NEW LIFE AND OLD LEARNING.

There is not, in the whole of Bacon’s writings, a remark more profoundly characteristic of the man and his philosophy, than is embodied in his epigram that Antiquity is the Youth of the World. If men could only have had the courage to act upon this truth as soon as it was pointed out,—if they could but have seen, that, in their mode of reckoning antiquity, they made always the mistake of beginning the calculations from the wrong end, and that, in everything relating to the progress of knowledge, and the advancement of the species, the Present, not the Past, should be deemed of superior authority,—how many miseries society would have spared itself, and how much earlier it would have profited by the greatest of its teachers, Experience!

‘For antiquity,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘the opinion which men cherish concerning it is altogether negligent, and scarcely congruous even to the name. For the old age and grandevity of the world are to be truly counted as antiquity; which are properly to be ascribed to our times, not to the younger 131age of the world, such as it was with the ancients. Since that age, in respect to us indeed, is ancient and greater; but in respect to the world itself, was new and lesser. And in reality, as we look for a greater acquaintance with human affairs, and a more mature judgment, from an old than from a young man, on account of his experience, and the variety and abundance of the things which he has seen, and heard, and considered, just so it is fit also that much greater things be expected from our age (if it knew its strength, and would endeavour and apply) than from the old times; as being a more advanced age of the world, and enlarged and accumulate with numberless experiences and observations.’

Have these pregnant sentences lost their meaning in the two centuries and a half that have since rolled away? Let us take the wealthiest and most distinguished seminary of learning now existing in England, and judge.

At the commencement of the present century, when the Novum Organum had been written nearly two hundred years, the examinations at the University of Oxford, so far as they were scientific at all, and not restricted to learned languages, turned entirely on the scholastic logic which the Novum Organum had shown to be a foul obstruction to knowledge. The new and true logic, as explained by Bacon, was never mentioned in the venerable place; and the new discoveries of the laws of nature to which it had led, formed no part of the general course of study, or of the subjects of public examination. It was quite possible for an Oxford man to have brought away a distinguished degree in the sciences, without knowing the truths of universal gravitation, or of the celestial motions, or of the planetary forces, or of any one of the provisions made by nature for the stability of the system we inhabit; and the very highest Oxford degree in the non-scientific departments, did not imply, any more than it does even yet, the remotest knowledge of modern languages or literature, of modern history or philosophy, of whether it might not have been Cromwell who discovered America, or Columbus who fought at Marston Moor. For any interest that the students at Oxford University were required to take in such matters, the past three hundred years might never have existed, or have been utterly annihilated, and all their wondrous burden of experiences melted into air.

It was not till after the nineteenth century had begun, that some sense of what had been going on in the world outside crept into the cloisters at Oxford. Statutes were then passed to recognise the Newtonian improvements in philosophy, and recommending, though not necessitating, their adoption into the course for honours. Honours nevertheless continued to be taken without them; and it is notorious that the soil has been ungenial to their growth, and that they never have flourished in it. Oxford, in effect, continued up to this day no other than it was four centuries ago. Apart from the doubtful discipline of life and manners attainable within its walls, it is still no more than a huge theological school, where the lay youth of England are admitted to participate in such meagre allowance of intellectual training as the clergy think safe for themselves; where Manchester and Birmingham are ignored; where the Greek and Latin authors continue in the same esteem as when they actually contained whatever existed of learning left upon the earth, and no education could proceed without them; and from which there issue into the world yearly reinforcements of the upper classes of society, less able to cope with the wants and duties that surround them, and less acquainted with the laws and operations by which the present is to be guided into the future, than any self-taught merchant’s clerk at Liverpool, or any sharp engineer’s lad at the railway in Euston Square.

Now, what has been the answer from Oxford when reproaches of this kind have been addressed to it? What was its answer when ridiculed, forty years ago, for teaching what rational men had been laughing at for more than a century? It amounted to this—that so intimately had the original statutes of the University interwoven the Aristotelian methods with the whole course of its studies and exercises, and so sacredly were its officers bound to see to the enforcement of those statutes, that the last stronghold from which any such learning could be dislodged was the University, to which its mere forms and practices unhappily continued to be essential, even long after every vestige of reality had vanished out of them. In other words it was confessed that Oxford had been so constructed as a place of study, that the rules and statutes which should have been framed for the reception of truth, in whatever quarter it might appear, had turned out to be only available for the retention and perpetuation of error; and that Education, whose express province everywhere else was to absorb and make profit of every new acquisition, was miserably bound, on this spot only, to reject them all. Precisely the same arguments have very lately been repeated. When the great ‘whip’ of the country parsons brought up a majority against the Modern History statute twelve months ago, this was the plea on which bigotry rallied her forces; and when more recently the statute was again proposed, the same plea would have secured it the same reception, if the old flock of reverend Thwack-’ums had not meanwhile tired of the expense and trouble of being dragged in a drove from their parsonages to the Senate House, to bleat forth ignorant non placets.

As it was, the History statute was passed with its notable limitation against the events of the last sixty years. The Oxford scholar 132may now sail down the stream of modern story as long as the water is smooth, or the storm seen only in the distance; but as he nears the explosive point of 1789, of which the vast and terrible wrecks are still tumbling around us, a huge board warns him of ‘danger,’ and his frail little cock-boat of history is driven forcibly all the way back again. Such is the point of advance to which the present year of our Lord has brought the University of Oxford. Such is the provision made at the wealthiest place of education in the world, in the middle of the nineteenth century, for that true and subtle understanding of modern life and institutions on which the peaceful development of the twentieth century will mainly depend! But Oxford was founded by a Church, which, amid all ludicrous surrounding evidences of her failures and her follies, still claims to be infallible; and the worst peculiarities of the founder cleave to the foundation. The next fifty years will have to show, however, whether an institution shall be allowed to continue in the annual disposal of some half million or more of money for a purpose she so manifestly mistakes, that even the learning she prefers to every other is less taught to her scholars for the wisdom to be found in it, than for mere constructive skill in the language by which that wisdom is conveyed.

Sydney Smith has remarked it as one of the great advantages of the classical education in which we are trained in this country, that it sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity in thought. ‘It is impossible for us,’ he exclaims, in one of those noble lectures on moral philosophy of which the fragments have recently been published, ‘in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully related, without catching, ourselves, some taste for greatness, and a love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things than other men. And though the state of order and discipline into which the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice; the noblest incitement to love truth and manly independence and honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the system of life upon the rock of integrity.’

But is the opportunity fairly afforded for this? Is not the attention which ought to be fixed upon Things, to secure any part of the gain thus eloquently set before us, for the most part distracted and occupied by Words, in the system which commonly prevails? Has not the labour to be undergone in obtaining the ready verbal skill exacted in College examinations, a direct tendency to weaken our pleasure in the history, philosophy, or poetry on which we grind and sharpen that verbal skill? We apprehend that this is really the case; and that the old learning which Oxford persists in thinking all-sufficient for the wants of our new and busy life, is taught upon a method which strips it of its noblest lessons, and withers its choicest fruit.

The question is a most serious one for those whom it most immediately concerns, and whom it should warn of the danger of too manifestly lagging behind the time. At this moment power is changing hands, as certainly as in the days of those subtle and eager men who seated the ancient learning on its throne; and who would as surely depose it now, if founding new universities amongst us, and give it but its due and proper place in the expanding circles of knowledge, as, four hundred years ago, they admitted its just predominance, and established its solitary sway. When periods of such vicissitude arrive, it is for those who have been powerful heretofore, to look to their tenures of authority. Upon nothing can they hope to rest, if not upon complete accordance with the spirit of the age, and a thorough aptitude to its necessities and wants. If the education of children is to continue imperfect and bad, as Dean Swift tells us he had found it always in his experience, in exact proportion to the wealth and grandeur of the parents, the next generation of parents will have to look to the continued security of their wealth and grandeur. The Earth is in incessant motion. The time when it was supposed to be permanently fixed in the centre of the universe has passed away for ever, and modes of study only suited to that time will have to share the fate that has befallen it.