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
and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.
7.
This, then, is the answer which I am prepared to give to the question with
which I opened this Discourse. Before going on to speak of the object of
the Church in taking up Philosophy, and the uses to which she puts it, I
am prepared to maintain that Philosophy is its own end, and, as I
conceive, I have now begun the proof of it. I am prepared to maintain that
there is a knowledge worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for
what it does; and what minutes remain to me to-day I shall devote to the
removal of some portion of the indistinctness and confusion with which the
subject may in some minds be surrounded.
It may be objected then, that, when we profess to seek Knowledge for some
end or other beyond itself, whatever it be, we speak intelligibly; but
that, whatever men may have said, however obstinately the idea may have
kept its ground from age to age, still it is simply unmeaning to say that
we seek Knowledge for its own sake, and for nothing else; for that it ever
leads to something beyond itself, which therefore is its end, and the
cause why it is desirable;—moreover, that this end is twofold, either of
this world or of the next; that all knowledge is cultivated either for
secular objects or for eternal; that if it is directed to secular objects,
it is called Useful Knowledge, if to eternal, Religious or Christian
Knowledge;—in consequence, that if, as I have allowed, this Liberal
Knowledge does not benefit the body or estate, it ought to benefit the
soul; but if the fact be really so, that it is neither a physical or a
secular good on the one hand, nor a moral good on the other, it cannot be
a good at all, and is not worth the trouble which is necessary for its
acquisition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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