In the appreciation of scholarship is found the strain of intellectual humility. The scholar is more inclined to inquire than to affirm. He is more ready to ask "What do you think?" than to say "I know." He is remote from intellectual arrogance. Humility means greatness. Cockiness is a token of narrowness. The Socratic spirit of modesty is as true a manner of wisdom as it is an effective method of increasing wisdom. The man who has an opinion on all things, has no right to an opinion on any one.
This intellectual sympathy and appreciation should take on esthetic relations. You should be a lover of beauty as well as of wisdom. Good books, good pictures, good music, good architecture, should be among your avocations. Read a piece of good literature every day. See a good picture or a good copy of one every day. Hear some good music every day. The chapel service may give it to you. And see a piece of good architecture every day. Some of the college buildings can give it. Alas! many do not. Such visions and hearings will soak into your manhood.
All this is only saying lead the life intellectual. You should not only be a thinker, you should be thoughtful. You should be a man of large thoughtfulness. You should be prepared to interpret life and all phenomena in terms of the intellect. Many of our countrymen are intelligent. They know a great deal. They have gathered up information about many things. This information is desultory, unrelated. Their minds are a Brummagem drawer. Here, by the way, lies the worthlessness of President Eliot's list of books to the untrained mind. To the educated mind such books mean much; to the uneducated, little. Yet, as a college man, you may know less than not a few uneducated people may know. I don't care. The life intellectual is more and most important.
VII
I also want you to go from the college a good combination of a good worker and a good loafer. To be able to loaf well is not a bad purpose of an education. The loafing that carries along with itself the freedom from selfishness, appreciation of others' conditions, and gentlemanliness, is worth commending. Loafing that follows hard work and prepares for hard work is one of the best equipments of a man. Loafing that has no object, loafing as a vocation, is to be despised. The late Professor Jebb wrote to his father once from Cambridge, saying:—
"I will read but not very hard; because I know better than you or any one can tell me, how much reading is good for the development of my own powers at the present time, and will conduce to my success next year and afterwards; and I will not identify myself with what are called in Cambridge 'the reading set,' i. e., men who read twelve hours a day and never do anything else; (1) because I should lose ten per cent. of reputation (which at the university is no bubble but real living useful capital); (2) because the reading set, with a few exceptions, are utterly uncongenial to me. My set is a set that reads, but does not only read; that accomplishes one great end of university life by mixing in cheerful and intellectual society, and learning the ways of the world which its members are so soon to enter; and which, without the pedantry and cant of the 'reading man,' turns out as good Christians, better scholars, better men of the world, and better gentlemen, than those mere plodders with whom a man is inevitably associated if he identifies himself with the reading set."
I rather like the loafing which young Jebb indulged in, but I fear it is a type of the life which some college men do not follow. They are inclined to look upon the four college years as a respite between the labor of the preparatory school and the labor of business, or rather they may look upon the four college years as a life of professional leisure. I am glad you cannot, even if you wished to, and I know you do not wish to, think of college as either respite or leisure. Whether the college is wise in allowing such loafing, it is not for me now to say, but I can trust you to be the proper kind of loafer as well as of worker.
Indeed, I want you to have good habits of working. In such habits the valuation of time is of special significance. For time is not an agent. It does nothing. As a power, time is absolutely worthless. As a condition, time is of infinite worth. Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln College, said: "Time seems infinite to the freshman in his first term." But let me add that to a senior in his last term time is a swiftly moving opportunity. The need of time becomes more and more urgent as the college years go. When Jowett was fifty-nine years old, he wrote: "I cannot say vixi, for I feel as if I were only just beginning and had not half completed what I had intended. If I live twenty-five years more I will, Dei gratia, accomplish a great work for Oxford and for philosophy in England. Activity, temperance, no enmities, self-denial, saving eyes, never overwork." On his seventieth birthday Jowett made out what he called his Scheme of Life. It was this:—
EIGHT YEARS OF WORK.