UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 55 



knowledge, no question as to their relative importance, or as to the 

 superiority of one to the other, can be seriously raised. 



On the face of the matter, it is absurd to ask whether it is more 

 important to know the limits of one's powers ; or the ends for which 

 they ought to be exerted ; or the conditions under which they must 

 be exerted. One may as well inquire which of the terms of a rule- 

 of-three sum one ought to know, in order to get a trustworthy result. 

 Practical life is such a sum, in which your duty multiplied into your 

 capacity, and divided by your circumstances, gives you the fourth 

 term in the proportion, which is your deserts, with great accuracy. 

 All agree, I take it, that men ought to have these three kinds of 

 knowledge. The so-called " conflict of studies " turns upon the ques- 

 tion of how they may best be obtained. 



The founders of universities held the theory that the Scriptures 

 and Aristotle taken together, the latter being limited by the former, 

 contained all knowledge worth having, and that the business of phi- 

 losophy was to interpret and coordinate these two. I imagine that in 

 the twelfth century this was a very fair conclusion from known facts. 

 Nowhere in the world, in those days, was there such an encyclopaedia 

 of knowledge of all three classes as is to be found in those writings. 

 The scholastic philosoj)hy is a wonderful monument of the patience 

 and ingenuity with which the human mind toiled to build up a logi- 

 cally consistent theory of the universe, out of such materials. And 

 that philosophy is by no means dead and buried, as many vainly 

 suppose. On the contrary, numbers of men of no mean learning and 

 accomplishment, and sometimes of rare power and subtilty of thought, 

 hold by it as the best theory of things which has yet been stated. 

 And, what is still more remarkable, men who speak the language of 

 modern pliilosophy nevertheless think the thoughts of the school- 

 men. " The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands 

 of Esau." Every day I hear " Cause," " Law," " Force," " Vitality," 

 spoken of as entities, by people who can enjoy Swift's joke about 

 the meat-roasting quality of the smoke-jack, and comfort themselves 

 with the reflection that they are not even as those benighted school- 

 men. 



Well, this great system had its day, and then it was sapped and 

 mined by two influences. The first was, the study of classical litera- 

 ture, which familiarized men with methods of philosophizing ; with 

 conceptions of the highest good ; with ideas of the order of Nature ; 

 with notions of literary and historical criticism ; and, above all, with 

 visions of art, of a kind which not only would not fit into the scIjo- 

 lastic scheme, but showed them a pre-Christian, and indeed altogether 

 un-Christian world, of such grandeur and beauty that they ceased to 

 think of any other. They were as men who had kissed the fairy 

 queen, and, wandering with her in the dim loveliness of the under- 

 world, cared not to return to the familar ways of home and fatlier- 



