popular forces, was arrayed not more against ecclesiastical or political authority than against scholastic. And to-day, while our professors are still mumbling drowsily over Hegelian, or even pre- Kantian philosopliies, the whole world outside their class-rooms is ringing with noise of the great theory which will be for ever associated with the 'horsey undergraduate' of Edinburgh and the pupil of the provincial schoolmaster at Derby.
It is true that a general charge of this nature must not be made without some modifications. In Germany the Universities, for very good reasons, have long been an honourable exception to the pre- vailing rule. In France, like everything else there, they have been vastly bettered by the Revolution ; and even in England it would be impossible to find nowadays a state of matters quite so bad as that described by Gibbon. The measures of reform there carried have borne at least some fruit; the Victorian and Durham Universities liave not been without their influence; and in the rise of a school of English philology at Oxford there are promising sisns of life. But in Scotland the work of reform is still practically all to do. Our Universities, indeed, are by common consent the very worst in Western Europe outside of Spain. It is enough to allude merely to their disgraceful attitude towards the just claims of women. And for the education of men — it is possible for a student here to take his degree in classics and yet be ignorant of the work of Niebuhr and Mommsen; in philosojihy, and yet know nothing of Spencer; in literature, and yet be unable to construe a line of Layamon's Brut. Save Switzerland, there is no other country with so small a population and so many universities ; and yet we confess ourselves unequal to the task of educating our own youth. Our students go to Oxford for a decent knowledge of Latin, and to Cambridge for an adequate notion of mathematics, while even our clergymen have to betake themselves to Bonn or Jena before they can learn enough heterodoxy to keep their congregations from sleep.
What is the cure of all this ? Not, certainly, a mere increase of endowment, or even the erection of a few more chairs. There are those who think that our professors are, many of them, far too comfort- able already ; and in an atmosphere where so many studies have languished, it is not likely that new plants will take vigorous root. What our Universi- ties need is not a sop but a stimulant ; and probably the best metiiod of reform in all cases is that which the abuses themselves most fear. One may get some guidance from ancient history—a school where only fools and politicians decline to learn. Although for some centuries back the Universities have as a rule been laggards, yet there was a time when they were in the very forefront of thought. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the great schools of Paris and Bologna, and to a less extent those of Oxford and Cambridge, were the intellectual guides of Europe. They furnished not the teaching only, but also the original thinking of the age ; they were the birthplace of new systems, the home of heresies, the battle-ground of belief. It is to the Montagne Latine that we owe the first and forgotten Renaissance, the new birth of the intellect in Europe, as its slow successor was of the arts. The scholastic philosophy, with all its subtleties and daring, was the indubitable issue of the Universities, its exponents were their teachers, and the discussion and development of it constituted their daily work. Peter the Lombard, William of Champeaux, above all the arch-heretic Abelard, were among the founders of the fame of Paris. To get a modern parallel, we must imagine the Evolution philosophy taking rise from Oxford, and Herbert Spencer the Dean of Christ Church. But the Oxford nineteenth-century movement is represented by Tracts for the Times.
The most significant thing, however, about this vigour of the Mediaeval Universities is that it went along with a certain type of structure, which has since been lost. Nowadays the very mention of the word 'extramural' is enough to freeze a professor's blood. But in that time the word would have had no meaning, for as yet there were no privilege-giving walls. Locally the University of Paris meant simply a quarter of the town, in which by a natural process of segregation the students had come to settle and the masters to teach. As Savigny puts it, 'A teacher inspired by a love of teaching gathered round him a circle of scholars eager to learn. Other teachers followed, the circle of listeners increased, and thus by a kind of inner necessity an enduring school was formed.' There were no colleges, and even no definite class-rooms ; the masters tauglit principally in their own houses, and the students lived where they liked. Nay, strangest of all, there was actually no sacred circle of pro- fessors, lounging aloft, like the happy gods of Lucretius, securum agere acvum. ' At first each man who had it in him, or thought he had, began to lecture, and took his chance. As a lecturer he was called "magister" or "docto " in the generic sense. As the Universities gradually hardened down into definite self-governing organisations, the Chancellor, on the presentation of the "masters" or "doctors," as the case might be, formally granted a licence to competent students after examination." [1]
- ↑ Laurie, Rise and Early Constitution of Universities, 1886, p. 228.
