ideas or dazzling projects; who, under the influence of excitement, are
able to cast a light, almost as if from inspiration, on a subject or
course of action which comes before them; who have a sudden presence of
mind equal to any emergency, rising with the occasion, and an undaunted
magnanimous bearing, and an energy and keenness which is but made intense
by opposition. This is genius, this is heroism; it is the exhibition of a
natural gift, which no culture can teach, at which no Institution can aim;
here, on the contrary, we are concerned, not with mere nature, but with
training and teaching. That perfection of the Intellect, which is the
result of Education, and its _beau ideal_, to be imparted to individuals
in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and
comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them,
each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost
prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from
its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its
freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith,
because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of
heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things
and the music of the spheres.
7.
And now, if I may take for granted that the true and adequate end of
intellectual training and of a University is not Learning or Acquirement,
but rather, is Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge, or what may be
called Philosophy, I shall be in a position to explain the various
mistakes which at the present day beset the subject of University
Education.
I say then, if we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must
ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level; we must generalize, we
must reduce to method, we must have a grasp of principles, and group and
shape our acquisitions by means of them. It matters not whether our field
of operation be wide or limited; in every case, to command it, is to mount
above it. Who has not felt the irritation of mind and impatience created
by a deep, rich country, visited for the first time, with winding lanes,
and high hedges, and green steeps, and tangled woods, and every thing
smiling indeed, but in a maze? The same feeling comes upon us in a strange
city, when we have no map of its streets. Hence you hear of practised
travellers, when they first come into a place, mounting some high hill or
church tower, by way of reconnoitring its neighbourhood. In like manner,
you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you;
and the more you have of it, the greater will be the load. The learning of
a Salmasius or a Burman, unless you are its master, will be your tyrant.
“Imperat aut servit;” if you can wield it with a strong arm, it is a great
weapon; otherwise,
Vis consili expers
Mole ruit suâ.
You will be overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by the heavy wealth which you have
exacted from tributary generations.
Instances abound; there are authors who are as pointless as they are
inexhaustible in their literary resources. They measure knowledge by bulk,
as it lies in the rude block, without symmetry, without design. How many
commentators are there on the Classics, how many on Holy Scripture, from
whom we rise up, wondering at the learning which has passed before us, and
wondering why it passed! How many writers are there of Ecclesiastical
History, such as Mosheim or Du Pin, who, breaking up their subject into
details, destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their anxiety
about the parts! The Sermons, again, of the English Divines in the
seventeenth century, how often are they mere repertories of miscellaneous
and officious learning! Of course Catholics also may read without
thinking; and in their case, equally as with Protestants, it holds good,
that such knowledge is unworthy of the name, knowledge which they have not
thought through, and thought out. Such readers are only possessed by their
knowledge, not possessed of it; nay, in matter of fact they are often even
carried away by it, without any volition of their own. Recollect, the
Memory can tyrannize, as well as the Imagination. Derangement, I believe,
has been considered as a loss of control over the sequence of ideas. The
mind, once set in motion, is henceforth deprived of the power of
initiation, and becomes the victim of a train of associations, one thought
suggesting another, in the way of cause and effect, as if by a mechanical
process, or some physical necessity. No one, who has had experience of men
of studious habits, but must recognize the existence of a parallel
phenomenon in the case of those who have over-stimulated the Memory. In
such persons Reason acts almost as feebly and as impotently as in the
madman; once fairly started on any subject whatever, they have no power of
self-control; they passively endure the succession of impulses which are
evolved out of the original exciting cause; they are passed on from one
idea to another and go steadily forward, plodding along one line of
thought in spite of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering
from it in endless digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as
is very certain, no one would envy the madman the glow and originality of
his conceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that intellect,
which is the prey, not indeed of barren fancies but of barren facts, of
random intrusions from without, though not of morbid imaginations from
within? And in thus speaking, I am not denying that a strong and ready
memory is in itself a real treasure; I am not disparaging a well-stored
mind, though it be nothing besides, provided it be sober, any more than I
would despise a bookseller’s shop:—it is of great value to others, even
when not so to the owner. Nor am I banishing, far from it, the possessors
of deep and multifarious learning from my ideal University; they adorn it
in the eyes of men; I do but say that they constitute no type of the
results at which it aims; that it is no great gain to the intellect to
have enlarged the memory at the expense of faculties which are
indisputably higher.
8.
Nor indeed am I supposing that there is any great danger, at least in this
day, of over-education; the danger is on the other side. I will tell you,
Gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last twenty years,—not
to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but
to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error
of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of
subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is
not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of
considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons,
and the possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent
lecturers, and membership with scientific institutions, and the sight of
the experiments of a platform and the specimens of a museum, that all this
was not dissipation of mind, but progress. All things now are to be
learned at once, not first one thing, then another, not one well, but many
badly. Learning is to be without exertion, without attention, without
toil; without grounding, without advance, without finishing. There is to
be nothing individual in it; and this, forsooth, is the wonder of the age.
What the steam engine does with matter, the printing press is to do with
mind; it is to act mechanically, and the population is to be passively,
almost unconsciously enlightened, by the mere multiplication and
dissemination of volumes. Whether it be the school boy, or the school
girl, or the youth at college, or the mechanic in the town, or the
politician in the senate, all have been the victims in one way or other of
this most preposterous and pernicious of delusions. Wise men have lifted
up their voices in vain; and at length, lest their own institutions should
be outshone and should disappear in the folly of the hour, they have been
obliged, as far as they could with a good conscience, to humour a spirit
which they could not withstand, and make temporizing concessions at which
they could not but inwardly smile.
It must not be supposed that, because I so speak, therefore I have some
sort of fear of the education of the people: on the contrary, the more
education they have, the better, so that it is really education. Nor am I
an enemy to the cheap publication of scientific and literary works, which
is now in vogue: on the contrary, I consider it a great advantage,
convenience, and gain; that is, to those to whom education has given a
capacity for using them. Further, I consider such innocent recreations as
science and literature are able to furnish will be a very fit occupation
of the thoughts and the leisure of young persons, and may be made the
means of keeping them from bad employments and bad companions. Moreover,
as to that superficial acquaintance with chemistry, and geology, and
astronomy, and political economy, and modern history, and biography, and
other branches of knowledge, which periodical literature and occasional
lectures and scientific institutions diffuse through the community, I
think it a graceful accomplishment, and a suitable, nay, in this day a
necessary accomplishment, in the case of educated men. Nor, lastly, am I
disparaging or discouraging the thorough acquisition of any one of these
studies, or denying that, as far as it goes, such thorough acquisition is
a real education of the mind. All I say is, call things by their right
names, and do not confuse together ideas which are essentially different.
A thorough knowledge of one science and a superficial acquaintance with
many, are not the same thing; a smattering of a hundred things or a memory
for detail, is not a philosophical or comprehensive view. Recreations are
not education; accomplishments are not education. Do not say, the people
must be educated, when, after all, you only mean, amused, refreshed,
soothed, put into good spirits and good humour, or kept from vicious
excesses. I do not say that such amusements, such occupations of mind, are
not a great gain; but they are not education. You may as well call drawing
and fencing education, as a general knowledge of botany or conchology.
Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and
a resource to the idle, but it is not education; it does not form or
cultivate the intellect. Education is a high word; it is the preparation
for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that
preparation. We require intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes
for sight. We need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain
them without setting about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep, or by
hap-hazard. The best telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing
press or the lecture room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to
ourselves, we must be parties in the work. A University is, according to
the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not
a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.
9.
I protest to you, Gentlemen, that if I had to choose between a so-called
University, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence,
and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide
range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or
examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for
three or four years, and then sent them away as the University of Oxford
is said to have done some sixty years since, if I were asked which of
these two methods was the better discipline of the intellect,—mind, I do
not say which is _morally_ the better, for it is plain that compulsory
study must be a good and idleness an intolerable mischief,—but if I must
determine which of the two courses was the more successful in training,
moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men the more fitted for their
secular duties, which produced better public men, men of the world, men
whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the
preference to that University which did nothing, over that which exacted
of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun. And,
paradox as this may seem, still if results be the test of systems, the
influence of the public schools and colleges of England, in the course of
the last century, at least will bear out one side of the contrast as I
have drawn it. What would come, on the other hand, of the ideal systems of
education which have fascinated the imagination of this age, could they
ever take effect, and whether they would not produce a generation
frivolous, narrow-minded, and resourceless, intellectually considered, is
a fair subject for debate; but so far is certain, that the Universities
and scholastic establishments, to which I refer, and which did little more
than bring together first boys and then youths in large numbers, these
institutions, with miserable deformities on the side of morals, with a
hollow profession of Christianity, and a heathen code of ethics,—I say, at
least they can boast of a succession of heroes and statesmen, of literary
men and philosophers, of men conspicuous for great natural virtues, for
habits of business, for knowledge of life, for practical judgment, for
cultivated tastes, for accomplishments, who have made England what it
is,—able to subdue the earth, able to domineer over Catholics.
How is this to be explained? I suppose as follows: When a multitude of
young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men
are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn
one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation
of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new
ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for
judging and acting, day by day. An infant has to learn the meaning of the
information which its senses convey to it, and this seems to be its
employment. It fancies all that the eye presents to it to be close to it,
till it actually learns the contrary, and thus by practice does it
ascertain the relations and uses of those first elements of knowledge
which are necessary for its animal existence. A parallel teaching is
necessary for our social being, and it is secured by a large school or a
college; and this effect may be fairly called in its own department an
enlargement of mind. It is seeing the world on a small field with little
trouble; for the pupils or students come from very different places, and
with widely different notions, and there is much to generalize, much to
adjust, much to eliminate, there are inter-relations to be defined, and
conventional rules to be established, in the process, by which the whole
assemblage is moulded together, and gains one tone and one character.
Let it be clearly understood, I repeat it, that I am not taking into
account moral or religious considerations; I am but saying that that
youthful community will constitute a whole, it will embody a specific
idea, it will represent a doctrine, it will administer a code of conduct,
and it will furnish principles of thought and action. It will give birth
to a living teaching, which in course of time will take the shape of a
self-perpetuating tradition, or a _genius loci_, as it is sometimes
called; which haunts the home where it has been born, and which imbues and
forms, more or less, and one by one, every individual who is successively
brought under its shadow. Thus it is that, independent of direct
instruction on the part of Superiors, there is a sort of self-education in
the academic institutions of Protestant England; a characteristic tone of
thought, a recognized standard of judgment is found in them, which, as
developed in the individual who is submitted to it, becomes a twofold
source of strength to him, both from the distinct stamp it impresses on
his mind, and from the bond of union which it creates between him and
others,—effects which are shared by the authorities of the place, for they
themselves have been educated in it, and at all times are exposed to the
influence of its ethical atmosphere. Here then is a real teaching,
whatever be its standards and principles, true or false; and it at least
tends towards cultivation of the intellect; it at least recognizes that
knowledge is something more than a sort of passive reception of scraps and
details; it is a something, and it does a something, which never will
issue from the most strenuous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual
sympathies and no intercommunion, of a set of examiners with no opinions
which they dare profess, and with no common principles, who are teaching
or questioning a set of youths who do not know them, and do not know each
other, on a large number of subjects, different in kind, and connected by
no wide philosophy, three times a week, or three times a year, or once in
three years, in chill lecture-rooms or on a pompous anniversary.
10.
Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is
preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does
so little for the mind. Shut your College gates against the votary of
knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own
mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your Babel. Few indeed
there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of instructors,
or will do any thing at all, if left to themselves. And fewer still
(though such great minds are to be found), who will not, from such
unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are
not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the attainment of truth.
And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will not be reminded from time to
time of the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imperfect
grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregularities of their
knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle
which they exhibit. They will be too often ignorant of what every one
knows and takes for granted, of that multitude of small truths which fall
upon the mind like dust, impalpable and ever accumulating; they may be
unable to converse, they may argue perversely, they may pride themselves
on their worst paradoxes or their grossest truisms, they may be full of
their own mode of viewing things, unwilling to be put out of their way,
slow to enter into the minds of others;—but, with these and whatever other
liabilities upon their heads, they are likely to have more thought, more
mind, more philosophy, more true enlargement, than those earnest but
ill-used persons, who are forced to load their minds with a score of
subjects against an examination, who have too much on their hands to
indulge themselves in thinking or investigation, who devour premiss and
conclusion together with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole
sciences on faith, and commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often,
as might be expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up
all they have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their
anxious labours, except perhaps the habit of application.
Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that ambitious system
which has of late years been making way among us: for its result on
ordinary minds, and on the common run of students, is less satisfactory
still; they leave their place of education simply dissipated and relaxed
by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have never really mastered,
and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I
say, is it for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be
found, to eschew the College and the University altogether, than to submit
to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more
profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of
education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they
meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit
suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the
exiled Prince to find “tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!”
How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in the
Poem(21)—a Poem, whether in conception or in execution, one of the most
touching in our language—who, not in the wide world, but ranging day by
day around his widowed mother’s home, “a dexterous gleaner” in a narrow
field, and with only such slender outfit
“as the village school and books a few
Supplied,”
contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher’s boat, and the
inn’s fireside, and the tradesman’s shop, and the shepherd’s walk, and the
smuggler’s hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the
restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his
own!
* * * * *
But in a large subject, I am exceeding my necessary limits. Gentlemen, I
must conclude abruptly; and postpone any summing up of my argument, should
that be necessary, to another day.
Discourse VII.
Knowledge Viewed In Relation To Professional Skill.
1.
I have been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on the
cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued
for its own sake; and next, on the nature of that cultivation, or what
that cultivation consists in. Truth of whatever kind is the proper object
of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and
contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions
which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or
as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance,
but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by
going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual
correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the
employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and
exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers,
such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is
necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter
of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces
the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many
subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attending many
lectures. All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be
lingering in the vestibule of knowledge:—he may not realize what his mouth
utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may have
no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of
advancing one step forward of himself, in consequence of what he has
already acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood,
of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things
according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building
up ideas. Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind; it
is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of
wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual
self-possession and repose,—qualities which do not come of mere
acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects,
is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth,
is the work of discipline and habit.
This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed
or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific
trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake,
for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest
culture, is called Liberal Education; and though there is no one in whom
it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a
pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one
but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards
it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard
of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and
secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right
standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students
towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be
the business of a University.
2.