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
Let me make use of an illustration. In the combination of colours, very
different effects are produced by a difference in their selection and
juxta-position; red, green, and white, change their shades, according to
the contrast to which they are submitted. And, in like manner, the drift
and meaning of a branch of knowledge varies with the company in which it
is introduced to the student. If his reading is confined simply to one
subject, however such division of labour may favour the advancement of a
particular pursuit, a point into which I do not here enter, certainly it
has a tendency to contract his mind. If it is incorporated with others, it
depends on those others as to the kind of influence which it exerts upon
him. Thus the Classics, which in England are the means of refining the
taste, have in France subserved the spread of revolutionary and deistical
doctrines. In Metaphysics, again, Butler’s Analogy of Religion, which has
had so much to do with the conversion to the Catholic faith of members of
the University of Oxford, appeared to Pitt and others, who had received a
different training, to operate only in the direction of infidelity. And so
again, Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, as I think he tells us in the narrative
of his life, felt the science of Mathematics to indispose the mind to
religious belief, while others see in its investigations the best
parallel, and thereby defence, of the Christian Mysteries. In like manner,
I suppose, Arcesilas would not have handled logic as Aristotle, nor
Aristotle have criticized poets as Plato; yet reasoning and poetry are
subject to scientific rules.
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