Page:The Student, Edinburgh University Magazine, New Series, Volume V., Summer Session 1891.pdf/22

 am going to astonish you, and perhaps vex you; and one would have astonished and perhaps vexed me, if he had insinuated to me at your age what I tell you in bald terms:—You have not yet got much to say. It is bad to hear the sound of a mill grinding nothing, or crushing the few small grains fallen from a green head before August.

Let me recommend to you an exercise, modest, serious, and useful.

Among the multitude of books printed each year there are some good books and a few great ones. First take those accredited by well-known names. Distribute them among those of you who will read them, to give an account of them to the others. It is difficult to read a book well; to get to the bottom of it, one must open both eyes and be all attention, passive to receive all, active to hold all, to keep one’s judgment, and at the same time let it act. Then meet to hear the report, and to discuss the matter. A dozen such conferences each year on books of all sorts will give you a glimmer of the philosophy, science, and art of your times. Afterwards, when they have read, worked, and thought much, the best of you will change the glimmer to the glow.

It is then you become fellow-workers with your University, to your own profit, in introducing yourselves to the actuality, for the books I recommend bear the happy label “just issued.” Thus you supply the other lack of philosophy, for I mean by the great books that appear each year in France, in England, in Germany, those which attempt the explanation of the things of nature and of spirit.

I shall give you some advice, but between ourselves, and you must not go and betray me to your masters. As you find difficulties, go and tell one of your professors of it, and say how grateful you would be were he to aid you. “Sir, here is a book on philosophy, a book on science; would you not come some evening, any night you are free, and talk to us about it, just as little as you like?” He will come. It is difficult to refuse anything to the goodwill of young people.

Emboldened by this first success, ask for something more. If it be impossible to grasp at present the philosophy of the whole, each man has in him more or less precise a philosophy of his science or his art. From time to time, then, go to some one and say, “Sir, we would gladly know the whereabouts of this or that science, and if you will have the kindness to make us understand, very simply, by what ways she has passed to reach where she is, we shall be very grateful, for then without doubt we shall begin to see whither she is tending and the direction of our intellectual progress?” On the days when your masters come—five or six times a year—you will open your large hall, which will be an annex, a free aula of the University, where by littles you will construct your philosophy.

But I should be the first to blame you if you came here to do nothing but work. This house, given by the town of Montpellier to its children at College, the artists of Montpellier, its sculptors and painters, have willingly ornamented with their art. Science, art, and youth, it is an adorable trinity; and I do not forget the third person—youth. I do not disdain your billiard rooms, and your halls for fencing and gymnastics, nor your baths.

I hope you will hold in horror sloven sedentariness, and that from time to time bands of you will start for the hills or for the sea. Go then—walk, run, swim, and sail. Inertia in the young is an abdication of life.

Only guard against inertia of spirit and intellectual sedentariness. I call him inert and sedentary who studies but one subject, and whose curiosity is limited by the examination programme. I pity them, and fear for them, because I know that, later, an atrophied man will be within them. They are to be pitied who live in solo pane. They are to be feared, for they develop in the hearth of France a weight of dead ashes.

To quote from the address of your Rector: “What we lack is in the number of men placed above their professional tasks by reflection and study, capable of in­-