The
higher education comprised also Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and
Theology. Of the cultural effect of the old education, Professor Huxley
spoke in the highest praise on the occasion of his inaugural address as
rector of Aberdeen University. "I doubt," he said, "if the curriculum
of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension
of what is meant by culture as the old Trivium and Quadrivium does."
(The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, p. 466.)
Speaking of education in those distant days, one thinks of the supreme
intellect of medieval life, the giant genius St. Thomas Aquinas, whose
philosophy was the food of Dante and became the basis not only of
Dante's great poem but of Christian Apologetics down to our own day,
when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and
universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the
Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such
perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more
generally than that of any other school of philosophy--taught in the
regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia--such a philosopher
could have left the impress of his genius upon seven succeeding
centuries only if his work had been to philosophy what Dante's Divina
Commedia is to literature.
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