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
trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose
of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which
has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a
gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without
which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and
disappointment have a charm. The art which tends to make a man all this,
is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the
art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible,
less certain, less complete in its result.
Discourse VIII.
Knowledge Viewed In Relation To Religion.
1.
We shall be brought, Gentlemen, to-day, to the termination of the
investigation which I commenced three Discourses back, and which, I was
well aware, from its length, if for no other reason, would make demands
upon the patience even of indulgent hearers.
First I employed myself in establishing the principle that Knowledge is
its own reward; and I showed that, when considered in this light, it is
called Liberal Knowledge, and is the scope of Academical Institutions.
Next, I examined what is meant by Knowledge, when it is said to be pursued
for its own sake; and I showed that, in order satisfactorily to fulfil
this idea, Philosophy must be its _form_; or, in other words, that its
matter must not be admitted into the mind passively, as so much
acquirement, but must be mastered and appropriated as a system consisting
of parts, related one to the other, and interpretative of one another in
the unity of a whole.
Further, I showed that such a philosophical contemplation of the field of
Knowledge as a whole, leading, as it did, to an understanding of its
separate departments, and an appreciation of them respectively, might in
consequence be rightly called an illumination; also, it was rightly called
an enlargement of mind, because it was a distinct location of things one
with another, as if in space; while it was moreover its proper cultivation
and its best condition, both because it secured to the intellect the sight
of things as they are, or of truth, in opposition to fancy, opinion, and
theory; and again, because it presupposed and involved the perfection of
its various powers.
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