Oct. 19, 1876] 



NATURE 



551 



don in having done with all that nonsense. The Bill that 

 has been dropped was a Bill empowering certain com- 

 missioners to take funds now devoted to College pur- 

 poses and devote them to university purposes. What 

 these university purposes are is not stated — is not 

 known — not known even to the promoters of the Bill. 

 All that is known is that among those purposes is not the 

 promotion of science and learning. This purpose, which 

 was announced by Lord Salisbury, has been anxiously 

 disavowed by Lord Salisbury's colleagues. In these cir- 

 cumstances it cannot be any great matter for regret that 

 the Universities Bill should have been laid aside." 



Mr. Pattison then spoke of the University itself. He 

 briefly showed how our two g eat universities, from being 

 national, became State Church institutions, and that not- 

 withstanding the abolition of the Test Act, the eccle- 

 siastical spirit is still practically supreme. 



Something might be done to counteract this sinister 

 influence by opening the headships of colleges to laymen, 

 and by attaching to the University a number of eminent 

 men of science. The universities, moreover, he went 

 on to show, are anything but popular ; with a population 

 of twenty-one millions, and realised property of 6,000 

 millions, the total number of university students does 

 not exceed 6,000 out of 114,000 males between eighteen 

 and twenty-one that ought to be receiving a high-class 

 education. This state of things, Mr. Pattison justly says, 

 can be described as nothing less than a state of national 

 destitution — an intellectual blight. It is not the mere 

 cost, though this is large enough as contrasted with the 

 cost of university education in Scotland and Germany, 

 that deters the middle classes from sending their sons to 

 a university, it is the prevalent belief that, unless to a 

 professional man, a university education is worse than 

 useless. Mr. Pattison then went on to show what he 

 thinks a university ought to be. 



" Universities are not to fit men for some special mode 

 of gaining a livelihood ; their object is not to teach law 

 or divinity, banking, or engineering, but to cultivate the 

 mind and form the intelligence. A university should be 

 in possession of all science and all knowledge, but it is 

 as science and knowledge, not as a money-bringing pur- 

 suit, that it possesses it. There is an old saying — so old 

 that it is quite forgotten even in the universities— ' A 

 university is founded on arts' — founded, that is, its fabric 

 of the special sciences is raised upon the liberal studies. 

 Men are men, whether they are lawyers or physicians, 

 merchants or manufacturers — they possess an intellect and 

 a conscience ; and it is with these as men, and not as 

 lawyers or physicians, merchants or manufacturers, that 

 liberal education has to do. What professional men 

 should carry away with them from the university is not 

 professional knowledge, but that which directs the use of 

 their professional knowledge, and brings the light of 

 general culture to illuminate the technicalities of a special 

 pursuit. To go to Cambridge, like the youth in the old 

 Latin grammar," adcapiendum ingenii ailtnm " sttrasio 

 the practical Englishman like telling him to feed on 

 moonshine. The idea of education is a lost idea among 

 the middle classes. When his school-time is over — and 

 a very unprofitable time it has mostly been to him — he 

 can't conceive that there is anything beyond, except 

 qualifying for a bread-winning profession. The reason 

 why the son of a wealthy middle-class family is not at 

 the university is exactly the same as the reason why the 

 son of a day-labourer is not at the village school. He 

 does not see the good of it." 



Mr. Pattison then referred to a statement made by Mr. 

 Smith, of Halifax, at the Brighton meeting, that if parents 

 saw their way to getting 5 per cent, on the sum laid out on 

 a girl's education, then they would be as ready to spend 

 2,000/. on that as they are on a boy's. 



" Mr. Smith, of Halifax, was very likely worth thou- 

 sands ; but his view is precisely the view of John Nokes, 



the day-labourer in our village, who doesn't want his boy 

 * to have no school-laming ; he never saw no good come 

 of it ; the boy don't get more wages by it.' John Nokes 

 earns twenty shillings a week ; Mr. Smith, of Halifax, has 

 5 per cent, upon many thousands of pounds ; but their 

 ideas of education are the same — no sense of the value 

 of life, of the intrinsic worth of the human soul, and of 

 its capacities for being trained. Man or woman is a 

 machine for earning an income. The charm and beauty 

 of life, as it can be lived and adorned, is wholly unknown. 

 The work of the British workman, we say, is deteriorated 

 because he cares nothing for the work itself, but only for 

 the wages it is to bring him in. At this we are all indig 

 nant. We have little right to be so, when we ourselves 

 care as little for life for life's sake as he does for art for 

 art's sake. It may be confidently asserted, then, that the 

 universities in any country cannot rise above public 

 instruction generally. They may fall below it." 



Mr. Pattison then showed that the great reforms in the 

 Oxford University curriculum during .the last sixty or 

 seventy years have been forced upon her from without. 



" It is no longer now a question of breaking up the old 

 monopoly of Latin and Greek, and of the introduction of 

 a few popular branches of instruction by the side of the 

 old. A far wider conception of a university has now been 

 opened up, and of the function it is expected to fulfil for 

 the nation at large. This conception is a consequence of 

 the position which science has come to occupy in the 

 world in the last quarter of a century. When scientific 

 men had to speak to the wider public fifty years ago they 

 used to dwell on the various applications of science to the 

 arts of life. The industrial value of scientific knowledge 

 had then to be inculcated. It was from this point of 

 view that science first got recognition. This has been 

 successfully done. Facts stronger than arguments have 

 sufficiently proved the utility of scientific knowledge. On 

 this point no more needs to be said. The public are alive 

 to the truth. But a nevv^ consideration now emerges out 

 of this proved utility. Science has been incessantly grow- 

 ing since the close of the great European war of 181 5. It 

 has been extending its boundaries, enlarging its mass, in- 

 creasing its complexity, disclosing inner harmonies, and 

 bringing the world of thought, of work, of life within its 

 grasp. All this growth and movement has taken place 

 outside the universities. Our most considerable names 

 in science have often not been university men ; when 

 they have been so their scientific activity has been quite 

 apart from their university employment. This scientific 

 atmosphere, this consciousness of a common aim and a 

 common inspiration among a multitude of labourers — 

 this active pursuit of truth, which forms a bond as strong 

 as the bond of charity — this is not the atmosphere of our 

 universities. There exists, then, in the world outside a 

 vast body of knowledge, of the importance of which in- 

 telligent people are well aware. And there exist inside 

 the universities, colleges with considerable endowments. 

 What is more natural than the wish to bring these two 

 separate existences together ? How are we to provide for 

 the maintenance and transmission of all this rich treasure 

 of knowledge which has been painfully accumulating in 

 the past ? Can a more proper place for the purpose be 

 found than in our vmiversities .? A university, says Prof. 

 Huxley, is a corporation which has charge of the interests 

 of knowledge as such, the business of which is to repre- 

 sent knowledge by the acquirements of its members and 

 to increase it by their studies. The change demanded 

 consists in a change of the atmosphere of the university, 

 in the diffusion of a disinterested love of knowledge. It 

 may be that legislation can do little to promote it. But 

 there is one change which legislation only can make, and 

 which is a necessary condition of the establishment of a 

 system of scientific study and instruction. This is the 

 removal of the fellowship system. The history of this 

 peculiar institution has been often given of late, and the 



