The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest
importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years
the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself
into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form
itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually
to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of
an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence, I mean among other things--and very chiefly--honesty in
all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the
way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that.
Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really
come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all
that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to
be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing
as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it
is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with
intelligence.
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