University of Texas Austin - Cactus Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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• c-7 rc r ACTUS • To All Students of the University S ' E draw near to another Commencement my mind is running upon the rapidly recurring years and the ever-flowing yet con- stanth- renewed stream of students whose lives are touching ours, and then going out. What have you gotten here? We have had a message for you, a message with many sides, presented from many angles, viewed from many standpoints, yet essentially one. Have we made it clear to you so that you have been able to see it and, more than that, to make it your own? After all that is the important thing, that you have made it your own. The process of the college is necessarily analytical. Things are here broken up into their constituent parts so that you may see each part for what it is. But if the process is an anah ' tical one, yet the object is wholly s} ' nthetic, for it is not enough that you should know the con- stituent elements of things but you must also see them in their relations. When you have taken the clock to pieces to see what makes the wheels go round, you must not lose sight of the faCt that it must all be put together again, for the purpose of the clock is to keep time and nothing else. Down at the bottom that represents just what we have been trying to do for you here. Our ultimate purpose is not to store your memories with certain forms of knowledge, nor to acquaint you with any certain body of facts, nor to give you a facility either great or small in any particular line of endeavor, so that you may consider yourself a master therein. Our effort is to bring you into contact with stores of knowledge, with the accumulations of world experience, with conditions and theories and problems, so that your powers may be aroused, all your spiritual powers, and that they may try themselves, may be exercised and strengthened, so that you may afterwards be able to set your own lessons and do them, and bring to all of you problems after college life not the rules but the abilit)- which college life affords. If you have in any sort gotten this ability to see into the heart of things, to think straightly and thoroughly, to analyse and to put together, to see life thoroughly and to see it whole, then we are glad. If you haven ' t, then your time and our efforts have been wasted, for the trial by iire of } ' Our after life will reveal no costly stones but only wood, hay and stubble of four years thrown away. -»r J? Ka o •

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• c-y Tcp C OTUS • i ROBERT ERNEST VINSON, D. D., LL. D. President of the Universit ■ of Texas .t f(aKO

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• c-y rc CACTUS • i Board of Regents C. E. KEI.LEV i-RED W. COOK L. J. WORTH AM LUTCHER STARK W. R. BRENTS 1. A. KEMP W. H. DOUGHERTY H. A. WROE icaleo RALPH STEINER