itself into.  The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.  By diligence, I mean among other things—­and very chiefly—­honesty in all your inquiries into what you are about.  Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest.  More and more endeavour to do that.  Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown.  Leave all that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known when you do not yet know it.  Count a thing known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence.

There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them; and he goes flourishing about with them. ("Hear, hear,” and a laugh.) There is also a process called cramming in some Universities (a laugh)—­that is, getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about.  Avoid all that as entirely unworthy of an honourable habit.  Be modest, and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it.  Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them.  Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.  In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others.  A dishonest man cannot do anything real; and it would be greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing.  He does nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters.  That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of generations of which we are the latest.

I daresay you know, very many of you, that it is now seven hundred years since Universities were first set up in this world of ours.  Abelard and other people had risen up with doctrines in them the people wished to hear of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the world.  There was no getting the thing recorded in books as you may now.  You had to hear him speaking to you vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it was that he wanted to say.  And so they gathered together the various people who had anything to teach, and formed themselves gradually, under the patronage of kings and other potentates who were anxious about the culture of their populations, nobly anxious for their benefit, and became a University.