Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/384

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to Fox." It is plainly unreasonable to look for any vivid interest in European politics when the questions that agitate the Western nations are so different from those that present themselves in the East. If our students were not too polite to descend to so obvious a retort^ they might ask with some pertinence if educated Englishmen were in the habit of taking a deep interest in the land tenures of India.

While I urge these pleas for a more kindly spirit of criticism as regards the higher education in this country, I concede that there are many imperfections which cannot escape the most friendly critic. Perhaps, it would have been better if I had directed attention to some of these. To do so would be useful both to you and to me, to you before whom there lie, I hope, many years of further progress, and to me whose duty it is, as one of the body of teachers, never to be satisfied with what it has already done if anything better is within reach. Permit me, though late, to refer to a single defect. Speaking then from my own experience, I believe it is true, looking to the great body of our students, that while there is plenty of industry there is too little thought. They are prone to satisfy themselves with words without realizing clearly to their own minds an exact image or picture of the thing, and, in a complicated group of facts, they are too often content with attending to the parts separately without studying their relation to each other or the whole. Of the latter defect illustrations are easily given. In examinations it is seen in the frequent mistakes as to the exact point of a question. It has been said that it requires some knowledge to ask a wise question. It is equally true that it requires a good deal of knowledge to understand the purport and drift of a question. Any body of reasoned truth or any group of connected facts is like a complicated machine and a knowledge of the bearing and connection of the parts is necessary for an intelligent comprehension of a question. From a want of this comes the charge of vagueness so frequently made against a particular paper. The vagueness for the most part is in the student's mind and not in the question. The same defect is seen in the want of power to separate material things from immaterial when a brief statement is required of a complicated story. A wise traveller, after visiting the points of interest in a foreign city seeks some lofty point, tower, or mina.ret, from which the whole lies before him; and the student by a mental effort, which may not inaptly be likened to the toilsome labour of climbing, should seek to get a wide survey of every subject he studies. Labour