Science and Culture, and Other EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Philosophy
Science and Culture, and Other Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
The Faculties arose by process of natural differentiation out of the
primitive University. Other constituents, foreign to its nature,
were speedily grafted upon it. One of these extraneous elements was
forced into it by the Roman Church, which in those days asserted with
effect, that which it now asserts, happily without any effect in these
realms, its right of censorship and control over all teaching. The
local habitation of the University lay partly in the lands attached to
the monastery of S. Geneviève, partly in the diocese of the Bishop of
Paris; and he who would teach must have the licence of the Abbot, or of
the Bishop, as the nearest representative of the Pope, so to do, which
licence was granted by the Chancellors of these Ecclesiastics.
Thus, if I am what archæologists call a “survival” of the primitive
head and ruler of the University, your Chancellor stands in the same
relation to the Papacy; and, with all respect for his Grace, I think
I may say that we both look terribly shrunken when compared with our
great originals.
Not so is it with a second foreign element, which silently dropped
into the soil of Universities, like the grain of mustard-seed in the
parable; and, like that grain, grew into a tree, in whose branches
a whole aviary of fowls took shelter. That element is the element
of Endowment. It differed from the preceding, in its original design
to serve as a prop to the young plant, not to be a parasite upon it.
The charitable and the humane, blessed with wealth, were very early
penetrated by the misery of the poor student. And the wise saw that
intellectual ability is not so common or so unimportant a gift that it
should be allowed to run to waste upon mere handicrafts and chares.
The man who was a blessing to his contemporaries, but who so often has
been converted into a curse, by the blind adherence of his posterity
to the letter, rather than to the spirit, of his wishes—I mean the
“pious founder”—gave money and lands, that the student, who was rich in
brain and poor in all else, might be taken from the plough or from the
stithy, and enabled to devote himself to the higher service of mankind;
and built colleges and halls in which he might be not only housed and
fed, but taught.
The Colleges were very generally placed in strict subordination to the
University by their founders; but, in many cases, their endowment,
consisting of land, has undergone an “unearned increment,” which has
given these societies a continually increasing weight and importance
as against the unendowed, or fixedly endowed, University. In Pharaoh’s
dream, the seven lean kine eat up the seven fat ones. In the reality of
historical fact, the fat Colleges have eaten up the lean Universities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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