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
There were two questions, to which I drew your attention, Gentlemen, in
the beginning of my first Discourse, as being of especial importance and
interest at this time: first, whether it is consistent with the idea of
University teaching to exclude Theology from a place among the sciences
which it embraces; next, whether it is consistent with that idea to make
the useful arts and sciences its direct and principal concern, to the
neglect of those liberal studies and exercises of mind, in which it has
heretofore been considered mainly to consist. These are the questions
which will form the subject of what I have to lay before you, and I shall
now enter upon the former of the two.
1.
It is the fashion just now, as you very well know, to erect so-called
Universities, without making any provision in them at all for Theological
chairs. Institutions of this kind exist both here and in England. Such a
procedure, though defended by writers of the generation just passed with
much plausible argument and not a little wit, seems to me an intellectual
absurdity; and my reason for saying so runs, with whatever abruptness,
into the form of a syllogism:—A University, I should lay down, by its very
name professes to teach universal knowledge: Theology is surely a branch
of knowledge: how then is it possible for it to profess all branches of
knowledge, and yet to exclude from the subjects of its teaching one which,
to say the least, is as important and as large as any of them? I do not
see that either premiss of this argument is open to exception.
As to the range of University teaching, certainly the very name of
University is inconsistent with restrictions of any kind. Whatever was the
original reason of the adoption of that term, which is unknown,(5) I am
only putting on it its popular, its recognized sense, when I say that a
University should teach universal knowledge. That there is a real
necessity for this universal teaching in the highest schools of intellect,
I will show by-and-by; here it is sufficient to say that such universality
is considered by writers on the subject to be the very characteristic of a
University, as contrasted with other seats of learning. Thus Johnson, in
his Dictionary, defines it to be “a school where all arts and faculties
are taught;” and Mosheim, writing as an historian, says that, before the
rise of the University of Paris,—for instance, at Padua, or Salamanca, or
Cologne,—“the whole circle of sciences then known was not taught;” but
that the school of Paris, “which exceeded all others in various respects,
as well as in the number of teachers and students, was the first to
embrace all the arts and sciences, and therefore first became a
University.”(6)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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