Lord Derby delivered his Rectorial address to the University of
Edinburgh yesterday week, his chief theme being the advan- tages of culture, in that it sets a man free from the danger of attaching too much value to his own thoughts, or even the thoughts of his own day and generation. " To the ignorant man, England is the world ; the nineteenth century represents all Time. To the student, who has lived in the life of many countries and .many ages, human existence is too complex to be embodied in any formulas. He thinks of the disappointed expectations and the unfulfilled predictions which are the staple of history. He remembers how many burning questions have grown cold, how many immortal principles have not survived their authors. . . . Napo- leon predicting that within fif ty years Europe would be either Repub- lican or Cossack ; Canning calling the South-American Republics into existence to redress the balance of the Old World ; the French thinkers of the last century believing in the immediate downfall -of what they called superstition ; philanthropists, even in liar own time, announcing that the, great European wars had beCome out of date and impossible,—these and a hundred other instances -occur to his mind, when sanguine men predict a future of unlimited progress, because progress has been the rule in Europe during the last five hundred years, or when philosophers attempt to cal- culate the movements of the human mind as astronomers calculate the movements of a comet." 'Be tolerant of conviction in others, but be yourselves steadfast in doubt,' may be said to have been the chief moral of Lord Derby's advice to the Edinburgh students.
