Ideas

by Peter Watson

  There were two responses we may mention. One was the creation of civic universities in Britain, particularly University College and King’s College, London, both of which were established deliberately to accept Nonconformists, and which were based partly on the Scottish universities and their excellent medical schools. One of the men involved in the creation of University College, London, Thomas Campbell, visited the Universities of Berlin (founded 1809) and Bonn (1816), as a result of which he opted for the professorial system of tuition, in use there and in Scotland, rather than Oxford’s tutorial system. Another source of inspiration came from the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 thanks largely to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson. The main ideals of this institution were set out in the report of a State Commission which met at Rockfish Gap in the Blue Ridge in 1818 and which became known as the Rockfish Gap Report. The specific aim of this university, according to the report, was ‘to form the statesmen, legislature and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend…’ Politics, law, agriculture, commerce, mathematical and physical sciences, and the arts, were all included. University College, London, followed this more practical vision and the even more practical–and novel–idea was adopted of floating a public company to finance the building of the college. Non-denominational university education was begun in England.79

  This became a bone of contention, which culminated in May 1852 in a series of five lectures given in Dublin by John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, on ‘The Idea of the University’. The immediate spur to Newman’s lectures was the founding of the new universities, like the University of London, and the Queen’s Colleges in Ireland (Belfast, Cork and Galway), in which the study of theology was excluded on principle. Newman’s lectures, which became famous as the classic defence of what is still sometimes called ‘a liberal education’, argued two points. The first was that ‘Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education’.80 Newman argued that all branches of knowledge were connected together and that to exclude theology was to distort wisdom. His second point was that knowledge is an end in itself, that the purpose of a university education was not to be immediately useful but to bear its fruits throughout life. ‘A habit of mind is formed which lasts throughout life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit…Knowledge is capable of being its own end.’81 Newman’s seminal idea, and the most controversial–a dispute that is still with us–was set out in his seventh lecture (five were given at Dublin, five others published but not delivered). In this, he says: ‘…the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgement, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to…with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense, then,…mental culture is emphatically useful.’82

  Apart from Newman’s concern with ‘liberal’ education, his emphasis on religion was not as out of place as it may seem, especially in America. As George M. Marsden has shown, in his survey of early American colleges, some five hundred were founded in the pre-Civil War era, of which perhaps two hundred survived into the twentieth century. Two-fifths were either Presbyterian or Congregationalist colleges, down from over a half in Jefferson’s day, at the expense of Methodist, Baptist and Catholic establishments, which accelerated after 1830 and especially after 1850.83 In nineteenth-century America, in the educational sphere, there was a widely shared article of faith that science, common sense, morality and true religion ‘were firmly allied’.84

  For many years, say the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, Harvard and Yale were almost all there was to American higher education. Only toward the end of that period was an Anglican college established in the South, William and Mary (chartered in 1693, opened in 1707, and only gradually becoming a fully-fledged college). Beyond that, most of the colleges that became well-known universities were founded by New Light clergy–New Jersey (Princeton), 1746, Brown, 1764, Queen’s (Rutgers), 1766, and Dartmouth, 1769. ‘New Light’ was a religious response in America to the Enlightenment. Yale had been founded in 1701 as a response to a perceived decline in theological orthodoxy at Harvard. The new moral philosophy presupposed that ‘virtue’ could be discovered on a rational basis, that God would reveal to man the moral basis of life, based on reason, much as He had revealed to Newton the laws by which the universe operated. This was essentially the basis on which Yale was founded.85 In a short while the new approach developed into what became known as the Great Awakening, which, in the American context, described a shift from the predominantly pessimistic view of human nature to a far more optimistic–positive–outlook, as typified by Anglicanism. This was a far more humanistic cast of mind (unlike Harvard, which remained Calvinist) and led to a much greater appreciation of the achievements of the Enlightenment in those colleges, such as Princeton, which followed Yale.

  Such thinking culminated in the famous Yale Report of 1828, which argued that the human personality was made up of various faculties of which reason and conscience were the highest, and that these must be kept in balance. So the goal of education was ‘to maintain such a proportion between the different branches of literature and science, as to form in the student a proper balance of character’.86 The report then went on to argue that the classics should form the core of this balanced character-building.

  A large mission of the colleges was to spread Protestant Christianity to the untamed wilds of the west and in 1835, in his Plea for the West, Lyman Beecher urged that education beyond the seaboard could not be achieved simply by sending teachers out from the east–the west must have colleges and seminaries of its own. There was then a fear that Catholics would take over the west, a fear fortified by the growing immigration into America from the Catholic countries of southern Europe. The warning was heeded and, by 1847, Presbyterians had built a system of about a hundred schools in twenty-six states.87 The University of Illinois was founded in 1868 and California in 1869. It was about now that the attractions of the German system began to be appreciated, with several professors and university administrators travelling to Prussia, in particular, to study the way things were done there. In this way, religion began to occupy less of a role in American university education. The fact that the Germans led the way in history, for example, increasingly implied that theology was itself an historical development, and this encouraged biblical criticism. Germany was also responsible for the idea that education should be the responsibility of the state, not just a private matter. Finally, it was a German idea that the university should be the home of scholars (researchers, writers) and not just of teachers.

  This was nowhere more evident than at Harvard. It had begun as a Puritan college in1636. More than thirty partners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were graduates of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and so the college they established near Boston naturally followed the Emmanuel pattern. Equally influential was the Scottish model, in particular Aberdeen. Scottish universities were non-residential, democratic rather than religious, and governed by local dignitaries–a forerunner of boards of trustees.

  The man who first conceived the modern university as we know it was Charles Eliot, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, in 1869, at the age of only thirty-five, was appointed President of Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate. When Eliot arrived, Harvard had 1,050 students and fifty-nine members of the faculty. In 1909, when he retired, there were four times as many students and the faculty had grown ten-fold. But Eliot was concerned with m
ore than size. ‘He killed and buried the limited arts college curriculum which he had inherited. He built up the professional schools and made them an integral part of the university. Finally, he promoted graduate education and thus established a model which practically all other American universities with graduate ambitions have followed.’ Above all, Eliot followed the German system of higher education, the system that gave the world Planck, Weber, Strauss, Freud and Einstein. Intellectually, Johann Fichte, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant were the significant figures in German thinking about education, freeing German scholarship from its stultifying reliance on theology. As a result, and as we have seen, German scholars acquired a clear advantage over their European counterparts in philosophy, philology and the physical sciences. It was in Germany, for example, that physics, chemistry and geology were first regarded in universities as equal to the humanities.88 The graduate seminar, the PhD, and student freedom were all German ideas.

  From Eliot’s time onwards, the American universities set out to emulate the German system, particularly in the area of research. However, this German example, though impressive in advancing knowledge and in producing new technological processes for industry, nevertheless sabotaged the ‘collegiate way of living’ and the close personal relations between undergraduates and faculty which had been a major feature of American higher education until the adoption of the German approach. The German system was chiefly responsible for what William James called ‘the PhD octopus’. Yale awarded the first PhD west of the Atlantic in 1861; by 1900 well over three hundred were being granted every year.89

  The price for following Germany’s lead was a total break with the British collegiate system. At many universities, housing for students disappeared entirely, as did communal eating. At Harvard in the 1880s the German system was followed so slavishly that attendance at classes was no longer required–all that counted was performance in the examinations. Then a reaction set in. Chicago was first, building seven dormitories by 1900 ‘in spite of the prejudice against them at the time in the [mid-]West on the ground that they were medieval, British and autocratic’. Yale and Princeton soon adopted a similar approach. Harvard reorganised after the English housing model in the 1920s.90

  At much the same time that the pragmatists of the Saturday Club were forming their friendship and their views, a very different group of pragmatists was having an effect on American life. Beginning around 1870, in the wake of the Civil War, America produced a generation of the most original inventors that nation–or any other–has seen. Thomas P. Hughes, in his history of American invention, goes so far as to say that the half-century between 1870 and 1918 was a comparable era to Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy or the Britain of the industrial revolution. Between 1866 and 1896 the number of patents issued annually in the United States more than doubled and in the decade from 1879 to 1890 rose from 18,200 to 26,300 a year.91

  Richard Hofstadter, in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, has written about the tension in the United States between businessmen and intellectuals, of Herman Melville’s warning, ‘Man disennobled–brutalised / By popular science’, of Van Wyck Brooks chiding Mark Twain because ‘his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery’, of Henry Ford who famously remarked ‘history is more or less bunk’.92 But America’s first generation of inventors do not seem to have been especially anti-intellectual. Rather, they inhabited a different culture and this was because, as we have seen, scholarship and research were still coming into being in the nineteenth-century universities. They were still predominantly religious institutions and would not become universities as we know them until the very end of the nineteenth century.

  And likewise, since the industrial research laboratory didn’t come into common use until around 1900, most of these inventors had to construct their own private laboratories. It was in this environment that Thomas Edison invented the electric light and the phonograph, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, the Wright brothers invented their flying machine, and telegraphy and radio came into being.93 It was in this environment that Elmer Sperry pioneered his gyrocompass and automatic control devices for the navy and in which Hiram Stevens Maxim, in 1885, set up for manufacture, and demonstrated, ‘the world’s most destructive machine gun’. By using the recoil from one cartridge to load and fire the next, the Maxim far surpassed the Gatling gun, which had been invented in1862. It was the Maxim gun that inflicted a great deal of the horror in colonial territories at the high point of empire.94 It was the German Maxim which inflicted 60,000 casualties at the Somme on 1 July 1916. And it was these inventors who, in collaboration with financial entrepreneurs, were to create some of America’s most enduring business and educational institutions, household names to this day–General Electric, AT&T, Bell Telephone Company, Consolidated Edison Company, MIT.

  In the context of this book, perhaps the telegraph is worth singling out from these other inventions. The idea of using electricity as a means of signalling had been conceived around 1750 but the first functioning telegraph had been set up by Francis Ronalds, in his garden in Hammersmith in London, in 1816. Charles Wheatstone, professor of experimental philosophy at King’s College, London, and the man who had first measured the speed of electricity (wrongly), was the first to realise that the ohm, a measure of resistance, was an important concept in telegraphy and, together with his colleague Fothergill Cooke, took out the first patent in 1837. Almost as important as the technical details of telegraphy was Wheatstone and Cooke’s idea to string the wires alongside the newly-built railways. This helped ensure the rapid spread of the telegraph, though the much-publicised capture of John Tawell, who was arrested in London after fleeing a murder scene in Slough, thanks to the telegraph, hardly did any harm. Samuel Morse’s code played its part, of course, and Morse was one of several Americans pushing for a transatlantic cable. The laying of this cable was an epic adventure that lies outside the scope of this book. While the cables were being laid, many had high hopes that the more speedy communication they would permit would prove an aid to world peace, by keeping statesmen in closer touch with one another. This hope proved vain, but the transatlantic cable, achieved in 1866, made its mark quickly in commercial terms. And, as Gillian Cookson has written in The Cable: The Wire that Changed the World, ‘From this moment began a sense of shared experience, a convergence of cultures, between the two English-speaking nations.’95

  35

  Enemies of the Cross and the Qu’ran–the End of the Soul’

  To Chapter 35 Notes and References

  In 1842, George Eliot, the English novelist, stopped going to church. Her doubts over Christianity had begun early but she had been deeply influenced by David Friedrich Strauss’s book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, which as we have seen was published in Germany in the middle 1830s and which she had rendered into English. In her rather tortured translation, Strauss had concluded ‘There is little of which we can say for certain that it took place, and of all to which the faith of the Church especially attaches itself, the miraculous and supernatural matter in the facts and destinies of Jesus, it is far more certain that it did not take place.’1 In much the same way, when Tennyson read Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1836 he was troubled, as so many were, by Lyell’s interpretation of the fossil evidence, that ‘the inhabitants of the globe, like all other parts of it, are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes, but whole species.’2

  The sad, slow, but inexorable loss of faith in the nineteenth century by so many people, prominent or otherwise, has been explored by the writer A. N. Wilson. His survey of Eliot, Tennyson, Hardy, Carlyle, Swinburne, James Anthony Froude, Arthur Clough, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Samuel Butler, John Ruskin and Edmund Gosse confirms what others have said, that the loss of faith, the ‘death of God’, was not only an intellectual change but an emotional conversion as well. Specific books and arguments made a difference but there was also a change in the general climate o
f opinion, the cumulative unsettling effect of one thing, then another, often quite different.3 When Francis Galton, Darwin’s step-cousin, circulated a questionnaire to 189 Fellows of the Royal Society in 1874, inquiring after their religious affiliation, he was surprised by the answers he received. Seventy per cent described themselves as members of the established churches and while some said that they had no religious affiliation, many others were Nonconformist of one stripe or another–Wesleyan, Catholic, or some other form of organised church. Asked in the same questionnaire if their religious upbringing had in any way had a deterrent effect on their careers in science, nearly 90 per cent replied ‘None at all.’4 Among those who, as late as 1874, still believed in a deity may be included Michael Faraday, John Herschel, James Joule, James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). Wilson shows that there were almost as many reasons as there were people for the loss of faith, where it occurred. Some were much more convinced than others that God was dead, while ‘some managed to be both anti-God and anti-science at the same time’.5