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
You will see what I mean by the parallel of bodily health. Health is a
good in itself, though nothing came of it, and is especially worth seeking
and cherishing; yet, after all, the blessings which attend its presence
are so great, while they are so close to it and so redound back upon it
and encircle it, that we never think of it except as useful as well as
good, and praise and prize it for what it does, as well as for what it is,
though at the same time we cannot point out any definite and distinct work
or production which it can be said to effect. And so as regards
intellectual culture, I am far from denying utility in this large sense as
the end of Education, when I lay it down, that the culture of the
intellect is a good in itself and its own end; I do not exclude from the
idea of intellectual culture what it cannot but be, from the very nature
of things; I only deny that we must be able to point out, before we have
any right to call it useful, some art, or business, or profession, or
trade, or work, as resulting from it, and as its real and complete end.
The parallel is exact:—As the body may be sacrificed to some manual or
other toil, whether moderate or oppressive, so may the intellect be
devoted to some specific profession; and I do not call _this_ the culture
of the intellect. Again, as some member or organ of the body may be
inordinately used and developed, so may memory, or imagination, or the
reasoning faculty; and _this_ again is not intellectual culture. On the
other hand, as the body may be tended, cherished, and exercised with a
simple view to its general health, so may the intellect also be generally
exercised in order to its perfect state; and this _is_ its cultivation.
Again, as health ought to precede labour of the body, and as a man in
health can do what an unhealthy man cannot do, and as of this health the
properties are strength, energy, agility, graceful carriage and action,
manual dexterity, and endurance of fatigue, so in like manner general
culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and
educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to
think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who
has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental
vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator,
or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business,
or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an
antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he
can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any
other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a
versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense
then, and as yet I have said but a very few words on a large subject,
mental culture is emphatically _useful_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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