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.

1 Year--Politics, Republic, Dialogues of Plato.
2 Years--Moral Philosophy.
2 Years--Life of Christ.
1 Year--Sermons.
2 Years--Greek Philosophy; Thales to Socrates.

I turn over the last pages of Jowett's "Life and Letters," and I
find a list of his works. Is there a moral philosophy in the list?
No. A life of Christ? No. A treatise on Greek philosophy? No.
But I do find a volume of college sermons, published since his
death, and also a new edition of his "Plato." One of the most
pathetic things in the volumes that cover his life is the constant
reference to _agenda_--things he was to do. But the _agenda_ rapidly
become _nugae_--impossibilities--and the reason was simply, as it
ever is, the lack of time.

To save time, take time in large pieces. Do not cut time up into bits.
Adopt the principle of continuous work. The mind is like a locomotive.
It requires time for getting under headway. Under headway it makes its
own steam. Progress gives force as force makes progress. Do not slow
down as long as you run well and without undue waste. Take advantage
of momentum. Prolonged thinking leads to profound t