Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/215

 branches o£ physics or chemistry or any of the great inventions by which the world has been enriched in its material sphere from the early gropings of its first devotees down to its development in our days, we find in that task a noble and worthy exercise of the highest capacity. If we attempt to appreciate the influence of such an invention or discovery on the world as it exists now, we are involved in a very comprehensive view of the existing conditions of human existence. If we attempt to anticipate what these inventions are to produce in the future we are engaged on a problem which is worthy of the very highest speculative ability. It should never be said then that technological instruction, when properly pursued on a scientific basis, is in any way opposed to the high cultivation of the mind or to the objects of a University. It takes its part beside, and in no way under, it. At the same time the objects of a technical institution, its aims and its method, must differ to a considerable extent from those of a University. It seeks to utilize generally the material productions of the earth, to improve our means of locomotion, to give us better clothes to wear, better houses to live in, and make the conditions of our physical existence altogether more comfortable. And this it does by taking generally the sciences, perhaps in a somewhat fragmentary way, and bringing their different results together—focussing them on some particular point on which it desires to build up some structure of comfort and advantage to mankind. Its spirit is strictly and intensely practical. The ruling idea of a University, on the other hand, is a spiritual and intellectual one. It desires, not to produce immediate material results, but to enrich and discipline, to expand and enlarge the human mind, to make it more worthy of the capacities with which the Creator has endowed it, and to go on to heights which we never reach, but which we ever try to approach, in learning and science pursued, not for their material results but as an exercise to the intellect, and as sufficient and satisfactory in themselves. A University which pursues this course, however, must at the same time not cut itself off in arrogance or apathy from the influences by which it is surrounded. No human institution can afford to live isolated, and if a University divorces itself from the active life around it, it is pretty certain that it will very shortly become hide-bound, narrow, and pedantic, and will ultimately perish or sink into insignificance, through a kind of inanition. If we want examples of this we have only to look to the history of Athens, through several centuries; and we have only to look to China at this day to see that, although there is a good deal of learning