Part 2 (1/2)
”Knowledge is power.” ”Knowledge is wealth.” These trite maxims are sufficiently esteemed in our community, and need not that they be enforced by any one. So far as knowledge will yield immediate distinction or gain, it is sought and fostered by mult.i.tudes. But, when the aim is low, the attainment is low, and too many of our students are satisfied with superficiality, if it only glitters, and with charlatanry, if it only brings gold.
Let me not be understood to depreciate the material advantages of learning. I rejoice that in this world knowledge frequently yields wealth and fame, and I should have little hope for human progress were the prizes of scholars.h.i.+p less than they are. Power and wealth are n.o.ble aims, and when rightly used may be the means of conferring unmeasured blessings on mankind; but I desire at this time to impress upon you, my friends, the fact that knowledge has n.o.bler fruits than these, and that the worth of your knowledge is to be measured not by the credits it will add to your account in the ledger, or the position it may give you among men, but by the extent to which it educates your higher nature, and elevates you in the scale of manhood.
I address young men who are just entering on life, who are at an age when the mystery of our being usually presses most closely upon the soul, and whose aspirations for higher culture and clearer vision have not been deadened by the sordid damps of the world. Trust no croakers who tell you that your youthful visions are illusions, which a little contact with the real business of the world will dispel.
It is only too true that these visions will become fainter and fainter, if you allow the cares of the world to engross your thoughts; but, unless your higher nature becomes wholly deadened, you will look back to the time when the visions were brightest, as the golden period of your life, and let me a.s.sure you that, if you only are true to the aspirations of your youth, the visions will become clearer and clearer to the last, and, as we firmly believe, will prove to be the dawn of the perfect day.
My friends, if you have seen these visions, ”the n.o.bility of knowledge”
has been a reality of your experience. You know that there is a life lived in communion with the thoughts of great men or with the thoughts of G.o.d as we can read them in Nature and Revelation, which is purer and n.o.bler than a life of money-making or political intrigue, and I would that I could so bring you to appreciate not only the n.o.bility, but also the happiness, of such a life as to induce you to try to live it.
Do you tell me that it is only granted to a few men to become scholars, and that you have been educated for some industrial pursuit? Remember, as I said before, that it is your special privilege to have been educated, to have added knowledge to your handicraft, and that this very knowledge, if kept alive so far as you are able, will enn.o.ble your life.
Knowledge, like the fairy's wand, enn.o.bles whatever it touches. The humblest occupations are adorned by it, and without it the most exalted positions appear to true men mean and low.
Nor is it the extent of the knowledge alone which enn.o.bles, but much more the spirit and aim with which it is cultivated, and that spirit and aim you may carry into any occupation, however engrossing, and into any condition of life, however obscure.
And let me add that what I have said is true not only of the individual, but also, and to an even greater degree, of the nation. Our people, for the most part, look upon universities and other higher inst.i.tutions of learning as merely schools for recruiting the learned professions, and estimate their efficiency solely by the amount of teaching work which they perform. But, however important the teaching function of the university may be, I need not tell you that this is not its only or chief value to a community. The university should be the center of scientific investigation and literary culture, the nursery of lofty aspirations and n.o.ble thoughts, and thus should become the soul of the higher life of the nation. For this and this chiefly it should be sustained and honored, and no cost and no sacrifice can be too great which are required to maintain its efficiency; and its success should be measured by the amount of knowledge it produces rather than by the amount of instruction it imparts.
Harvard College, by cheris.h.i.+ng and honoring the great naturalist she has recently lost, has done more for Ma.s.sachusetts than by educating hosts of commonplace professional men. The simple t.i.tle of teacher, which in his last will Louis Aga.s.siz wrote after his name, was a n.o.bler distinction than any earthly authority could confer; but remember he was a teacher not of boys, but of men, and his influence depended not on the instruction in natural history which he gave in his lecture-room, but on his great discoveries, his far-reaching generalization, and his n.o.ble thoughts. Although that man died poor, as the world counts poverty, yet the bequest which he left to this people can not be estimated in coin.
It is a sorry confession to make, but it is nevertheless the truth, that, if we compare our American universities, in point of literary or scientific productiveness, with those of the Old World, they will appear lamentably deficient. Let me add, however, that this deficiency arises not from any want of proper aims in our scholars, but simply from the circ.u.mstance that our people do not sufficiently appreciate the value of the higher forms of literary and scientific work to bear the burden which the production necessary entails. Scholars must live, as well as other men, and in a style which is in harmony with their surroundings and cultivated tastes, and their best efforts can not be devoted to the extension of knowledge unless they are relieved from anxiety in regard to their daily bread.
In our colleges the professors are paid for teaching and for teaching only, while in a foreign university the teaching is wholly secondary, and the professor is expected to announce in his lectures the results of his own study, and not the thoughts of other men. Until the whole status of the professors in our chief universities can be changed, very little original thought or investigation can be expected, and these inst.i.tutions can not become what they should be, the soul of the higher life of the nation.
It is in your power, however, to bring about this change, but the reform can be effected in only one way. You must give to your universities the means of supporting fully and generously those men of genius who have shown themselves capable of extending the boundaries of human knowledge, and demand of them, only, that they devote their lives to study and research, and let me a.s.sure you that no money can be spent which will yield a larger or more valuable return.
If you do not look beyond your material interests, the higher life of the nation, which you will thus serve to cherish and foster, will guard your honor and protect your home; and, on the other hand, what can you expect in a nation whose highest ideal is the dollar or what the dollar will buy, but venality, corruption, and ultimate ruin?
But, rising at once to the n.o.blest considerations, and regarding only the welfare of your country and the education of your race, what higher service can you render than by sustaining and cheris.h.i.+ng the grandest thought, the purest ideals, and the loftiest aspirations which humanity has reached, and making your universities the altars where the holy fire shall be kept ever burning bright and warm?
Do you think me an enthusiast? Look back through history, and see for yourselves what has made the nations great and glorious. Why is it that, after twenty centuries, the memory of ancient Greece is still enshrined among the most cherished traditions of our race? Is it not because Homer sang, Phidias wrought, and Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thucydides, with a host of others, thought and wrote? Or, if for you the military exploits of that cla.s.sic age have the greater charm, do not forget that were it not for Grecian literature, Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis would have been long since forgotten, and that the bravery, self-devotion, and patriotism which these names embalm were the direct fruits of that higher life which those great thinkers ill.u.s.trated and sustained.
And, coming down to modern times, what are the shrines in our mother country which we chiefly venerate, and to which the transatlantic pilgrim oftenest directs his steps? Is it her battlefields, her castles and baronial halls, or such spots as Stratford-on-Avon, Abbotsford, and Rydal Mount? Why, then, will we not learn the lesson which history so plainly teaches, and strive for those achievements in knowledge and mental culture which will be remembered with grat.i.tude when all local distinctions and political differences shall have pa.s.sed away and been forgotten?
While I was considering the line of discourse which I should follow on this occasion, an incident occurred suggesting an historical parallel, which will ill.u.s.trate, better than any reflections of mine, the truth I would enforce. The s.h.i.+p Faraday arrived on our coast after laying over the bed of the Atlantic another of those electric nerves through which pulsate the thoughts of two continents, and as I read the description of that n.o.ble s.h.i.+p, fitted out with all the appliances which modern science had created to insure the successful accomplishment of the enterprise, I remembered that not a century had elapsed since the first obscure phenomena were observed, whose conscientious study, pursued with the unselfish spirit of the scientific investigator, had led to these momentous results, and my imagination carried me back to an autumn day of the year 1786, in the old city of Bologna, in Italy, and I seemed to a.s.sist at the memorable experiment which has a.s.sociated the name of Aloysius Galvani with that mode of electrical energy which flashes through the wire cords that now unite the four quarters of the globe.
Galvani is Professor of Anatomy in the University of Bologna, and there is hanging from the iron balcony of his house a small animal preparation, which is not an unfamiliar sight in Southern Europe, where it is regarded as a delicacy of the table. It is the hind-legs of a frog, from which the skin had been removed, and the great nerve of the back exposed. Six years before, his attention had been called to the fact that the muscles of the frog were convulsed by the indirect action of an electrical machine, under conditions which he had found very difficult to interpret. He had connected the phenomenon with a theory of his own: that electricity--that is, common friction electricity, the only mode of electrical action then known--was the medium of all nervous action; and this had led him into a protracted investigation of the subject, during which he had varied the original experiment in a thousand ways, and he had now suspended the frog's legs to the iron balcony, in order to discover if atmospheric electricity would have any effect on the muscles of the animal.
Galvani has spent a long day in fruitless watching, when, while holding in his hand a bra.s.s wire, connected with the muscles of the frog, he rubs the end, apparently listlessly, against the iron railing, when, lo! the frog's legs are convulsed.
The patient waiting had been rewarded, for this observation was the beginning of a line of discovery which was ere long to revolutionize the world. But Galvani was not destined to follow far the new path he had thus opened. The remarkable fact observed was this: The convulsions of the frog's legs could be produced without the intervention of electricity, or, at least, of the one kind of electricity then known, and Galvani soon found out that the only condition necessary to produce the result was, that the nerve of the frog should be connected with the muscle of the leg by some good electrical conductor.
But, although Galvani followed up this observation with the greatest zeal, and showed remarkable sagacity throughout his whole investigation, yet he was too strongly wedded to his own theory to interpret correctly the facts he observed. He supposed, to the end of his life, that the whole effect was caused by animal electricity flowing through the conductor from the nerve to the muscle, and his experiments were chiefly interesting to himself and to his contemporaries from the light they were supposed to throw on the mysterious principle of life. We now know that animal electricity played only a small part in the phenomena he observed, and that the chief effects were due to a cause of which he was wholly ignorant.
Galvani published his observations in 1791, in a monograph ent.i.tled ”The Action of Electricity in Muscular Motion.” This publication excited the most marked attention, and, within a year, all Europe was experimenting on frogs' legs. The phenomena were everywhere reproduced, but Galvani's explanation of the phenomena was by no means so universally accepted.
His theory was controverted in many quarters, and by no one more successfully than by Alexander Volta, Professor of Physics in the neighboring University of Pavia.
Volta, while admitting, with Galvani, that the muscular contractions were caused by electricity, explained the origin of the electricity in a wholly different way. According to Volta, the electricity originated not in the animal, but in the contact of the dissimilar metals or other materials used in the experiment. This difference of opinion led to one of the most remarkable controversies in the history of science, and for six years, until his death in 1798, Galvani was occupied in defending his theory of animal electricity against the a.s.saults of his distinguished countryman.
This discussion created the liveliest interest throughout Europe. Every scholar of science took sides with one or the other of these eminent Italian philosophers, and the scientific world became divided into the school of Galvani and the school of Volta. Yet, so far at least as the fundamental experiment was concerned, both were wrong. The electricity came neither from the body of the frog nor from the contact of dissimilar kinds of matter, but was the result of chemical action, which both had equally overlooked.
But, nevertheless, the controversy led to the most important results: for Volta, while endeavoring to sustain his false theory by experimental proofs, was led to the discovery of the Voltaic pile, or, as we now call it, the Voltaic battery, an instrument whose influence on civilization can be compared only with the printing-press and the steam-engine. Yet, although the whole action of the battery was in direct contradiction to his pet theory, still, to the last, Volta persistently defended the erroneous doctrine he had espoused in his controversy with Galvani thirty years before, and he died in 1827, without realizing how great a boon he had been instrumental in conferring on mankind; so true it is that Providence works out his bright designs even through the blindness and mistakes of man.