212 
NA BORE. 
[DECEMBER 31, 1903 
You will say that I also have my prejudices, which urge 
me to ask if you wish for ever to look at man and nature 
through Greek spectacles. Well, I certainly cannot worship 
at Greek shrines. If Jowett’s translation is the real Plato 
I can see none of the infinite depth of thought that my 
friends rave about ; he seems to me pretentious and shallow ; 
and when Aristotle speaks about things of which I happen 
to have some special knowledge, he seems to me so un- 
scientific as to be maudlin. Macaulay somewhere says that 
the account by Thucydides of the retreat of the Athenians 
from Syracuse is the most affecting episode in history. 
Well, I have a great respect for Macaulay, and I have tried 
to cultivate a love for the people of the city of the Violet 
Crown, but I know some crimson patches of Macaulay’s 
own which seem to me to be to Thucydides what Swinburne 
is to Shenstone. What is a fair man to say when he hears 
his friends tallk of the greatness of Sophocles and Euripides 
and Aristophanes in the original, if he knows that these 
friends never read Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Gold- 
smith or Dickens? I feel ungrateful as I speak, for I have 
enjoyed the reading of Bohn’s ‘‘ Odyssey ’’ and many 
another translation from the ancients as much as anything 
modern. et I cannot help acknowledging a suspicion that 
this worship of Greek is like one’s fondness for the rhymes, 
often rubbishy rhymes, that associate themselves with our 
infancy and boyhood, or like Johnson’s belief that his wife 
was amiable and beautiful. Have I, therefore, prejudices 
against Greek which prevent my seeing things from an 
Oxford point of view? I think not. At all events I can 
respect it, for I know that the other point of view has been 
held by some of the greatest Englishmen, and this alone 
is sufficient to give me diffidence. But whatever diffidence 
a man may feel in the expression of his opinion, he is some- 
times compelled to put it aside. Not once, but many times 
in preparing this address upon Iceland and its snakes have 
I felt how stupid I was to undertake it, but it was too late 
to withdraw. 
You will say that I, a man of little culture, am very 
poorly qualified to speak of reform to cultured Oxford men. 
Do you think that Jonah was particularly cultured 
when he was called upon to urge reform upon the rich, the 
intellectual, the high descended people of Nineveh? I 
do not speak to conscious Oxford. It is something 
altogether subconscious in a human being or in an insti- 
tution to which we really speak when we expect reform. 
It is to subconscious Oxford that I speak, that dumb un- 
conscious soul which has, on the whole, guided her rightly 
through the centuries in spite of all the visible long-con- 
tinued eruptions of the flesh. Many colleges have for gener- 
ations in the past been given up to eating and drinking and 
sensuality in general. Jealous quarrelling has ruled in her 
common rooms. Poor thin scholarship has often had un- 
worthy victory. But the heart of England is beating in 
Oxford, and on the whole it is a very sound heart. 
Now it seems to me—a rank outsider—that Oxford is 
cursed among universities in one very important particular. 
There has in the past been only one kind of real study here. 
Whatever was studied in Athens or Alexandria to the end 
of the second century a.p., that has been open to you, that 
has been a medium of mental training. But those subjects 
in which Germany has made her mark, theology, law, 
history, Bible criticism and others, these are denied you. 
Who was it who first pointed out how England differs 
from France in one important particular? The French 
Revolution has made such a complete severance of the 
modern from the old French system that a French philo- 
sopher can discuss French history as if it were of another 
planet. When he speaks of the old provincial Parliaments 
or the edicts of St. Louis, his prejudices and interests inter- 
fere in no way with his reasoning. When he discusses the 
present Concordat or the Coup d'E tat of Napoleon, he makes 
no reference to the times of Philip Augustus or Louis XIV. 
But in England it is quite different. When the lunacy 
regency in the time of George III. was being discussed in 
Parliament, all the precedents long before the time of 
Henry VI., even back to the time of Edward IIJ., had the 
force of legal documents. The Parliament and ministers 
of Charles I. both appealed to English history, and both 
found support for their very divergent views, and so English 
history has to be read and written with the bias of modern 
NO. 1783, VOL. 69] 
political party spirit. In the same way the student cannot» 
touch the questions of theology or law without consider- 
ing them as party questions. A subject which can only be 
approached by a student with prejudices evoked by the party: 
politics of his own day is distinctly not a subject through 
which university culture is possible; I mean that it cannot 
be studied scientifically. Theology presently becomes mere 
dogma, and degenerates into credulity as the glory of the 
church is more important than truth. Thus it is that the 
scienufic students at Oxford have confined themselves to 
the study of eight or nine old books. Never, perhaps, has 
there been so wonderful a phenomenon as this, the cleverest 
men of a nation devoting themselves for centuries to one 
narrow stream of erudition, making Greek literature and 
Greek philosophy phosphoresce in the most brilliant 
manner. But it is too narrow, this stream, and the laws 
of the game are too technical, too artificial. Consequently, 
every now and again something like the fidgets, the desire 
for something real to think about, seizes upon the Oxford 
community ; it throws itself into politics or tractarian move- 
ments, it is strongly conservative or strongly liberal, it is 
high or broad or low, and, after a splendid display of energy, 
the fever works itself out, and there is a gradual return 
to the older learning after a time of unintellectual laziness. 
In these times of fever, as in the time of the Tracts, real 
study falls to its lowest ebb, because truth of any kind has 
ceased to be an object of worship. If I am right, then it 
is the leanness of the studies which are really scientific 
which causes these great alternations, these periods of de- 
gradation, these times of easy conscience when that freedom 
which is the glory of Oxford degenerates into licence. You 
know quite well that there must be such degeneration un- 
less men have healthy, delightful work to do, and there is 
a healthy public opinion to be feared or welcomed. 
Such attacks as those on the fair-minded Gibbon and ex- 
amples such as that of the very much prejudiced Froude 
show how difficult it is for any Englishman to make 
a scientific study of English history, or English law, or 
English, or, indeed, any kind of Christian 
Indeed, in the study of mental and moral philosophy of the 
a priori kind, according to any school from that of Socrates 
to that of Kant, it is difficult for an Englishman to keep 
clear of dogmatic theology and partisanship. d 
But the great world of natural science remains, the region 
in which no attention whatsoever need be paid to sacred 
books, to dogma, to authority, the region in which the 
mind feels no fetters, where no kind of individuality is a 
crime, a world of promise in which the first pioneers have 
already in a short time found great stores of wealth on the 
mere surface of the ground, a world which seems infinite in 
its possibilities. It is only in this free atmosphere that the 
mental constitution will become healthy enough to be able 
to combat prejudice and the dogmatic microbe. Talk no 
more of man as if he were apart from nature. The mind, 
the consciousness, the soul of man and all his emotions 
are natural and to be studied by the deductive and experi- 
mental and inductive methods used by us in all parts of 
natural philosophy. Give up this mere absorption of other 
men’s ideas, whether in old classics or in quarterly and 
monthly reviews, this collecting of ready-made opinions on 
all subjects whatsoever. Are you for ever to hang to the 
apron strings of the ancients? Is your manhood worth so 
little that you cannot exist without worshipping men who 
were creatures like yourselves? You speak of the reason 
of man as if it were an omnipotent thing. We speak of 
the spirit of God in man brooding over phenomena which 
seem chaotic until new light is evolved and you actually 
think that we are beggars living upon scraps of wisdom 
dropped from your tables. When you insist upon your 
classical tests you spoil our whole scheme of study, and you 
are merely acting as brigands, you are only taking that 
sort of advantage which all mean people take when they 
have official positions. 
It is not learning that is 
is to create men, men of original thought, men of 
character, men of resource, men fond of _ reading. 
And you men of the university as distinct from the 
colleges—if you really can invent some examination which 
will select the men of thought, do so, and use it, but 
for my part I do not think this business of selection one for 
important. A university 
v 
theology. 
