There is not, in the whole of Bacon’s writings, a remark more profoundly
characteristic of the man and his philosophy, than is embodied in his
epigram that Antiquity is the Youth of the World. If men could only have
had the courage to act upon this truth as soon as it was pointed out,—if
they could but have seen, that, in their mode of reckoning antiquity,
they made always the mistake of beginning the calculations from the
wrong end, and that, in everything relating to the progress of
knowledge, and the advancement of the species, the Present, not the
Past, should be deemed of superior authority,—how many miseries society
would have spared itself, and how much earlier it would have profited by
the greatest of its teachers, Experience!
‘For antiquity,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘the opinion which men cherish
concerning it is altogether negligent, and scarcely congruous even to
the name. For the old age and grandevity of the world are to be truly
counted as antiquity; which are properly to be ascribed to our times,
not to the younger age of the world, such as it was with the ancients.
Since that age, in respect to us indeed, is ancient and greater; but in
respect to the world itself, was new and lesser. And in reality, as we
look for a greater acquaintance with human affairs, and a more mature
judgment, from an old than from a young man, on account of his
experience, and the variety and abundance of the things which he has
seen, and heard, and considered, just so it is fit also that much
greater things be expected from our age (if it knew its strength, and
would endeavour and apply) than from the old times; as being a more
advanced age of the world, and enlarged and accumulate with numberless
experiences and observations.’
Have these pregnant sentences lost their meaning in the two centuries
and a half that have since rolled away? Let us take the wealthiest and
most distinguished seminary of learning now existing in England, and
judge.
At the commencement of the present century, when the Novum Organum had
been written nearly two hundred years, the examinations at the
University of Oxford, so far as they were scientific at all, and not
restricted to learned languages, turned entirely on the scholastic logic
which the Novum Organum had shown to be a foul obstruction to knowledge.
The new and true logic, as explained by Bacon, was never mentioned in
the venerable place; and the new discoveries of the laws of nature to
which it had led, formed no part of the general course of study, or of
the subjects of public examination. It was quite possible for an Oxford
man to have brought away a distinguished degree in the sciences, without
knowing the truths of universal gravitation, or of the celestial
motions, or of the planetary forces, or of any one of the provisions
made by nature for the stability of the system we inhabit; and the very
highest Oxford degree in the non-scientific departments, did not imply,
any more than it does even yet, the remotest knowledge of modern
languages or literature, of modern history or philosophy, of whether it
might not have been Cromwell who discovered America, or Columbus who
fought at Marston Moor. For any interest that the students at Oxford
University were required to take in such matters, the past three hundred
years might never have existed, or have been utterly annihilated, and
all their wondrous burden of experiences melted into air.
It was not till after the nineteenth century had begun, that some sense
of what had been going on in the world outside crept into the cloisters
at Oxford. Statutes were then passed to recognise the Newtonian
improvements in philosophy, and recommending, though not necessitating,
their adoption into the course for honours. Honours nevertheless
continued to be taken without them; and it is notorious that the soil
has been ungenial to their growth, and that they never have flourished
in it. Oxford, in effect, continued up to this day no other than it was
four centuries ago. Apart from the doubtful discipline of life and
manners attainable within its walls, it is still no more than a huge
theological school, where the lay youth of England are admitted to
participate in such meagre allowance of intellectual training as the
clergy think safe for themselves; where Manchester and Birmingham are
ignored; where the Greek and Latin authors continue in the same esteem
as when they actually contained whatever existed of learning left upon
the earth, and no education could proceed without them; and from which
there issue into the world yearly reinforcements of the upper classes of
society, less able to cope with the wants and duties that surround them,
and less acquainted with the laws and operations by which the present is
to be guided into the future, than any self-taught merchant’s clerk at
Liverpool, or any sharp engineer’s lad at the railway in Euston Square.
Now, what has been the answer from Oxford when reproaches of this kind
have been addressed to it? What was its answer when ridiculed, forty
years ago, for teaching what rational men had been laughing at for more
than a century? It amounted to this—that so intimately had the original
statutes of the University interwoven the Aristotelian methods with the
whole course of its studies and exercises, and so sacredly were its
officers bound to see to the enforcement of those statutes, that the
last stronghold from which any such learning could be dislodged was the
University, to which its mere forms and practices unhappily continued to
be essential, even long after every vestige of reality had vanished out
of them. In other words it was confessed that Oxford had been so
constructed as a place of study, that the rules and statutes which
should have been framed for the reception of truth, in whatever quarter
it might appear, had turned out to be only available for the retention
and perpetuation of error; and that Education, whose express province
everywhere else was to absorb and make profit of every new acquisition,
was miserably bound, on this spot only, to reject them all. Precisely
the same arguments have very lately been repeated. When the great ‘whip’
of the country parsons brought up a majority against the Modern History
statute twelve months ago, this was the plea on which bigotry rallied
her forces; and when more recently the statute was again proposed, the
same plea would have secured it the same reception, if the old flock of
reverend Thwack-’ums had not meanwhile tired of the expense and trouble
of being dragged in a drove from their parsonages to the Senate House,
to bleat forth ignorant _non placets_.
As it was, the History statute was passed with its notable limitation
against the events of the last sixty years. The Oxford scholar may now
sail down the stream of modern story as long as the water is smooth, or
the storm seen only in the distance; but as he nears the explosive point
of 1789, of which the vast and terrible wrecks are still tumbling around
us, a huge board warns him of ‘danger,’ and his frail little cock-boat
of history is driven forcibly all the way back again. Such is the point
of advance to which the present year of our Lord has brought the
University of Oxford. Such is the provision made at the wealthiest place
of education in the world, in the middle of the nineteenth century, for
that true and subtle understanding of modern life and institutions on
which the peaceful development of the twentieth century will mainly
depend! But Oxford was founded by a Church, which, amid all ludicrous
surrounding evidences of her failures and her follies, still claims to
be infallible; and the worst peculiarities of the founder cleave to the
foundation. The next fifty years will have to show, however, whether an
institution shall be allowed to continue in the annual disposal of some
half million or more of money for a purpose she so manifestly mistakes,
that even the learning she prefers to every other is less taught to her
scholars for the wisdom to be found in it, than for mere constructive
skill in the language by which that wisdom is conveyed.
Sydney Smith has remarked it as one of the great advantages of the
classical education in which we are trained in this country, that it
sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity
in thought. ‘It is impossible for us,’ he exclaims, in one of those
noble lectures on moral philosophy of which the fragments have recently
been published, ‘in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the
great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully
related, without catching, _ourselves_, some taste for greatness, and a
love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things
than other men. And though the state of order and discipline into which
the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such
things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of
Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security
for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest
antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice;
the noblest incitement to love truth and manly independence and
honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the
system of life upon the rock of integrity.’
But is the opportunity fairly afforded for this? Is not the attention
which ought to be fixed upon Things, to secure any part of the gain thus
eloquently set before us, for the most part distracted and occupied by
Words, in the system which commonly prevails? Has not the labour to be
undergone in obtaining the ready verbal skill exacted in College
examinations, a direct tendency to weaken our pleasure in the history,
philosophy, or poetry on which we grind and sharpen that verbal skill?
We apprehend that this is really the case; and that the old learning
which Oxford persists in thinking all-sufficient for the wants of our
new and busy life, is taught upon a method which strips it of its
noblest lessons, and withers its choicest fruit.
The question is a most serious one for those whom it most immediately
concerns, and whom it should warn of the danger of too manifestly
lagging behind the time. At this moment power is changing hands, as
certainly as in the days of those subtle and eager men who seated the
ancient learning on its throne; and who would as surely depose it now,
if founding new universities amongst us, and give it but its due and
proper place in the expanding circles of knowledge, as, four hundred
years ago, they admitted its just predominance, and established its
solitary sway. When periods of such vicissitude arrive, it is for those
who have been powerful heretofore, to look to their tenures of
authority. Upon nothing can they hope to rest, if not upon complete
accordance with the spirit of the age, and a thorough aptitude to its
necessities and wants. If the education of children is to continue
imperfect and bad, as Dean Swift tells us he had found it always in his
experience, in exact proportion to the wealth and grandeur of the
parents, the next generation of parents will have to look to the
continued security of their wealth and grandeur. The Earth is in
incessant motion. The time when it was supposed to be permanently fixed
in the centre of the universe has passed away for ever, and modes of
study only suited to that time will have to share the fate that has
befallen it.