OcrToBER 19, 1899] 
NATURE 
599 
and intellectual interests, but between different intellectual 
interests themselves ; and a characteristic of a university educa- 
tion is that by some means or other it aims at conveying, not 
merely accurate knowledge on some one subject, but a healthy 
interest in all forms of mental effort. This wider range, this 
general cultivation, should distinguish the university scholar 
from him who has merely mastered the technicalities of a 
profession. A man may be a good lawyer or tradesman, he 
may have grasped a branch of pure science or succeeded in a 
scientific profession, and yet be careless and ignorant of all that 
does not bear upon the central interest of his life. The blend- 
ing of expert and general knowledge, of professional skill in 
some one subject and of intelligent interest in others, is not to 
be accomplished by obeying formal rules, such as those which 
must be followed in producing a given chemical compound. 
Each one of us must decide for himself what particular com- 
bination represents for him the maximum of gain and the 
minimum of loss ; but the true university as distinguished from 
the professional or technical school is for ever preaching that man 
is many-sided, that the light of heaven reaches him through 
many windows, and though to some of us the call may come to 
sacrifice all else to gain one supreme end, yet it is well to count 
the cost and to remember that the loss may outweigh the gain. 
In speaking of sacrifice I am not now referring to the 
ordinary habits of industry and self-control which are essential 
to success in any physical or intellectual struggle. Iam dealing 
rather with that sacrifice which is so often made without any 
sense of loss, the surrender of all effort to understand the appeal 
made by nature or art to one or other of our higher intellectual 
powers. 
A man may be so interested in painting or in music that he 
loses all sense of the divine curiosity which impels the man of 
science as he strives to unravel the plan of the universe. The 
seeker after truth may allow the dry light of science to wither 
the sensibilities which can be touched by art alone. He may 
purchase the higher knowledge at the cost of the higher emotions. 
Let us then consider for a few moments the principles which 
should direct our choice, and the help which a University of 
London can give us in choosing. 
With regard to principles, it is impossible, as I have already 
said, to lay down any hard and fast rules. In this, as in so 
many other questions on which a practical decision must be 
made, two extreme courses are possible to follow, either of 
which is in most cases clearly wrong. I shall call before you 
a distinguished advocate of each, and allow them to plead in 
their own words. 
The first policy may be called the policy of concentration, 
dear to the apostles of the gospel of self-help. 
““The one prudence in life,” says Emerson in his essay on 
Power, ‘‘the one prudence in life is concentration ; the one 
evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our 
dissipations are coarse or fine ; property and its cares, friends, 
and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Every- 
thing is good which takes away one plaything and delusion 
more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. 
Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes— 
all are distractionsjwhich cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, 
and make a good poise and a straight course impossible. You 
must elect your work ; you shall take what your brain can, and 
drop all the rest.’ Only so can that amount of vital force 
accumulate which can make the step from knowing to 
doing. . . “Tisa step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into 
fruitfulness. ” 
And yet what counsel is this! To you the happiness or 
sorrows of your friends are to be mere distractions which make 
a straight course towards the conclusion of your own task im- 
possible. Politics—that is the well-being of your country ; 
books, the whole world of literature ; music and pictures, all 
these are mere playthings and delusions, which you are to cast 
aside with all other childish things, and now that you are a 
man you are to care only for doing your own stroke of faithful 
work, ; 
It is nothing to you that you are viewing with callous in- 
difference the faithful work of others. ‘ At sundry times and 
in divers manners” the noblest of our race have been striving to 
express the best that was in them by poetry and prose, by line 
and colour, by oratory and music. You are to care for none of 
these things. They are dissipations—not indeed of the coarsest 
kind—but dissipations none the less, dissipations which dis- 
tract you from your own sustained and self-conscious endeavour 
NO. 1564, VOL. 60] 
to do something which may perhaps entitle you to rank among 
the meanest of those whose works you spurn. And then, when: 
the work is done, the discovery made, the memoir published, 
what wonder if they in turn regard it with a disdain not less 
than your own? what wonder if Charles Lamb, along with 
Court Calendars, Directories, Draught Boards, bound and 
lettered on the back, and Almanacs, should place scientific 
treatises in his list of Biblia A-Biblia ; or Books which are not 
Books ? 
Turn now to the other extreme policy, that which regards it 
as our wisdom to aim, not so much at one high end which can be 
attained only by an intense concentration, as at the ‘‘fruit of a 
quickened, multiplied consciousness.” 
No one has put the case in support of this philosophy more: 
eloquently than Walter Pater in the celebrated conclusion to his 
‘* Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” 
The passage is too long to quote in full, but he tells us that 
the service of culture to the human spirit ‘‘is to startle it into a 
sharp and eager observation. 
“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face $ 
some tone on the hills or sea is choicer than the rest ; some 
mood of passion or insight or intellectual! excitement is irresist- 
ibly real or attractive for us—for that moment only. 
‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. 
A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, 
dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen: 
by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point 
to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest 
number of vital forces unite in their purest energy ? 
** To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain 
this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for 
habit is relative to a stereotyped world ; meantime it is only the 
roughness of the eye that makes. any two persons, things, 
situations, seem alike. 
‘*While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any 
exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge, that seems 
by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any 
stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious 
odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s 
friend. 
‘*Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude 
in those about us, and in the brilliance of their gifts some tragic 
dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and 
sun, to sleep before evening.” 
Beautiful words! Butas their music fades from the ear, as 
the brilliance of the ‘‘ hard, gem-like flame” is quenched by the 
light of day, can we accept their teaching? Not to do but to 
feel, not to achieve but to enjoy, is the rule of life to be de- 
duced logically from these premisses. If some great work is to 
be attempted, it is for the sake of the experience, for the joy of 
the effort and the success, and not for the sake of the work itself, 
Even ‘‘ the enthusiasm of humanity” is classed by Pater among 
the ‘‘high passions,” which are valuable chiefly for ‘‘the 
quickened sense of life” they impart ; and beyond and above 
them all is placed art, not because it leads to a noble end, but 
because it professes ‘‘to give nothing but the highest quality to 
your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ 
sake,” 
If the doctrine of concentration leads to ignorance of the 
work of others, the doctrine of the multiplication of states of 
consciousness leads to the neglect of what you yourself may do. 
Nay, more ; it leads to the paradoxical result that you laud and 
magnify the achievements of those whom, nevertheless, you 
count as having failed in life, if their work, like most of the best 
work of the world, has been brought to the birth with bitter 
travail; and if, in the effort to achieve, they have sacrificed the 
joys to be found in ‘strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious. 
odours.” 
If you have to choose one philosophy or the other, to adopt 
one rigid rule of life, I take it that the nobler among you would 
follow Emerson rather than Pater, would prefer to do ‘* one 
stroke of faithful work” rather than to maintain a life long 
ecstasy. But this is not one of the cases in which no com- 
promise is possible, in which we must vote “‘ Yea” or *‘ Nay,” 
and must put aside wholly one teaching or the other. It may 
be a great thing to make the efforts and sacrifices which are 
required in adopting an extreme position, but it is a still higher 
achievement to maintain through life the intellectual balance 
necessary for the policy of the ‘* golden mean.” 
I am not concerned to deny that radically different views 
