the intellect by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge,
enlargement of mind, or illumination; terms which are not uncommonly given
to it by writers of this day: but, whatever name we bestow on it, it is, I
believe, as a matter of history, the business of a University to make this
intellectual culture its direct scope, or to employ itself in the
education of the intellect,—just as the work of a Hospital lies in healing
the sick or wounded, of a Riding or Fencing School, or of a Gymnasium, in
exercising the limbs, of an Almshouse, in aiding and solacing the old, of
an Orphanage, in protecting innocence, of a Penitentiary, in restoring the
guilty. I say, a University, taken in its bare idea, and before we view it
as an instrument of the Church, has this object and this mission; it
contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it
professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is
intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its
work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason
well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.
2.
This, I said in my foregoing Discourse, was the object of a University,
viewed in itself, and apart from the Catholic Church, or from the State,
or from any other power which may use it; and I illustrated this in
various ways. I said that the intellect must have an excellence of its
own, for there was nothing which had not its specific good; that the word
“educate” would not be used of intellectual culture, as it is used, had
not the intellect had an end of its own; that, had it not such an end,
there would be no meaning in calling certain intellectual exercises
“liberal,” in contrast with “useful,” as is commonly done; that the very
notion of a philosophical temper implied it, for it threw us back upon
research and system as ends in themselves, distinct from effects and works
of any kind; that a philosophical scheme of knowledge, or system of
sciences, could not, from the nature of the case, issue in any one
definite art or pursuit, as its end; and that, on the other hand, the
discovery and contemplation of truth, to which research and systematizing
led, were surely sufficient ends, though nothing beyond them were added,
and that they had ever been accounted sufficient by mankind.
Here then I take up the subject; and, having determined that the
cultivation of the intellect is an end distinct and sufficient in itself,
and that, so far as words go it is an enlargement or illumination, I
proceed to inquire what this mental breadth, or power, or light, or
philosophy consists in. A Hospital heals a broken limb or cures a fever:
what does an Institution effect, which professes the health, not of the
body, not of the soul, but of the intellect? What is this good, which in
former times, as well as our own, has been found worth the notice, the
appropriation, of the Catholic Church?
I have then to investigate, in the Discourses which follow, those
qualities and characteristics of the intellect in which its cultivation
issues or rather consists; and, with a view of assisting myself in this
undertaking, I shall recur to certain questions which have already been
touched upon. These questions are three: viz. the relation of intellectual
culture, first, to _mere_ knowledge; secondly, to _professional_
knowledge; and thirdly, to _religious_ knowledge. In other words, are
_acquirements_ and _attainments_ the scope of a University Education? or
_expertness in particular arts and pursuits_? or _moral and religious
proficiency_? or something besides these three? These questions I shall
examine in succession, with the purpose I have mentioned; and I hope to be
excused, if, in this anxious undertaking, I am led to repeat what, either
in these Discourses or elsewhere, I have already put upon paper. And
first, of _Mere Knowledge_, or Learning, and its connexion with
intellectual illumination or Philosophy.
3.
I suppose the _primâ-facie_ view which the public at large would take of a
University, considering it as a place of Education, is nothing more or
less than a place for acquiring a great deal of knowledge on a great many
subjects. Memory is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a
boy’s business when he goes to school is to learn, that is, to store up
things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than an
instrument for taking in facts, or a receptacle for storing them: he
welcomes them as fast as they come to him; he lives on what is without; he
has his eyes ever about him; he has a lively susceptibility of
impressions; he imbibes information of every kind; and little does he make
his own in a true sense of the word, living rather upon his neighbours all
around him. He has opinions, religious, political, and literary, and, for
a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from
his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be.
Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school
exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost
passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say this in no disparagement of
the idea of a clever boy. Geography, chronology, history, language,
natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for
a future day. It is the seven years of plenty with him: he gathers in by
handfuls, like the Egyptians, without counting; and though, as time goes
on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in the Elements of
Mathematics, and for his taste in the Poets and Orators, still, while at
school, or at least, till quite the last years of his time, he acquires,
and little more; and when he is leaving for the University, he is mainly
the creature of foreign influences and circumstances, and made up of
accidents, homogeneous or not, as the case may be. Moreover, the moral
habits, which are a boy’s praise, encourage and assist this result; that
is, diligence, assiduity, regularity, despatch, persevering application;
for these are the direct conditions of acquisition, and naturally lead to
it. Acquirements, again, are emphatically producible, and at a moment;
they are a something to show, both for master and scholar; an audience,
even though ignorant themselves of the subjects of an examination, can
comprehend when questions are answered and when they are not. Here again
is a reason why mental culture is in the minds of men identified with the
acquisition of knowledge.
The same notion possesses the public mind, when it passes on from the
thought of a school to that of a University: and with the best of reasons
so far as this, that there is no true culture without acquirements, and
that philosophy presupposes knowledge. It requires a great deal of
reading, or a wide range of information, to warrant us in putting forth
our opinions on any serious subject; and without such learning the most
original mind may be able indeed to dazzle, to amuse, to refute, to
perplex, but not to come to any useful result or any trustworthy
conclusion. There are indeed persons who profess a different view of the
matter, and even act upon it. Every now and then you will find a person of
vigorous or fertile mind, who relies upon his own resources, despises all
former authors, and gives the world, with the utmost fearlessness, his
views upon religion, or history, or any other popular subject. And his
works may sell for a while; he may get a name in his day; but this will be
all. His readers are sure to find on the long run that his doctrines are
mere theories, and not the expression of facts, that they are chaff
instead of bread, and then his popularity drops as suddenly as it rose.
Knowledge then is the indispensable condition of expansion of mind, and
the instrument of attaining to it; this cannot be denied, it is ever to be
insisted on; I begin with it as a first principle; however, the very truth
of it carries men too far, and confirms to them the notion that it is the
whole of the matter. A narrow mind is thought to be that which contains
little knowledge; and an enlarged mind, that which holds a great deal; and
what seems to put the matter beyond dispute is, the fact of the great
number of studies which are pursued in a University, by its very
profession. Lectures are given on every kind of subject; examinations are
held; prizes awarded. There are moral, metaphysical, physical Professors;
Professors of languages, of history, of mathematics, of experimental
science. Lists of questions are published, wonderful for their range and
depth, variety and difficulty; treatises are written, which carry upon
their very face the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious
information; what then is wanting for mental culture to a person of large
reading and scientific attainments? what is grasp of mind but acquirement?
where shall philosophical repose be found, but in the consciousness and
enjoyment of large intellectual possessions?
And yet this notion is, I conceive, a mistake, and my present business is
to show that it is one, and that the end of a Liberal Education is not
mere knowledge, or knowledge considered in its _matter_; and I shall best
attain my object, by actually setting down some cases, which will be
generally granted to be instances of the process of enlightenment or
enlargement of mind, and others which are not, and thus, by the
comparison, you will be able to judge for yourselves, Gentlemen, whether
Knowledge, that is, acquirement, is after all the real principle of the
enlargement, or whether that principle is not rather something beyond it.
4.
For instance,(20) let a person, whose experience has hitherto been
confined to the more calm and unpretending scenery of these islands,
whether here or in England, go for the first time into parts where
physical nature puts on her wilder and more awful forms, whether at home
or abroad, as into mountainous districts; or let one, who has ever lived
in a quiet village, go for the first time to a great metropolis,—then I
suppose he will have a sensation which perhaps he never had before. He has
a feeling not in addition or increase of former feelings, but of something
different in its nature. He will perhaps be borne forward, and find for a
time that he has lost his bearings. He has made a certain progress, and he
has a consciousness of mental enlargement; he does not stand where he did,
he has a new centre, and a range of thoughts to which he was before a
stranger.
Again, the view of the heavens which the telescope opens upon us, if
allowed to fill and possess the mind, may almost whirl it round and make
it dizzy. It brings in a flood of ideas, and is rightly called an
intellectual enlargement, whatever is meant by the term.
And so again, the sight of beasts of prey and other foreign animals, their
strangeness, the originality (if I may use the term) of their forms and
gestures and habits and their variety and independence of each other,
throw us out of ourselves into another creation, and as if under another
Creator, if I may so express the temptation which may come on the mind. We
seem to have new faculties, or a new exercise for our faculties, by this
addition to our knowledge; like a prisoner, who, having been accustomed to
wear manacles or fetters, suddenly finds his arms and legs free.
Hence Physical Science generally, in all its departments, as bringing
before us the exuberant riches and resources, yet the orderly course, of
the Universe, elevates and excites the student, and at first, I may say,
almost takes away his breath, while in time it exercises a tranquilizing
influence upon him.
Again, the study of history is said to enlarge and enlighten the mind, and
why? because, as I conceive, it gives it a power of judging of passing
events, and of all events, and a conscious superiority over them, which
before it did not possess.
And in like manner, what is called seeing the world, entering into active
life, going into society, travelling, gaining acquaintance with the
various classes of the community, coming into contact with the principles
and modes of thought of various parties, interests, and races, their
views, aims, habits and manners, their religious creeds and forms of
worship,—gaining experience how various yet how alike men are, how
low-minded, how bad, how opposed, yet how confident in their opinions; all
this exerts a perceptible influence upon the mind, which it is impossible
to mistake, be it good or be it bad, and is popularly called its
enlargement.
And then again, the first time the mind comes across the arguments and
speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a novel light they cast upon
what he has hitherto accounted sacred; and still more, if it gives in to
them and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice what it has
hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its
imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression
of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free
to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when it
does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it
will, that “the world is all before it where to choose,” and what system
to build up as its own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful
thoughts rushes over and inundates it, who will deny that the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one
of the gods, with a sense of expansion and elevation,—an intoxication in
reality, still, so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an
illumination? Hence the fanaticism of individuals or nations, who suddenly
cast off their Maker. Their eyes are opened; and, like the
judgment-stricken king in the Tragedy, they see two suns, and a magic
universe, out of which they look back upon their former state of faith and
innocence with a sort of contempt and indignation, as if they were then
but fools, and the dupes of imposture.
On the other hand, Religion has its own enlargement, and an enlargement,
not of tumult, but of peace. It is often remarked of uneducated persons,
who have hitherto thought little of the unseen world, that, on their
turning to God, looking into themselves, regulating their hearts,
reforming their conduct, and meditating on death and judgment, heaven and
hell, they seem to become, in point of intellect, different beings from
what they were. Before, they took things as they came, and thought no more
of one thing than another. But now every event has a meaning; they have
their own estimate of whatever happens to them; they are mindful of times
and seasons, and compare the present with the past; and the world, no
longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, is a various and
complicated drama, with parts and an object, and an awful moral.
5.
Now from these instances, to which many more might be added, it is plain,
first, that the communication of knowledge certainly is either a condition
or the means of that sense of enlargement or enlightenment, of which at
this day we hear so much in certain quarters: this cannot be denied; but
next, it is equally plain, that such communication is not the whole of the
process. The enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception
into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the
mind’s energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those
new ideas, which are rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative
power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements; it is
a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a
familiar word, it is a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of
our previous state of thought; and without this no enlargement is said to
follow. There is no enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one
with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them.
We feel our minds to be growing and expanding _then_, when we not only
learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already. It is not the mere
addition to our knowledge that is the illumination; but the locomotion,
the movement onwards, of that mental centre, to which both what we know,
and what we are learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements,
gravitates. And therefore a truly great intellect, and recognized to be
such by the common opinion of mankind, such as the intellect of Aristotle,
or of St. Thomas, or of Newton, or of Goethe, (I purposely take instances
within and without the Catholic pale, when I would speak of the intellect
as such,) is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and
present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all
these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre. It
possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutual and
true relations; knowledge, not merely considered as acquirement, but as
philosophy.
Accordingly, when this analytical, distributive, harmonizing process is
away, the mind experiences no enlargement, and is not reckoned as
enlightened or comprehensive, whatever it may add to its knowledge. For
instance, a great memory, as I have already said, does not make a
philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called a grammar. There are
men who embrace in their minds a vast multitude of ideas, but with little
sensibility about their real relations towards each other. These may be
antiquarians, annalists, naturalists; they may be learned in the law; they
may be versed in statistics; they are most useful in their own place; I
should shrink from speaking disrespectfully of them; still, there is
nothing in such attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness of
mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men of information,
they have not what specially deserves the name of culture of mind, or
fulfils the type of Liberal Education.
In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons who have seen much of
the world, and of the men who, in their day, have played a conspicuous
part in it, but who generalize nothing, and have no observation, in the
true sense of the word. They abound in information in detail, curious and
entertaining, about men and things; and, having lived under the influence
of no very clear or settled principles, religious or political, they speak
of every one and every thing, only as so many phenomena, which are
complete in themselves, and lead to nothing, not discussing them, or
teaching any truth, or instructing the hearer, but simply talking. No one
would say that these persons, well informed as they are, had attained to
any great culture of intellect or to philosophy.
The case is the same still more strikingly where the persons in question
are beyond dispute men of inferior powers and deficient education. Perhaps
they have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a passive,
otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are forced upon them
there. Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth to the
other; but the multiplicity of external objects, which they have
encountered, forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon their
imagination; they see the tapestry of human life, as it were on the wrong
side, and it tells no story. They sleep, and they rise up, and they find
themselves, now in Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of great cities
and wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid the islands
of the South; they gaze on Pompey’s Pillar, or on the Andes; and nothing
which meets them carries them forward or backward, to any idea beyond
itself. Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a history or a
promise. Every thing stands by itself, and comes and goes in its turn,
like the shifting scenes of a show, which leave the spectator where he
was. Perhaps you are near such a man on a particular occasion, and expect
him to be shocked or perplexed at something which occurs; but one thing is
much the same to him as another, or, if he is perplexed, it is as not
knowing what to say, whether it is right to admire, or to ridicule, or to
disapprove, while conscious that some expression of opinion is expected
from him; for in fact he has no standard of judgment at all, and no
landmarks to guide him to a conclusion. Such is mere acquisition, and, I
repeat, no one would dream of calling it philosophy.
6.
Instances, such as these, confirm, by the contrast, the conclusion I have
already drawn from those which preceded them. That only is true
enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as
one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the
universal system, of understanding their respective values, and
determining their mutual dependence. Thus is that form of Universal
Knowledge, of which I have on a former occasion spoken, set up in the
individual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of this
real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended
subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part, or
without the associations which spring from this recollection. It makes
every thing in some sort lead to every thing else; it would communicate
the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes
in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its
component parts, and giving them one definite meaning. Just as our bodily
organs, when mentioned, recall their function in the body, as the word
“creation” suggests the Creator, and “subjects” a sovereign, so, in the
mind of the Philosopher, as we are abstractedly conceiving of him, the
elements of the physical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks,
offices, events, opinions, individualities, are all viewed as one, with
correlative functions, and as gradually by successive combinations
converging, one and all, to the true centre.
To have even a portion of this illuminative reason and true philosophy is
the highest state to which nature can aspire, in the way of intellect; it
puts the mind above the influences of chance and necessity, above anxiety,
suspense, unsettlement, and superstition, which is the lot of the many.
Men, whose minds are possessed with some one object, take exaggerated
views of its importance, are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the
measure of things which are utterly foreign to it, and are startled and
despond if it happens to fail them. They are ever in alarm or in
transport. Those on the other hand who have no object or principle
whatever to hold by, lose their way, every step they take. They are thrown
out, and do not know what to think or say, at every fresh juncture; they
have no view of persons, or occurrences, or facts, which come suddenly
upon them, and they hang upon the opinion of others, for want of internal
resources. But the intellect, which has been disciplined to the perfection
of its powers, which knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned
to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of
reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot
be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and
majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the
origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each
delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from
one point to another. It is the τετράγωνος of the Peripatetic, and has the
“nil admirari” of the Stoic,—
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.