ii.] UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 41 



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 question 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 philosophy was 

 to interpret and co-ordinate these two. I imagine 

 that in the twelfth century this was a very fair con- 

 clusion from known facts. Nowhere in the world, in 

 those days, was there such an encyclopaedia of know- 

 ledge of all three classes, as is to be found in those 

 writings. The scholastic philosophy is a wonderful 

 monument of the patience and ingenuity with which 

 the human mind toiled to build up a logically con- 

 sistent 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 subtlety 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 philosophy, 

 nevertheless think the thoughts of the schoolmen. 



