Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/586

 tells me that it is oftenest the thought, which comes fresh with warm life from the brain of a teacher as he deals at lecture with some great subject, "striking across the mind and flushing all the face" that is indelibly fixed in our minds and moulds our future life. You have all had these opportunities in whatever Faculty you have been studying, and I would hope that one and all of you are carrying away some such life-giving thoughts, some such grains of gold which you may treasure in the store-houses of your memories, some such seeds of wisdom which may grow up in the good soil of your minds and yield fruit an hundred-fold.

Now as to supplementing the courses of study through which you have passed for your degree. Gentlemen, Bachelors of Arts, if you have during your University course disciplined and strengthened your understanding, if you have acquired a knowledge of things which an educated man in South India must know to be a useful citizen, supplemented by a fairly thorough knowledge of some one science, if you have added to this a sound knowledge of the English tongue and through its literature have grasped in some degree the genius of that people, if you have along with all this cultivated a truth-loving spirit, a spirit which "abhors idols," be they of the tribe, of the cave, of the market place or of the theatre, you will be fitted for preparing yourselves by special study for the branch of activity by which you will hereafter seek to earn your livelihood and live the life of a cultivated being. You have laid the foundation in the schools of this University for the school of life. It is but the foundation. I know full well that temptations to a vain spirit are many and peculiar. You have come, many of you, from what you now regard as ignorant homes and you are surrounded too often by unenlightened relatives and friends, whilst a graduate in Europe would live amongst those whose knowledge and experience of life he cannot for a moment afford to disparage or dispute. But this condition of things is not one which should make you self-complacent. It should rather fill you with the spirit of meekness and of fear—of meekness because your superior knowledge should make you know that after all what you have learnt is but little of the sum of knowledge, and of fear, for you must see that you, even more than the English graduate, have need to supplement that knowledge. If you arrest your development in knowledge, says Sir Henry Maine, conceit and scepticism must be cultivation must the result, "intellectual cultivation should be constantly progressive." First then, you in a way require a more thorough knowledge of the English