Science & Education eBook

This is not the first time that I have quoted those remarkable assertions.  I should like to engrave them in public view, for they have not been refuted; and I am convinced that if their import is once clearly apprehended, they will play no mean part when the question of University reorganisation, with a view to practical measures, comes on for discussion.  You are not responsible for this anomalous state of affairs now; but, as you pass into active life and acquire the political influence to which your education and your position should entitle you, you will become responsible for it, unless each in his sphere does his best to alter it, by insisting on the improvement of secondary schools.

Your present responsibility is of another, though not less serious, kind.  Institutions do not make men, any more than organisation makes life; and even the ideal University we have been dreaming about will be but a superior piece of mechanism, unless each student strive after the ideal of the Scholar.  And that ideal, it seems to me, has never been better embodied than by the great Poet, who, though lapped in luxury, the favourite of a Court, and the idol of his countrymen, remained through all the length of his honoured years a Scholar in Art, in Science, and in Life.

  “Wouldst shape a noble life!  Then cast
  No backward glances towards the past: 
  And though somewhat be lost and gone,
  Yet do thou act as one new-born. 
  What each day needs, that shalt thou ask;
  Each day will set its proper task. 
  Give others’ work just share of praise;
  Not of thine own the merits raise. 
  Beware no fellow man thou hate: 
  And so in God’s hands leave thy fate.” [4]

* * * * *

Footnotes: 

[1] “Quamvis enim melius sit bene facere quam nosse, prius tamen est nosse quam facere.”—­“Karoli Magni Regis Constitutio de Scholis per singula Episcopia et Monasteria instituendis,” addressed to the Abbot of Fulda.  Baluzius, Capitularia Regum Francorum, T. i., p. 202.

[2] Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St. Andrew, February 1, 1867, by J. S. Mill, Rector of the University (pp. 32, 33).

[3] Suggestions for Academical Organisation, with Especial Reference to Oxford.  By the Rector of Lincoln.

[4] Goethe, Zahme Xenien, Vierte Abtheilung.  I should be glad to take credit for the close and vigorous English version; but it is my wife’s, and not mine.

IX

ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION [1]

[1876]

The actual work of the University founded in this city by the well-considered munificence of Johns Hopkins commences to-morrow, and among the many marks of confidence and good-will which have been bestowed upon me in the United States, there is none which I value more highly than that conferred by the authorities of the University when they invited me to deliver an address on such an occasion.