The True Study.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20205, 16 January 1934, Page 6

The True Study.

”Intrigues All the Higher Faculties (Special to the '* Star.”) WELLINGTON, January IG. “'JHIE TWO SUBJECTS in which an examiner can free himself best from personal bias are mathematics and languages,” said Professor J. Macmillan Brown, Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, in his address to the University Senate to-day. “In the former he can test both knowledge and power of thought by problems. In the latter he should depend most of all on translation of passages at sight from or into the language concerned. “ But there is no true study of any language unless its literature is also known and the civilisation that it expresses. And it is this that has made language the favourite cultural subject. It deals with the great problems that have made modern man what he is. It surveys the growth of the htiman spirit and learns the problems that are still to be solved and the way to their solution. It intrigues all the higher faculties and especially the imagination. It is the training-school for poets, philosophers and statesmen. “ Most of all is it so in the case of the classical languages; for they open up to us the greatest creative period of human history and the springs of our modern civilisation, the far-off heights whence flow the streams that have enriched our modern world with ambitions and far-reaching thoughts and designs. The purely linguistic treatment of them, though making the art of examination easy, leads the mind to no height that overlooks the ocean whither we are hastening.”