Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/250

 world, that they may infuse into them the higher life of which they are the living channels. Does not every true student recall to mind that lofty abandon which placed him in contact with the genius loci— the spirit of his alma mater, and, how with mind surrendered to its higher influences, he was raised by it to a new and loftier plane. It matters little what a University may gain if it loses this higher power. It is easier to possess it and to wield it amid the awakening impulse of a new epoch, and it can be continuously maintained when these movements have grown into the every-day conditions only by a continuous elevation of the intellectual ideal. I believe that the time has now fully come for carrying into effect what may now reasonably be expected as the fruit of a thirty years' development. Now that the claims of general education have so far been met, the University should feel itself free to work out within its own peculiar sphere its own higher ideal. This conviction working strongly and independently in many minds has brought us face to face with one of the most important of those University problems which have engaged our attention during the past year. I refer to the readjustment of the curriculum in Arts. This is a subject on which I feel the deepest interest, and I ask your indulgence, gentlemen, while I urge the importance of worthily completing the programme of reform upon which you have entered. I am one of those who cordially welcome the resolution to extend the period of study. I know that this resolution does not commend itself to those who regard it as only placing a new obstacle in the path of those who are struggling to attain the University degree, but the grounds on which this complaint is based are in most cases utterly unacademic, and cannot claim a hearing within these walls. It is not the main function of a University to facilitate the attainment of a degree, but to uphold the standard of intellectual culture and to improve the methods by which that standard may be reached. Now the change which has so strongly recommended itself to the Senate has sprung from a conviction that both the standard and the method of study called for revision. On the one hand the constitution of the curriculum in respect of the general distribution of the subjects of study and the position occupied by certain of them, and on the other, the time allowed for study, demanded re-consideration. The life of a student with the shadow of an annual examination overhanging it invited our sympathy, and it was felt that if we would raise the tone of University education by redeeming it from the charge of being simply a pursuit of examinations and making it in reality a scholarly pursuit of knowledge, the time allowed for the study of the higher and more important subjects must be extended so that