by Will Durant
The secular spirit in Germany found voice in Christian Thomasius. We shall commemorate him later as a philosopher; here we see him as the greatest German educator of his time. Driven from his native Leipzig because of his heresies, he moved to Halle, in the rising state of Brandenburg-Prussia (1690); his lectures there led to the founding of the university; he became its most famous professor, and the protagonist in making it the first “modern” university. He laughed Scholasticism out of face, replaced Latin with German as the language of instruction, published a German magazine, introduced science courses into the curriculum, and fought for the freedom of teachers and students to think. Frederick the Great called him the father of the Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment.
Elementary education was made universal and compulsory for both sexes in the duchy of Württemberg in 1565, in the Dutch Republic in 1618, in the duchy of Weimar in 1619, in Scotland in 1696, in France in 1698, in England in 1876. The delay in England was due to the wide extension of voluntary education through private religious agencies, and to the feeling in the ruling classes that in the prevailing economic system the education of the poor was unnecessary and probably undesirable. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge began in 1699 to establish “charity schools” for poor children, chiefly to transmit Christian theology and discipline; all teachers were to be members of the Church of England, and required a license from the bishop. Bernard Mandeville, who made a stir in 1714 with his Fable of the Bees, denounced these schools as a waste of money; if parents were too poor to pay for the education of their children, he said, “it is impudence in them to aspire any further.” 17
In France every parish had to maintain an elementary school. The teacher was usually a layman, but he was chosen and controlled by the bishop, and instruction was firmly Catholic. The petites écoles of Port-Royal reached only a few selected boys. In 1684 Jean Baptiste de La Salle founded the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes, soon to be known as the Frères Chrétiens. La Salle, an ascetic priest, made religion the pervading essence of the education which these “Christian Brothers” offered gratis to the children of the poor. Four hours a day were devoted to religious exercises; reading, writing, and arithmetic were added; but the never forgotten aim was to train loyal Catholics, and to save souls from worldly riot and everlasting hell. Flogging was found useful for these purposes. Teachers were exhorted to teach by example rather than precept. In 1685 the Christian Brothers opened what was probably the first modern institution for the training of elementary-school teachers.
Secondary education in France remained in the hands of the Jesuits, and was still the best in Christendom. Their Collegium Societatis Jesu, directly behind the Sorbonne, changed its name to Collegium Ludovici Magni, or Collège Louis-le-Grand, after the King attended a play produced there by the pupils in 1674. At the urging of Mme. de Maintenon Louis XIV in 1686 opened at St.-Cyr (three miles from Versailles) the first French boarding school for girls. Nunneries provided higher education for elite paying girls, always with the emphasis on religion. Catholic and Protestant authorities agreed in the conviction that human nature was so ill adjusted to civilized restraints that it could be molded to morality and order only through the fear of God. The attempt to educate character without the aid of religion is still in the experimental stage.
Except in the Dutch Republic, universities were now in decline, purged by victorious sects, disordered by riotous students, and dominated by barren theological disputes. In France and Germany university degrees were sold for cash. None of the great philosophers of the period, and few of the leading scientists, were on university staffs, and Hobbes, Leibniz, and Bayle all spoke of the professors with a contempt that made no allowance for public pressures upon public employees. Some new universities were opened in this period: Duisberg (1655), Durham (1657), Kiel (1665), Lund (1666), Innsbruck (1673), Halle (1694), and Breslau (1702). These were mostly small establishments, seldom having more than twenty professors or four hundred pupils. In nearly all of them the curriculum had stiffened with age, and the requirements of orthodoxy cramped students and teachers alike. Milton complained that the English universities took “from young men the use of their reason by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, miracles, traditions, and absurd scriptures”; he felt that he had misspent his years at Cambridge trying to digest “an asinine feast of sour thistles and bramble,” and other “sophistical trash.” 18 This bondage of tradition continued in Oxford and Cambridge until the example of the Royal Society, and the professorate of Newton at Trinity College (1669–1702), stirred Cambridge to give a daring prominence to science.
Poets, priests, journalists, and philosophers struggled to reinvigorate education. We have summarized Milton’s “Letter to Mr. Hartlib” (1644) on the ideal school; his prescriptions had no influence upon actual teaching. In France the most attractive contribution was Fénelon’s little Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687). Mme. de Beauvilliers had asked him to outline some principles to guide the instruction of her daughters. The priest naturally stressed the religious reinforcement of the moral code, but he deprecated the austerities and seclusion of conventual schooling; nunneries, he felt, “provided no preparation for life in the world, into which the convent graduate entered as one emerging into full daylight from a cave.” 19 He pleaded for gentle methods in teaching; education should suit itself to the nature, interests, and sensitivity of the child, rather than bend all pupils to one inflexible rule. Let us teach the way nature teaches—not by abstractions but by leading children into the middle of things; let their games and their natural interests be used as means of instruction. (Here were Rousseau’s pedagogy, and the “progressive education” of the twentieth century, expounded by a priest of the seventeenth.) Fénelon wished girls to read the classics, if possible in the original languages; they ought to learn some history, and enough law to govern an estate; but they should not meddle with science—a young woman should show a certain “modesty about science” (une pudeur sur la science). The handsome priest was sensitive to feminine charms, and did not want them clothed in algebra; he would never have understood Voltaire’s love for that professor of Newtonian mechanics, Mme. du Châtelet.
Ten years after Fénelon’s Traité, Defoe published his appeal for the higher education of women. Except in rich homes, English girls of the seventeenth century found little opportunity for secondary education. Like Esther Johnson with Jonathan Swift, they had to rely on tutors, or, like Evelyn’s favorite daughter, they had to purloin knowledge by private enterprise. Macaulay judged that “even in the highest ranks the English women of that generation [1685–1715] were decidedly worse educated than they have been at any other time since the Revival of Learning.” 20 Swift estimated that hardly one gentlewoman in a thousand was taught to read or spell; 21 but that gloomy Dean throve on exaggerations. In any case Defoe thought the neglect of feminine education a barbarous inequity. “I cannot think that God Almighty ever made women so delicate, so glorious creatures, and furnished them with such charms . . . to be only stewards of our houses, cooks, and slaves.” So he proposed for girls an academy similar to the “public” schools of England. There they should learn not merely music and dancing, but “languages, as particularly French and Italian; and I venture the injury of giving a woman more tongues than one.” They should study history, and acquire all the graces and courtesies of speech. The gallant novelist concluded that “a woman well bred and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behavior, is a creature without comparison, . . . the finest and most delicate part of God’s creation”; and that “the man that has such a one to his portion has nothing to do but rejoice in her and be thankful.” 22
By far the best considered and most influential contribution to pedagogical theory in this age of Louis XIV was John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), 23 written after the author had served several years as tutor in the family of the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Taking cues from Montaigne, the p
hilosopher proposed that the teacher should first aim at physical health and stamina; a sound body is prerequisite to a sound mind. So his pupils are to eat a simple diet, accustom themselves to scanty clothing, hard beds, cold weather, fresh air, plenty of exercise, regular sleep, no wine or liquor, and “very little or no physick” (medicine). Second in time but first in importance is the formation of character; all education, physical and mental as well as moral, should be a discipline in virtue. And as the body is to be trained to health by hardships, so character is to be molded by inculcating self-denial in all things that run counter to mature reason. “Children should be used to submit their desires, and go without their longings, even from their very cradles”; the discipline of desire is the backbone of character. This discipline is to be made as pleasant as possible, but it is to be insisted upon throughout. Nor will single good actions suffice; the pupil must be formed by the repetition of virtuous actions into good habits; for “habits work more constantly and with greater facility than reason, which, when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted, and more rarely obeyed.” Locke oscillates between Aristotle and Rousseau. He prefers a libertarian education to one that ignores the bent and individuality of the child; lessons should be made interesting, and discipline humane; but he accepts the occasional desirability of physical punishments for conscious misbehavior. Moreover, “inuring children gently to suffer some degrees of pain without shrinking is a way to gain firmness for their minds, and lay a foundation for courage and resolution in the future part of their lives.”
The education of the intellect should be a discipline in methods of thought and rigor of reasoning, not a digest of classics or a bandying of languages. French and Latin should be taught to the children at an early age, and by conversation rather than by grammar. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic should be left to professional scholars. It would be better to give time to geography, mathematics, astronomy, and anatomy; later to ethics and law; finally to philosophy. “The business of education is not to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it.” And as virtue is to be trained by habit, so thought is to be trained by repeated reasonings:
Nothing does this better than mathematics, which therefore, I think, should be taught to all those who have the time and opportunity, not so much to make them mathematicians as to make them reasonable creatures. . . . We are born to be, if we please, reasonable creatures, but it is use and exercise that makes us so, and we are indeed so no further than industry and application has carried us. . . . I have mentioned mathematics as a way to settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely and in train . . .; that, having got the way of reasoning which that study naturally brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge as they shall have occasion. 24
Locke’s treatise was designed for a “liberal education”—i.e., one chiefly in arts, literature, and manners; it was intended to produce a gentleman—i.e., a man of “gentle” birth, who would never have to work for a living.* Its curriculum, while admitting some sciences, generally adhered to the “humanities”—the studies favored by the Renaissance humanists. It included also dancing, riding, wrestling, fencing, and even “a manual trade, nay two or three,” but as helps to health and character, not as means of livelihood. The arts were to be taught as recreations, not as professions; the young gentleman was not to take such affairs very seriously; he should enjoy poetry, but not write it except as a pastime; he should be taught to enjoy music, but not to seek proficiency on any instrument; this would take too much time, and, besides, it would put the youth into “such odd company.” So Locke’s treatise was both conservative and liberal. In its repudiation of Scholastic absorption in ancient languages, its lessened stress on religion and theology, its emphasis on health and character, and its effort to prepare well-born youth for public life and service, it pointed to the future, and had immense influence in England and America. It shared in forming the physical and moral side of education in the English “public” schools. Translated into French (1695), it went through five editions in fifty years, and gave many suggestions to Rousseau. Locke’s own pupil, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whom we shall meet again, did credit to his teacher’s theories and character.
III. THE SCHOLARS
Despite their apparent preoccupation with dying languages and dead debates, great scholars continued to mold the future by illuminating the past; and some found themselves embattled in the struggle of Christianity against free thought.
Certain minor devotees merit a passing reverence. Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, astonished his contemporaries—who knew him as a lawyer in the Paris Parlement—by issuing (1678) a dictionary of late and medieval Latin in three volumes so meticulous in scholarship that they are still the authority in their field. Pierre Huet discovered and edited a major manuscript of Origen, learned Syriac, Arabic, and chemistry, made eight hundred anatomical dissections, wrote poetry and fiction, and shared with the learned Mme. Dacier in editing for the instruction of the Dauphin the famous sixty-volume “Delphin” edition of Latin classics; he was made bishop of Avranches, and, dying, left the library that is now a treasured part of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The Jesuit “Bollandists” continued their centipedalian Acta Sanctorum. In Paris, under the lead of Jean Mabillon, the Benedictine Congregation of St.-Maur compiled (1668–1702) a twenty-volume history of Benedictine saints; in the process they shed precious light upon the annals and literature of medieval France. Mabillon himself gave a new form to Latin paleography by his De Re diplomatica (1681)—not a manual of diplomacy but a treatise on the date, character, and authenticity of old charters and manuscripts. Completing one of his fat folios, Mabillon wrote: “May it please God not to impute it to me as a crime that I have passed so many years studying the acts of the saints, and yet resemble them so little.” 25
The giant of classical erudition in this age was Richard Bentley, stern master of Trinity College, Cambridge, for forty-two years. His youth was consumed in consuming the Bodleian Library; at twenty-nine he was already among the most learned pundits of Europe in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literature and antiquities. In that year (1691) he published a hundred-page Epistola ad Millium, a letter to an early John Mill, so accurate and recondite in its scholarship that it gave him a European fame. At thirty he was chosen to give the first series of the lectures for which funds and a name had been provided in the will of the pious chemist Robert Boyle. He responded by arguing powerfully that the cosmic order revealed in Newton’s recent Principia proved the existence of God. This was a great comfort to Newton, who had been accused of atheism. Bentley was appointed to the post of royal librarian, with an apartment in St. James’s Palace. There he met frequently Newton, Locke, Evelyn, and Wren; and from that citadel he fought one of the famous battles in British scholarship.
The contest arose from the English share in the debate on the relative merits of ancient versus modern literature. Sir William Temple opened fire with the essay Of Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), defending antiquity. Bentley would probably have praised the essay had it not praised Phalaris as an example of Greek superiority in literature. Phalaris was a dictator who governed Akragas (Agrigento) in Greek Sicily in the sixth century before Christ. History or legend described him as roasting his enemies in the belly of a brazen bull; but it honored him as a patron of literature, and 148 letters had come down the centuries allegedly from his pen. Charles Boyle, an undergraduate at Christ Church College, Oxford, published the letters in 1695. William Wotton, preparing a second edition (1697) of his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, in which he opposed Temple, asked Bentley to judge the authenticity of the letters. Bentley replied that their attribution to Phalaris was a mistake, that they were written in the second century A.D.; incidentally he pointed out some errors in Charles Boyle’s edition. Boyle and his teachers issued a hot defense of Phalaris’ authorship. Jonath
an Swift, secretary to Temple, entered the fracas on his master’s side by ridiculing Bentley in The Battle of the Books. The general opinion of scholars supported Boyle, and Bentley’s friends bemoaned the apparent collapse of his reputation. His answer to them deserves remembrance: “No man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.” 26 In 1699 he issued an enlarged Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris. Not only did it prove his case, but it shed so much light on the evolution of the Greek language that the world of scholarship acclaimed him as worthy to join the line of the Scaligers, Casaubon and Salmasius. Even the style of the letters betrayed their century, said Bentley, and he added:
Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off and become obsolete; others are taken in and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense and notion, which in tract of time makes as observable a change in the air and features of a language as age makes in the lines and mien of a face. All are sensible of this in their own native tongues, where continual use makes every man a critic. For what Englishman does not think himself able, from the very turn and fashion of the style, to distinguish a fresh English composition from another a hundred years old? Now, there are as real and sensible differences in the several ages of Greek. . ., but very few are so versed and practised in that language as ever to arrive at that subtlety of taste. 27
Here was a scholar who could write English as well as read Greek.