Part 10 (1/2)

But there is more to be said. In order to obtain, and to retain, health, freedom from debt, and a good conscience, there are pre-supposed very considerable advantages. We cannot continue healthy and out of debt, unless we have a fair start in life, that is, unless we have a tolerable provision to begin with; a circ.u.mstance that the maxim keeps out of sight.

Yet farther. The conditions named are of themselves mere negatives; they imply simply the absence of certain decided causes of unhappiness--ill-health, poverty, and bad conduct. There is a farther stealthy a.s.sumption, namely, that the individual is placed in a situation otherwise conducive to happiness. Health, absence of debt, and a good conscience will not make happiness, under severe or ungenial toil, irritation, ill-usage, affliction, sorrow,--- even if they could be long maintained under such circ.u.mstances. Nor even, in the case of exemption from the worst ills of life, can we be happy without some positive agreeables--family, general society, amus.e.m.e.nts, and gratifications. There is a certain degree of loneliness, seclusion, dulness, that destroys happiness without sapping health, or miming us into debt and vice.

The maxim, as expressed, professes to aim at happiness, but it more properly belongs to duty. If we fail in the conditions mentioned, we run the risk rather of neglecting our duties than of missing our pleasures.

It is not every form of ill-health that makes us miserable; and we may become seared to debt and ill-conduct, so as to suffer only the incidental misery of being dunned, which many can take with great composure.

The definition of happiness by Paley is vague and incomplete; but it does not omit the positive conditions. After health, Paley enumerates the exercise of the affections and some engaging occupation or pursuit; both which are highly relevant to the attainment of happiness. Indeed with an exemption from cares, and a considerable share of the positive gratifications, we can enjoy life on a very slender stock of health; otherwise, where should we be in the inevitable decline that age brings with it?]

[Footnote 14: This Society has since been dissolved.]

VI.

THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL--PAST AND PRESENT.[15]

GENTLEMEN,

By your flattering estimate of my services, I have been unexpectedly summoned from retirement, to a.s.sume the honours and the duties of the purple, and to occupy the most historically important office in the Universities of Europe.

The present demands upon the Rectors.h.i.+p somewhat resemble what we are told of the Homeric chief, who, in company with his Council or Senate, the _Boule_, and the Popular a.s.sembly, or _Agora_, made up the political const.i.tution of the tribe. The functions of the chief, it is said, were to supply wise counsel to the _Boule_ (as we might call our Court), and unctuous eloquence to the _Agora_. The second of these requirements is what weighs upon me at the present moment.

Whatever may have been the practice of my predecessors, generally strangers to you, it would be altogether unbecoming in me to travel out of our University life, for the materials of an Address. My remarks then will princ.i.p.ally bear on the UNIVERSITY IDEAL.

[THE HIGHER TEACHING IN GREECE.]

To the Greeks we are indebted for the earliest germ of the University.

It was with them chiefly that education took that great leap, the greatest ever made, from the traditional teaching of the home, the shop, the social surroundings, to schoolmaster teaching properly so called.

Nowadays, we, schoolmasters, think so much of ourselves, that we do not make full allowance for that other teaching, which was, for unknown ages, the only teaching of mankind. The Greeks were the first to introduce, not perhaps the primary schoolmaster, for the R's, but certainly the secondary or higher schoolmaster, known as Rhetorician or Sophist, who taught the higher professions; while their Philosophers or wise men, introduced a kind of knowledge that gave scope to the intellectual faculties, with or without professional applications; the very idea of our Faculty of Arts.

So self-a.s.serting were these new-born teachers of the Sophist cla.s.s, that Plato thought it necessary to recall attention to the good old perennial source of instruction, the home, the trade, and the society.

He pointed out that the pretenders to teach virtue by moral lecturing, were as yet completely outrivalled by the influence of the family and the social pressure of the community. In like manner, the arts of life were all originally handed down by apprentices.h.i.+p and imitation. The greatest statesmen and generals of early times had simply the education of the actual work. Philip of Macedon could have had no other teaching; his greater son was the first of the line to receive what we may call a liberal, or a general education, under the educator of all Europe.

[LOGIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES.]

THE MIDDLE AGE AND BOeTHIUS.

I must skip eight centuries, to introduce the man that linked the ancient and the modern world, and was almost the sole luminary in the west during the dark ages, namely, Boethius, minister of the Gothic Emperor Theodoric. As much of Aristotle as was known between the 6th and the 11th centuries was handed down by him. During that time, only the logical treatises existed among the Latins; and of these the best parts were neglected. Historical importance attaches to a small circle of them known as the Old Logic (_vectus logica_), which were the pabulum of abstract thought for five dreary centuries. These consisted of the two treatises or chapters of Aristotle called the ”Categories,” and the ”De Interpretatione,” or the Theory of Propositions; and of a book of Porphyry the Neo-Platonist, ent.i.tled 'Introduction' (_Isagoge_), and treating of the so-called Five Predicables. A hundred average pages would include them all; and three weeks would suffice to master them.

Boethius, however, did much more than hand on these works to the mediaeval students; he translated the whole of Aristotle's logical writings (the Organon), but the others were seldom taken up. It was he too that handled the question of Universals in his first Dialogue on Porphyry, and sowed the seed that was not to germinate till four centuries afterwards, but which, when the time came, was to bear fruit in no measured amount. And Boethius is the name a.s.sociated with the scheme of higher education that preceded the University teaching, called the _quadrivium_, or quadruple group of subjects, namely, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. This, together with the _trivium_, or preparatory group of three subjects--Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic--const.i.tuted what was known as the _seven liberal arts_; but, in the darkest ages, the quadrivium was almost lost sight of, and few went beyond the trivium.

EVE OF THE UNIVERSITY.

In the 7th century, the era of deepest intellectual gloom, philosophy was at an entire stand-still. Light arises with the 8th, when we are introduced to the Cathedral and Cloister Schools of Charlemagne; and the 9th saw these schools fully established, and an educational reform completed that was to be productive of lasting good results. But the range of instruction was still narrow, scarcely proceeding beyond the Old Logic, and the teachers were, as formerly, the Monks. The 11th century is really the period of dawn. The East was now opened up through the Crusades, and there was frequent intercourse with the learned Saracens of Spain; and thus there were brought into the West the whole of Aristotle's works, with Arabic commentaries, chiefly in Latin translations. The effervescence was prodigious and alarming. The schools were reinforced by a higher cla.s.s of teachers, Lay as well as Clerical; a marked advance was made in Logic and Dialectic; and the great controversy of Realism _versus_ Nominalism, which had found its birth in the previous century, raged with extraordinary vigour. We are now on the eve of the founding of the Universities; Bologna, indeed, being already in existence.

[TWO CLa.s.sES OF MEDIEVAL CHURCHMEN.]

SEPARATION OF PHILOSOPHY FROM THEOLOGY.