ΤΟ

my friend and colleague,

H. Humphrey Neill,

in pleasant recollection

of the points we have discussed and the plans we have made together,

in the sphere of study to which this book. aspires to contribute.

and which as improper? 3. Question yourself searchingly in respect to your own motives. Why did you come to college? Have you a clear idea of what you are seeking here? Will the motive bear scrutiny? 4. Specify what you think the college should do for the student in training him for work, for play, and for social living. 5. Does your experience in college life attest the truth of the writer's statement in regard to the undue importance attached to the "side shows," as he calls student diversions? What do you think is the place and value of this phase of college life? Do these matters seem to have in your institution an injurious effect upon scholarship? 6. With the aid of a large dictionary, find the history of the word 'college," and trace the steps by which the term, originally belonging to Roman law, has been transferred to educational usage. tinguish between the college and the university; between the college and the technical school. 8. Is a college training more necessary at the present time for success in professions such as the ministry, teaching, law, medicine, scientific investigations, and in engineering than in the past? If so, why?

7. Dis

KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION TO LEARNING 1

JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN

[John Henry, Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), was a distinguished English theologian and writer. For a time he was identified with the so-called Oxford Movement in the Church of England, but after severe self-scrutiny he turned to the Church of Rome as a refuge from the religious unrest of his age. Possessed of one of the most keen and subtle intellects of his age, Newman was also master of an English style of marvelous beauty and power. This selection is one of a series of addresses given before the University of Dublin and addressed primarily to Catholic educators.]

I

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 1 Reprinted from Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated, 1854.

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 labor on a preliminary matter.

In default of a recognized term, I have called the perfection or virtue of 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 1 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

1 In England, the terms university and college are not differentiated in meaning as in the United States. Newman's use of the word university may be regarded as equivalent to the American use of college.

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.

II

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 suffi