Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/19

 been an ever-diligent and conscientious student; this is seen by the problems in science which he examined and solved, and by his faith in the inexhaustibleness of research to which he ever gave witness.

In addition to these attributes of a master of his craft, there was in him the crowning spirit—which ever marks the great—of being more than a mere specialist.

Only by this extra activity of mind is a man strong enough for self-surrender. A king is greater than a tyrant, a general more than a devastator, a judge higher than an exact lawyer, a scientist of fuller insight than a microscopist, and an artist of larger mind than a mere skilful manipulator.

To this higher class it was that Professor Romanes, in recognizing that there is still an outside region to those mysteries fathomable by the profoundest human investigation, proved himself to belong. In accepting the principle of the survival of the fittest, he saw that it must be never again the brutally fittest; it must be the mentally, the morally, and also the spiritually fittest; for otherwise civilization had been wrong in supplanting savagedom, and in establishing that force of peace and order by self-control, under which Darwin had been able to pursue his profitable investigations. The narrow-minded are to be found in every pursuit, in none more at this period than in Art, and I speak primarily not of my branch of it alone, but of that larger region, in which the human mind conveys original thought or fancy to others, of which Art in form and colour is only a part.

The noisiest spokesmen of to-day claim for Art that