A UNIVERSITY AS PART OF THE NATIONAL LIFE.

A lecture was given last evening in the hall of the Ann-street School of Arts by Mr. R. H. Roe, M.A., the subject being " A University as Part of the National Life."

THE THREE PERIODS OF INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS IN OUR HISTORY.

It will, I think, be found by the student of history that the great periods of intellectual advancement have been times of enthusiasm, times at which the discovery of some new world of knowledge has fired men's souls and imaginations, much in the same way as the wonders of the new lands and seas opened up by Columbus and Vasco de Gama stirred the spirit of adventure and commercial enterprise in the men of the sixteenth century. There have in our history been three such periods : the first, the age of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, followed by the establishment of universities throughout Europe ; the second, the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the history, philosophy, poetry, and art of the ancient world were rediscovered for the new ; the third, our own century, in which the marvellous discoveries of science have revolutionised our knowledge and habits of life alike, and given a fresh impulse to learning, which has made itself felt in every class of the community and every branch of literature.

FIRST PERIOD.—THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES.

It will he desirable to consider in detail the work done by the universities at each of these periods. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the time of the Crusades the intellectual condition of Europe was in a barbarous state; monarchs and nobles often unable to write, the priests themselves so illiterate that King Alfred tells us "he knew no priest south of the Thames who, understood the meaning of the Latin prayers he used." Church dignitaries in high position often, as Charlemagne complains, so uneducated that they could not write a letter without obscurity and uncouth diction, and the masses everywhere in a state of absolute ignorance. Not a discovery of importance was made for 1000 years. Charlemagne declaring that though right action is better than knowledge—yet in order to do right we must know what is right—established a system of schools throughout his empire which were the seed-beds whence sprang the material that in due time built up the universities. His example was followed by our own scholar—King Alfred.

ITS CAUSES.

It was the general fusion of races at the time of the Crusades, the sight of new lands and peoples, the intercourse of minds running before in isolated grooves, but above all the respect for general merit, the love of truth, honour, courtesy, and refinement, taught by the spirit of chivalry, that gave the first new impulse to higher learning in Europe after the long intellectual sleep of the dark ages.

The Crusaders in the East came in contact with the remnants of Greek culture in the Byzantine Empire and in the schools and universities of the Arabs ; for the Arabs, like the Romans, had come under the spell of Greek civilisation, when they conquered the Empire of Alexander. Aristotle and Euclid were translated into Arabic and taught in the universities of Cairo, Bagdad, Alexandria, and Cordova, centuries before they found their way into Europe; and we must never forgot, while considering the wonderful progress of Mohammedanism in carrying the sword and the Koran to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, that the Arabs possessed as distinct a supremacy of intellect and knowledge over other nations at that time as they did of religious fervour.

ITS RESULTS.

The Crusaders carried back to their homes a desire for this new culture ; and there began to spring up all over Europe, in the thirteenth, century, a crop of universities very similar to those which had already existed in the East.

THE FOUNDATION OF THE UNIVERSITIES.

The thousands of needy students who flocked to the halls of Paris, Bologna, Padua, and Oxford pursuing with all the rapture of youth the phantom of scholastic philosophy, gnawing ravenously at the dry branch of Roman law and Greek principles of medicine, bearing unflinchingly all bodily hardships, in order to gain the mental food for which their soul craved, furnish us with a picture of unselfish devotion, noble ambition, and intellectual fervour unsurpassed in any age; and though the best minds of Europe for a while lost themselves in the subtleties of the schoolmen, though the first frenzied enthusiasm was followed by a reaction of partial sloth, though the iron hand of orthodoxy crushed for a while that freedom of inquiry which is the breath of life to all intellectual progress, still the movement left many permanent marks upon the face of European civilisation. The universities were now established as strongholds in which all that was then known of the learning of past ages could be stored, and as cities of refuge under the bulwarks of whose privileges the persecuted could find shelter. As the baron entrenched himself within his castle, as the towns gathered within their city walls the strength that was to break down the nobles, as the trades resisted encroachment of king, nobles, and fellow citizens by their guilds, so in an age when sheer brute force ruled the world, learning found refuge and safety behind the laws and charters of the universities. The spirit which ruled these early universities was a prominent force in breaking down the traditional principles of feudalism. They proclaimed by practice, no less than precept, that a man's claim to supremacy over his fellows depended, not upon accidents of birth, or possession of lands and riches, or skill in arms, but upon intellectual superiority. To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole title to lead. He who by his labour and skill was entitled to be their teacher and governor was hailed master, and exercised authority over them, whether born of noble, townsman, or of serf. They proclaimed, too, the universal brotherhood of men in the face of Europe, when it was divided as it had never been before, or will be again, into isolated baronies, duchies, and counties, embittered by hereditary feuds and mutual plunderings ; when intercourse was well nigh impossible owing to the dangers that beset travellers on the road. Safe conduct was often given by monarchs to students from other countries, even in time of war, just as with the Greeks those attending the Olympian games were granted immunity from attack at the time of their bitterest feuds, and there arose under   university influence a spirit of broad intellectual comradeship, rising above distinctions of race ; men of all nations and tongues formed as it were one community, with Latin as a common language for the interchange of thought.

Bologna was the especial home of civil law, Salerno of medicine, Paris and Oxford of arts—that is of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy although in most of those cities faculties were soon founded in which students could qualify for practice in any of the three professions. From Bologna came to Oxford the principles of civil law, which so alarmed King Stephen that ho prohibited the lectures and issued a royal edict forbidding Englishmen to own treatises on foreign law. However, civil law hold its own at Oxford in spite of the opposition of Popes and Kings, and bore its fruit in the charters wrung from reluctant monarchs at the hands of Stephen Langton and Simon de Montfort, the former Chancellor of the University of Paris, the latter the intimate friend of Adam Marsh and Roger Bacon. But it was even more in the matter of religious than political freedom that the influence of the universities was felt. The Church had at first fostered these new centres of learning, believing that all knowledge tended to the glory of God, but the spirit of the new philosophy which maintained the absolute supremacy of the reason in all theological or other truths soon came in conflict with the dogmas of traditional religion, and the age of suppression followed. It was upon John Wycliffe, master of Balliol, and his followers, the Lollards, that the storm fell with the greatest fury. This reformer of the morals   and dogmas of the Church had the stanch support of the university, who evaded or defied the successive Papal Bulls issued against him. It was at Oxford that Wycliffe's translation of the New Testament was made, at Oxford that his band of disciples was first formed and afterwards recruited, and though the fires of persecution effectually destroyed his teaching for a while in England, his works were carried to the University of Prague by some of his exiled followers, and there bore later fruit in the reforms of John Huss the Bohemian. We   see then here the intimate connection of university movement with freedom of inquiry. Barren as were many of the metaphysical speculations of this age, they are of importance as being the battlefields of intellectual freedom. " It is in truth," says Professor Laurie, " to the free activity of the human mind in dealing with questions of abstract philosophy and theology, that we are indebted primarily for the scientific spirit. It was not the study of physical science which either in the eleventh or twelfth, or afterwards in the fifteenth, century gained for mankind liberty of thought. This was the work of the philosopher and the man of letters. Physical science entered into the possession of a kingdom of liberty already conquered." The Wycliffe controversy was closed by an order in 1406 that no book written in the time of John Wycliffe or since should be read until it had been examined and approved by Archbishop Arundel or his successor, a provision which effectually checked all originality of thought and literary productiveness in the university for several generations.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS OF FIRST PERIOD.

To sum up briefly the work done by the universities in the centuries prior to the Renaissance, it may be claimed for them that they were a powerful element in the forces that broke down the isolation of feudalism and spread the democratic principles of brotherhood and equality ; they were the storehouses of all existing learning, and the training grounds of the intellect of the times ; they were the centres from which radiated the knowledge of civil law and theological speculation, which won for us the first victories in civil and religious freedom.

SECOND PERIOD.—THE RENAISSANCE—ITS CAUSES.

The next outburst of intellectual enthusiasm was the period of the Renaissance, when the full of Constantinople had driven westward many learned Greeks, and had enabled universities and private collectors to acquire a muss of precious writings hitherto unknown or forgotten, Oxford scholars journeying to Italy brought back with them a knowledge of the Greek language and a store of Greek books either purchased or transcribed, and the printing press hastened the diffusion of their contents over the country through the past and present members of the universities. The men to whom England owes most in this great revival were William Grocyn, the first teacher of Greek in England ; Limacre, the learned Oxford physician ; Colet, the Oxford lecturer and reformer of English education; Thomas More, then a university student, and Erasmus. Our literature has been over since so saturated with a classical spirit that we can hardly realise how deeply the human mind was stirred in those days by this revival of the old learning.

ITS RESULTS.

The effect on university studies was electrical. " The students rush," says an eye-witness, "to Greek letters ; they endure watching, fasting, toil, and hunger in pursuit of them." How completely the universities did their work may be soon in the classical spirit which, ruled the language and thought of the next generation, and which survives with almost unabated strength in our own days.

MORE'S UTOPIA.

Sir Thomas More may be taken as a type of the new culture. In his Utopia he adapts to the wants of his own country and times the ideal republics of Plato and Aristotle. Few of us are aware, I think, how many of the great social problems of our modern society were then first cast upon the waters of English thought. He raises a cry of pity for the poor and a protest against the tyranny of landlords and manufacturers ; he demands that the period of daily labour shall be fixed by law at nine hours,   that the worker may have time for that intellectual improvement which is essential to the well-being of the commonwealth ; State aid is to provide that every child in the community shall be well taught; proper dwellings, giving light, air, comfort, and cleanliness are to be erected for all citizens; punishment, he asserts, should be proportionate to the crime, and therefore theft should not be punished by death, but the criminal should be be reformed by labour and hope of recovery ; he proclaims the principle of broad religious toleration. " Every man in his state may be of what religion he will, for the people of Utopia were persuaded that it was not in a man's power to believe what he list." These ideas have taken centuries to establish themselves, but there they are, one of the first gifts of the new learning towards the reformation of society. Since the Renaissance the classics of Greece and Rome have been a mine of wealth from which all poets, philosophers, and historians have directly or indirectly drawn.

POETRY.

There is hardly a poet in the English language that has not come from the universities, and whose poems do not bear the impress of classical culture. Shakspeare, Burns, Pope, and Keats are almost the only instances of English poets outside of the ranks of English university men. Even Shakspeare, with his small Latin and less Greek, was largely indebted to " Plutarch's Lives" for some of his finest plays and characters, and his whole poems breathe the spirit of that broad humanity which the new learning had infused into his times. Pope, though debarred by his religion from an university education, stands at the head of a school of poets, with whom a servile imitation of Greece and Rome has destroyed the originality and study of Nature, which are the life-blood of genuine verse ; the author of "Endymion" has perhaps caught the spirit of Greek culture more vividly than any other   English writer. Milton's diction and thought are almost encumbered with the weight of classical allusion and imagery that hangs upon every line. All the literature of the age of Elizabeth bears distinctly the impress of the new learning ; the greater part is the product of university, men. Spenser was at Cambridge, Sir Philip Sydney and Raleigh at Oxford; Ben Johnson, Marlowe, and Shirley were at Cambridge, Otway at Oxford, so that the Elizabethan drama, of which we are so justly proud, may be fairly claimed as an university product. Later on the Leviathan of Hobbes which issued from Oxford was a potent force in the spread of those ideas which brought on the Revolution.

THE RESTORATION.

The leading intellects also in the work of the Reformation were all members of universities. More and Fisher, Erasmus, Melancthon and Luther were men whose university connection lasted through their lives. Knox was trained at St. Andrew's, and Calvin at Paris. The work of the translation of the Scriptures necessarily devolved on men of university training. The translations of Wycliffe, Tyndal, and Coverdale successively brought within the reach of the English people those Scriptures which have since been the standard not only of religious truth but of the English language in its purest form.

PHILOSOPHY.

In philosophy the classic Bacon revolutionised the old methods of inquiry, and laid down scientifically the laws of induction which have been the basis of all modern experimental science. Locke, Whately, Mansel, Hamilton have given us that logic which is the most rigorous instrument for the training of the intellect and nicety of expression. Moral philosophy and metaphysics, the most elevating and purifying of all studies, based absolutely as they are upon the teachings of Aristotle and Plato, have been, as we should expect, confined to university men, or men steeped in the learning of universities. It is impossible to do more than mention names here. Pascal, Descartes, Locke, Stewart, Reid, Kant, Hegel, and Goethe were all the leading lights of their universities, and most of them professors.

ESSAYISTS.

Amongst the essayists, Bacon, Steele, Addison, Jonson, Swift, and De Quincey have probably done more than any other class of writers to raise the level of English thought, and purify the style of current literature.

BENTHAM.

What an influence upon English politics and law has been wrought by the labours of a student like Bentham, whose books, though unread by the general public, have been the teachers of the teachers and governors of our race. " It was not Bentham by his own   writings," says Mill, " who caused the Reform Bill and the simplification of English law, but it was Bentham through the minds and pens which those writings fed, through the men in more direct contact with the world, into whom his spirit passed." He taught us what we were slow enough to learn, that no innovation is to be scouted because it is an innovation, and no establishment to be considered sacred because it is an establishment ; every institution must stand on its trial, and justify its existence by its work. This spirit has been the basis of all modern reforms.

THE CHURCH AND THE BAR.

In jurisprudence I need not mention the long list of chancellors and distinguished advocates who have been university men, for the universities have always been considered the special school of lawyers and divines. It is, however, worthy of remark here that it has been through the training and endowments of the universities that that struggling talent which, in spite of early poverty, has adorned the pulpit and the bench, has risen into eminence, and been enabled to do service to its country.

ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS.

Mathematical science has been developed to its grand proportions entirely in the universities. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Laplace, Newton were all engaged in teaching there ; Pascal and Leibnitz were students who maintained a long connection with their universities. Almost all those marvellous discoveries in astronomy by which our conception of the universe has been so much exalted, and by which we have come to recognise law and order extending to the utmost limits of space, to compare the masses of the planets, and to banish the terrors of eclipses, comets, and meteors, have been the results of the labours of university teachers.

SCIENCE.

Science had its beginnings in the studies at Oxford of Roger Bacon, whose prophetic anticipation of the use of gunpowder and the telescope earned for him the character of a magician ; the first discoveries about electricity and magnetism were made by Dr. Gilbert, of Cambridge, in the reign of Elizabeth ; William Harvey, of Cambridge, by his proof of the circulation of the blood gave the first impulse to anatomy and surgery ; the foundations of research in natural science were laid by that group of experimental philosophers, who gathered round Boyle at Oxford, in the reign of Charles II., and started the Royal Society,

OBJECT OF THIS REVIEW OF THE PROGRESS OF LEARNING.

This review of the progress of human learning has been perhaps somewhat long. My aim has been to show how, in every branch of knowledge, the history of our progress has been almost identical with the history of the universities. The grandest thoughts of philosophy which tend to elevate the dignity of man, the flights of poetic imagination which warm our sympathies and purify our emotions, the political principles which guide our governments, the social laws which regulate our health and intercourse, the science by which we investigate Nature and appropriate her riches to our use, can be traced to the universities as their birthplace and their home, the focus from which they have spread out and leavened the national life.

THIRD PERIOD.—THE UNIVERSITIES OF OUR OWN TIMES.

And if this has been the work of the universities in the past, we may refer, too, with equal pride to the results they are achieving now. Ours is the busiest age of thought that the world has seen, and knowledge radiates so rapidly from centre to centre, that many follow labourers outside the universities can now attain the learning which before was to be gained in them alone.

MILL AND SPENCER.

Men like Mill and Herbert Spencer, whose genius and indomitable industry place them amongst our leaders of thought, have been able to dispense with university training; but how much of their culture is due to those university books on which they have fed ; how much more to the intercourse and conflict with university minds amongst whom they have spent their lives ; how vast a portion of their influence is due to the thousands of scholars trained at university lectures in Mill's logic and Spencer's social statics ?

MEN OF PRACTICE AND OF THEORY IN SCIENCE.

In science we need and welcome the services of practical men, like Stephenson, Edison, and Bessemer, for the application of our now scientific truths to the supply of our growing needs. But side by side with the expansion of our range of practical science is needed also the advance of theory and systematic training. Without the researches of our men of theory, our Huxley, Tyndall, Thomson, Groove, Darwin, Lyell, and Roscoe—all university men—further progress would soon become impossible. Huxley assures us that all the processes employed in arts and manufactures fall within the range of chemistry or physics. In order to improve them one must understand, and no one has a chance of really understanding unless he has obtained that mastery of principles which is gained alone by long continued and well directed scientific training. Experimental research becomes yearly more expensive, and the necessity more preying for a costly supply of instruments and materials, which an university laboratory alone can supply.

It is in the laboratories of the German universities and those of our English professors that nearly all the applications of chemistry to our manufactures have been made. The grand generalisation of Darwin has revolutionised men's ideas on biology and physiology and given a lasting stimulus to the study of every branch of natural history.

THE UTILITY OF THEORY IN SCIENCE.

Sir William Thomson's investigations and inventions in electricity rendered the Atlantic cable a possibility. Ocean navigation would be wandering in the dark without the guidance of the Nautical Almanac, whose tables each year represent the results of the highest mathematical study. Our scientific knowledge of magnetism alone enables us to employ the compass still in our iron ships. The great engineering feats of which we are so justly proud all depend in every detail upon the mathematical calculations made by minds highly trained in pure and applied science. To take one instance of hundreds, in the construction of the St. Gotthard Tunnel, owing to the perfection of these scientific calculations, the two working parties were able to start on opposite sides of the mountain, nine miles from each other, and meet in the centre with such exactness that the axes of the two bores were only 2ft. apart. In every application of knowledge to practical use the same truth holds the vaster the materials with which we are dealing the more need is there of deep and sound theoretic training.

UNIVERSITY INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE, POLITICS,AND RELIGION.

But it is not in our science alone that the activity of university thought is making itself felt. English history has been in our age for the first time written in a scientific spirit. Macaulay of Cambridge, Froude, Freeman, and Green of Oxford, and Lecky from Dublin have made our history at once intelligible and fascinating to us. Oxford and Cambridge have furnished the vast majority of our leading politicians ; Gladstone, Goschen, Morley, Lowe, Selborne were all first-class men in the Oxford classical school, and the majority of the members of the past and present Cabinet have borne the marks of their university culture throughout their public careers. The new science of philology has opened up a wealth of past history and given us a view of the natural affinities of different languages of which previous generations never dreamt. The critical and historical spirit has entered into the domain of theology, and established the right of free discussion and the principle of broad toleration. The evangelical movement, which originated at Cambridge, and the Tractarian movement at Oxford have infused new vitality into the teaching and practical Christianity of the Church.

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. :  1887) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article174757476