The Dedicated Life: An Address Delivered to the Students of the University of Edinburgh on January 10, 1907

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John Murray, 1907 - 29 pages
 

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Page 27 - Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, When the spirit's true endowments Stand out plainly from its false ones, And apprise it if pursuing Or the right way or the wrong way, To its triumph or undoing.
Page 8 - ... and quality, are what are essential, and what the University must seek to produce. If Universities exist in sufficient numbers and strive genuinely to foster, as the outcome of their training, the moral and intellectual virtue, which is to be its own reward, the humanity which has the ethical significance that ought to be inseparable from high culture, then the State need not despair.
Page 28 - Such a University cannot be dependent in its spirit. It cannot live and thrive under the domination either of the Government or the Church. Freedom and development are the breath of its nostrils, and it can recognise no authority except that which rests on the right of the Truth to command obedience.
Page 6 - ... are wide or sure unless they are such that all the world can be legitimately asked to accept them as foundations. Such a test leaves room for abundance of healthy party difference and criticism, but it insists on that without which there cannot be real stability. The foundation of purpose in the State, through all changes of party policy, must, if the national life is to grow permanently and not diminish, to prosper and not to fade, be ethical. A nation can insist on its just rights and on due...
Page 22 - This may not, regarded from the outside, appear to the spectator to be the greatest of possible careers, but the ideal career is the one in which we can be greatest according to the limits of our capacity. A life into which our whole strength is thrown, in which we look neither to the right nor to the left, if to do so is to lose sight of duty — such a life is a dedicated life. The forms may be manifold. The lives of all great men have been dedicated ; singleness of purpose has dominated them throughout....
Page 20 - Theatetus, you have, or wish to have, any more embryo thoughts, they will be all the better for the present investigation, and if you have none, you will be soberer and humbler and gentler to other men, not fancying that you know what you do not know.
Page 10 - State, and through their disciples there penetrated to the public the thought that the life of the State, with its controlling power for good, was as real and as great as the life of the individual. Men and women were taught to feel that in the law and order which could be brought about by the general will alone was freedom in the deepest and truest sense to be found — the freedom which was to be realized only by those who had accepted whole-heartedly the largest ends in place of particular and...
Page 23 - ... him. It is the function of education in the highest sense to teach him that there are latent in him possibilities beyond what he has dreamed of, and to develop in him capacities of which, without contact with the highest learning, he had never become aware. And so the University becomes, at its best, the place where the higher ends of life are made possible of attainment, where the finite and the infinite are found to come together.
Page 10 - That man alone attains to life and freedom who daily has to conquer them anew.' The true leader must teach to his countrymen the gospel of the wide outlook. He must bid them live the larger life, be unselfish, be helpful, be reverent. But he must teach them yet more. He must fill the minds of those who hear him, even of such as are...
Page 15 - The passion for excellence, the domination of a single purpose which admits of no intrusion, can suffice for him who would reach the heights. When the passion for excellence is once in full swing it knows no limits. It dominates as no baser passion can, for it is the outcome of faith that can move mountains.

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