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A Decade of Addresses, Delivered to the Senior Classes of Bowdoin College
A Decade of Addresses Delivered to the Senior Classes of Bowdoin College Author:William Allen General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1830 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: THIRD ADDRESS, DELIVERED AT THE COMMENCEMENT, AUG. 21, THE IGNORANCE OF MAN. You have now finished your collegia! course of study, and finished it with honor; but, I trust, you are little satisfied with the amount of your acquisitions, and that your exertions for the attainment of knowledge are but just begun. If at this interesting moment I remind you of the Ignorance Op Man, it is not to degrade human learning, but by bringing to your heart a sense of your poverty to awaken in you a more earnest zeal to gain the most valuable treasures of science. It is especially to produce in you that humility, which is the foundation, in man, of all real excellence of character. In the variety of your pursuits in this Seminary you have read the writings and surveyed the lives of some of the most eminent philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome ; and you have probably consid- ered Socrates as holding the first rank. You know, that in the opinion of Cicero ' he was the first, who called down philosophy from heaven to earth, and introduced her into the public walks and private dwellings of men, that she might instruct them concerning life and manners, and concerning things good and evil.' In his wise and enlarged views he considered philosophy as useful, not for display and as the means of gaining applause, not as furnishing the arms of skilful controversy, -- but for extirpating prejudice and subduing habits of vice; and he estimated knowledge according to its bearing on virtue and happiness. He thought, as Milton thought, "That not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know T...« less