When you have completed your course of study and leave this College,
crowned, I hope, with academic distinction, there will be your future
career in life to choose and follow. A small number among you may,
perhaps, be so circumstanced as to be able to devote yourselves
entirely to original scientific research, selecting such branches
of inquiry as may have specially interested you here, and giving up
your whole time and energy to investigation. A much larger number
will, no doubt, enter professions where a scientific training can be
turned to practical account, and you may become engineers, chemists,
or medical men. But in the struggle for existence, which every year
grows keener amongst us, these professions are more and more crowded,
so that a large proportion of your ranks may not succeed in finding
places there, and may in the end be pushed into walks in life where
there may be little or no opportunity for making much practical use of
the knowledge in science which you have gained here. To those who may
ultimately be thus situated it will always be of advantage to have had
the mental training given in this Institution, and it will probably be
your own fault if, even under unfavourable conditions, you do not find,
from time to time, chances of turning your scientific acquirements to
account. Your indebtedness to your professors demands that you shall
make the effort, and, for the credit of the College, you are bound to
do your best.
Among the mental habits which your education in science has helped
to foster, there are a few which I would specially commend to your
attention as worthy of your most sedulous care all through life.
In the first place I would put Accuracy. You have learnt in the
laboratory how absolutely essential this condition is for scientific
investigation. We are all supposed to make the ascertainment of the
truth our chief aim, but we do not all take the same trouble to attain
it. Accuracy involves labour, and every man is not gifted with an
infinite capacity for taking pains. Inexactness of observation is sure
sooner or later to be detected, and to be visited on the head of the
man who commits it. If his observations are incorrect, the conclusions
he has drawn from them may be vitiated. Thus all the toil he has
endured in a research may be rendered of no avail, and the reputation
he might have gained is not only lost but replaced by discredit. It
is quite true that absolute accuracy is often unattainable; you can
only approach it. But the greater the exertion you make to reach it,
the greater will be the success of your investigations. The effort
after accuracy will be transferred from your scientific work to your
every-day life and become a habit of mind, advantageous both to
yourselves and to society at large.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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