only those who recognize the truth of what I say as to the tendency of the pedagogic mind who do think, and keep themselves fresh and open. The intellectual effort and the moral courage required to organize, and the personal enthusiasm required to maintain, the inner life of the Humanistic school of the 15th and 16th centuries must have been the endowment of few. The second period of the Renaissance saw the philological and textual movement in full activity, and was distinguished by the names, among others, of the younger Scaliger and Casaubon, and on the religious side by the formulation of Protestant dogma. The schools unfortunately felt the movement at once, because of the tendency of all teaching to content itself with form and formula and precept. There was no agency for maintaining a scholastic aim and method; the scholastic profession in short was not a profession: it took the colour of the time. It had no independent vitality and no philosophic basis. But every great movement, even when it is spent, leaves some gain for the world. When we ask ourselves what the 16th century did for the secondary schools of Europe, we have only to compare the work of the old cathedral and monastery schools with those of the 16th and 17th centuries. The classical authors of Greece and Rome were now firmly established as instruments of instruction. It is true that the spirit of Vittorino da Feltre, of Neander and Sturm and Ascham was lost in the 17th century; but classical books remained, and could not be taken away. Grammar, though then (and now) badly taught, was simplified, because the text-books had been. simplified. These were two solid facts which survived and defied the dullest of teachers. But it appears to me that this was all. The glimmerings of method and the ethical fervour born of the alliance of Humanism with the reformed Christianity had disappeared, and grammar and flagellation, twin brothers, had reasserted themselves— indeed from many schools they had never disappeared. Many causes contributed to this: the school cannot be permanently in advance of the time, and every organ of progressive civilization must wait for peace among the nations. Meanwhile the great scheme of the evangelical Humanists which contemplated a vernacular education for all had received practical effect in many towns; but as a universal scheme it had to wait (except in Scotland, and, later, in Saxony) on political enfranchisement for its full recognition; and this was a business of about 300 years. The extension, however, of primary vernacular religious schools, which had existed in towns before the Reformation, had received a powerful impulse, and continued to advance wherever the reformed religion was honestly held as a religion of personal conviction and soulexperience. The central position of the Reformers was that between man and God in Christ the personal relation was immediate. No external authority could relieve a man of his duty to work out his own salvation. For this, knowledge of the truth assimilated by himself was essential, and this, again, was impossible without instruction. Popular education was thus a logical necessity of the position. CHAPTER IV. UNIVERSITIES. IN the Universities the permanent gain to the Humanists was chiefly the introduction of Latin literature, of Greek, a little mathematics, and the genuine Aristotle (though still taught chiefly through a Latin medium), aided by scholastic text-books and bald epitomes. The study of Civil Law had now also more reference to the spirit and life of antiquity, and Medicine began to be more scientific in its ground-work. These higher institutions were however essentially conservative and responded very slowly and unwillingly to the claims of Humanism and of the modern spirit generally. It has to be remembered that universities were for long placed in a difficult position. They were scholae publicae to which all might go, fit or unfit; and so long as the secondary schools were few in number they had themselves to discharge the function of secondary schools, as they still do at Oxford and Cambridge in the case of all who are unable to pass the previous examination on entrance', and also in the case of the ordinary pass-man. The necessity thus imposed on universities, and which led to their being attended by boys of 13 or 14, had in mediaeval times been fully accepted, especially at Paris. The result must have been a low standard 1 In the Scottish Universities all have to pass a preliminary examination on entrance. of general attainment, except for a select few. Then, the practice of giving school instruction at the universities reacted everywhere throughout Europe to prevent the erection of secondary schools. But the general conception of a university as a school of the higher faculties, law, medicine, theology, and of philosophy (which also was practically a higher faculty) was never quite lost sight of. In Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries Professors of Latin and Greek literature gathered round them at University and Court centres all who desired culture as opposed to professional instruction, but the universities themselves were not re-organized on a Humanistic basis. The lecturers were in truth constantly moving from place to place like the Greek Rhetoricians in Roman imperial times. Prior to the 16th century the higher university intellect occupied itself in the department of Arts mainly with logic and metaphysics, as interpreted by the schoolmen in unclassical Latin, and too often based on a partially understood Aristotle. But in the midst of all this they were trying to read for themselves the riddle of life and thought, and they were accomplishing great things, when we consider the conditions under which they worked and the complex dogmatism which they had to rationalize. "Scarcely thirty years ago," says Erasmus (1516) in a letter to a friend (quoted in Seebohm's Oxford Reformers, p. 399), “nothing was taught at Cambridge but the parva logicalia of Alexander, antiquated exercises from Aristotle, and the 'Quaestiones' of Scotus. In process of time improved studies were added, viz., mathematics, a new, or at all events a renovated Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek letters." After the 15th century, though scholastic logic and disputations still occupied the field, yet the ultimate reference was now to a better understood authority. Luther desired to see the curriculum relieved from the Aristotelian metaphysics, ethics, and physics, as taught from text-books, and confined to the logic, rhetoric, and poetics in the original, or studied in epitomes of the original. Cicero's rhetoric also he advocated, but without cumbrous commentaries. These philosophic studies, with the addition of Latin, Greek and Hebrew and their literatures, would have constituted Luther's scheme of university reform; and substantially also Melanchthon's. And this with the introduction of a better mathematics was in truth the general line which reform took where it was welcomed. At best, however, it was only initiated. In short, even after the 16th century, the Aristotelian encyclopaedia (metaphysics, logic, ethics, poetics, politics, physics) was the ideal curriculum; but now more genuinely Aristotelian than formerly, and not so thickly overlaid with commentary. The mass of students, however, could never get beyond their text-books, and these were still highly scholastic in their form. Thus the complaints of men like Bacon (b. 1561), and subsequently Milton (b. 1608), re-echoed by all educational reformers, were fully justified. In truth, the resettlement of the Faith of Europe, and the great political issues everywhere at stake, added to the natural conservatism of universities, and the inadequate preparation of those coming to them from secondary schools retarded the full growth of modern ideas in the higher education. And yet the planting of mathematics and Greek in Academic Halls and the study of the ancient literatures, by the few at least, were permanent gains. The universities, however, like the rest of the world, had to wait for Bacon and Descartes and Newton, before they could begin to throw off their mediaevalism; and they, doubtless, owed it to the growth of modern literatures that the true purpose of studying the ancient classics was kept alive by being understood. George Buchanan, the Scottish Humanist, who had taught in the Humanistic College (secondary school) of Bordeaux when Montaigne was a pupil there, and was familiar with the work of the University of Paris, drew up a scheme for the reform of the University of St Andrews, which was printed in 1570. This is to my mind a very interesting document, |