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existing University Chairs? In short, I have to face the dilemma:—How shall I faithfully fulfil my commission, as Professor of Technology, and yet faithfully respect the rights of my brother professors?
In reference to this, let me urge, 1st, that you must not interpret the word Technology by its dictionary-meaning, for, like multitudes of other words, its intended signification is much more limited than it might justly be made to bear. It is not, in this respect, however, distinguished from the titles of the other Chairs in this University. My brother-professors have nearly all commissions nominally as wide as my own, and these have been restricted in meaning only by common consent, by traditional custom, or conventional use and wont. My learned colleague, Professor Pillans, might, as Professor of Humanity, i.e., of the humanizing arts and sciences, claim to teach any or all of the subjects taught from the Chairs of his brethren; and it would be enough for him to quote the one line of the Eoman author. Nihil humani me alienum puto, and to say, I consider nothing humanizing foreign to my Chair. Professor Kelland might appeal to Professor Blackie to testify that Mathematics means, etymologically. Learning, and affirm that the wide world of acquired knowledge was open to him as prelector, if he pleased. Sir William Hamilton (whom I do not speak of as colleague, though he kindly welcomes me as such, because I will be content all my days to consider myself his pupil), might simply, as commissioned Professor of Metaphysics, and not because of his boundless learning,—on the one hand, not only ignore Professor Macdougall's genial eloquence, and claim Moral Philosophy as within his province, and further dispossess more than one of the Professors of Theology, for at least great part of each Session, of their Chairs,—but, on the other hand, as Teacher of Psychology, take from the Professors of Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, and nearly all the branches of Medicine, those discussions of mental phenomena in which they so largely and so fitly engage.
There is room, no doubt, for reprisals. Dr Bennett is favoured with a double commission, as Professor of the Institutes of Medicine or Physiology, and each commission would virtually entitle him to discuss the subjects supposed to be sacred to half a dozen other Chairs.
Sir William Hamilton would be the first to acknowledge Logic as an Institute of Medicine; Professor Blackie, I think, recommends
