In the next place, I would set Thoroughness, which is closely akin
to accuracy. Again, your training here has shown you how needful
it is in scientific research to adopt thorough and exhaustive
methods of procedure. The conditions to be taken into account are so
numerous and complex, the possible combinations so manifold, before
a satisfactory conclusion can be reached. A laborious collection of
facts must be made. Each supposed fact must be sifted out and weighed.
The evidence must be gone over again and yet again, each link in its
chain being scrupulously tested. The deduction to which the evidence
may seem to point must be closely and impartially scrutinised, every
other conceivable explanation of the facts being frankly and fully
considered. Obviously the man whose education has inured him to the
cultivation of a mental habit of this kind is admirably equipped for
success in any walk in life which he may be called upon to enter.
The accuracy and thoroughness which you have learnt to appreciate
and practise at College must never be dropped in later years. Carry
them with you as watchwords, and make them characteristic of all your
undertakings.
In the third place, we may take Breadth. At the outset of your
scientific education you were doubtless profoundly impressed by the
multiplicity of detail which met your eye in every department of
natural knowledge. When you entered upon the study of one of these
departments, you felt, perhaps, almost overpowered and bewildered
by the vast mass of facts with which you had to make acquaintance.
And yet as your training advanced, you gradually came to see that
the infinite variety of phenomena could all be marshalled, according
to definite laws, into groups and series. You were led to look
beyond the details to the great principles that underlie them and
bind them into a harmonious and organic whole. With the help of a
guiding system of classification, you were able to see the connection
between the separate facts, to arrange them according to their
mutual relations, and thus to ascend to the great general laws under
which the material world has been constructed. With all attainable
thoroughness in the mastery of detail, you have been taught to combine
a breadth of treatment which enables you to find and keep a leading
clue even through the midst of what might seem a tangled web of
confusion. There are some men who cannot see the wood for the trees,
and who consequently can never attain great success in scientific
investigation. Let it be your aim to master fully the details of the
tree, and yet to maintain such a breadth of vision as will enable you
to embrace the whole forest within your ken. I need not enlarge on the
practical value of this mental habit in every-day life, nor point out
the excellent manner in which a scientific education tends to develop
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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