“A Harmony of Many Virtues”

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 95, 16 January 1926, Page 13

“A Harmony of Many Virtues”

Mr. Baldwin on the Ideal Character

national character.

_ T is the education received unconsciously that counts for most in the | making of a man. The University can only work within the limits I of the human material which it receives from the homes and schools I of the country. ft can provide a favourable soil for the developing intelligence under the supervision of expert gardeners, but it cannot grow tigs from thistles. The University is a rich storehouse of knowledge—(cheers and dissent)—and some fragments of its treasures do somehow find their way into the possession of the students. (Laughter.) The University is also an instrument for increasing knowledge, and some students a small proportion—do contrive to add to the accumulated learning of the ages. But besides, or rather in the process of, transmitting and increasing knowledge and training ability, the University is a school of character. That is true not only of the common room and the playing field; it is also true of the lecture room and the laboratory.

In a notable address to the Students of Edinburgh University, deliverrd on the occasion of his installation as Lord Rector, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, British Minister, gave expression to some admirable sentiments on the subject of the development of individual and

'The ideal character is a harmony of many virtues; and it is a tradition amongst us to give to truthfulness the position of cardinal virtue. Hence, for example, the curious power of Lord Althorp, who was known to have said to the House of Commons, “I know this to be right. I cannot remember why—but you may take it that it is so”—(laughter)—and they believed him. And if the noblest exercise of freedom is the pursuit of truth, the best equipment for the search is to be truthful. The inculcation of the practice of truthfulness no less than the acquisition of knowledge is the motive force of our educational system. The student is here to learn habits of accuracy in measurement, precision in statement, honesty in handling evidence, fairness in presenting a cause in a word, to be true in word and deed. That is the goal of British education, because it is recognised that no man can be a worthy citizen whose word cannot be trusted—(hear, hear) —and whose deed is compounded of deceit.

Men think by means of words and communicate with each other through their medium. This “most noble and profitable invention of speech is man’s proudest triumph over nature, without which there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth nor society, nor contract for peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.” Words are the currency of love and friendship, of making and marketing, of peace a;id war. Nations are bound and loosed by them. Three or four simple words can move waves of emotion through the hearts of multitudes like great tides of the sea—“ Lest we forget,” “Patriotism is not enough.” There is a well-known passage in the writings of John Stuart Mill—(cheers and dissent)—l am glad his name is still known—where he doubts whether all the inventions of machinery have on balance added to human happiness. lam always reminded by that passage of another m John Locke, where he is so impressed with the defects of language as to affirm that if anyone “shall well consider the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that are spread in the world by an ill-use of words, he .will find some reason to doubt whether language, as it has been employed, has contributed more to the improvement or hindrance of knowledge among mankind.”

The Scottish arc cautious—(hear, hear)—it has been said, because they have lived with one another for so long. (Laughter and cheers). Y’ou are capable of practising great restraint and economy in the use of words; but I do not think that even you will go as far as Locke and wish to put us all into a Trappist monastery. Such, knowledge as there.is in the world has been built up by the help of words. A civilisation without words is perhaps conceivable, but under it the life of men would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But if we cannot go all the way with Locke, we can agree with his successor, Bentham, that "error is never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its roots in language.” “Improper terms are the chains which bind men to unreasonable practises. Every improper term contains the germ of fallacious propositions; it forms a cloud, which conceals the nature of the thing, and presents a frequently invincible obstacle to the discovery of truth.” It is in a similar mood that Mr. Wells complains of the fluidity of thought and the fixity of language. Master of English as he is, he finds its terms solid, opaque, and stable, and therefore “incurably inaccurate.” That is not merely a defence of philosophic doubt —(laughter)—but a conclusion of despair, which, if we accepted literally, would close all Universities to-morrow, and destroy ail foundations of belief. (Laughter and cheers).

“No small part of education lies in learning the right use of words, m tracing their birth and behaviour, in fitting them closely to facts and ideas. That is why you are here invited to study the Humanities, not only for their own fair sake, but for the discipline which is experienced in the manipulation of two of the finest instruments ever devised to express the minds of men. Through the Humanities you should learn not only something of the polity and law, the poetrv and eloquence of the ancient world, but you. should learn the value of the words of your own native tongue. No man who can do good Greek or Latin prose can deceive people with words except he sin against the light. He can no longer be deceived himself. He will know that to use words equivocally is prostitution. Nor does he need to use italics in speech or writing. Headlines cannot hypnotise him, and the latest sensation is already stale.

Through mathematics we learn on the very threshold a lesson which, if universally known and applied, would prevent most of the ills to which the world is heir. To know and realise that two and two make four—(cheers) — and can in no circumstances make anything else, is to be equipped with knowledge that will save us daily from mistakes, unpleasant to ourselves, and possibly disastrous to others. I know that some of Euclid’s axioms, which appear to commonsense to be necessary, and are declared by mathematicians “to derive their appearance of necessity from our mere familiarity with actual space, and not from any (a priori) logical foundation. By imagining worlds in which these axioms arc false, the mathematicians have used logic to show the possibility of spaces differing from that in which we live.” But even these daring speculators assure us that in any possible world they feel that two and two would be four, and this is not a mere fact, but a necessity to which everything actual and possible must conform. Whatever be the case in a world of Einsteins, or in Russia, over most part of the world two and two are still believed to make four. Without that knowledge, or in the belief that two and two in a happier environment make five you may indeed upset a constitution, but you will never make an engine, nor, if you were in a possession of a ship, could you bring it into any port in the world. Those, therefore, who would navigate the ship of State, if they would avoid shipwreck, had better base their sailing orders on this platitudinous verity, Through all your studies of the physical sciences you are being taught a similar lesson. Principles are constantly being subjected to the test of fact, purified in the furnace of experiment. Working hypotheses are being confronted with masses of detail, and as a result arc discarded, revised or quickened. You strive to compel the material facts of the world to reveal their nature, you watch and record their behaviour, and truth is the accurate statement of the facts observed. By means of this discipline you learn that things arc what they arc, and the consequences will be what they will be.

Lastly, there is the study of the ultimate science, the science of sciences, of modern philosophy—(oh!)—for which the University has been, so justly famous. There was a time when it might be said that the chief export of Scotland, measured in values, was metaphysics. (“What about whisky?”) It was to this University that more than one Prime Minister came from England to sit at rhe feet of Dugald Stewart. The penetration of English practice by .Scottish reflection was one of the most fruitful results of the Union, and is still happily proceeding in the perron of our distinguished chairman. (Cheers). Philosophy fctces the student to examine the assumptions on which all the other sciences rest, the hypotheses by which they all work. You ask not only How? but Why? You challangc all appearance; you doubt science itself in your search for reality. Magic, rayfli, ritual, religion; the mysterious and emotion.il story of human belief; the theological speculations of mankind; the very instrument by which mankind knows anything at all—all arc crossexamined as facts of experience, ami an attempt is made to interpret them and lit them into some coherent explanation of our life and destiny. You cannot go any distance on tins road without arriving at the distinction between true assertions and false ones, and you will not need to travel much farther before reaching the distinction between right and wrong.

Throughout all these activities in which you arc engaged in this University there is the double motive of acquiring knowledge and learning to think truly The latter is the more important task. The greatest service this or any University can render the modern world is to discharge well this duty which is laid upon it, and to send forth year after year generations of young men and women who have not only a stock of ideas but minds which will turn on the poles of truth. Ability to read is not synonymous with ability to reflect on •Khat is read. Better to doubt methodically than to think capriciously. Education that has merely taught people to follow a syllogism without enabling diem to detect a fallacy has left them in constant peril. And, as with the fallacv, so with its near relation, the half-truth. For, though it has been accepted through the ages th.".t half a loaf is better than no bread—(cheers) —

half a truth is not only not better than no truth, it is worse than many lies and the slave of lies and half truth is ignorance. Ignorance, static and inert, is bad; but ignorance is motion, as Goethe once observed, is the mos terrible force in nature, for it may destroy in its passage the accumulated mental and material capital of generations. You will need this habit of truth when you leave this home of learning and reflection. It is our greatest national asset. The industries and commence of this country, its enormous foreign trade, involving innumerable ransactions with known and unknown customers, has been made possible not only bytl e enterprise of our merchants, but by their integrity. (Hear, hear. Jhe c nowhere in the world, 1 believe, a higher standard of commcrmal honour tan in this country (Cheers.) And the same is true of our Courts of Law , wll enjoy a world-wide prestige, nowhere better exemplified than in the Admiralty Court, to which shipowners from all over the world resort, even in cases where no British ship is in the collision or salvage operation. Why is it, then, when we turn to polities, a lower standard of truthfulness is alleged to prevail in the world of science or of business? I am not now talking of this country more than another. I think our reputation i at least as good as that of any other country in this regard, and it has grown in the last 100 years and is still growing. The sc.entist >s assumed to be a truth-lover; honesty is proverbially the best policy in business; but politicians have been despised for hypociisy and dishonesty in all the literatures o the Old World and the New. I open the work of a brilliant Cambridge scholar and theologian, and this is what I read on the first pagc:-“In regard to truth the more one reads of man’s notions about the meaning and method of civil society, the more often is one inclined in despair to say that truth has as little to do with politics as it has with most politicians.” (Laughter). And this is the verdict of a learned foreign observer at the end of an immense treatise on the pathology of partv government“To the low' types which the human race has produced, from Cain down to Tartuffe, the age of democracy has added a new one—the politician.” (Laughter). What is the explanation of this evil reputation which attaches not to politicians of one party, but to the whole race? Primarily, I suppose, it is due to the fact that ever since States began to be they have been in peril, and have trusted to force for their safety. War has been the normal history. Savagery has never been far away from the realm of law. How’ long is it since that ceased to be true of Scotland? With war and the preparation for war go the stratagems of diplomacy, the dropping of the ordinary code of morals, a holiday for truth, and an aftermath of cynicism. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues, wrote the author of “Leviathan.” The statesman’s goal is the preservation of the State, and reasons of State have been held to justify all policies whatsoever.

In the arena of international rivalry and conflict men have placed patriotism above truthfulness as the indispensable virtue of statesmen. “When the entire safety of a country is at stake, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful, must intervene is a copybook maxim from the pages of a well-known exponent of the art of government. And it was a statesman much nearer our own times who said to a group of friends, “If we had done for ourselves the things which we are doing for Italy, we should be great rascals.” It was the prevailing view for centuries, openly avowed and defended, that you could have one code of morals among nations and another and much more exacting one among individuals, that you could be a Machiavellian abroad and a Christian at home. Whatever may have been our lapses we have never in this country accepted this view in the bald and summary form in which I am putting it. It was nevertheless a British Prime Minister who said that "no great country was ever saved by good men” which is perhaps why Lord Acton said that great men were nearly always bad men. (Laughter). But the shifts to which statesmen and diplomatists have resorted in the field of foreign affairs, especially in time of strain or open conflict, have helped to give all politicians a bad name. The party system is perhaps a contributory cause. The system has its advantages, its team work, its loyalties, and others which I need not stop to describe, especially as the whole' subject was most ably analysed by my colleague, Lord Cecil, in his address to the students at Aberdeen a few days ago. To our sporting countrymen, it appears as the game, and as such it has its rules, and these for the most part tire honourably obeyed, and arc an important help to probity in our public life. But the party system does put a certain embargo on a complete frankness of speech in the arena of debate.

The material of politics is human nature, its motives honourable and base, its appetites for power and for service, its passions, its prejudices, its memories and aspirations. But the politician cannot work with scales and forceps, with test-tube and mortar. His instruments are the written and spoken word. Politics can never be an exact science. Democracy is government by discussion, by talk. Politicians must talk, and they cannot to-day, like Pitt, confine their speeches to the House of Commons. The perils of the platform orator have been pointed out from the days of Cleon. Words have lost some of their equivocal character since his day. The difference between the Greek sophist and the modern demagogue, it is said, consists in this—the one displayed his ingenuity by appearing to prove that which his hearers knew to be false, the other displays it by appearing to prove that which his hearers wish to be true. It is the business of the Universities to change all this, and they are doing it.

The politician is much nearer in type to the barrister and advocate than to the scientist The latter has no case to prove; he sits humbly before the facts and lets them speak. The advocate and politician arc more interested in persuasion than in proof. I hey have a client or a policy to defend. lhe political audience is not dishonest in itself, nor does it desire to approve dishonesty or misrepresentation in others, but it is an audience only imperfectly prepared to fellow a close argument, and the speaker wishes to make a favourable impression, to secure support for a policy. It is easy to sec how this may lead to the depreciation of the verbal currency and to the circulation ol promises which cannot be cashed. Closely allied with this is the pressure laid upon the politician in a democratic State to speak while important negotiations are in process, however inconvenient the moment. lhe result once more is inevitably to place a xcto on complete frankness and to tempt recourse to words which arc nebulous, hesitating, ambiguous or misleading. Some of us have become as adept as the Prague poet who went to see Beranger in 18'1i, and had to answer a few questions. Was Prague in Hungary or in Poland ?—ln neither one nor the other. Was Bohemia in Austria or Germany ?—ln both. Was the Prussian monarchy absolute or constitutional ?—Partly one, partly the other. At last Beranger lost patience. “Frenchmen,” he cried “like things to be clear. What is not clear is not French.” If the subject is o'*' of high foreign policy, the wrong words may raise issues not settled by dropping pieces of paper in a ballot-box, but by dropping bombs on cities. That is the essential difference between the methods of politics and of business. I come back to where 1 begun. False words, said the dying Socrates, are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Although the use of words may be abused and the fight for their honour may at times seem hopeless, we must never give up the struggle to use them solely in the service of truth. Let us aim at meaning what we say, and saying what we mean. The price man has to pay. for the good things he enjoys is constant watchfulness lest they be employed for evil. Has not this been the case from the dawn of history with drink, language and liberty? Let us, in the language of Leviathan, use perspicuous words, having first snuffed and putged them (torn ambiguity and made them luminous. Let us take our stand on public right and a law of nations with Grotius rather than with Machiavelli; let us seek to moralise our public intercourse and reduce the area of casuistrv and duplicity. 1 bat is not onlx the accepted principle amongst us, but it is, I am sure, in haimony with a widespread instinct in the “British people. It asserted itself in August 1911, when it was made plain that ethics was not a branch of politics, but the reverse. It is at the root of our support of the League of Nations at Geneva-a city with which Scotland has had spiritual ties for centuries—(cheers)—and from which your Churches derive their svstem of regulated freedom It is truth alone that will “destroy the face of the covering cast over all people and the veil that is spread over all nations.” There is much that is profoundly wrong and remediable in our civilisation, but let us not lightly discard the gains so hardly won from the savagery which so readily besets us. In stretching forth our hands to the farther shore let us realise that civilisation itself is but tlic ice formed in process of ages on the turbulent stream of unbridled human passion, and while this ice seemed to onr fathers secure and permanent it had rotted and cracked during the agony of the Great War, and in places the sub merged torrent had broken through leaving fragments in constant collision threatening bv their attrition to diminish and ultimatclv disappear The more need for von. the lamp-bearers of your generation, to guide vonr swps bv the truth mid to light the way for the wandering peoples of the world. .(Loud cheers) < ,