Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/456

Again, social progress is, and must be, if I may so call it, a continuous development. The development in the past offers to you a rich inheritance, though it is also attended with peculiar dangers. In the great mass of general principles underlying the social system in this country, and many of which are the products of exigencies felt in archaic and other stirring times of which we can now have but an imperfect notion, there will assuredly be a mixture of error which may operate on men's minds with the traditional power of immemorial prescription, and may, from the very reverence due to their age, easily obtain dominion over you. It would be folly either to abandon from indolence or self-complacency the advantage of your position and to build up an entirely new social system even if it were possible to do so, or to accept what is as the best that can be had on the authority of prescription. To avoid the danger it is necessary to examine anew the whole body of what has descended to you from the past, and to question and trace each element to its origin. The proper spirit in which such work should be undertaken, is, to borrow from a philosophic jurist, one of intellectual freedom, of independence of all authority, but this sense of freedom should not degenerate into arrogant dogmatism, but should be tempered by that feeling of humility which would result from an unbiased contemplation of your limited individual powers. Thus, gentlemen, the revision of the labors of the past, in order to gradually eliminate what is unsuited to the requirements of modern culture and appropriate what is suited to them as your permanent posses- sion, is necessary to enable you to deal with the great problems of social life which will confront you before India is regenerated. In calling your attention to the revival of Sanscrit literature and philosophy in connexion with progress, I desire that you should recognise it as a means whereby you may improve the vernacular literature, and I may say -that until this work of revision is taken in hand by the graduates of the University, and until the results of their research and criticism are presented to the reading public through the vernacular medium, it would be premature to talk of regenerated India or of carrying the people with you when you suggest changes for the improvement of your social system. To such of you as may have a predilection for natural and physical science, I have to say a word. It is a general complaint in the country that the knowledge which you pick up at school is neither augmented nor even kept up, and that it is scarcely used in furthering the advancement of the people. The only reason I can imagine for this comparative neglect is, that it is, perhaps, not found to be directly instrumental in securing , success in the professions which you