mparison with those on which we differ.

* * * * *

The aim of this lectureship, if I have apprehended it aright, is that
men who are out on the sea of practical life, feeling the force and
strain of the winds and currents of the time, and who therefore
occupy, to some extent, a different point of view from either students
or professors, should come and tell you, who are still standing on
the _terra firma_ of college life, but will soon also have to launch
forth on the same element, how it feels out there on the deep.

Well, there is a considerable difference.

The professorial theory of college life is, that the faculties are
being exercised and the resources collected with which the battles of
life are subsequently to be fought and its victories won. And there
is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in this theory. The acquisitions
of the class-room will all be found useful in future, and your only
regret will be that they have not been more extensive and thorough.
The gymnastic of study is suppling faculties which will be
indispensable hereafter. Yet there is room amidst your studies, and
without the slightest disparagement to them, for a message more
directly from life, to hint to you, that more may be needed in the
career to which you are looking forward than a college can give, and
that the powers on which success in practical life depends may be
somewhat different from those which avail most at your present stage.

There are two very marked types of intellect to be observed amongst
men, which we may call the receptive and the creative. Receptive
intellect has the power of taking fully in what is addressed to it by
others. It separates its acquisitions and distributes them among the
pigeon-holes of the memory. Out of these again it can reproduce them,
as occasion requires, and even make what may be called permutations
and combinations among its materials with skill and facility. The
creative intellect, on the contrary, is sometimes anything but apt to
receive that which people attempt to put into it. Instead of being an
open, roomy vessel for holding things, it may be awkwardly shaped, and
sometimes difficult to open at all. Nor do things pour out of it in a
stream, as water does from a pitcher; they rather flash out of it,
like sparks from the anvil. Instead of possessing its own knowledge,
it is possessed by it; it burns as it emits it, and its fire is
contagious.

The former is