Part 12 (1/2)
THE IDEAL GRADUATE.
All this supposes that you realise the position; that you fill up the measure of the opportunities; that you keep in view at once the Professional life, the Citizen life, and the life of Intellectual tastes. The mere professional man, however prosperous, cannot be a power in society, as the Arts' graduate may become. His leisure occupations are all of a lower stamp. He does not partic.i.p.ate in the march of knowledge. He must be aware of his incompetence to judge for himself in the greater questions of our destiny; his part is to be a follower, and not a leader.
It is not, then, the name of graduate that will do all this. It is not a sc.r.a.pe pa.s.s; it is not decent mediocrity with a languid interest. It is a fair and even attention throughout, supplemented by auxiliaries to the cla.s.s work. It is such a hold of the leading subjects, such a mastery of the various alphabets, as will make future references intelligible, and a continuation of the study possible.
Our curriculum is one of the completest in the country, or perhaps anywhere. By the happy thought of the Senatus of Marischal College, in 1753, you have a fundamental cla.s.s (Natural History) not existing in the other colleges. You have a fair representation of the three great lines of science--the Abstract, the Experimental, and the Cla.s.sifying. When it is a general education that you are thinking of, every scheme of option is imperfect that does not provide for such three-sided cultivation of our reasoning powers. A larger quant.i.ty of one will no more serve for the absence of the rest than a double covering of one part of the body, will enable another part to be left bare.
VOLUNTARY EXTENSION OF THE BASIS.
Your time in the Arts' curriculum is not entirely used up by the cla.s.ses. You can make up for deficiences in the course, when once you have formed your ideal of completeness. For a year, or two after graduating, while still rejoicing in youthful freshness, you can be widening your foundations. The thing then is, to possess a good scheme and to abide by it. Now, making every allowance for the variation of tastes and of circ.u.mstances, and looking solely to what is desirable for a citizen and a man, it is impossible to refuse the claims of the department of Historical and Social study. One or two good representative historical periods might be thoroughly mastered in conjunction with the best theoretical compends of Social Philosophy.
[THE WELL-INSTRUCTED MAN.]
Farther, the ideal graduate, who is to guide and not follow opinion, should be well versed in all the bearings of the Spiritual Philosophy of the time. The subject branches out into wide regions, but not wider than you should be capable of following it. This is not a professional study merely; it is the study of a well-instructed man.
Once more. A share of attention should be bestowed early on the higher Literature of the Imagination. As, in after life, poetry and elegant composition are to be counted on as a pleasure and solace, they should be taken up at first as a study. The critical examination of styles, and of authors, which forms an admirable basis of a student's society, should be a work of study and research. The advantages will be many and lasting. To conceive the exact scope and functions of the Imagination in art, in science, in religion, and everywhere, will repay the trouble.
THE ARTS' GRADUATE IN LITERATURE.
Ever since I remember, I have been accustomed to hear of the superiority of the Arts' graduate, in various crafts, more especially as a teacher.
Many of you in these days pa.s.s into another vocation--Letters, or the Press. Here too, almost everything you learn will pay you professionally.
Still, I am careful not to rest the case for general education on professional grounds alone. I might show you that the highest work of all--original enquiry--needs a broad basis of liberal study; or at all events is vastly aided by that. Genius will work on even a narrow basis, but imperfect preparatory study leaves marks of imperfection in the product.
The same considerations that determine your voluntary studies, determine also the University Ideal. A University, in my view, stands or falls with its Arts' Faculty. Without debating the details, we may say that this Faculty should always be representative of the needs of our intelligence, both for the professional and for the extra-professional life; it should not be of the shop, shoppy. The University exists because the professions would stagnate without it; and still more, because it may be a means of enlarging knowledge at all points. Its watchword is Progress. We have, at last, the division of labour in teaching; outside the University, teachers too much resemble the Regent of old--having too many subjects, and too much time spent in grinding.
Our teachers are exactly the reverse.
Yet, there cannot be progress without a sincere and single eye to the truth. The fatal sterility of the middle ages, and of our first and second University periods, had to do with the mistake of gagging men's mouths, and dictating all their conclusions. Things came to be so arranged that contradictory views ran side by side, like opposing electric currents; the thick wrappage of ingenious phraseology arresting the destructive discharge. There was, indeed, an elaborate and pretentious Logic, supplied by Aristotle, and amended by Bacon; what was still wanted was a taste of the Logic of Freedom.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 15: RECTORIAL ADDRESS, to the Students of Aberdeen University, _15th November_, 1882.]
VII.
THE ART OF STUDY.
Of hackneyed subjects, a foremost place may be a.s.signed to the Art of Study. Allied to the theory and practice of Education generally, it has still a field of its own, although not very precisely marked out. It relates more to self-education than to instruction under masters; it supposes the voluntary choice of the individual rather than the constraint of an outward discipline. Consequently, the time for its application is when the pupil is emanc.i.p.ated from the prescription and control of the scholastic curriculum.
There is another idea closely a.s.sociated with our notion of study--namely, learning from books. We may stretch the word, without culpable licence, to comprise the observation of facts of all kinds, but it more naturally suggests the resort to book lore for the knowledge that we are in quest of. There is a considerable propriety in restricting it to this meaning; or, at all events, in treating the art of becoming wise through reading, as different from the arts of observing facts at first hand. In short, study should not be made co-extensive with knowledge getting, but with book learning. In thus narrowing the field, we have the obvious advantage of cultivating it more carefully, and the un.o.bvious, but very real, advantage of dealing with one h.o.m.ogeneous subject.
In the current phrase, ”_studying under_ some one,” there is a more express reference to being taught by a master, as in listening to lectures. There is, however, the implication that the learner is applying his own mind to the special field, and, at the same time, is not neglecting the other sources of knowledge, such as books. The master is looked upon rather as a guide to enquiry, than as the sole fountain of the information sought.
Thus, then, the mental exercise that we now call ”study” began when books began; when knowledge was reduced to language and laid out systematically in verbal compositions. A certain form of it existed in the days when language was as yet oral merely; when there might be long compositions existing only in the memory of experts, and communicable by speech alone. But study then was a very simple affair: it would consist mainly in attentive listening to recitation, so as to store up in the memory what was thus communicated. The art, if any, would attach equally to the reciter and to the listener; the duty of the one would be to accommodate his lessons in time, quant.i.ty, and mode of delivery to the retentive capacity of the other; who, in his turn, would be required to con and recapitulate what he had been told, until he made it his own, whatever it might be worth.
[BOOK STUDY AMONG THE ANCIENTS]
Even when books came into existence, an art of study would be at first very simple. The whole extent of book literature among the Jews before Christ would be soon read; and, when once read, there was nothing left but to re-read it in whole or in part, with a view of committal to memory, whether for meditative reflection, or for awakening the emotions. We see, in the Psalms of David, the emphasis attached to mental dwelling on the particulars of the Mosaic Law, as the nourishment of the feelings of devotion.