Volume 1

The Hunterian oration : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on the 14th of February, 1879 / by George Murray Humphry.

  • George Murray Humphry
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Hunterian oration : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on the 14th of February, 1879 / by George Murray Humphry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cei What is really wanted, and what teachers and examiners must combine to promote, is, to use the words of the ‘laughing philosopher’ Democritus, who was one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity, that “we should strive not after fulness of knowledge, but ful- ness of understanding,” that is, that we should strive for good, clear, solid, intelligent, producible and avail- able knowledge of the kind that will be useful in after life—not so much the refinements of Chemistry, Ana- tomy and Physiology, which, in their aggregate, are likely to perplex, encumber, stupefy, and then pass away like chaff before the wind, but the essential fundamental facts and principles welded together, and sO woven into the student’s mind that he can hold them firmly and wield them effectually, and that he is conscious of them, not as the goods of other men, or as dogmas which he has because they were imposed upon him, but as his own possessions, of which he appreciates the value because he knows how to use them. ‘The knowledge which a man can use is the only real knowledge, the only knowledge which has life and growth in it, and converts itself into practical power. The rest hangs like dust about the brain, or dries like rain-drops off the stones!.” It is a hopeful feature of our time that teaching is now occupying the serious attention of thoughtful minds, is beginning to be regarded as a science,— assuredly it is second to none in practical importance, —and that it is likely to receive that recognition at our Universities, as a subject of special study, which it ' Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, p. 267.
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