Addresses by REV. Jesse Appleton, D. D., Late President of Bowdoin College; Delivered at the Annual Commencements, from 1808 to 1818 with a Sketch of (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1820. Excerpt: ... ADDRESS, DELIVERED AT THE COMMENCEMENT IN 1814. Young Gentlemen, In the composition of human beings, we distinguish the body, the intellects, and the heart. The cultivation of these, demands our attention in proportion to their respective importance. Of bodily powers, agility and physical strength are the principal, if not the only constituents. By the intellects we perceive, compare, abstract, and form conclusions. Their province extends to moral, not less than to other relations. Moral ideas, together with their relations, are as truly objects of intellect, as are ideas of number or quantity. Perceiving these relations, we discern the reality of duty and the fitness of actions. But though the obligations of virtue are discerned by the understanding, the understanding is not the seat of moral virtue. There is no conceivable state of the intellects, of which we can predicate either virtue or vice. Moral dispositions or affections are distinct from the understanding; and, in these consist whatever, in accountable beings, is worthy of praise or blame. On this distinction are grounded those few remarks, which the present interesting occasion gives me an opportunity of addressing to you, relative to that union, which ought ever to be maintained between piety and good morals on the one hand, and literature and science on the other. Mind, however capacious, if perverted, does not raise its possessor, so much above brute animals, as it leaves him inferior to the man of moral goodness. So long as the moral character is debased, I know not whether it is desirable, that the intellects should be improved. Knowledge gives power, which is injurious or beneficent, according to the manner, in which it is used. Physical strength will be dangerous, if guided by brute impu...