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
If then I am arguing, and shall argue, against Professional or Scientific
knowledge as the sufficient end of a University Education, let me not be
supposed, Gentlemen, to be disrespectful towards particular studies, or
arts, or vocations, and those who are engaged in them. In saying that Law
or Medicine is not the end of a University course, I do not mean to imply
that the University does not teach Law or Medicine. What indeed can it
teach at all, if it does not teach something particular? It teaches _all_
knowledge by teaching all _branches_ of knowledge, and in no other way. I
do but say that there will be this distinction as regards a Professor of
Law, or of Medicine, or of Geology, or of Political Economy, in a
University and out of it, that out of a University he is in danger of
being absorbed and narrowed by his pursuit, and of giving Lectures which
are the Lectures of nothing more than a lawyer, physician, geologist, or
political economist; whereas in a University he will just know where he
and his science stand, he has come to it, as it were, from a height, he
has taken a survey of all knowledge, he is kept from extravagance by the
very rivalry of other studies, he has gained from them a special
illumination and largeness of mind and freedom and self-possession, and he
treats his own in consequence with a philosophy and a resource, which
belongs not to the study itself, but to his liberal education.
This then is how I should solve the fallacy, for so I must call it, by
which Locke and his disciples would frighten us from cultivating the
intellect, under the notion that no education is useful which does not
teach us some temporal calling, or some mechanical art, or some physical
secret. I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself,
brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it
undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number.
There is a duty we owe to human society as such, to the state to which we
belong, to the sphere in which we move, to the individuals towards whom we
are variously related, and whom we successively encounter in life; and
that philosophical or liberal education, as I have called it, which is the
proper function of a University, if it refuses the foremost place to
professional interests, does but postpone them to the formation of the
citizen, and, while it subserves the larger interests of philanthropy,
prepares also for the successful prosecution of those merely personal
objects, which at first sight it seems to disparage.
7.
And now, Gentlemen, I wish to be allowed to enforce in detail what I have
been saying, by some extracts from the writings to which I have already
alluded, and to which I am so greatly indebted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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