Alumni Oration

"Alumni Oration. By A. W. Duff, '84. Professor of Physics, at Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass." University Monthly 25, 7-8 (May-June 1906): 210-219.

Speaking in this hall and before this audience, I need offer no apology for taking education as my theme, rather than some topic that might possess more of the interest of novelty. For education, like health and government, is one of the great permanent interests of the world and is, for the moment at least, the chief interest of those who yearly assemble here to mark with fitting observance the passing of another class from the academic halls. Nor need I apologize for asking you to listen to some remarks on the highest aim of education, even if I should not say or attempt to say anything essentially new. To the solution of the fundamental problems of education wise men in all times have contributed sufficient wisdom to solve them all, could practice keep step with accepted principle and accomplishment with aspiration. Yet it is true that most people who are not professionally interested in education accept it as one of the routine processes of the world and seldom consider its essential aim, and those of us who are teachers of youth are mostly so deeply immersed in the minutae of an onerous occupation, that we do not often go back to first principles but some time drift step by step into methods considerably at variance with our professed aims.

We are generally agreed that we educate for the purpose of action: we learn that we may do, and the years of formal education are spent as a preparation for complete living in some walk of life. All over this continent in this season of the year when all nature is springing into renewed life, gatherings like these are being held to usher into the world of activity young men and women, who have for four years devoted their best energies to preparing for living and doing with high and generous aims. Some, no doubt, suppose that learning is now over, that nothing remains but to reap the fruits of learning. Yet a very few years or months will suffice to show that life itself is the great school room, that to live and do effectually we must be ever seeking to learn, that the years of formal study are properly the years of preparation for wider, deeper learning in this larger university. It we are not continually learning, we are doing the opposite, or unlearning the lessons we have learned and are daily confirming ourselves in our ignorance, if we have learned in school and college to analyze the contents of our class books and sift the large and important from the small and unimportant, we have so far fitted ourselves to analyze the contents of the book of life and see its complete aims and motives in truer perspective, so that we may follow the fundamentally important and lightly estimate the superficial and trifling. Our hoard of garnered knowledge will assist us but little if we have not acquired the habit and instinct of ever seeking for more light.

All true education, whether in school or college, must aim at the development of the power of self-education. The little installment of knowledge of things which can be imparted during school life is trifling compared with the wealth of knowledge that lies open to one who has learned to educate himself. But even as regards what of information can be acquired in the schools themselves, it is true that little is acquired that is acquired under mere compulsion. Let us grant that a few shreds of knowledge may be forced upon unwilling recipients, but as an offset to this we must place the increased distaste for learning in general produced by the way in which the latter is acquired, and we may well conclude that the last estate of the wholly reluctant learner is little better than his first. Some degree of the desire to know, some slight enthusiasm for learning is an essential ingredient of the soil in which the seed of instruction will take root and grow, and to seek out and encourage to the utmost whatever of independent initiative in self-education the mind may contain must ever he the first aim of wise instruction.

Little of real enthusiasm accompanies that which requires mere memorizing without the effort to understand. The phrase "training of the memory," as frequently employed, contains, I think, one of the fallacies of education. The memory, the mere irrational associational memory, is one of our lowest faculties, the one that we share in largest measure with the unthinking brutes. It is of ten more highly developed in the uneducated than in the educated, as is frequently illustrated by characters in the dramas of Shakespeare or the novels of Scott and Jane Austin. The higher memory is rather the art of judiciously forgetting, that is of casting aside the irrelevant and pondering that which appeals to the reason and the imagination, until forgetting becomes an impossibility. The memory in itself requires no direct training. In this I think we are often misled by superficial observation of men of great stores of useful knowledge. Many years ago I was employed on some scientific work in which the greatest physicist of that time, Lord Kelvin, was interested. To my surprise, he often for a moment seemed ignorant of some elementary fads that I could quote with fluency. This, however, lasted but a moment; starting low down in a line of thought with which his mind was familiar, he quickly passed step by step through a train of semi-conscious reasoning that included without effort all the apparently missing links and soon had passed into regions beyond my power of following. This I have noticed frequently in less gifted but highly rational minds. It is the working of the rational memory, that which binds things together, not by the mere outward circumstances of time and place of acquirement and chance collocations of words as they strike on the ear, but by the rational living interest in the relations of things, and it is the memory, as a form of reasoning, that needs the utmost cultivation. Where this higher memory is lacking there has been some defect of interest or of rational connection in the original impressions.

The training of the reason, of the logical faculty, is a much higher aim than the so-called exercising of the memory; for it is by the reason, and not by memory or tradition, that we must test the truth or falseness of traditional, current, or novel propositions. Herein lies the chief value to most men, of the study of mathematics (especially geometry), physics, economics and some of the natural sciences, provided the mere memorizing of facts and principles be not the chief aim. In some men the reasoning faculty is mostly in abeyance and is only called into action by the spur of necessity or by ardor in debate, when it is apt to degenerate into subtlety or special pleading. The reasoning faculty that begins promptly and instinctively on the examination of an unfamiliar statement without the need of an external stimulus is a priceless possession. It enables the possessor to reach his conclusions calmly and sanely, while the forensic convictions of the fervid debater are too often a source of delusion to himself and others.

But the memory may be a storehouse of facts rivalling that of Mezzofani with his hundred acquired languages, that "Briarens parts of speech," and the logical faculty may too, if called on, be a keen sword capable of piercing to the heart of a fallacy; but what will these avail if the impulse to use them, the instinctive outreach of the mind to lay hold on the framework of truth and life, should be deficient? Lacking use, the facts will grow musty and the logic rusty and the mind, like an untitled field, will revert into the primitive wilderness. To vary the figure, memorized facts and sharpened wits are but the raw material and the tools of mental life. Some who have them in large proportion derive little pleasure or profit from them, for lack of a third or higher gift.

A distinguished English physician, speaking recently of English schools in general, has said that "while the memory is exercised and the intellect somewhat called upon, the imagination, the centre of creative life the source of great actions, is left out in the cold." In this wise remark, which need not be confined to the schools of any one country, we have, I believe, the secret of much of our failure to stir the initiative and arouse something of that enthusiasm which will make all education at basis, self-education. The imagination, after all, is that which instills life into the dry bones of memorizing and reasoning. It is the spring of the mind, the spur of the initiative and with its enlistment, if it can be enlisted, effort becomes largely unconscious.

But why, someone may ask, should one whose energies are devoted to the teaching and investigation of scientific subjects, take any interest in the education of the imagination? Does not the book of science consist of dull facts gathered by plodding unimaginative people, whose gaze is limited to the field of view of a microscope or to the contents of an invisibly small molecule, and are not these uninteresting facts condensed into more or less unintelligible laws that are the terror of school boys and college students? Is not the field of the lower imagination pre-empted by the writers of fiction and that of the higher imagination the inheritance of the poet, the painter and the musician? To answer these imperious questions we must take time to consider the matter a little more closely.

The musical composer, from his memory stored with harmonious chords and melodious successions of notes, imagines the effects of combinations which no ear has ever heard; and the painter, from his observation of the beauties of nature and his knowledge of the effects of paint applied to canvas, imagines the effects of new combinations of color and arrangements of outlines. But the, work of the scientist is no less dependent on the power of imagining the existence of that which the senses have never perceived. The geologist observes the form and contents of the strata of the earth and notes the remains of past life which they contain and from these he passes backward in his imagination to the past history of the constitution of the earth and forward to its future necessitudes. A great biologist, like, Darwin, notes the forms, relations and distinctions of living things and, with a marvelous outstretch of the imagination, he grasps the steps of differentiation by which the multiplicity of living forms came by slow evolution from a limited number of primitive forms. No one can see, and probably no one ever will see a single molecule of matter, separate and distinguished from its fellows, but the imagination of the physicist or chemist sees in the molecule an orderly group of atoms, and in the atom a multitude of minute corpuscles in endless whirl, giving rise to the phenomena of heat, light and electricity by which matter is known to the senses. The man who a century ago had dared to dream of the flashing of messages across the Atlantic in less time than it takes the mind to think would have been rated as too imaginative to be left at large; but the imagination of the scientist revealed it, and today, by wireless telegraphy, we are within electric earshot of Europe. All progress in science depends on the highest cultivation of the scientific imagination, followed and checked by the closest reasoning.

In fact in what profession, trade or occupation is not the imagination, specialized in the direction of that occupation, a gift of the highest order, nay an indispensable gift for even commonplace tasks? The engineer who, from a mass of timbers and steel girders can imagine the great bridge in which each part shall find its appropriate place, the physician who from few external symptoms can picture the state of the internal organs which are in rebellion against ill treatment, the manufacturer who sees in his mind a prosperous business, springing up and supporting a busy community and is moved by the clearness of his vision to realize his dream, the servant of the state whose mind grasps the improvements that may come from more just laws and better institutions, while the dully unimaginative cannot realize that things can ever he different from the present: are not all these dependent on the possession of an active, beneficent imagination? From the realized and sensible to the unrealized and unperceived is the mainspring of action, and is not then the cultivation of the imagination one of the greatest of all educational aims, because one of the most fundamental in laying from the foundation of self-education and self-directed activity? As President Eliot of Harvard has well said: "The imagination is the greatest of human powers, no matter in what field it works,—in art, literature, in mechanical invention, in science, government, commerce or religion, and the training of the imagination is therefore far the most important part of education."

But all this might be admitted and many might still ask, can the imagination be cultivated? Let us admit at once that no mere effort to stimulate it is likely to make a Shakespeare, a Newton or a Beethoven out of ordinary clay. The genius never needs our system of education; the most that can be done for him is to remove obstacles from his way. But the imagination of the ordinary youth can be encouraged or dulled according as we treat it. Nothing is more striking in an average child than his tendency to imagine himself any historical character he has read about, and his imagination outruns his knowledge and produces the instinct of self-education. But there is, I fear too little of this instinct in many who a dozen years later seek our colleges and universities, however well exercised their memories and logical faculties. I know that there are many earnest university students everywhere who realize that a university is properly a place where opportunities and facilities of all kind are supplied for self-education, while the initiative and enthusiasm should be brought by themselves. They have the imagination necessary to realize the ennobling value of true learning as that which elevates the whole man and expels the ignoble and the base or, if their aim be professional training, they are moved by some vision of the future rewards of soundly trained minds and broadened intellectual interests. Yet it must also be confessed that many justify the humorous words of that shrewd moralizer, Mr. Dooley, and expect to be met by the college president with the words, "The dear boy, what special branch iv learnin' wud ye like to have studied for ye be our compitint professors?" Some others are so far receptive that they are willing to have knowledge poured into some detached receptacles of their minds, while they for the most remain rather disinterested observers. Now what is the cause of this frequent defect of initiative? Different people will give different answers. Some think it is because our schools make things too easy and amusing and such seem, at times, inclined to think that every subject is good material for instruction provided only it is disagreeable enough. For myself, I think with the English writer whom I have quoted, that, in many cases, the condition is partly due to the fact that one of the highest faculties of the learner has not been enlisted in the teaching of any subject. Something of the greatest value to mental life is lost if memory and reason be alone appealed to. In all teaching there is a tendency to teach chiefly that which is relevant to compact formulae of some kind, so that the evidence of learning can be produced at a moment's notice. But the most valuable parts of the contents of a literature or science are not condensable into peptonized tablets, sugar-coated or otherwise, that slip over easily and occupy little space in the memory, while imposing no tax on the reason and the imagination. Every conscientious teacher, whether in a school or college, knows the temptation in this direction, and the frequency with which he unconsciously yields to it, and such a teacher is ever on the watch to correct his own tendency in this direction.

This is not the place for detailed discussion of educational methods, especially by one who cannot claim a close acquaintance with school work in this province. But the defect I refer to is widely prevalent and it will not be out of place for me to say that, in proportion as we exalt mechanical excellence in any subject above the evidence of reason and imagination, we encourage the letter and discourage the spirit of real education. School life is limited and everything desirable cannot be accomplished. Too much time spent in attaining perfection of a mechanical kind may leave too little time for the attainment of real understanding. Nothing awakens the interest and broadens the mind more than the intelligent study of history, provided more attention is given to the habits, ideas and institutions of a people at different stages of its growth than to dates, wars, battles and treaties, which take up an undue portion of most school histories. In the study of literature might we not have something more of an attempt to realize the thought and beauty of a masterpiece, more of an attempt to catch the inspiration under which it was written and less minutiae of verbal and grammatical criticism. The distinction might be extended, though with limitations and differences of degree to the teaching of almost any subject however unelementary or advanced: but this is not the time to attempt it.

After all it will be seen that this is merely a plea for the teaching of the essentially valuable in the branches taught. The realities of things appeal to the imagination and the reason, whereas the somewhat artificial forms we are sometimes apt to give them when we make them the subject of formal instruction, often fail to make such an appeal and sometimes result in the deadening of intellectual interest.

Among the injurious mechanical measures of attainment preeminence must, I think be awarded to the written examination, which does so much evil everywhere in defeating the higher ends of college education. I speak from considerable experience, for I have I believe, passed more profitless examinations than any one here present and I have probably conducted as many as any. What college professor does not know the intellectual frost that sets in as the semi-annual examination approaches, nipping the tender buds of real scholarships, often very tender, and narrowing the interests to definition, formulas and catch phrases, thus leaving the final ineradicable impression that these are the whole things. Yet I regret to say I am not prepared to advocate the abolition of examinations, but in spite of many specious pleas. I believe they can only be defended on the ground of their apparent necessity for ascertaining standing and granting degrees. There are, however signs that the past worship of the fetish is diminishing, such as the abolition of the wranglership examination at Cambridge. Sometime in the future no doubt, a genius will arise to show us how to get rid of all.

Perhaps it will be by the entire abolition of degrees with their corollary the written examination, thus permitting a university to be a place where learning is sought for its own sake and where only those who wish it on those terms need apply.

In part of what I have said I probably lay myself open to misconception. I can only take the time to state that I am not in the least advocating the abolition of drill in elementary or advanced education; for without repetition and insistence or thoroughness not much is obtained. Moreover, in shaking at some length of the part that the imagination should play in education, I do not assume that it is in all cases the imagination rather than the reason, that needs encouragement. But having in the course of life spent in several different countries, had occasion to note that in the increasing systematization of education in any country, emphasis is more apt to be placed on the mechanical and readily tested products of education, I feel it necessary to insist on the value of that quickened interest in intellectual things and that spontaneous enthusiasm for self- instruction, which are the highest aim of school and college education. To learn, to learn how to learn and to acquire the love of learning are the aims of education, but the highest is the love of learning.

Returning after considerable absence to the university, from which I graduated many years ago, and speaking as the representative of my fellow alumni, I may be permitted to say a few words regarding the future of the university and its relation to that of the province. That this vast dominion, extending from ocean to ocean, with its great resources of soil and mines, is destined to have a great future and play an important part on this continent and in the world is evident to every thoughtful observer, and is, I may venture to add, as ungrudgingly admitted in the neighboring republic as anywhere. Coming on the stage later than the republic and maturing more slowly, the dominion will have the advantage of profiting by both the mistakes and successes of the republic in attempting to solve the serious industrial and social problems, that are even now pressing for solution. From this point of view the existence side by side of two great English-speaking peoples, differing markedly in constitutional and political aspects, must be reckoned a distinct advantage.

In viewing the possibilities of the future it must occur to every intelligent native of these eastern provinces to ask, what part they are likely to play in the future of the dominion. If New Brunswick is to share in any marked degree in the honor of creating a great nation it will probably not be primarily by virtue of her material resources of field, mine and forest. But, and it has not infrequently happened in the history of the world, that a province or state, which could not rely on the bounty of nature, has found the road to greatness in the development of the character and intelligence of its people. Among the states of Greece, Athens was by no means the richest in material resources, yet her impress on the world has lasted ever since and will never cease. To take a widely different example, Scotland, with its meagre soil and forbidding climate, enjoyed few of the bounties, though many of the beauties of nature: yet her contribution to moulding the thought and directing the destinies of the British Empire has hardly been second to that of her vastly richer neighbor. To take an example nearer home, Massachusetts among the states of the union by no means occupies a leading position in material resources, yet her intellectual, moral, and even industrial leadership is still hardly questioned.

In all these we have examples of what a people lacking the highest material resources of nature's giving can achieve by the instructive or conscious cultivation to the utmost, of her still higher resources of mind and character. And may it not be true this province will see that, in developing to the utmost the intelligence of a naturally intelligent people, lies her true way to a worthy destiny? But this will certainly not be achieved by sinking back into indifference or satisfaction with any system or methods of instruction however good. Nothing but the utmost candor and earnestness in seeking the best the world has to offer in enlightened methods of instruction and the most cordial co-operation by the leaders of public opinion will avail.

We are usually accustomed to think of a university as the pinnacle of a state's educational temple, having regard to the nature of the instruction imparted. But in a truer sense it is the foundation. Educational progress ever proceeds from above downwards; the few are educated and educate the many. The mass of public opinion is met and can only be moved and directed to high aims by the far-seeing intelligence of the educated minority; and, while it may not be true that the wise leaders of a country are all, or even must of them, graduates of universities, yet it is, I think true in general that the greatest single influence for moulding the intelligence of a country and building up its public schools radiates from its seat of highest learning. And in this university which has already served the province so faithfully for over a century, will, I believe, if anywhere, be found the centre of influence that will point the province to its true destiny, provided it receive that enthusiastic support which it deserves and needs.