Knowledge which is its own end, when I call it liberal knowledge, or a
gentleman’s knowledge, when I educate for it, and make it the scope of a
University. And still less am I incurring such a charge, when I make this
acquisition consist, not in Knowledge in a vague and ordinary sense, but
in that Knowledge which I have especially called Philosophy or, in an
extended sense of the word, Science; for whatever claims Knowledge has to
be considered as a good, these it has in a higher degree when it is viewed
not vaguely, not popularly, but precisely and transcendently as
Philosophy. Knowledge, I say, is then especially liberal, or sufficient
for itself, apart from every external and ulterior object, when and so far
as it is philosophical, and this I proceed to show.
6.
Now bear with me, Gentlemen, if what I am about to say, has at first sight
a fanciful appearance. Philosophy, then, or Science, is related to
Knowledge in this way:—Knowledge is called by the name of Science or
Philosophy, when it is acted upon, informed, or if I may use a strong
figure, impregnated by Reason. Reason is the principle of that intrinsic
fecundity of Knowledge, which, to those who possess it, is its especial
value, and which dispenses with the necessity of their looking abroad for
any end to rest upon external to itself. Knowledge, indeed, when thus
exalted into a scientific form, is also power; not only is it excellent in
itself, but whatever such excellence may be, it is something more, it has
a result beyond itself. Doubtless; but that is a further consideration,
with which I am not concerned. I only say that, prior to its being a
power, it is a good; that it is, not only an instrument, but an end. I
know well it may resolve itself into an art, and terminate in a mechanical
process, and in tangible fruit; but it also may fall back upon that Reason
which informs it, and resolve itself into Philosophy. In one case it is
called Useful Knowledge, in the other Liberal. The same person may
cultivate it in both ways at once; but this again is a matter foreign to
my subject; here I do but say that there are two ways of using Knowledge,
and in matter of fact those who use it in one way are not likely to use it
in the other, or at least in a very limited measure. You see, then, here
are two methods of Education; the end of the one is to be philosophical,
of the other to be mechanical; the one rises towards general ideas, the
other is exhausted upon what is particular and external. Let me not be
thought to deny the necessity, or to decry the benefit, of such attention
to what is particular and practical, as belongs to the useful or
mechanical arts; life could not go on without them; we owe our daily
welfare to them; their exercise is the duty of the many, and we owe to the
many a debt of gratitude for fulfilling that duty. I only say that
Knowledge, in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular,
ceases to be Knowledge. It is a question whether Knowledge can in any
proper sense be predicated of the brute creation; without pretending to
metaphysical exactness of phraseology, which would be unsuitable to an
occasion like this, I say, it seems to me improper to call that passive
sensation, or perception of things, which brutes seem to possess, by the
name of Knowledge. When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something
intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses;
something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses
convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests
it with an idea. It expresses itself, not in a mere enunciation, but by an
enthymeme: it is of the nature of science from the first, and in this
consists its dignity. The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its
worth, its desirableness, considered irrespectively of its results, is
this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process. This is
how it comes to be an end in itself; this is why it admits of being called
Liberal. Not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of
slaves or children; to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at
least the ambition, of Philosophy.
Moreover, such knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage,
which is ours to-day and another’s to-morrow, which may be got up from a
book, and easily forgotten again, which we can command or communicate at
our pleasure, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our
hand, and take into the market; it is an acquired illumination, it is a
habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment. And this is the
reason, why it is more correct, as well as more usual, to speak of a
University as a place of education, than of instruction, though, when
knowledge is concerned, instruction would at first sight have seemed the
more appropriate word. We are instructed, for instance, in manual
exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in ways of
business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the
mind itself, are contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition, or
to use, and bear upon an end external to themselves. But education is a
higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the
formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is
commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. When, then, we
speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby
really imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and
since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are
thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the
word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which
is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure,
and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.
7.
This, then, is the answer which I am prepared to give to the question with
which I opened this Discourse. Before going on to speak of the object of
the Church in taking up Philosophy, and the uses to which she puts it, I
am prepared to maintain that Philosophy is its own end, and, as I
conceive, I have now begun the proof of it. I am prepared to maintain that
there is a knowledge worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for
what it does; and what minutes remain to me to-day I shall devote to the
removal of some portion of the indistinctness and confusion with which the
subject may in some minds be surrounded.
It may be objected then, that, when we profess to seek Knowledge for some
end or other beyond itself, whatever it be, we speak intelligibly; but
that, whatever men may have said, however obstinately the idea may have
kept its ground from age to age, still it is simply unmeaning to say that
we seek Knowledge for its own sake, and for nothing else; for that it ever
leads to something beyond itself, which therefore is its end, and the
cause why it is desirable;—moreover, that this end is twofold, either of
this world or of the next; that all knowledge is cultivated either for
secular objects or for eternal; that if it is directed to secular objects,
it is called Useful Knowledge, if to eternal, Religious or Christian
Knowledge;—in consequence, that if, as I have allowed, this Liberal
Knowledge does not benefit the body or estate, it ought to benefit the
soul; but if the fact be really so, that it is neither a physical or a
secular good on the one hand, nor a moral good on the other, it cannot be
a good at all, and is not worth the trouble which is necessary for its
acquisition.
And then I may be reminded that the professors of this Liberal or
Philosophical Knowledge have themselves, in every age, recognized this
exposition of the matter, and have submitted to the issue in which it
terminates; for they have ever been attempting to make men virtuous; or,
if not, at least have assumed that refinement of mind was virtue, and that
they themselves were the virtuous portion of mankind. This they have
professed on the one hand; and on the other, they have utterly failed in
their professions, so as ever to make themselves a proverb among men, and
a laughing-stock both to the grave and the dissipated portion of mankind,
in consequence of them. Thus they have furnished against themselves both
the ground and the means of their own exposure, without any trouble at all
to any one else. In a word, from the time that Athens was the University
of the world, what has Philosophy taught men, but to promise without
practising, and to aspire without attaining? What has the deep and lofty
thought of its disciples ended in but eloquent words? Nay, what has its
teaching ever meditated, when it was boldest in its remedies for human
ill, beyond charming us to sleep by its lessons, that we might feel
nothing at all? like some melodious air, or rather like those strong and
transporting perfumes, which at first spread their sweetness over every
thing they touch, but in a little while do but offend in proportion as
they once pleased us. Did Philosophy support Cicero under the disfavour of
the fickle populace, or nerve Seneca to oppose an imperial tyrant? It
abandoned Brutus, as he sorrowfully confessed, in his greatest need, and
it forced Cato, as his panegyrist strangely boasts, into the false
position of defying heaven. How few can be counted among its professors,
who, like Polemo, were thereby converted from a profligate course, or like
Anaxagoras, thought the world well lost in exchange for its possession?
The philosopher in Rasselas taught a superhuman doctrine, and then
succumbed without an effort to a trial of human affection.
“He discoursed,” we are told, “with great energy on the government of the
passions. His look was venerable, his action graceful, his pronunciation
clear, and his diction elegant. He showed, with great strength of
sentiment and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and
debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher. He
communicated the various precepts given, from time to time, for the
conquest of passion, and displayed the happiness of those who had obtained
the important victory, after which man is no longer the slave of fear, nor
the fool of hope.… He enumerated many examples of heroes immoveable by
pain or pleasure, who looked with indifference on those modes or accidents
to which the vulgar give the names of good and evil.”
Rasselas in a few days found the philosopher in a room half darkened, with
his eyes misty, and his face pale. “Sir,” said he, “you have come at a
time when all human friendship is useless; what I suffer cannot be
remedied, what I have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only
daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age,
died last night of a fever.” “Sir,” said the prince, “mortality is an
event by which a wise man can never be surprised; we know that death is
always near, and it should therefore always be expected.” “Young man,”
answered the philosopher, “you speak like one who has never felt the pangs
of separation.” “Have you, then, forgot the precept,” said Rasselas,
“which you so powerfully enforced?… consider that external things are
naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same.” “What
comfort,” said the mourner, “can truth and reason afford me? Of what
effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will not be
restored?”
8.
Better, far better, to make no professions, you will say, than to cheat
others with what we are not, and to scandalize them with what we are. The
sensualist, or the man of the world, at any rate is not the victim of fine
words, but pursues a reality and gains it. The Philosophy of Utility, you
will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it,—it aimed
low, but it has fulfilled its aim. If that man of great intellect who has
been its Prophet in the conduct of life played false to his own
professions, he was not bound by his philosophy to be true to his friend
or faithful in his trust. Moral virtue was not the line in which he
undertook to instruct men; and though, as the poet calls him, he were the
“meanest” of mankind, he was so in what may be called his private capacity
and without any prejudice to the theory of induction. He had a right to be
so, if he chose, for any thing that the Idols of the den or the theatre
had to say to the contrary. His mission was the increase of physical
enjoyment and social comfort;(17) and most wonderfully, most awfully has
he fulfilled his conception and his design. Almost day by day have we
fresh and fresh shoots, and buds, and blossoms, which are to ripen into
fruit, on that magical tree of Knowledge which he planted, and to which
none of us perhaps, except the very poor, but owes, if not his present
life, at least his daily food, his health, and general well-being. He was
the divinely provided minister of temporal benefits to all of us so great,
that, whatever I am forced to think of him as a man, I have not the heart,
from mere gratitude, to speak of him severely. And, in spite of the
tendencies of his philosophy, which are, as we see at this day, to
depreciate, or to trample on Theology, he has himself, in his writings,
gone out of his way, as if with a prophetic misgiving of those tendencies,
to insist on it as the instrument of that beneficent Father,(18) who, when
He came on earth in visible form, took on Him first and most prominently
the office of assuaging the bodily wounds of human nature. And truly, like
the old mediciner in the tale, “he sat diligently at his work, and hummed,
with cheerful countenance, a pious song;” and then in turn “went out
singing into the meadows so gaily, that those who had seen him from afar
might well have thought it was a youth gathering flowers for his beloved,
instead of an old physician gathering healing herbs in the morning
dew.”(19)
Alas, that men, in the action of life or in their heart of hearts, are not
what they seem to be in their moments of excitement, or in their trances
or intoxications of genius,—so good, so noble, so serene! Alas, that Bacon
too in his own way should after all be but the fellow of those heathen
philosophers who in their disadvantages had some excuse for their
inconsistency, and who surprise us rather in what they did say than in
what they did not do! Alas, that he too, like Socrates or Seneca, must be
stripped of his holy-day coat, which looks so fair, and should be but a
mockery amid his most majestic gravity of phrase; and, for all his vast
abilities, should, in the littleness of his own moral being, but typify
the intellectual narrowness of his school! However, granting all this,
heroism after all was not his philosophy:—I cannot deny he has abundantly
achieved what he proposed. His is simply a Method whereby bodily
discomforts and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the
greatest number; and already, before it has shown any signs of exhaustion,
the gifts of nature, in their most artificial shapes and luxurious
profusion and diversity, from all quarters of the earth, are, it is
undeniable, by its means brought even to our doors, and we rejoice in
them.
9.
Useful Knowledge then, I grant, has done its work; and Liberal Knowledge
as certainly has not done its work,—that is, supposing, as the objectors
assume, its direct end, like Religious Knowledge, is to make men better;
but this I will not for an instant allow, and, unless I allow it, those
objectors have said nothing to the purpose. I admit, rather I maintain,
what they have been urging, for I consider Knowledge to have its end in
itself. For all its friends, or its enemies, may say, I insist upon it,
that it is as real a mistake to burden it with virtue or religion as with
the mechanical arts. Its direct business is not to steel the soul against
temptation or to console it in affliction, any more than to set the loom
in motion, or to direct the steam carriage; be it ever so much the means
or the condition of both material and moral advancement, still, taken by
and in itself, it as little mends our hearts as it improves our temporal
circumstances. And if its eulogists claim for it such a power, they commit
the very same kind of encroachment on a province not their own as the
political economist who should maintain that his science educated him for
casuistry or diplomacy. Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good
sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and
justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound,
gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying
principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic,
but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a
cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate
mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;—these are the
connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a
University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but
still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for
conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the
profligate, to the heartless,—pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows
when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what
they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected
by close observers, and on the long run; and hence it is that they are
popularly accused of pretence and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own
fault, but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking
them for what they are not, and are officious in arrogating for them a
praise to which they have no claim. Quarry the granite rock with razors,
or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen
and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend
against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.
Surely we are not driven to theories of this kind, in order to vindicate
the value and dignity of Liberal Knowledge. Surely the real grounds on
which its pretensions rest are not so very subtle or abstruse, so very
strange or improbable. Surely it is very intelligible to say, and that is
what I say here, that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the
cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or
less than intellectual excellence. Every thing has its own perfection, be
it higher or lower in the scale of things; and the perfection of one is
not the perfection of another. Things animate, inanimate, visible,
invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a _best_ of themselves,
which is an object of pursuit. Why do you take such pains with your garden
or your park? You see to your walks and turf and shrubberies; to your
trees and drives; not as if you meant to make an orchard of the one, or
corn or pasture land of the other, but because there is a special beauty
in all that is goodly in wood, water, plain, and slope, brought all
together by art into one shape, and grouped into one whole. Your cities
are beautiful, your palaces, your public buildings, your territorial
mansions, your churches; and their beauty leads to nothing beyond itself.
There is a physical beauty and a moral: there is a beauty of person, there
is a beauty of our moral being, which is natural virtue; and in like
manner there is a beauty, there is a perfection, of the intellect. There
is an ideal perfection in these various subject-matters, towards which
individual instances are seen to rise, and which are the standards for all
instances whatever. The Greek divinities and demigods, as the statuary has
moulded them, with their symmetry of figure, and their high forehead and
their regular features, are the perfection of physical beauty. The heroes,
of whom history tells, Alexander, or Cæsar, or Scipio, or Saladin, are the
representatives of that magnanimity or self-mastery which is the greatness
of human nature. Christianity too has its heroes, and in the supernatural
order, and we call them Saints. The artist puts before him beauty of
feature and form; the poet, beauty of mind; the preacher, the beauty of
grace: then intellect too, I repeat, has its beauty, and it has those who
aim at it. To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to
know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power
over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical
exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object
as intelligible (for here we are inquiring, not what the object of a
Liberal Education is worth, nor what use the Church makes of it, but what
it is in itself), I say, an object as intelligible as the cultivation of
virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.
10.
This indeed is but a temporal object, and a transitory possession; but so
are other things in themselves which we make much of and pursue. The
moralist will tell us that man, in all his functions, is but a flower
which blossoms and fades, except so far as a higher principle breathes
upon him, and makes him and what he is immortal. Body and mind are carried
on into an eternal state of being by the gifts of Divine Munificence; but
at first they do but fail in a failing world; and if the powers of
intellect decay, the powers of the body have decayed before them, and, as
an Hospital or an Almshouse, though its end be ephemeral, may be
sanctified to the service of religion, so surely may a University, even
were it nothing more than I have as yet described it. We attain to heaven
by using this world well, though it is to pass away; we perfect our
nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature,
and directing it towards aims higher than its own.
Discourse VI.
Knowledge Viewed In Relation To Learning.
1.
It were well if the English, like the Greek language, possessed some
definite word to express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency
or perfection, such as “health,” as used with reference to the animal
frame, and “virtue,” with reference to our moral nature. I am not able to
find such a term;—talent, ability, genius, belong distinctly to the raw
material, which is the subject-matter, not to that excellence which is the
result of exercise and training. When we turn, indeed, to the particular
kinds of intellectual perfection, words are forthcoming for our purpose,
as, for instance, judgment, taste, and skill; yet even these belong, for
the most part, to powers or habits bearing upon practice or upon art, and
not to any perfect condition of the intellect, considered in itself.
Wisdom, again, is certainly a more comprehensive word than any other, but
it has a direct relation to conduct, and to human life. Knowledge, indeed,
and Science express purely intellectual ideas, but still not a state or
quality of the intellect; for knowledge, in its ordinary sense, is but one
of its circumstances, denoting a possession or a habit; and science has
been appropriated to the subject-matter of the intellect, instead of
belonging in English, as it ought to do, to the intellect itself. The
consequence is that, on an occasion like this, many words are necessary,
in order, first, to bring out and convey what surely is no difficult idea
in itself,—that of the cultivation of the intellect as an end; next, in
order to recommend what surely is no unreasonable object; and lastly, to
describe and make the mind realize the particular perfection in which that
object consists. Every one knows practically what are the constituents of
health or of virtue; and every one recognizes health and virtue as ends to
be pursued; it is otherwise with intellectual excellence, and this must be
my excuse, if I seem to any one to be bestowing a good deal of labour on a
preliminary matter.