THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL. 459 



To the Greeks we are indebted for the earliest germ of the univer- 

 sity. 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 appli- 

 cations ; the very idea of our Faculty of Arts. 



So self-asserting were these new-born teachers of the sophist class, 

 that Plato thought it necessary to recall attention to the good old per- 

 ennial 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 outrivaled 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 apprenticeship 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. 



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 sixth and the eleventh centuries was handed down by him. Dur- 

 ing 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 {vetus logica), which 

 were the pabulum of abstract thought for five dreary centuries. These 

 consisted of the two treatises or chapters of Aristotle called the " Cate- 

 gories," and the " De Interpretation e," or the theory of propositions ; 

 and of a book of Porphyry, the neo-Platonist, entitled " Introduc- 

 tion " (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 Dia- 

 logue on Porphyry, and sowed the seed that was not to germinate till 

 four centuries afterward, but which, when the time came, was to bear 



