Another consideration which you will permit me to present to your attention, as suggestive of salutary thought in connection with the benefits to be derived through an association like yours, is this: no man who has done nothing more than go through a college course, it matters not how brilliant he may have been, can rightly be called educated. Education is the work of the man, and not of the boy. The best that school‐training can do is to teach the boy how he should study when he has become a man. Though there will generally be found a certain refinement, correctness of expression, and intelligent appreciativeness in those who have made a collegiate course, yet, if this be not followed up by the study of the man, they will be found to possess neither mental strength nor logical accuracy. Before entering upon the direct treatment of the proper method to be pursued by those who seek to improve their minds, allow me to say a word of the work of preparation, which is twofold, intellectual and moral. We should prepare the mind for the reception of truth by freeing it from all those opinions which rest upon no other foundation than prejudice. There are personal prejudices, family prejudices, national prejudices, prejudices of childhood, prejudices of old age, prejudices of men, prejudices of women, all of which tend to prevent the view of things as they are in themselves, by directing the mind, in an undue manner, to their relations to ourselves. Personal prejudice inclines each one to think too well of himself, his talents, his acquirements; it is that, in a word, which makes it almost impossible that any power should “The giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us.” It is the great obstacle to self‐knowledge and the fruitful source of error, warping the judgment and perverting the will. It creates within us a tendency to deceive ourselves concerning whatever we love or hate. National prejudice is another very common phase of this universal weakness. How few men are capable of forming just and fair opinions of the manners, customs, and opinions of foreign nations! The infirmity of even great minds is, in this respect, lamentable; above all, this is an original sin of the English people; for they—if I be not myself under the influence of the prejudice which I condemn—are the most narrow and insular, in their self‐conceit, of all the peoples of the earth. It is next to miraculous that an Englishman should judge fairly of the Irish, the French, the Italians, or the Americans; and this unfortunate defect of the national mind has been stamped upon the literature of the country.(72)