The name is absent

238 History of Universities

and Hebrew studies with avidity; and, instead of reacting
against the new subjects in the curriculum, the Reformers
tended to throw out Aristotle, as an intellectual bulwark to
the Catholic philosophy, and make way for new subjects.
Melanchthon’s famous address to the students of Witten-
berg, De Corrigendis Adolescentiae Studiis, “Concerning
the Studies of Youth that should be Corrected” (1518),
decried Metaphysics, called for more Mathematics, Poetry,
and History; and emphasized the three Sacred Tongues,
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as essential for an educated
Protestant. Unfortunately it was the best works of Aristotle
—his logical organon and his Ethics—that the Reformers
threw out, while they retained his least valuable books, those
on Natural Science; for the Reformers accepted the same
general explanation of reality as the Catholic Church. The
scientific work of the Renaissance did not get under way
much before the seventeenth century, and Aristotelian sci-
ence was brought over, with hardly a dent in it, to our first
colonial college.

In the end, however, the Protestant Reformation strength-
ened the cause of higher education everywhere in the West-
ern World. The Catholic Church, determined never again
to be caught flat-footed, reformed the teaching of Theology
in the universities that remained steadfast in the faith,
and acquired an auxiliary of immense pedagogic power and
boundless devotion, in the Jesuit order. Salamanca, for in-
stance, reached the height of her glory in the era of the
counter-reformation, with Sixtyprofessorial chairs, including
four professorships of Greek and two of Hebrew, and sub-
jects such as Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, and Music;
with over six thousand students, ample revenues, and a
score of colleges. But the most far-reaching and significant
effect of the Protestant Reformation on the learned world

<<   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   >>

More intriguing information