Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/381



accidental circumstances of time and place, and follows every incident, however irrelevant it may be. The man of culture sees the relations of things and the art of arrangement is habitual to him. And it is impossible for a student to master anybody of reasoned truth without acquiring some tincture of method and orderly arrangement. Everyone has heard of the remark once made of Burke, that one could not stand under the same archway during a shower of rain without finding him out. The comment of Coleridge on this observation is not perhaps so commonly known. I gladly quote the substance of it, as it bears on the point I am seeking to enforce. That which strikes us, he says, in such a casual meeting with a man of superior mind or culture is not the weight or novelty of his remarks, for that is precluded by the shortness of the intercourse. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity of his words and phrases. For unusual words he would avoid as a rock. Only one point of distinction remains; and that is the habitual and unpremeditated arrangement of what he says. However desultory the talk, there is method in the fragments. This habit of mind is more needed at present in the public service of this country than at any previous time. The administration has become in recent years more elaborate, and it is certain that, for the working of our present system there are needed men who have received a somewhat extended course of intellectual training.

I have already given the reason why I did not rise to the challenge of my anti-educational friend, and stated that I should be ready to leave the matter to the slowly gathering weight of opinion which seems to me unmistakably in its favor. At the same time, I do not wish to discourage our critics by treating them with apparent neglect. I trust they will persevere. Satire and ridicule have their uses. But, as they would be still more useful if they were guided by knowledge and sympathy, I will venture to make one or two remarks that The fault of more friendly and charitable view our of educational work m this country, ihe critics of the Hindu student set up too high a standard. They compare him not with the graduates of England or Scotland or Germany, but with an ideal man who loves culture purely for its own sake and into whose mind there never enters, in connection with his studies, any idea of personal aggrandizement in the shape either of money or of fame. This perfect character, of which perhaps rare specimens may be found, is not, I venture to say, the type of the ordinary graduate in any counti-y known to geographers. To find this high ideal, you must make