INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT BARTLETT.

Rev. Samuel C. Bartlett, D.D., of the Chicago Theological Seminary, was elected the eighth president of the college. We insert entire his inaugural address, delivered at the Commencement, June, 1877:

"Certain occasions seem to prescribe their own themes of discourse, and certain themes are endowed with perpetual life. There are problems with which each coming generation and each last man grapples as freshly as the first.

"How shall the ripest growth of the ages be imparted to one young soul? Twice, at least, in a lifetime, is this great question wont to rise solemnly before each thoughtful man—when he looks forward in youthful hope, and when he looks back in parental solicitude. It is a question of many forms and multiplying answers. Shall there be a long, fundamental training, wide and general? or, shall it be closely professional? Shall it be predominantly classic, or scientific, or esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive "nines" not known on Helicon, and challenge British Oxford, alas? with its boat crew? Shall the American College student follow his option, or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches? or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the Concord sage,—'You send your son to the schoolmasters, and the schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the whole tone of the institution?

"In these and other forms is the same fundamental question still thrust sharply before us. I do not propose to move directly on such a line of bristling bayonets, but to make my way by a flank movement across this "wilderness" of conflict. It will go far towards determining the methods of a liberal education, if we first ascertain, as I propose to do, The Chief Elements of a Manly Culture.

"Obviously the primal condition of all else must be found in a self-prompted activity or wakefulness of intellect. The time when the drifting faculties begin to feel the helm of will, when the youth passes from being merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the first remove from the tohu va-vohu was when the Spirit of God brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic. It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round restlessly by a yearning instinct; it may be driven by the strong impulse of native genius; or, it may rise to the condition of being the facile servant of the forceful will. When the boy at Pisa curiously watches the oil lamp swinging by its long chain in the cathedral, a pendulum begins to vibrate in his brain, and falling bodies to count off their intervals; and when afterward he deliberately fits two lenses in a leaden tube, the moon's mountains, Jupiter's satellites, and Saturn's rings are all waiting to catch his eye. A thoughtful meditation on the spasms of a dead frog's leg in Bologna becomes galvanic. The gas breaking on the surface of a brewery vat, well watched by Priestley, bursts forth into pneumatic chemistry. A spider's web in the Duke of Devonshire's garden expands in the mind of my lord's gardener, Brown, into a suspension bridge. A sledge hammer, well swung in Cromarty, opened those New Walks in an Old Field. The diffraction of light revealed itself to Young in the hues of a soap-bubble. As the genie of the oriental tale unfolded his huge height from the bottle stamped with Solomon's seal, so the career of Davy first evolved itself out of old vials and gallipots. When the boy Bowditch was found in all his leisure moments snatching up his slate and pencil, when Cobbett grappled resolutely with the grammar, when Cuvier dissected the cuttlefish found upon the shore, or Scott was seen sitting on a ladder, hour after hour, poring over books, they will be further heard from.

"If such instances illustrate the propulsive force of native genius, they also indicate what training must do when the impulsive genius is not there. No idler plea was ever entered for an idler than when he says,—'I have no bent for this, no interest in that, and no genius for the other.' The animal has his habitat, and stays fast. A complete man is intellectually and physically a cosmopolite. Till he has gained the power to throw his will-force wherever the work summons him, most of all to the weak points of his condition, till he has learned to be his own task-master and overseer, he is but a 'slave of the ring.'

"In most lines the highest gift is the gift of toil. Indeed, men of genius have often been the most terrible of toilers, and in the regions of highest art. How have the great masters of music first welded the keys of the organ and harpsichord to their fingers' ends and their souls' nerves before they poured forth the Creation or the Messiah, the symphonies and sonatas! Think of Meyerbeer and his fifteen hours of daily work; of Mozart's incessant study of the masters, and his own eight hundred compositions in his short life; of Mendelssohn's nine years elaboration of Elijah. Or in the sister art, how we track laborious, continuous study in the Peruginesque, the Florentine, and the Roman styles successively of Raphael, and in the incredible activity that crowded a life of thirty-seven years with such a vast number of portraits and Madonnas, of altar-pieces and frescoes, mythological, historical, and Biblical. And that still grander contemporary genius, how he wrought by night with the candle in his pasteboard cap, how he had dissected and studied the human frame like an anatomist or surgeon before he chiseled the David and Moses, or painted the Sistine chapel, and how the plannings of his busy brain were always in advance of the powers of a hand that, till the age of eighty-eight, was incessantly at work.

"The servant is not above his master. The lower intellect can buy at no cheaper price than the higher, and the hour of full intellectual emancipation comes only when the student has learned to serve—to turn the whole freshness and sharpness of his intellect on any needful theme of the hour; it may be the scale of a fossil fish, or the annual movement of a glacier, the disclosures of the spectrum, or the secrets of the arrow-headed tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and helpers when he has learned to teach himself. His emancipation, once fairly purchased, confers on him potentially the freedom of the empire of thought; and, as evermore, the freeman toils harder than the slave. The strong stimulus of such a self-moved activity, thoroughly aroused, becomes in Choate or Gladstone the fountain of perpetual youth, and forms the solid basis of the titanic scholarship of Germany. It stood embodied in the life and motto of the aged, matchless artist Angelo,—'Ancora imparo,' I am learning still.

"But impulse and activity may move blindly. Another cardinal quality of such a culture, therefore, must be precision—the close, clean working of the faculties. A memory trained to clear recollection, what a saving of reiterated labor and of annoying helplessness. A discrimination sharpened to the nicest discernment of things that differ, though always a shining mark for the arrow of the satirist, will outlive all shots with his gray-goose shaft; for it shines with the gleam of tempered steel. An exactness of knowledge that defines all its landmarks, how is it master of the situation. A precision of speech, born of clear thinking, what controversial battlefields of sulphurous smoke and scattering fire might it prevent. He has been called a public benefactor who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. He is as great a benefactor, who in an age of verbiage makes one word perform the function of two. Wonderful is the precision with which this mental mechanism may be made to work. Some men can even think their best on their feet in the presence of a great assembly. There are others whose spontaneous thoughts move by informal syllogisms. Emmons sometimes laid off his common utterances like the heads of a discourse. Johnson's retorts exploded like a musket, and often struck like a musket-ball. John Hunter fairly compared his own mind to a bee-hive, all in a hum, but the hum of industry and order and achievement. It reminds us, by contrast, of other minds formed upon the model of the wasp's nest, with a superabundance of hum and sting without, and no honey within. It was of the voluminous works of a distinguished author that Robert Hall remarked,—'They are a continent of mud, sir.' Nuisances of literature are the men who fill the air with smoke, relieved by no clear blaze of light. There have been schools of thought that were as smoky as Pittsburg. We have had 'seers' who made others see nothing, men of 'insight' with no outlook, scientists who in every critical argument jumped the track of true science, and preachers whose hazy thoughts and utterances flickered between truth and error. Pity there were not some intellectual Sing-Sing for the culprit!

"How refreshing, on the other hand, to follow the clear unfolding of the silken threads of thought that lie side by side, single and in knots and skeins, but never tangled. What a beautiful process was an investigation by Faraday in electro-magnetism, as he combined his apparatus, manipulated his material, narrowed his search, eliminated his sources of error, and drew his careful conclusions. With similar persistent acuteness, in the field of Biblical investigation, how does Zumpt, by an exhaustive exclusion and combination, at length make the annals of Tacitus shake hands with the gospel of Luke over the taxing of Cyrenius. In metaphysics, how matchless the razor-like acuteness with which Hamilton could distinguish, divide, and clear up the questions that lay piled in confused heaps over the subject of perception. What can be more admirable than the workings of the trained legal or rather judicial mind, as it walks firmly through labyrinths of statute and precedent and principle, holding fast its strong but tenuous thread, till it stands forth in the bright light of day;—it may be some Sir John Jervis, unraveling in a criminal case the web of sophistries with which a clever counsel has bewildered a jury; or it may be Marshall or Story, in our own college case, shredding away, one by one, its intricacies, entanglements, and accretions, till all is delightfully, restfully clear.

"It is a trait all the more to be insisted on in these very times, because there is so strong a drift toward a seeming clearness which is a real confusion. By two opposite methods do men now seek to reach that underlying order and majestic simplicity which more and more appear to mark this universe. The one distinguishes, the other confounds, things that certainly differ. The one system belongs to the reality and grandeur of nature, the other to the pettiness and perverseness of man. Not a few seem bent on seeing simplicity and uniformity by the short process of shutting their eyes upon actual diversity. They proceed not by analytical incision, but by summary excision. They work with the cleaver and not with the scalpel. What singular denials of the intuitive facts of universal consciousness, what summary identifications of most palpable diversities, and what kangaroo-leaps beyond the high wall of their facts, mark many of the deliverances of those who loudly warn us off from 'the unknowable!' What shall we say of the steady confusion, in some arguments, of structure and function, and of force with material? When men, however eminent, openly propose to identify the force which screws together two plates of metal with the agency which corrodes or dissolves both in an acid, or to identify the affinity that forms chemical combinations with the vitality that so steadily overrides, suspends, and counteracts those affinities, is this an ascent into the pure ether, or a plunge in the Cimmerian dark? When, in opposition to every possible criterion, a man claims that there is but 'one ultimate form of matter out of which successively the more complex forms of matter are built up,' is this the advance march of chemistry, or the retrograde to alchemy? When a writer, in a style however lucid and taking, firmly assumes that there is no essential difference in objects alike in material elements, but separated by that mighty and mysterious thing, life, is that the height of wisdom, or the depth of folly? And how such a central paralysis of the mental retina spreads its darkness, as, for example, in the affirmation that as oxygen and hydrogen are reciprocally convertible with water, so are water, ammonia, and carbolic acid convertible into and resolvable from living protoplasm!—a statement said to be as false in chemistry as it certainly is in physiology. An ordinary merchant's accountant will, if need be, work a week to correct in his trial balance the variation of a cent. But when he listens to Sir John Lubbock calmly reckoning the age of the human implements in the valley of the Somme at from one hundred thousand up to two hundred and forty thousand years; when he sees Croll, in dating the close of the glacial age, leap down from the height of near eight hundred thousand to eighty thousand years; when he finds Darwin and Lyell claiming for the period of life on the earth more than three hundred millions of years, while Tait and Thompson pronounce it 'utterly impossible' to grant more than ten, or, at most, fifteen millions,—this poor, benighted clerk is bound to sit and hearken to his masters in all outward solemnity, but he must be excused for a prolonged inward smile. Who are these, he says, that reckon with a lee-way of hundreds of thousands of years, and fling the hundreds of millions of years right and left, like pebbles and straws?

"Brilliancy, so-called, is no equivalent or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and one of his volumes was unfortunate for him and his readers, in that for his central position he planted himself on a figure of speech, and not on a logical proposition. The well-known story se non vero e ben trovato, of that keenest of lawyers, listening to a lecture of which every sentence was a gem and every paragraph rich with the spoils of literature, and replying to the question, "Do you understand all that?" "No, but my daughters do." It was as beautiful and iridescent as the Staubbach, and as impalpable.

"The more is the pity when a vigorous mind, in the outset of some great discussion, heads for a fog-bank or a wind-mill. When a man proposes to chronicle a 'Conflict between Religion and Science,' and makes religion stand indiscriminately for Romanism, Mohammedanism, superstition, malignant passion, obstinate prejudice, and what not, also confounding Christianity with so-called Christians, and those often most unrepresentative,—at the same time appropriating to 'Science' all intellectual activity whatever, though found in good Christian men, and though fostered and made irrepressible by the fire of that very religion, it is easy to see what must be the outcome of such a sweepstakes race. There will be a deification of science, and not even a whited sepulchre erected over the measureless Golgothas of its slaughtered theories. There will be, on the other hand, the steady suppressio veri concerning books, systems, men, and events, the occasional though unintended assertio falsi, the eager conversion of theories into facts, constructions unfair and uncandid and, throughout, with much that is bright and just, that 'admixture of a lie that doth ever add pleasure' to its author and grief to the judicious. Such confusions are no doubt often the outgrowth of the will. But a main end of a true culture is to prevent or expose all such bewilderments, whether helpless or crafty.

"The great predominance of the disciplinary process was what once characterized the English university system even more than now. It consisted in the exact and exhaustive mastery of certain limited sections of knowledge and thought, as the gymnastic for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make answer. The whole massive literature of England shall respond.

"But to this precision of working must be furnished material with which to work. Mental fullness is, therefore, another prime quality of a manly culture. To what degree it should be sought in the curriculum has been in dispute. It is the American theory, and a growing belief of the English nation, that the British universities have been defective here. Their men of mark have traveled later over the broader field.

"Provincialism of intellect is a calamity. All men of great achievements have had to know what others achieved. The highest monuments are always built with the spoils of the past. Any single genius, if not an infinitesimal, counts at most but a digit in the vast notation of humanity. The great masters have been the greatest scholars. Many a bright mind has struggled alone to beat the air. Behold in some national patent-office a grand mummy-pit of ignorant inventors.

"Those men upon whom so much opprobrium has been heaped, the Schoolmen, were unfortunate chiefly in the lack of material on which to expend their singular acuteness. Leibnitz was not ashamed to confess his obligations to them, nor South to avail himself of their subtle distinctions. Doubtless theology owes them a debt. Some of them have been well called, by Hallam, men 'of extraordinary powers of discrimination and argument, strengthened in the long meditation of their cloister by the extinction of every other talent and the exclusion of every other pursuit. Their age and condition denied them the means of studying polite letters, of observing nature, or of knowing mankind. They were thus driven back upon themselves, cut off from all the material on which the mind could operate, and doomed to employ all their powers in defense of what they must never presume to examine.' 'If these Schoolmen,' says Bacon, 'to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contemplation, they had proved great lights to the advancement of all learning and knowledge.' And so, for lack of other timber, they split hairs. Hence the mass of ponderous trifling that has made their name a by-word. A force, sometimes Herculean, was spent in building and demolishing castles of moonshine.

"A robust mental strength requires various and solid food. The best growth is symmetrical. There is a common bond—quoddam commune vinculum—in the circle of knowledge, that cannot be overlooked. Men do not know best what they know only in its isolation. Even Kant offset his metaphysics by lecturing on geography; and Niebuhr, the historian, struggled hard and well to keep his equilibrium by throwing himself into the whole circle of natural science and of affairs. Such, also, are the interdependencies of scholarship, that ample knowledge without our specialty is needful to save us from blunders within. Olshausen was a brilliant commentator, and the slightest tinge of chemistry should have kept him from suggesting that the conversion of water into wine at Cana was but the acceleration of a natural process. A smattering of optics would have prevented Dr. Williams from repeating the old cavil of Voltaire, that light could not have been made before the sun. A moderate reflection upon the laws of speech and the method of Genesis would have restrained Huxley from sneering at the 'marvelous flexibility' of the Hebrew tongue in the word 'day,' and a New York audience from laughing at the joke rather than the joker. Some tinge of ethical knowledge should have withheld Max MÜller from finding the grand distinctive mark of humanity in the power of speech. The merest theorist needs some range of reality for the framework of his theories, and the man of broad principles must have facts to generalize. Indeed, a good memory is the indispensable servant of large thought, and however deficient in certain directions, the great thinkers have had large stores. 'The best heads that have ever existed,' says an idealist,—'Pericles, Plato, Julius CÆsar, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton,—were well read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had the means of knowing the opposite opinion.'

"While every year increases the impossibility of what used to be called universal knowledge, it also emphasizes the necessity of a scholarship that has its outlook toward all the vast provinces of reading and thought. It cannot conquer them, but it can be on treaty relations with them. The tendency of modern science is, of necessity, steadily toward sectional lines and division of labor. It is a tendency whose cramping influence is as steadily to be resisted, even in later life, much more in early training. We are to form ourselves on the model of the integer rather than the fraction of humanity. The metaphysician cannot afford to be ignorant of the 'chemistry of a candle' or the 'history of a piece of chalk,' nor the chemist of the laws of language, the theologian of astronomy and geology, nor the lawyer of the most ancient code and its history. Mill himself made complaint of Comte's 'great aberration' in ignoring psychology and logic.

"Intellectual fetichism is born of isolation, and dies hard. While in the great modern uprising we may boast that the heathen idols have been swept away from three hundred dark islands of Polynesia, new 'idols of the cave' stalk forth upon the world of civilized thought. We are just now much bewildered with brightness in streaks, which falls on us like the sunlight from a boy's bit of glass, and blinds our eyes instead of showing our path. Half-educated persons seize fragments of principles and snatch at half-truths. Crotchets infest the brains, and hobbies career through the fields of thought. Polyphemus is after us, a burly wretch with one eye. Better if that were out.

"The remedy is, to correct our narrowness by a clear view of the wide expanse. We must come out of our cave. We must link our pursuits to those of humanity. Breadth and robustness given to the mental constitution in its early training shall go far through life to save us from partial paralysis or monstrosity.

"To insure this result, however, we must add to that fullness of material the quality of mental equipoise or mastery, the power of grasping and managing it all. A man is to possess, and not to be 'possessed with,' his acquisitions. He wants an intellect decisive, incisive, and, if I might coin a word, concisive.

"The power to unify and organize must go with all right acquisition. Knowledges must be changed to knowledge. It takes force to handle weight. Some men seem to know more than is healthy for them. It does not make muscle, but becomes plethoric, dropsical, adipose, or adipocere. Better to have thought more and acquired less. Frederick W. Robertson, in his prime, wrote,—'I will answer for it that there are few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have;' and Mrs. Browning confessed,—'I should be wiser if I had not read half as much;' while old Hobbes, of Malmesbury, caustically remarked,—'If I had read as much as other men I should know as little.' It may serve as a hint to the omnivorous college student. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew, it is said, more than a hundred languages. What came of it all? A eulogy on one Emanuele da Ponte. He never said anything in all the languages he spoke! What constitutes the life of an intellectual jelly-fish? Even the brilliancy of Macaulay was almost overweighted by the immensity of his acquisitions. The vivid glitter of details in his memory may sometimes have dazzled his perception of a tout ensemble, and for principles it was his manner to cite precedents. A multitude of lesser lights have been almost smothered by superabundance of fuel. A man knows Milton almost by heart, and Shakespeare too, can quote pages of Homer, has read Chrysostom for his recreation, is full of history, runs over with statistics right and left, and withal is strong in mother-wit. But the mother-wit proves not strong enough, perhaps, to push forth and show itself over the ponderous dÉbris above it, the enormousness, or, if you please, the enormity of his knowledge.

"It requires a first-class mind to carry a vast load of scientific facts. Hence the many eminent observers who have been the most illogical of reasoners. What a contrast between Hugh Miller and his friend Francia; the mind of the latter, as Miller describes it, 'a labyrinth without a clew, in whose recesses was a vast amount of book-knowledge that never could be used, and was of no use to himself or any one else;' the former wielding all his stores as he swung his sledge. What is wanted is the comprehensive hand, and not the prehensile tail.

"Involved in such an equipoise is the decisiveness, the willforce, that not only holds, but holds the balance. Common as it may be, it is none the less pitiable to be just acute enough constantly to question, but not to answer—forever to raise difficulties, and never to solve them. Wakeful, but the wakefulness of weakliness. Fine-strung minds are they often, acquisitive, subtle, and sensitive, able to look all around their labyrinth and see far into darkness, but not out to the light. It is by nature rather a German than an Anglo-Saxon habit. It is not always fatal even there. De Wette, 'the veteran doubter,' rallied at the last, and, like Bunyan's Feeble-mind, went over almost shouting. In this country, youth often have it somewhat later than the measles and the small-pox, and come through very well, without even a pock-mark. Sometimes it becomes epidemic, and assumes a languid or typhoidal cast,—not Positivism, but Agnosticism. It is rather fashionable to eulogize perplexity and doubt as a mark of strength and genius. But whatever may be the passing fashion, the collective judgment of the ages has settled it that the permanent state of mental hesitancy and indecision, in whatever sphere of thought and action, is and must be a false condition. It indicates the scrofulous diathesis, and calls for more iron in the blood. It is a lower type of manhood. It abdicates the province of a human intelligence, which is to seek and find truth. It abrogates the moral obligation to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. It revolts from the great problem of life, which calls on us to know, and to know that we may do. Out upon this apotheosis of doubt. It is the sick man glorying in his infirmity, the beggar boasting of his intellectual rags.

"The comprehensive and decisive tend naturally to the incisive. The power to take a subject by its handle and poise it on its centre is perhaps the consummation of merely intellectual culture. When all its nutriment has been converted into bone and muscle and sinew and nerve, then the mind bounds to its work, lithe and strong, like a hunting leopard on its game. It was exactly the power with which our Webster handled his case, till it seemed to the farmer too simple to require a great man to argue. It was the quality that Lincoln so toiled at through his early manhood, and so admirably gained,—the power of presenting things clearly to 'plain people.' You may call it 'the art of putting things,' but it is the art of conceiving things. It is no trick of style, but a character of thinking, and it marks the harvest-time of a manly culture.

"I will add to this enumeration one other quality, one without which this harvest will not ripen. I speak of mental docility and reverence. A man will have looked forth to little purpose on the universe if he does not see that, even with his expanding circle of light, there is an ever-enlarging circle of darkness around it. He will have compared his achievements with those of the race to little profit, if he does not recognize his relative insignificance, gathering sands on the ocean shore.

"The wide range and rapid outburst of modern learning tend undoubtedly to arrogance and conceit. We gleefully traverse our new strip of domain, and ask, Were there ever such beings as we? Yes, doubtless there were,—clearer, greater, and nobler. Wisdom, skill, and strength were not born with us. All the qualities of manly thought, though with ruder implements and cruder materials, have been as conspicuously exhibited down through the ages past as in our day. The power of governing, ability in war, diplomacy in peace, subtle dialectics, clear insight, the art of conversation, persuasive and impressive speech, high art in every form, whatever constitutes the test of good manhood, has been here in full force. It would puzzle us yet to lay the stones of Baalbec, or to carve, move, and set up the great statue of Rameses. Within a generation, Euclid of Alexandria was teaching geometry in Dartmouth College, and Heraclides and Aristarchus anticipated Copernicus by sixteen centuries. No man has surpassed the sculptures of Rhodes, or the paintings of the sixteenth century. The cathedral of Cologne is the offspring of forgotten brains. Such men as Anselm were educated on the Trivium and Quadrivium. Five hundred years ago Merton College could show such men as Geoffrey Chaucer, William of Occam, and John Wickliffe. If the history of science can produce four brighter contemporary names than Napier, Kepler, Descartes, and Galileo, let them be forthcoming. But when, still earlier by a century and a half, we behold a man who was not only architect, engineer, and sculptor, and in painting the rival of Angelo, but who, as Hallam proves, 'anticipated in the compass of a few pages the discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Maestlin, Maurolycus, and Castelli immortal,' it may well 'strike us,' he suggests 'with something like the awe of supernatural knowledge;' and in the presence of Leonardo da Vinci the modern scientist of highest rank may stand with uncovered head.

"If wisdom was not born with us, neither will it die with us. There will be something left to know. Our facts will be tested, our theories probed, and our assertions exploded by better minds than ours. If it be true, as Bacon says, 'prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiÆ,' it is also true, 'imprudens assertio excidium scientiÆ.' We are in these days treated to 'demonstrations' which scarcely rise to the level of presumptions, but, rather, of presumption. There is an accumulation of popular dogmatism that is very likely doomed within a century to be swept into the same oblivion with the 'Christian Astrology,' of William Lilly and the 'Ars Magna' of Raymond Lully—a mass of rubbish that is waiting for another Caliph Omar and the bath-fires of Alexandria.

"It will not answer to mistake the despotism of hypothesis for the reign of law, nor physical law for the great 'I AM.' True thinkers must respect other thinkers and God. They cannot ignore the primal utterances of consciousness, the laws of logic, nor the truths of history. Foregone conclusions are not to bar out the deepest facts of human nature, nor the most stupendous events in the story of the race. Hume may not rule out the settled laws of evidence the moment they touch the borders of religion; nor may Strauss, by the simple assertion that miracles are impossible, manacle the arm of God. Comte may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to the great imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is fully proved in detail. We have no disposition, even with so eminent an authority as St. George Mivart, to denominate Natural Selection 'a puerile hypothesis.' We will promise to pay our respects to our 'early progenitor' of 'arboreal habits' and 'ears pointed and capable of movement,' when he is honestly identified by his ear-marks, and even to worship the original fire-mist when that is properly shown to be our only Creator, Preserver, and Bountiful Benefactor.

"Meantime, as a late king of Naples was said to have erected the negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, the single source of power,' ourselves 'conscious automatons' in whom 'mind is the product of the brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a 'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank. But it was Mephistopheles who said,—

"But even the man of theories might grant that the scheme of one great, governing, guiding, loving, and holy God is a theory that works wonders in practice for those that heartily receive it, and is a conception of magnificence beside which even a Nebular Hypothesis with all its grandeur grows small. And the man of facts may as well recognize what Napoleon saw on St. Helena,—the one grand fact of the living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy battalions; a force that this hour beats in millions of hearts, all over this globe, with a living warmth beside which the love of science and art is cold and clammy. Surely it would be not much to ask for the docility to recognize such patent facts as these. And I must believe that any mind is fundamentally unhinged that despises the profoundest convictions of the noblest hearts, or speaks lightly of the mighty influence that has moulded human events and has upheaved the world. It has, in its arrogance, cut adrift and swung off from the two grand foci of all truth, the human and the divine.

"Of the several qualities,—the wakefulness, precision, fullness, equipoise, and docility—that form, in other words, the motion, edge, weight, balance, and direction of the forged and tempered intellect,—I might give many instances. Such men as Thomas Arnold and Mr. Gladstone instantly rise to the thoughts,—the one by his truth-seeking and truth-finding spirit moulding a generation of English scholars, the other carrying by the sheer force of his clear-cut intellect and magnanimous soul the sympathies of a great nation and the admiration of Christendom. But let me rather single out one name from the land of specialties and limitations,—Barthold George Niebuhr, the statesman and historian. Not perfect, indeed, but admirable. See him begin in his early youth by saying,—'I do not ask myself whether I can do a thing; I command myself to do it.' Read the singular sketch of his intellectual gymnastics at twenty-one, spurring himself to 'inward deep voluntary thought,' 'guarding against society and dissipation,' devoting an hour each day to clearing up his thoughts on given subjects, and two hours to the round of physical sciences; exacting of himself 'an extensive knowledge of the facts' of science and history; holding himself alike accountable for minute 'description,' 'accurate definitions,' 'general laws,' 'deep reflection,' and 'distinct consciousness of the rules of my moral being,' together with what he calls the holy resolve—'more and more to purify my soul, so that it may be ready at all times to return to the eternal source.' How intensely he toiled to counteract a certain conscious German one-sidedness of mind, visiting England to study all the varied phenomena of its robust life, and yet writing home from London, at twenty-two,—'I positively shrink from associating with the young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness.' His memory, not inferior to that of Macaulay or Scaliger, he made strictly the servant of his thinking. Amid all the speculative tendencies of Germany, he became a man of facts and affairs. Overflowing with details, he probed the facts of history to the quick, and felt for its heart. Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as 'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the verified quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to 'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness and colossal egoism of his later career. In the midst of public honors he valued more than all his delightful home and literary life, and his motto was Tecum habita. Surrounded by Pyrrhonism, and bent by the nature of his studies toward skeptical habits, how grandly he recovered himself in his maturity, and said,—'I do not know what to do with a metaphysical God, and I will have none but the God of the Bible, who is heart to heart with us.' 'My son shall believe in the letter of the Old and New Testaments, and I shall nurture in him from his infancy a firm faith in all that I have lost or feel uncertain about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,' contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true and manly culture.

"Shall I say that such a culture as I have endeavored to sketch, it is, and will be, the aim of Dartmouth College to stimulate? I cannot, at the close of this discourse, compare in detail its methods with the end in view, and show their fitness. The original and central college is surrounded by its several departments, partly or wholly professional, each having its own specialty and excellence. The central college seeks to give that rounded education commonly called Liberal, and to give it in its very best estate. It will aim to engraft on the stock that is approved by the collective wisdom of the past, all such scions of modern origin as mark a real progress. By variety of themes and methods it would stimulate the mental activity, and by the breadth of its range it would encourage fullness of material, both physical and metaphysical, scientific and historic. It initiates into the chief languages of Europe. By the close, protracted concentration of the mathematics, by the intuitions, careful distinctions, and fundamental investigations of intellectual and ethical science, and by the broad principles of political economy, constitutional and international law, as well as by a round of original discussions on themes of varied character, it aims to induce precision and mastery. And all along this line runs and mingles harmoniously and felicitously that great branch of study for which, though often severely assailed because unwisely defended or inadequately pursued, the revised and deliberate judgment of the ablest and wisest men can find no fair substitute,—the study of the classic tongues. Grant that it may be, and often is, mechanically or pedantically pursued. Yet, when rightly prosecuted, its benefits are wide, deep, and continuous, more than can be easily set forth—and they range through the whole scale, rising with the gradual expansion of the mind. It comprises subtle distinctions, close analysis, broad generalization, and that balancing of evidence which is the basis of all moral reasoning; it tracks the countless shadings of human thought, and their incarnation in the growths of speech, and seizes, in Comparative Philology, the universal affinities of the race: it passes in incessant review the stores of the mother tongue; it furnishes the constant clew to the meaning of the vernacular, a basis for the easy study of modern European languages, and a key to the terminology of science and art; it familiarizes intimately with many of the most remarkable monuments of genius and culture; and it imbues with the history, life, and thought which have prompted, shaped, and permeated all that is notable in the intellectual achievements of two thousand years, and binds together the whole republic of letters. To such a study as this we must do honor. We endeavor to add so much of the esthetic and ethical element throughout as shall give grace and worth. And we crown the whole with some teaching concerning the track of that amazing power that has overmastered all other powers, and stamped its impress on all modern history. The college was given to Christ in its infancy, and the message that comes down through a century to our ears, sounds not so much like the voice of a president as of an high-priest and prophet—the 'burden of Eleazar:' 'It is my purpose, by the grace of God, to leave nothing undone within my power which is suitable to be done, that this school of the prophets may be, and long continue to be, a pure fountain. And I do, with my whole heart, will this my purpose to my successors in the presidency of the seminary, to the latest posterity; and it is my last will, never to be revoked, and to God I commit it, and my only hope and confidence for the execution of it is in Him alone who has already done great things for it, and does still own it as his cause.' God has never yet revoked the 'last will' of Wheelock. The college is as confessedly a Christian college as in the days of her origin; and in the impending conflict she sails up between the batteries of the enemy with her flag nailed to the mast and her captain lashed to the rigging.

"The college stands to-day in its ideal and the intention of its managers, representative of the best possible training for a noble manhood. And I may venture to say, here and now, that if there be anything known to be yet lacking to the full attainment of that conception, if anything needs to be added to make this, in the fullest sense, the peer of the best college in the land, it will be the endeavor of the Trustees and the Faculty to add that thing.

"Dartmouth College is fortunate in many particulars. Fortunate in its situation, so picturesque and so quiet, fitted for faithful study, and full of healthful influences, physical and moral; fortunate in being the one ancient and honored as well as honoring college of this commonwealth; fortunate in enjoying the full sympathy of the people around and the entire confidence of the Christian community of the land; fortunate in the great class of young men who seek her instruction, with their mature characters, simple habits, manly aims, and resolute purposes; fortunate in a laborious Faculty, whose well-earned fame from time to time brings honorable and urgent calls to carry their light to other and wealthier seats of learning; fortunate in her magnificent roll of alumni, unsurpassed in its average of good manhood and excellent work, and bright with names of transcendent lustre. The genius of the place bespeaks our reverence and awe. For to the mind's eye this sequestered spot is peopled to overflowing with youthful forms that went forth to all the lands of the earth to do valiantly in the battle of life. Across this quiet green there comes moving again invisibly a majestic procession of the faithful and the strong, laden with labors and with honors. In these seats there can almost be seen to sit once more a hoary and venerable array of the great and good whose names are recorded on earth and whose home is in heaven. And over us there seems to hover to-day a great cloud of witnesses—spirits of the just made perfect. It is good to be here. I only pray that the new arm may not prove too weak to bear the banner in this great procession of the ages."