The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of DublinNewman, John Henry
Religion
The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin
Newman, John Henry
Education, Higher; Universities and colleges
I have been insisting, in my two preceding Discourses, first, on the
cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued
for its own sake; and next, on the nature of that cultivation, or what
that cultivation consists in. Truth of whatever kind is the proper object
of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and
contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions
which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or
as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance,
but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by
going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual
correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the
employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and
exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers,
such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is
necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter
of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces
the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many
subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attending many
lectures. All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be
lingering in the vestibule of knowledge:—he may not realize what his mouth
utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may have
no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of
advancing one step forward of himself, in consequence of what he has
already acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood,
of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things
according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building
up ideas. Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind; it
is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of
wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual
self-possession and repose,—qualities which do not come of mere
acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects,
is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth,
is the work of discipline and habit.
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