ignorance, within the narrow boundaries of a single field. But whatever, within its confines, was knowable, they knew. It was said of Abelard, the forerunner of them all: Illi patuit quicquid scibile erat. The limits of the knowable -wherever they are to be placed—have in these days expanded so far that no ambition and no assiduity is equal to the task of taking all that lies within them for its province. Nothing can be more alien from the business of a University than to produce the shallow and fluent omniscience which has scratched the surface of many subjects, and got to the heart of none. But the fidelity of a University to the intellectual side of its mission must now, as always, be judged by the degree in which it has succeeded in enlarging and humanising the mental outlook of its students, and developing the love of knowledge for its own sake.

Such an ideal, I need hardly say, does not imply a divorce of knowledge from practice. Let me recall to your recollection a well-known and instructive incident in the history of this University. When James Watt in 1756 came back to Glasgow from London, the Corporation of Hammermen refused him permission to set up his business in the burgh, because he was neither son of a burgess nor an apprentice. The Faculty of Professors, of whom Adam Smith was one, at once appointed him mathematical instrument

maker to the University, and gave him a room, as they had power to do, in the College buildings for his workshop. It was in this workshop-a favourite resort of Adam Smith- and while engaged on the repair of a model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the University, that Watt evolved the idea of the separate condenser. It is often out of the mouths of Professors, and at the hands of Universities, that the practical man learns for the first time the real meaning and the latent possibilities of his own business. Statesmen and financiers and industrialists have never received two more magnificent presents than the Wealth of Nations and the Steam Engine: and both came to them from within the walls of Glasgow College.

We may fairly remember such facts as these when the term "academic " is used, as it often is nowadays, as a label of reproach to designate a proposition or an argument which is otiose or fanciful of which, at any rate, the practical man takes no account. I believe this to be an indefensible perversion of language. As Hazlitt says: "By an obvious transposition of ideas some persons have confounded a knowledge of useful things with useful knowledge." There is no fallacy which, in all its forms, a University is more bound by the very nature and object of its being to combat and expose.

I spoke a moment ago of the intellectual

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stamp which a University ought to leave on those whom it teaches. But that after all is not the supreme or ultimate test of its work. In the long run, it will be judged not merely or mainly by its success in equipping its pupils to outstrip their competitors in the crafts and professions. It will not be fully judged even by the excellence of its mental gymnastic, or its contributions to scholarship and science. It will be judged also by the influence which it is exerting upon the imagination and the character; by the ideals which it has implanted and nourished; by the new resources of faith, tenacity, aspiration, with which it has recruited and reinforced the untrained and undeveloped nature; by the degree in which it has helped to raise, to enlarge, to enrich, to complete, the true life of the man, and by and through him, the corporate life of the community.

I shall not, therefore, be travelling beyond my province to-day, if I endeavour to illustrate by

or two examples the truth of a seeming paradox: the essential utility, nay, the indispensable necessity, from this wider point of view, of some of those forms of knowledge which the man of affairs is apt to discard as useless or superfluous, but which it is the prerogative duty of a University to keep alive.

Take, first of all, those literary studies to which a large part of the time and energy of this

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and of other Universities continues to be given. Nothing is easier than to belittle or disparage their practical value. Nor will any one who is acquainted, for instance, with the history of scholarship deny that many of the hours and days, and even years, which were devoted by men of the type of Browning's Grammarian to settling and unsettling and resettling the most trivial minutiae, might have been almost as profitably given to astrology or heraldry. "The first distemper of learning," says Bacon in a famous passage, "is when men study words and not matter.' He compares this "vanity" to Pygmalion's frenzy," and cites the leading case of Erasmus. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo: Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone, and the echo answered in Greek ove, asine.” 1 The revival of learning in Western Europe in the fifteenth century supplies one of the best illustrations of this kind of intellectual demoralisation. Neglect and contempt of literary form had reached their lowest depth in the style of the later Schoolmen and their pupils. It is humiliating to an Oxford man to remember that, even in those bad days, the Oxoniensis loquendi mos seems to have been a byword for its slovenly incorrectness. Never was transformation more rapid and complete. Under the influence of the new passion for the

1 Advancement of Learning, Book I.

ancient models, the study of words and style became for the time a religion. The Humanists were "intoxicated with the exuberance" of their new "verbosity." But it was a passing disease, and when it subsided the English of Cranmer, the German of Luther, the Italian of Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio, had taken root, side by side with the classical languages, each to become the living source of a fresh and splendid progeny.

I will not enter upon the technical and singularly barren controversy as to whether literature or science affords the better training for the reasoning powers. There are some intelligences which no discipline can convert into accurately working instruments. And those which possess the capacity for being so developed vary as greatly in their structure and tendencies, and are therefore as little suited to a uniform regimen, as men's bodies and characters. No one will pretend that they ought all to be treated by the same method, unless he is either a quack, or possessed by that undiscriminating passion for symmetry, which used to make the Minister for Education in a neighbouring country reflect with complacency that, at a particular minute of a particular hour in the day, every schoolboy in every school in France was being confronted with the same fact in Roman History.

Nor shall I dwell, as an apologist for literary studies from the utilitarian point of view would