of nature it has before now contained within its precincts.
Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the
experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it
includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary
means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual
tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national
taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims
to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of
the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the
intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear
conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing
them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It
teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to
disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to
discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit,
and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate
himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to
bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an
understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any
society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and
when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can
ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has
nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a
pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be
serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to
trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose
of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which
has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a
gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without
which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and
disappointment have a charm. The art which tends to make a man all this,
is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the
art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible,
less certain, less complete in its result.

Discourse VIII.

K