods and the limitations of physical 
 science. 
 
 It is catholic. A University is strong enough 
 to prevent the overpowering dominance of a popular 
 pursuit. It is hospitable alike to the enthusiasm 
 which proclaims new thoughts and to the reverence 
 which lingers over the thoughts of a past age. It is 
 tolerant of all things except one-sided arrogance. No 
 specialist can move among bands of fellow-students 
 preoccupied with other interests without feeling the 
 amplitude of knowledge and of life, and the manifold 
 relations in which his own subject stands to others on 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 161 
 
 which he cannot enter. The common search for truth 
 and right brings mutual respect ; and the teacher who. 
 has felt the subtle influence of the University must 
 himself in turn diffuse its spirit. 
 
 It is equalising. Nowhere is fellowship more com- 
 plete among representatives of every class than at a 
 University. There poverty is no reproach, and wealth 
 is no title to superiority. The foremost students are 
 bound, perhaps unconsciously, in a brotherhood of 
 heart through which comes the power of penetrating 
 to the noblest in each man. The teacher who has 
 learnt his lessons under such social conditions will 
 be eager to bring the best to the humblest as a 
 fellow-heir with him of the wealth of humanity ;. and 
 he will not accept as permanent . conditions of life 
 which exclude any class or any man from access to 
 his birthright. 
 
 It is chastening. The University teacher cannot 
 forget that his office is not to supersede labour, but to 
 stimulate it. He will not entertain the vulgar notion 
 that we can bestow on others our thoughts as we can 
 bestow on them our money, so that they can employ 
 them rightly before they have made them their own. 
 He will bear in mind the pregnant saying of an old 
 divine, " We have ourselves as we use ourselves." He 
 will make it clear that great books can only be read 
 in the spirit in which they were written, as serious 
 work and not as indolent amusement. He will, there- 
 fore, claim from his hearers the difficult service of 
 thinking, as one who knows that the true teacher, like 
 Nature, gives nothing but materials and opportunities 
 and impulse. 
 
 It is historical. A University is not a bureau. 
 
 M 
 
162 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 It is a living body, a complex result of life, and not 
 an official provision for carrying into effect a formal 
 scheme. The teaching which answers to it is, as a 
 necessary consequence, vital and not intellectual only. 
 It bears the impress of many associations, old and new. 
 It is flexible, in the largest sense human, of the past 
 at once and of the present. A Cambridge man might 
 find it hard to analyse or to estimate the effect which 
 has been produced upon him by the great libraries, by 
 the old buildings wedded to new, by the chapels of 
 Trinity or King's, yet he will know that they have in 
 many undefined ways given him breadth and sym- 
 pathy and tenderness which will colour his own 
 work. 
 
 It is personal. The method of learning is, I 
 believe, of scarcely less moment than the matter. The 
 student who has mastered a subject by the help of a 
 text-book occupies a very different position intellect- 
 ually and morally from one who has gained his know- 
 ledge in continuous contact with a teacher. The frank 
 questioning, the interchange of thought, the influence 
 of personal enthusiasm, the inspiring power of living 
 words, which come in the free intercourse of the class- 
 room, give a force and meaning to facts and theories 
 which the book cannot convey. 
 
 It is spiritual. The end of the teacher whose 
 work we strive to follow is not fixed by the communi- 
 cation of his special lesson. He will seek, indeed, to 
 do this as perfectly as possible, but he will at the 
 same time suggest the vast fields which lie unexplored 
 even in his own department ; he will make clear the 
 limitations and assumptions under which his results 
 are obtained; he will add, if I may so express the 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 163 
 
 truth, the symbol of infinity to the provisional state- 
 ments which represent the actual attainments of man ; 
 he will use the most effective technical education as 
 the vehicle of wider culture. Literature, art, science 
 will be for him partial revelations of a boundless life ; 
 and it will be his object to make the life felt through 
 the least part with which he deals. 
 
 If, then, this is the general character of University 
 teaching, however imperfectly it may be realised by 
 the individual teacher, we may rightly maintain that 
 it does, as I have said, tend to quicken and sustain 
 ideals, to bring into view the loftiest aspects of man 
 and nature, to assure to thought and action that 
 liberal freedom which corresponds with the sense of 
 absolute law, to keep open a free course for aspirations 
 and endeavours which rise beyond the conventional 
 standard of custom. 
 
 Hitherto the Universities have fulfilled their teach- 
 ing office for a few. Now they are endeavouring to 
 extend it to every town and village, and to make it 
 effective even for those who are busily engaged in 
 various industries. The movement corresponds in 
 many respects with that out of which the old Univer- 
 sities themselves arose. It is still experimental, but 
 the results already obtained have far more than satis- 
 fied the hopes of those who watched the beginning of 
 the movement not without anxiety. They have won 
 a distinct academic recognition at Cambridge, and they 
 have contributed, I believe, in no small degree to 
 create the desire for a teaching University in London. 
 For, however important the test of an examination 
 may be for fixing the value of acquirements, the dis- 
 cipline of learning is yet more important for character ; 
 
164 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 and this discipline the Extension system offers in a 
 form equally attractive and stimulating. 
 
 Such a system, fitted to bring many-sided liberal 
 culture to every condition of life, to enlarge common 
 interests, to deepen fellowship, to create simplicity 
 through refinement, and to check the passion for 
 excitement by the force of purer interests, would be 
 welcome at any time. 
 
 But it is of singular importance now, when we are 
 in danger of losing the true conceptions of nature, 
 humanity, and life, and the calm vigour of action is 
 failing us. The inspiration of great ideals seems to 
 be alone able to meet the intellectual distraction, the 
 materialism, the critical indifferentism, and the conse- 
 quent enfeebling of will which appear to be the 
 dominant perils of our age. 
 
 On the one side our attention is concentrated on 
 isolated subjects. We are absorbed in the study of 
 fragments. We are fascinated by minute details. 
 We unconsciously treat our little domain as the whole. 
 On the other side, in the eager hurry of life, every one 
 is expected to possess a ready acquaintance with all 
 that can be known. In this way genuine labour and 
 superficial borrowing of opinions become equally de- 
 structive of broad and balanced judgment. But the 
 contemplation of a great ideal of nature will bring 
 proportion to special inquiries and justly discredit the 
 affectation of an impossible omniscience. The worth 
 of our own little service will be seen to be fixed by 
 the grandeur of the cause to which it is rendered, and 
 the worth of our knowledge by the help which it 
 brings to others. 
 
 Again, as long as our aims, our methods, our 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 165 
 
 sanctions are material, there can be no equal fellow- 
 ship, no enthusiasm of service, no stable peace. Wealth 
 to be held irresponsibly as a private possession is 
 tacitly accepted as the standard of success. The skill 
 which we labour to gain is regarded as a weapon to 
 overcome a rival. The final appeal is to strong bat- 
 talions. But the contemplation of a great ideal of 
 humanity will constrain us to recognise as axioms that 
 classes, nations, races rejoice and suffer together ; that 
 every possession, every power of a society or a people, 
 is an instrument for wider service ; that the accordant 
 voices of history and conscience give a verdict which 
 no force can arrest from final execution. 
 
 Yet, again, we are reminded at every turn that 
 men who should be prophets and pioneers of a noble 
 future are content to sink into expositors of the past 
 or present. They devote themselves to making a 
 survey, an analysis, a description. Life becomes a 
 study without a moral, treated as equally interesting 
 and equally transitory in all its forms, a drama pro- 
 vided for the amusement of those who are in a position 
 to forget that the actors are men of like passions and 
 like destiny with themselves. But as one of the most 
 noble of modern political leaders said with his latest 
 voice : " Our world is not a spectacle ; it is a field of 
 battle upon which all who in their hearts love justice, 
 beauty, and holiness are bound — whether as leaders or 
 soldiers, conquerors or martyrs — to play their part." 
 And the contemplation of a great ideal of life will 
 sustain the combatant in the struggle, and through 
 every failure enable him to strive as knowing that, 
 for states, as for men, the test of abiding greatness is 
 the power of sacrifice. 
 
166 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 Such an ideal will give back also, strengthened and 
 purified, the true conviction of personal responsibility. 
 At present we first shrink from forming a decision, 
 and then we improvise one. We are first irresolute 
 and then precipitate. It must be so till we fix our 
 eyes upon an unchangeable goal and have faith to 
 move towards it. As we do so we may err in this 
 step or that, but we shall never go wrong as to the 
 line of our advance. Thus only can we do our work. 
 An ideal is, we have seen, a condition of sustained 
 action ; and action is the mark of a man. He is born 
 not to think, as regarding one element only of his con- 
 stitution ; not to be, as gathering into himself all the 
 treasures which he can command ; but to act, to con- 
 secrate to one supreme cause the fulness of his powers, 
 as knowing that life is not a search for personal happi- 
 ness or aggrandisement, not an effort after self-centred 
 culture, but the accomplishment of a divine service. 
 
 Such ideals of nature, humanity, life, are, I repeat, 
 intensely practical, even if they are unattainable. 
 They are as sunlight upon our common ways. And 
 the teachings which this Society is seeking to gain and 
 to spread brings them into the very heart of our 
 common business. And it is on this that I wish to 
 lay the utmost stress. We cannot all be scholars or 
 philosophers or physicists, but we can all enter on the 
 blessings of the larger heritage which it is the office 
 of such explorers to gather. We can do our humblest 
 tasks thoroughly and liberally, not as drudges, but as 
 fellow- workers with saints and heroes ; we can feel 
 that we, too, in the lowest places, are servants of an 
 illustrious commonwealth ; we can find the oppor- 
 tunity for a generous career each in our narrow 
 
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 167 
 
 circle ; we can pursue our peculiar work in the spirit 
 which is common to us all as men, and enjoy the 
 invigorating energy of a larger being ; we can, if I may 
 so use your motto, learn to convert that which is a 
 means of livelihood into a means of life. 
 
 And it is, I believe, by the help of these noblest 
 ideals — ideals which belong to men as men, the 
 ideals of our Christian faith — that purity and peace 
 and freedom and dignity will be given to the 
 masses of our countrymen. This conviction has 
 brought me here to-day that I might plead once 
 more for a work which I have watched with grati- 
 tude from its beginning. Only let those of us who 
 have caught some distant glimpse of the beauty 
 of creation as the thought of God, and of the obli- 
 gation of labour as the lot of man, tell courageously 
 what we have seen and known. All who share our 
 nature are capable of our highest visions, and 
 awakened reverence will do her perfect work. The 
 ruined denes of Durham will then smile once more, 
 and smoke-wrapped rows of huts will give place to 
 homes of men. Ideals grow wider, and brighter, and 
 nearer with our own years and with the years of the 
 world. I see now that far more is within a measur- 
 able distance for nations and for men than seemed 
 possible when I was first stirred by great hopes in my 
 school days. Thoughts whispered then with bated 
 breath have become commonplaces. We know our 
 dangers ; in part, we know our aims and resources. 
 We stand on the edge of a new age. It is for the 
 young to shape it. To them we commit without fear 
 our ideals and our faith. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF THE GEEEK MIND 
 ON MODERN" LIFE 
 
 By Professor t Jebb, Litt.D., M.P. 
 
 1893 
 
 When the President of the London University 
 Extension Society honoured me with an invitation to 
 address you to-day, he at the same time encouraged 
 me to hope that a subject connected with classical 
 literature would be deemed admissible on the present 
 occasion, and that there were circumstances in the 
 work of the Society during the last few years which 
 would render such a choice appropriate. Since the 
 summer of 1889 numerous courses of lectures on 
 Greek literature and Greek art have, I believe, been 
 given, under the auspices of this Society, by men of 
 high eminence in the subjects which they severally 
 undertook, as well as by ladies whose distinguished 
 attainments in classical archaeology are joined to the 
 happiest gifts of exposition. Such teachers were 
 assured beforehand of attentive hearers ; but the 
 success which has followed these lectures, in respect 
 alike of the numbers attending them and the zeal 
 evoked, has surpassed the most sanguine expectations 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 169 
 
 that could have been formed. These results have 
 afforded fresh evidence of a fact which has long been 
 known to experienced workers in the field of popular 
 teaching, viz., that large and constantly increasing 
 numbers of men and women, of all classes and callings, 
 are beginning to comprehend the twofold claim which 
 entitles Greek to a permanent place in a liberal 
 education : first, the claim arising from its intrinsic 
 power to satisfy mental and moral wants which 
 become more widely felt the more widely liberal 
 studies are diffused; and, secondly, the historical 
 claim, arising from the relation of Greece to the 
 literature and the life of subsequent ages. It seemed 
 to me, then, that the moment was a favourable one 
 for inviting you to consider, though it be only in 
 rapid outline, the general nature of the influence 
 which Greece has exerted, and must always exert, 
 over the modern world. 1 
 
 The very name of this noble hall, in which your 
 Lordship's courtesy permits us to meet to-day, recalls a 
 part of that prehistoric background against which the 
 Greek genius first shone forth. The immemorial 
 civilisation on the banks of the Nile had gradually 
 passed under the bondage of stereotyped formulas, as 
 despotism of another kind overshadowed the lands of 
 the Tigris and the Euphrates, when the Greek spirit, 
 in the first glow of a youth which has proved 
 immortal, was beginning to clear the path of mankind 
 to political liberty, to the recognition of natural 
 beauty, and to the fearless pursuit of knowledge. If, 
 
 1 Some passages in this address are taken, with modifications, from 
 the first and last of a course of lectures which I gave at Baltimore in 
 1892, and which have since been published under the title of The 
 Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry. — R. C. J. 
 
170 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 again, we look back from a modern standing-point on 
 the various parts played in human progress by various 
 members of the Indo-European family, how singular 
 do the faculties of the Greek race appear, alike in 
 compass and in harmony ! This might be illustrated 
 from the history of modern art, when some felicity of 
 invention or achievement is explained by the. fact that 
 several strains of lineage, several branches of the 
 Indo-European stock, have contributed to a result 
 which no one of them Could have produced alone. 
 Thus, the most signal achievement of the Erench 
 genius in art has been the creation of Gothic archi- 
 tecture ; and, as the President of the Eoyal Academy 
 reminded its students some years ago, the cradle of 
 that architecture was the Eoyal Domain of central 
 France, a region in which the Celtic blood of the Cymri 
 was mingled with the Latin element derived from the 
 Eomans, and with the Teutonic element furnished by 
 the Eranks, giving birth to that Gothic style which 
 blends freedom with self-restraint, audacity with 
 prudence, and science with emotion. No similar 
 analysis can be applied to the masterpieces of the 
 Greek architect and the Greek sculptor. Imperfect 
 though our knowledge is, does it not warrant the 
 belief that no people has yet appeared upon the earth 
 whose faculty for art, in the largest sense of the term, 
 was at once so fine and so comprehensive ? 
 
 But it is through the classical literature of Greece 
 that the mind of the race is most fully known to us. 
 There is a passage in one of Macaulay's earliest 
 writings — a review of Mitford in Knight's Quarterly 
 Magazine — from which I will quote a few sentences, 
 because they put the claim of Greek literature in the 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 171 
 
 boldest form, — one which many readers, probably, 
 would deem extravagant, or even paradoxical. " If 
 we consider," he says, " the subtlety of disquisition, the 
 force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance 
 of expression, which characterise the great works of 
 Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically 
 most valuable ; but what shall we say when we 
 reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or 
 indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human 
 intellect ; that from hence were the vast accomplish- 
 ments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero, the wither- 
 ing tire of Juvenal, the plastic imagination of Dante, 
 the humour of Cervantes, the comprehension of 
 Bacon, the wit of Butler, the supreme and universal 
 excellence of Shakespeare ? " The claim which 
 Macaulay here makes for Greek literature would be 
 extravagant indeed if it meant that Cicero was 
 brilliant because he had profited by Demosthenes, that 
 Juvenal's satire was inspired by Aristophanes, that 
 Dante was vivid and sublime because Yirgil had 
 given him glimpses of Homer, that the humour of 
 Cervantes and the wit of Butler flowed from an Attic 
 source, that Bacon's grasp was due to study of 
 Aristotle, or that Shakespeare, who had small Latin 
 and less Greek, was the prince of dramatists by grace 
 of the Dionysiac Theatre. In what sense, then, if 
 in any, is the claim a just one ? In this — that 
 the Greeks were the people with whom the very con- 
 ception of artistic literature began; that, in all the 
 principal branches of poetry and of prose, the Greek 
 mind achieved work so abounding with intellectual 
 life, and so excellent in form, as to remain for after- 
 ages an inspiration and a standard. 
 
172 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 The vital power of the Greek spirit was indeed not 
 fully disclosed until, after suffering a partial eclipse in 
 the Macedonian age, it emerged in a new quality, as a 
 source of illumination to the Italian masters of the 
 world. Under the plastic touch of conquered Greece, 
 the Latin language was gradually moulded into an 
 apter instrument of literature, while the "Eoman intel- 
 lect itself acquired, in some measure, a flexibility not 
 native to it. Through Eome the Greek influence was 
 transmitted to medieval Europe in a form which 
 obscured much of its charm, yet also served to extend 
 its empire. In the earlier period of the Eenaissance, 
 the scholars of Italy, where the revival had its chief 
 seat, were engrossed with Latin literature ; they 
 regarded it as their Italian heritage, restored to them 
 after long deprivation. Greek studies, though ardently 
 pursued by a few, remained, on the whole, in the back- 
 ground. And it may be said that the general spirit of 
 the classical revival continued to be Latin rather than 
 Greek down to the latter part of the last century. 
 Even where the Greek language was most cultivated, 
 there was comparatively little sense of what is 
 characteristic and distinctive in the best Greek litera- 
 ture. This sense was developed, in the second half of 
 the eighteenth century, chiefly through two agencies. 
 One was the study of Greek art, as advanced by such 
 men as Winckelmann and Lessing, — bringing with it 
 the perception that those qualities which characterise 
 the best Greek art are also present in the best Greek 
 literature. The other agency was a reaction against 
 that conventional classicism, wearing a Latin garb, 
 which had so long been dominant. Minds insurgent 
 against that tyranny turned with joyous relief to the 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 173 
 
 elastic freedom of the Greek intellect, to the living 
 charm of Greek poetry and art. Goethe and Schiller 
 are representatives of the new impulse. The great 
 gain of the movement which thus began was that, for 
 the first time since the Eevival of Letters, the Greek 
 originals stood out distinct from the Latin copies. 
 Men acquired a truer sense of the Hellenic genius, and 
 the current of Hellenic influence upon modern life 
 began to flow in a clear channel of its own, no longer 
 confused with the somewhat turbid stream of Eenais- 
 sance classicism. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, modern literature and art had 
 experienced the influence of other forces, acting in very 
 different ways ; and with these forces the Hellenic 
 influence had to reckon. One of these was the pro- 
 duct of medieval Catholicism, which had given art a 
 new genius. A new world of beauty had arisen, even 
 more different from the pagan world than the Empire 
 of the twelfth century was different from that of the 
 first. Greek art had sprung from a free, cheerful life, 
 open to all the bright impressions of external nature, a 
 life warmed by frank human sympathies, and lit up 
 with fancy controlled by reason. The lawgivers of 
 medieval art were men withdrawn from communion 
 with the outward world by the rapture of a devotion 
 at once half mystic and intensely real; instead of 
 flexible intelligence they had religious passion ; instead 
 of the Greek's clear outlook upon the facts of humanity, 
 they had a faith which transfigured the actual world. 
 The Greek artist, even in portraying passion, was mind- 
 ful of balance, and placed certain limits upon the 
 expression of individual character. The medieval 
 artist strove before all things to express the intensity 
 
174 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 of the individual soul. In poetry Dante is the great 
 exponent of this spirit. And medieval Catholicism 
 deeply coloured the sentiment of all the literature 
 known by the general name of romantic. In Goethe's 
 younger days the conflict between the classical and the 
 romantic schools raged fiercely. THe interlude of 
 Helena, which forms the third act in the second part of 
 Faust, was the work of his old age. Faust's nature is 
 to be elevated and purified by developing in him the 
 sense of beauty ; Helena represents the classical, but 
 especially the Greek element in art and literature ; 
 and when Faust at last wins her, their union typifies 
 the reconciliation of the romantic with the classical. 
 Goethe himself dated a new life, a mental regeneration, 
 from the time when he first seized the true spirit of 
 the ancient masters. These are his own words, speak- 
 ing of Greek art and literature : " Clearness of vision, 
 cheerfulness of acceptance, easy grace of expression, are 
 the qualities which delight us ; and now, when we 
 affirm that we find all these in the genuine Grecian 
 works, achieved in the noblest material, the best pro- 
 portioned form, with certainty and completeness of 
 execution, we shall be understood if we always refer to 
 them as a basis and a standard. Let each one be a 
 Grecian in his own way, but let him be one." In 
 that allegorical strain which pervades the Helena, 
 Goethe has not failed to mark that, while the Hellenic 
 idea of beauty is supreme, the romantic element has 
 also enriched modern life. The gifts are not all from 
 one side. The symmetry, the clear outlines, the cheer- 
 ful repose of classical art, are wedded to the sentiment, 
 passion, and variety of the romantic. The great 
 German poet felt, and has expressed with wonderful 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 175 
 
 subtlety, the truth that no modern can absolutely 
 dissociate the Hellenic influence from the others 
 which have contributed to shape our modern life ; no 
 one can now be a pure Hellene, nor, if he could, would 
 it be desirable ; but every one should recognise the 
 special elements with which the Hellenic ideal can 
 ennoble and chasten the modern spirit, and these he 
 should by all means cultivate. To do so successfully, 
 is to educate one's sense of beauty; and to do that 
 aright, is so far to improve one's whole nature. This 
 lesson, taught half mystically in the second part of 
 Faust, has sometimes been obscured by what Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold called the Hebraising tendency. We 
 remember his definition, in Culture and Anarchy, of 
 Hebraism as contrasted with Hellenism. The govern- 
 ing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; 
 that of Hebraism is strictness of conscience : both seek, 
 in the Hebrew apostle's words, to make us partakers 
 of the divine nature ; but Hellenism seeks to do this 
 through the reason, by making us see things as they 
 are; Hebraism insists rather upon conduct and 
 obedience. In our own country the intellectual in- 
 fluence of the Eenaissance was crossed, and for a time 
 checked, by the Hebraising tendency. But, though 
 there is a profound difference, there is no necessary 
 antagonism between the ideal broadly described as 
 Hebraic, and the permanent, the essential parts of 
 Hellenism. The Greek influence has acted upon 
 modern life and literature even more widely as a 
 pervading and quickening spirit than as an exemplar 
 of form ; and it has shown itself capable of co-operat- 
 ing, in this subtle manner, with various alien forces, so 
 as neither to lose its own distinction, nor to infringe 
 
176 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 upon theirs. Milton illustrates this. By temperament 
 no less than creed he is a Puritan of the higher type. 
 Steeped though he was in classical literature, the 
 pervading spirit of his work is at any rate not Greek ; 
 it is more akin to the Hebraic, or, when not that, to 
 the Koman. The Lycidas, for instance, is a pastoral 
 elegy on an Alexandrian Greek model; but how 
 strangely the temper of the Hellenic original is changed 
 when the English poet's wrath blazes forth against the 
 corruptions of the time. He shows his own conscious- 
 ness of this in reverting to his theme : — 
 
 Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past 
 
 That shrunk thy streams ; return, Sicilian Muse ! 
 
 The Samson Agonistes has the form of a Greek drama, 
 but its inspiration, like its subject, is far more Hebraic 
 than Hellenic. Yet no one acquainted with the best 
 Greek poetry can read Milton without feeling what its 
 influence has contributed to his genius ; it has helped 
 to give him his lofty self-restraint and his serenity. 
 
 But the deepest and largest influence of Greece is 
 not to be sought in the modern literature which treats 
 Greek subjects or imitates Greek form ; that influence 
 works more characteristically when, having been 
 received into the modern mind, it acts by suggestion 
 and inspiration, breathing a grace and a power of its 
 own into material and form of a different origin. 
 This influence has been all-pervading in the modern 
 world. Yet those who most appreciate the true value 
 of Hellenism will never claim for it that, by itself, 
 it can suffice for the needs of humanity. In the intel- 
 lectual province its value is not only permanent but 
 unique. It has furnished models of excellence which 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 177 
 
 can never be superseded ; by its spirit it supplies a 
 medicine for diseases of the modern mind, a corrective 
 for aberrations of modern taste, a discipline no less 
 than a delight for the modern imagination ; since that 
 obedience to reason which it exacts is also a return to 
 the most gracious activities of life and nature. Of 
 such a power we may truly say : — 
 
 it will never 
 Pass into nothingness, but still will keep 
 A bower of quiet for us, and a sleep 
 Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 
 
 But in the province of religion and morals Hellen- 
 ism alone is not sufficient. Greek polytheism, even as 
 ennobled by the great poets, was incapable of generat- 
 ing religious conceptions which could satisfy the 
 mind and heart, or of furnishing an adequate rule for 
 the conduct of life. These must be sought from 
 another source. Yet there is no inherent conflict 
 between true Hellenism and spiritualised Hebraism 
 such as is contained in Christianity. The distinctive 
 quality of the best Greek literature and art, that by 
 which it has lived and will live, is the faculty of 
 rising from the earth into a clearer air. " The divine," 
 says Plato in the Phaedrus, " is beauty, wisdom, good- 
 ness, and the like ; by these the wing of the soul is 
 nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil, 
 it wastes and falls away." The Greek spirit, in its 
 noblest form, is indeed, to borrow Plato's beautiful 
 phrase, " the power of the wing " for the human soul. 
 The visions to which it can soar are such as that 
 described in the Phaedrus, where beauty is beheld 
 dwelling with modesty in a holy place. The best 
 Greek work in every kind is essentially pure ; to 
 
 N 
 
178 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 conceive it as necessarily entangled with the baser 
 elements of paganism is to confound the accidents with 
 the essence ; the accidents have passed away ; the 
 essence is imperishable. 
 
 A further claim which may be made for the best 
 Greek work is that it is capable of acting as an intel- 
 lectual tonic, and of bracing us for the battle of life. 
 " To pass from the study of Homer to the business of 
 the world/' says Mr. Gladstone, "is to step out of a 
 palace of enchantment into the cold gray light of a 
 polar day. But the spells in which this enchanter 
 deals have no affinity with that drug from Egypt 
 which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference; 
 rather they are like the §ap\iaKov icrOXov, the remedial 
 specific, which, freshening the understanding by con- 
 tact with the truth and strength of nature, should both 
 improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and 
 increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of 
 duty." The tribute here rendered to Homer might be 
 paid, with not less justice, to the classical Greek poetry 
 as a whole. True to Aristotle's principle for art, this 
 poetry deals with the universal, — with those elements 
 of human character and life which are not transient or 
 abnormal, but of interest for every age and every land. 
 On the high places, the templet, serena, of Greek 
 literature and art, those who are worn with the troubles 
 or disturbed by the mental maladies of modern civilisa- 
 tion can breathe an atmosphere which, like that of 
 Greece itself, has the freshness of the mountains and 
 the sea. But the loneliness of Oeta or Cithaeron is 
 not there; we have around us on those summits also 
 the cheerful sympathies of human life, the pleasant 
 greetings of the kindly human voice. The great 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 179 
 
 thinkers and artists of ancient Hellas recall the words 
 in which Aeschylus described those kinsmen of JSTiobe 
 who worshipped their ancestral deity on the mountain- 
 heights of Mysia : — 
 
 the seed of gods, 
 Men near to Zeus ; for whom on Ida burns, 
 High in the clear air, the altar of their sire, 
 Nor hath their race yet lost the blood divine. 
 
 Humanity cannot afford to lose out of its inheritance 
 any part of the best work which has been done for it 
 in the past. All that is most beautiful and most 
 instructive in Greek achievement is our permanent 
 possession ; one which can be enjoyed without detri- 
 ment to those other studies which modern life demands ; 
 one which no lapse of time can make obsolete, and 
 which no multiplication of interests can make super- 
 fluous. Each successive generation must learn from 
 ancient Greece that which can be taught by her alone. 
 Through what channels, in what modes, has her 
 teaching been most largely operative upon the world ? 
 History shows how, from the Eoman age to our own, 
 Greece has everywhere helped to educate gifted minds, 
 from which her light has radiated in ever widening 
 circles. It has been her privilege to elicit a sense of 
 kinship in the finer spirits of every race, and to enter 
 as a vitalising essence into the most varied forms of 
 modern thought, bringing to every such alliance some 
 distinction which no other element could have conferred. 
 But the peculiar characteristic of this influence among 
 us in recent years is the vast increase in the number 
 of those who receive it, not indirectly merely, but 
 directly, through their own study of Greek literature 
 and art. As regards the literature, this has been 
 
180 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 largely due to the appearance of really good transla- 
 tions. Through these a reader may learn to appreciate 
 some qualities, at least, of the best Greek writers. In 
 regard to art, again, any one whose eye has been trained 
 to recognise the distinction of the best Greek work has 
 learned much. 
 
 But the qualities of the Greek language are such, 
 that the difference made by a knowledge of it to one's 
 appreciation of the literature is greater than in the 
 case, for instance, of Latin, or German, or even of 
 French. In these languages, of course, as in all others, 
 very much is lost by translation ; yet not so much as 
 in Greek. The comprehension of Greek art, again, is 
 distinctly aided by a knowledge of the Greek language, 
 as the best archaeologists would, I think, agree ; and 
 these facts follow from that general character of Greek 
 which I must now attempt, however briefly, to describe. 
 Compare classical Greek with its elder sister, the 
 literary language of ancient India, and the difference is 
 striking. Sanskrit has been the more faithful guardian 
 of old Indo-European sounds and forms ; the trans- 
 parency of its structure gives it an unequalled value 
 for students in relation to that whole family of 
 languages. Greek attracts by a different charm. The 
 thought which it suggests is rather — how wonder- 
 fully this language has achieved the purposes inherent 
 in its own particular genius ! It is an instrument 
 which responds with happy elasticity to every demand 
 of the Greek intellect. The forms which it has 
 retained are light, graceful, flexible. It can express 
 the most delicate shades of meaning with an elegant 
 simplicity. This power is due, not only to its organic 
 structure, but also to the tact with which words ex- 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 181 
 
 pressing the same general idea have been discriminated 
 in its rich vocabulary. The Greek language is the 
 earliest work Of art created by the spontaneous working 
 of the Greek mind, and it is the greatest work of 
 Greek art which has survived. If those fragments of 
 Greek architecture and sculpture which we so prize 
 had come down to us without any credentials of their 
 origin, simply as relics of an otherwise unknown race, 
 it would not have been fantastic to conjecture that, of 
 all the peoples recorded in history, the only one pre- 
 sumably capable of producing such monuments in 
 marble was the same people whose thoughts had 
 moulded, and whose spirit had chastened, the most 
 perfect among the forms of human speech. The 
 characteristic qualities of the Greek language are no- 
 where seen to greater advantage than in the Homeric 
 poems, although the Homeric language has not yet 
 fully developed certain traits which the Attic dialect 
 shows in perfection. We perceive in Homer how 
 vividly this language bears the stamp of the imagina- 
 tion which has shaped it. The Greek saw the object 
 of his thought directly and clearly. His first aim in 
 speaking was to make the expression fit the thought. 
 When an imagination of this kind, unclouded by any 
 haze of literary reminiscence, and free from conscious 
 striving after effect, soars into the region of the mar- 
 vellous or the ideal, it still commands the obedience of 
 the language which it has disciplined in the field of 
 natural observation. Consider, for instance, the preter- 
 natural elements in the Odyssey. The Oriental art, 
 which embodied an abstract conception or a mystic 
 dogma in some hybrid or monstrous animal shape, was 
 merely making an effort of symbolism. The spectator 
 
182 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 may comprehend the meaning or accept the doctrine, 
 but he does not believe in the monster. The reader of 
 the Odyssey, on the other hand, who feels the persons 
 to be real, is not robbed of his illusion when Circe 
 changes the hero's companions into swine ; or when 
 the flesh of the Sun-god's oxen bellows on the spits ; 
 or when Poseidon petrifies the Phaeacian ship. The 
 human verisimilitude of the whole disguises the im- 
 possibility of the details ; we scarcely feel at the 
 moment that they are impossible. But how has this 
 effect been attained ? By an imagination which, 
 through habitual contact with what is living and real, 
 has learned to animate fiction also with the breath of 
 life ; and which is served here also by a language so 
 faithfully and finely moulded upon nature that, when 
 it clothes a narrative of the miraculous, the very out- 
 lines of the garment disarm suspicion as to the form 
 which they invest. Such is the general character of 
 the Greek language — a perfect organ of expression, 
 showing essentially the same qualities which appear in 
 the best Greek art. 
 
 We ought all to rejoice, then, in the remarkable 
 success of a new experiment in teaching that language, 
 which has arisen out of the work of this Society. 
 Classes have lately been formed for the study of 
 Greek, and students who had enjoyed no previous ad- 
 vantages of instruction in the language, but whose 
 interest in it had been quickened by lectures on the 
 literature, have shown a zeal and made a progress of 
 which their teachers have reason to be proud. I 
 would venture to commend this new enterprise to the 
 sympathies of all who are interested in classical studies, 
 or indeed in literary studies of any kind. To my 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 183 
 
 thinking, it is a movement of great importance, which 
 is very likely to mark the beginning of a time when a 
 first-hand knowledge of Greek shall be more widely 
 diffused. It would be a notable and fruitful result if, 
 as these new classes seem to promise, the interest felt 
 in the Greek language should grow into anything 
 that could fairly be described as a popular interest, 
 — so that considerable numbers of students, out- 
 side of our great schools and Universities, should set 
 themselves to acquire the power of reading the Greek 
 literature in the original. I do not think that such a 
 hope is chimerical, in view of what has already been 
 accomplished by the enthusiasm of teachers and 
 students. Perhaps one can scarcely expect that the 
 time should soon come when the members of such 
 classes, in any large numbers at least, will be able to 
 read the more difficult parts of Greek literature ; though 
 I have no doubt that some students, when once started, 
 will advance rapidly. But we may expect, I think, 
 that such a knowledge of Greek as enables one to read 
 Xenophon's Anabasis, for instance, will be found such 
 a pleasant and profitable acquisition that, even if the 
 student should not see his way to going much further, he 
 will think that his time has been well spent, and that 
 his labour has been well rewarded. I rest this belief 
 on the peculiar charm of the Greek language, and on 
 the peculiar way in which this charm affects learners, 
 almost from the beginning — as I know from my own 
 experience. A simple illustration may help to make 
 this plainer. There are many children to whom no toy 
 is more delightful than a printing-press, and its fascina- 
 tion consists chiefly in the leaden types. The letter 
 A, for instance, so clear cut, so faultless, as it stands forth 
 
184 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 from its neat stem — what a contrast it is to the same 
 letter as scrawled by pen or pencil; it is a little work 
 of art in itself, which appeals to the fancy of an in- 
 telligent child. And such as types are to him, such 
 are the words of the Greek language to a sympathetic 
 learner. The Greek words are, in themselves, so clear- 
 cut, so beautifully moulded, that they begin to please 
 one's artistic sense even before one has made much 
 progress with the language. This pleasure becomes 
 keen so soon as one proceeds to put Greek words to- 
 gether — even three or four at a time — in the simplest 
 sentences ; it is like the child's pleasure in type- 
 setting, only more varied. Therefore, for the beginner 
 in Greek, we may always prescribe a little easy com- 
 position, it does not matter how little or how easy, if 
 only it calls this feeling into play. For this feeling is 
 not an illusion which will fade in the presence of 
 better knowledge. It is the germ of that delight in 
 Greek which ripens with study, when the pleasure 
 given at first by shapely words is enhanced by a per- 
 ception of that symmetry and harmony, that unfailing 
 adequacy to the lucid utterance of thought which 
 distinguishes the language as wielded by all its great 
 masters, alike in verse and in prose. 
 
 I have firm faith, then, in the power of Greek to 
 retain the interest which it has once awakened, not only 
 for the sake of the treasures which it unlocks, but for 
 its own sake also. And I believe that anything which 
 tends to make the study of this language popular will 
 be valuable in a further way. High specialisation has 
 long ago become inevitable in every branch of know- 
 ledge. Classical philology is no exception to the rule. 
 If a student is to know the best that has been done in 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 185 
 
 even a small part of the field, he must concentrate 
 himself thereon. But in the case of classical studies 
 such completeness at a particular point may be pur- 
 chased too dearly. These studies used to be called 
 the " Humanities." This name expressed what is, 
 after all, the greatest and best gift which they have 
 to bestow. Their highest office is to influence the 
 character, to chasten the judgment, to illuminate the 
 understanding, and, in a word, to render their disciples 
 more truly humane. But, in order that they should 
 produce these effects, it is necessary that they should 
 be approached in a spirit more comprehensive than 
 that of the specialist who confines himself to one small 
 part of them, and comparatively ignores the rest. It 
 is better — for most minds at any rate — to renounce 
 the hope of an exhaustive acquaintance with any one 
 corner of the field, than to miss the largest benefit 
 which the entire discipline can confer. This is what, 
 under the conditions of modern scholarship, we are 
 perhaps too apt to forget. But, if the study of the 
 Greek language were to be spread over a wider area, 
 and if a more popular interest in the classics were to 
 spring from it, the academic tendency towards exces- 
 sive specialising would be gradually tempered by 
 more popular instincts ; the classics would be, so far, 
 recalled to their paramount function as " Humanities "; 
 in this sense, and to this extent, the intellectual 
 pleasures tasted by the scholars of the Eenaissance 
 would be enjoyed anew by large numbers among us, 
 to whom the charm of Greek literature, inseparable as 
 it is from that of the Greek language, would come with 
 all the joy of a discovery. 
 
 But even this is not the largest issue involved. 
 
186 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 
 
 That eager acceptance of stimulating lectures on the 
 classics which has been manifested at several great 
 centres of population is only one symptom, though a 
 most remarkable one, of a growing desire to know the 
 best literature at first hand. There is an eagerness 
 abroad in the land to participate in those highest benefits 
 of civilisation which are within the common rights of all 
 mankind, — those gifts of education which may enable 
 every one to live a worthier life, a life of higher 
 activities and higher enjoyments, a life in which the 
 duties of loyal citizenship can be discharged with 
 greater efficiency and intelligence. The strength of 
 the University Extension movement resides in the fact 
 that it has responded to this desire — indeed, has done 
 much to evoke it where it was latent, and to define it 
 where it was vague. The Universities, as representing 
 the higher education of the country, have gone out to 
 the people, clearly seeing that the popular desire is not 
 for the second best, but for the best, — only presented 
 in forms which can be understood. All thinking 
 persons will perceive the immense importance of such 
 a movement to the public welfare, not merely in an 
 educational sense, but in regard to social stability and 
 national security. Nothing could contribute more 
 powerfully to preserve the best things which we have 
 inherited from our ancestors, or to warrant a con- 
 fidence that the new generation will be qualified to deal 
 in a wise and enlightened manner with the conditions 
 and problems of their time. University Extension 
 has created a new profession, which demands special 
 gifts and a special training. The distinguished men 
 in its ranks have much hard work to do, sometimes 
 much drudgery ; and they have often to encounter 
 
PROFESSOR JEBB 187 
 
 difficulties which only perseverance can surmount. 
 But they will be encouraged by the thought that they 
 are rendering their country a great service — that they 
 are helping to maintain the continuity of its best 
 traditions, and to ensure that a people whose self- 
 respect has its root in centuries of ordered freedom 
 shall be knitted together by ties even stronger and 
 nobler than those which united their fathers. 
 
 In conclusion, allow me to thank you for the 
 kind patience with which you have listened to these 
 remarks. I earnestly hope, and fully believe, that this 
 great Society, which has already accomplished so 
 much, will go on prospering more and more. In the 
 field at which we have been looking to-day, it is doing 
 a great work by enlarging the basis of those studies 
 which are of primary importance for all literature and 
 history. This is really to work in the Athenian spirit ; 
 and it will bring fresh honour to London — in words 
 which a living poet applies to Athens — 
 
 While this city's name on earth shall be for earth her 
 mightiest name. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh 
 
BOOKS ON POLITICS. 
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF POLITICS. By H. Sidgwick, 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy, Cambridge. 8vo. 14s. net. 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE 
 SCIENCE OF POLITICS. By Sir F. Pollock, Bart. Crown 
 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION 
 FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES. By E. A. Freeman. 
 Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s. 
 
 GREATER BRITAIN : A Record of Travel in English- 
 speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867. By trie Right Hon. 
 Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Bart. With Maps and Illus- 
 trations. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 PROBLEMS OF GREATER BRITAIN. By the Right 
 Hon. Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Bart. Third and 
 Cheaper Edition. With Maps. Extra Crown 8vo. 12s. 6d. 
 
 IMPERIAL FEDERATION. The Problem of National 
 Unity. By George R. Parkin, M.A. With a Map. Crown 
 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 
 THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. By the Right 
 Hon. James Bryce, M.P., D.C.L., Author of "The Holy 
 Roman Empire." In Two Vols. The National Government— 
 The State Governments— The Party System. Public Opinion- 
 Illustrations and Reflections— Social Institutions. New Edition. 
 Thoroughly revised. Vol. I. Extra Crown 8vo. 12s. 6d. 
 
 AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS VIEWED FROM THE 
 STANDPOINT OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. Three Lectures 
 delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in May 1880. 
 By John Fiske. Crown 8vo. 4s. 
 
 CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 
 CONSIDERED WITH SOME REFERENCE TO ITS 
 ORIGIN. By John Fiske. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. 
 
 THE GOVERNMENT OF VICTORIA (Australia). By 
 Edward Jenks, M.A., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. 
 8vo. 14s. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 1 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERA- 
 TURE. By F. Ryland, M.A. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Being the History of English Poetry from its Beginnings to the 
 Accession of King Alfred. By the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, 
 M.A. With a Map. 2 vols. 8vo. 20s. net. 
 
 THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. A Plea for 
 
 its Recognition and Organisation at the Universities. By J. 
 Churton Collins, M.A. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 
 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH DRAMATIC LITERATURE 
 TO THE DEATH OF QUEEN ANNE. By Adolphus 
 William Ward, Litt.D., Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cam- 
 bridge ; Principal of the Owens College, Manchester. In Two 
 Vols. 8vo. 32s. 
 
 A HISTORY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 1560- 
 1665. By George Saintsbury. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 A HISTORY OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERA- 
 TURE. 1660-1780. By Edmund Gosse, M.A. Crown 8vo. 
 7s. 6d. 
 
 ENGLISH PROSE. Selections, with Critical Introductions 
 by various writers, and General Introductions to each Period. 
 Edited by Henry Craik. In Five Vols. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 each Volume. Vol. I. The Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century. 
 Vol. II. The Sixteenth Century to the Restoration. 
 
 THE ENGLISH POETS. Selections, with Critical Intro- 
 ductions by various writers, and a General Introduction by 
 Matthew Arnold. Edited by Thomas Humphry W t ard, 
 M.A., late Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Vol. I. Chaucer 
 to Donne. Vol. II. Ben Jonson to Dryden. Vol. III. Addison 
 to Blake. Vol. IV. Wordsworth to Rossetti. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 each Volume. 
 
 A STUDY OF THE WORKS OF ALFRED LORD 
 TENNYSON, POET LAUREATE. By Edward Campbell 
 Tainsh. New Edition, completed and largely rewritten. Crown 
 8vo. 6s. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 2 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO.'S HISTORICAL BOOKS. 
 
 By J. R. GREEN. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 By T- R Green, M.A. With Maps and Tables. Crown 8vo. 
 
 8s. 6d. 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Illustrated Edition. Edited by Mrs. J. R. Green and Miss Kate 
 
 Norgate. In Four Vols. (Volumes I., II., and III. now ready.) 
 
 Super royal 8vo. 12s. net each vol. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 
 
 Volume I. Early England— Foreign Kings — The Charter — The 
 
 Parliament. With eight Maps. 16s. 
 Volume II. The Monarchy, 1461-1540 — The Reformation, 
 
 1 540- 1 603. 8vo. 1 6s. 
 Volume III. Puritan England, 1603- 1 660 — The Revolution, 
 
 1660-1688. With four Maps. 8vo. 16s. 
 Volume IV. The Revolution, 1683- 1760 — Modern England, 
 
 1760-1815. 8vo. 16s. 
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND. 
 
 W T ith Map. Third Edition. 8vo. 16s. 
 
 THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 
 
 With Portrait and Maps. 8vo. 18s. 
 READINGS FROM ENGLISH HISTORY. 
 
 Selected and Edited by John Richard Green. Part I. From 
 Hengist to Cressy. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. Part II. From Cressy 
 to Cromwell. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. Part III. From Cromwell 
 to Balaklava. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. 
 
 By Miss KATE NORGATE. 
 
 ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS. 
 
 By Kate Norgate. In 2 vols. With Maps and Plans. 8vo. 32s. 
 
 By E. A. FREEMAN. 
 
 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 By E. A. Freeman. Fourth Edition. 8vo. 10s. 6d. 
 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. Second Series. Third Edition. Svo. 
 
 10s. 6d. 
 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. Third Series. Svo. 12s. 
 HISTORICAL ESSAYS. Fourth Series. 8vo. 12s. 6d. 
 
 HISTORY OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN GREECE 
 AND ITALY. With a General Introduction. New Edition. 
 Edited by J. B. Bury, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 Extra crown 8vo. 12s. 6d. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 3 
 
XTbe TEx>cv8lcy> Series— -new volumes. 
 
 LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD. Edited by 
 
 W. Aldis Wright. 2 vols. New Edition. Globe 8vo. 10s. 
 DAIL Y NEWS. — " The correspondence is full of pleasant talk about his friends, 
 
 about music and musicians, pictures, and, above all, about the numberless books 
 
 which he was reading." 
 
 GUARDIAN.—" No letters are more delightful than Fitzgerald's." 
 
 LEEDS MERCURY. — "There is wit in the book as well as wisdom, and a fine 
 
 air of cultured urbanity." 
 
 SOME OTHER VOLUMES OF THE EVERSLEY SERIES. 
 
 Globe 8vo. 5s. each volume. 
 
 THE WORKS OF R. H. HUTTON, M.A. 5 Vols. 
 
 Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers. 2 vols. Literary 
 Essays, i vol. Theological Essays, i vol. Essays on some of the 
 Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith, i vol. 
 
 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THOMAS HENRY 
 
 HUXLEY, F.R.S. g Vols. Vol. I. Method and Results. Vol. II. 
 Darwiniana. Vol. III. Science and Education. Vol. IV. Science and 
 Hebrew Tradition. Vol. V. Science and Christian Tradition. Vol. VI. 
 Hume, with Helps to the Study of Berkeley. Vol. VII. Man's Place 
 in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays. Vol. VIII. Discourses, 
 Biological and Geological. Vol. IX. Evolution and Ethics, and other 
 Essays. 
 
 JOHN MORLEY'S COLLECTED WORKS, n Vols. 
 
 I. Voltaire. II. III. Rousseau. IV. V. Diderot and the Encyclo- 
 paedists. VI. On Compromise. VII. -IX. Miscellanies. X. Burke. 
 XI. Studies in Literature. 
 
 EMERSON'S COLLECTED WORKS. With Introduc- 
 
 tion by John Morley. 6 Vols. I. Miscellanies. II. Essays. III. Poems. 
 IV. English Traits, and Representative Men. V. The Conduct of 
 Life, and Society and Solitude. VI. Letters, and Social Aims. 
 
 DEAN CHURCH'S MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS. 
 
 Collected Edition. 6 Vols. I. Miscellaneous Essays. II. Dante : 
 and other Essays. III. St. Anselm. IV. Spenser. V. Bacon. VI. The 
 Oxford Movement — Twelve Years, 1833-1845. 
 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY'S NOVELS AND POEMS. 
 
 13 Vols. Westward Ho ! 2 Vols. Hypatia. 2 Vols. Yeast. 1 Vol. Alton 
 Locke. 2 Vols. Two Years Ago. 2 Vols. Hereward the Wake. 2 Vols. 
 Poems. 2 Vols. 
 
 CHARLES LAMB'S COLLECTED WORKS. Edited, 
 
 with Introduction and Notes, by the Rev. Canon Ainger, M.A. 6 Vols. I. 
 The Essays of Elia. II. Poems, Plays, and Miscellaneous Essays. 
 III. Mrs. Leicester's School, and other Writings in Prose and Verse. IV. 
 Tales from Shakespeare. By Charles and Mary Lamb. V. and VI. 
 The Letters of Charles Lamb. 
 
 LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. By Alfred Ainger. 
 THE WORKS OF THOMAS GRAY, IN PROSE 
 
 AND VERSE. Edited by Edmund Gosse. 4 Vols. 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN MILTON. 
 
 Edited, with Memoir, Introductions, Notes, by David Masson, M.A., LL.D. 
 3 Vols. I. The Minor Poems. II. Paradise Lost. III. Paradise 
 Regained, and Samson Agonistes. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 4