an inaugural address on the occasion of his appointment to the
Lord Rectorship. It contained much to be admired, as did all he wrote.
There ran through it, however, the tacit assumption that life is for
learning and working. I felt at the time that I should have liked to
take up the opposite thesis. I should have liked to contend that life is
not for learning, nor is life for working, but learning and working are
for life. The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct
under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of
knowledge are secondary. It scarcely needs saying that the primary use
of work is that of supplying the materials and aids to living
completely; and that any other uses of work are secondary. But in men's
conceptions the secondary has in great measure usurped the place of the
primary. The apostle of culture as it is commonly conceived, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, makes little or no reference to the fact that the first use of
knowledge is the right ordering of all actions; and Mr. Carlyle, who is
a good exponent of current ideas about work, insists on its virtues for
quite other reasons than that it achieves sustentation. We may trace
everywhere in human affairs a tendency to transform the means into the
end. All see that the miser does this when, making the accumulation of
money his sole satisfaction, he forgets that money is of value only to
purchase satisfactions. But it is less commonly seen that the like is
true of the work by which the money is accumulated--that industry too,
bodily or mental, is but a means; and that it is as irrational to pursue
it to the exclusion of that complete living it subserves, as it is for
the miser to accumulate money and make no use of it. Hereafter, when
this age of active material progress has yielded mankind its benefits,
there will, I think, come a better adjustment of labour and enjoyment.
Among reasons for thinking this, there is the reason that the process of
evolution throughout the organic world at large, brings an increasing
surplus of energies that are not absorbed in fulfilling material needs,
and points to a still larger surplus for the humanity of the future. And
there are other reasons, which I must pass over. In brief, I may say
that we have had somewhat too much of "the gospel of work." It is time
to preach the gospel of relaxation.

This is a very unconventional after-dinner speech. Especially it will be
thought strange that i