Professor John U. New recently published an essay, “The Universities Look for Unity,”* the importance of which must be particularly stressed. He touches with a penetrating and firm mind on the most crucial and painful point concerning the needs of contemporary education, and offers practical reforms of great interest. It is to be hoped that his inspiring suggestions will be thoroughly examined and discussed by university men aware of present-day problems. In tribute to this essay by Professor Nef, I have gathered in this paper considerations about the need for unity in the upbringing of man, taken from the Terry Lectures which I gave at Yale University some time ago and which will shortly appear in printed form.”**

Education and teaching should never lose sight of the organic unity of the task to be performed, and of the essential need and aspiration of the mind to be freed in unity. If a man does not overcome the inner multiplicity of his drives and especially of the diverse currents of knowledge and belief and the diverse vital energies at play in his mind, he will always remain more a slave than a free man. Tears, sweat, and blood are needed for this all-too-difficult task of unifying our internal world. The school should help us in this effort, and not impair it and make it hopeless. The dispersion and atomization of human life are in our day the great distress of the adult world. Instead of opening itself more and more to this devastating dispersion, the school system at least should prepare us to surmount it, and provide our youth with a more fortunate world of its own, fitted to our spiritual demand and centered on unity. 

Undoubtedly the tremendous multiplicity of the fields of knowledge, due to the very progress of modern science, makes the work of unification more difficult than ever. Yet a great symphony can and must have internal unity as well as a piece of chamber music. What is wanted here is nothing less than inspiration and vision. 

In order to establish an organic and architectonic ordering of teaching, the prerequisite background is a sound philosophy of knowledge and of the degrees of knowledge, but the inspiring motive force is the vision embracing the whole practical dynamism of teaching. And toward what can such a vision be directed, except the very goal of this dynamism? And what is this very goal but wisdom? That knowledge we call wisdom, which penetrates and embraces things with the deepest, most universal and most united insights. Such a knowledge, which lives not only by supreme science, but also by human and spiritual experience, is over and above any field of specialization, for it has to do with realities which permeate each and every being and with aspirations which call to the very nature and freedom of man. It is in itself the highest value for the human mind. Education and teaching can only achieve their internal unity if the manifold parts of their whole work are organized and quickened by a vision of wisdom as the supreme goal, so as progressively to make youth capable of sharing to some degree in the intellectual and moral fruits of wisdom. 

The purpose of elementary and higher education is not to make of the youth a truly wise man, but to equip his mind with an ordered knowledge which will enable him to advance toward wisdom in his manhood. Its specific aim is to provide him with the foundations of real wisdom, and with a universal and articulate comprehension of human achievements in science and culture, before he enters upon the definite and limited tasks of adult life in the civil community, and even while he is preparing himself for these tasks through a specialized scientific, technical or vocational training. 

Such a universal and articulate comprehension of human achievements in science and culture, such a “music” of the wit, as Plato put it, takes shape in profoundly different ways on the several levels of education. In each of the great educational divisions which correspond to the main periods of the youth’s life, from the years of childhood to the years of university and graduate study, we have to face a mental world of comprehensive universality which has only a proportional similarity with the mental worlds of other levels. The universality adapted to the young readers of fairy tales is of quite another nature than that fitted to the students reading Kant or Spinoza. Yet each educational stage deals with a comprehensive universality of its own, approaching little by little that of maturity, and at each stage education should be guided by the vision of the appropriate mental world of comprehensive or “symphonic” universality. And this vision should be communicated in some way to the ones who are taught, in order to make them realize the vital interest of their task and to give them inspiration and energy. 

We come now to the third and advanced stage in education. If, according to the European habit, we reserve the name university for higher learning in advanced and graduate studies, we might say that the aim of the university is to achieve the formation and equipment of the youth in regard to the strength and maturity of judgment and the intellectual virtues. As Cardinal Newman puts it, a university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge.” 

Yet, paradoxically enough, university teaching coincides with a definite specialization of studies. Each particular science and art demands a highly specialized training. And in our age, when such teaching does not deal, as in the Middle Ages, with the formation of an intellectual leadership essentially consisting of clerics, nor, as in the following centuries, with the formation of the potential members of the ruling classes, but deals, according to a more democratic pattern, with the formation of a much larger and more diversified mass of outstanding citizens of all ranks in the nation, it is suitable that actually all the arts and sciences, even those which concern the management of common life and the application of the human mind to matters of practical utility, should be embraced by the typical modern university. The latter would thus have its field of specialization multiplied still more, as well as the number and diversity of its courses, a very small part of which each particular student can attend. The university should nevertheless still keep its essential character of universality, and teach universal knowledge, universal not only because all the parts of human knowledge would be represented in its architecture of teaching but also because this very architecture would have been planned according to the qualitative and internal hierarchy of human knowledge, and because from the bottom to the top, the arts and sciences would have been grouped and organized according to their growing value in spiritual universality. 

Thus a first order of subjects would be concerned with the realm of useful arts and applied sciences in the broadest sense of these words, and with advanced studies in technical training engineering, administrative sciences, arts and crafts, agriculture, mining, applied chemistry, statistics, commerce, finance and so on.***

A second order would be the realm of those practical sciences—practical either because they belong to the domain of art or because they belong to the domain of ethics—which, though covering thoroughly specialized fields, nevertheless relate to man himself and human life: medicine and psychiatry, for instance, and, on the other hand, law, economics and politics, education, etc. 

A third order would be the realm of the speculative sciences and fine arts, in other words it would be concerned with the liberal arts proper and with that disinterested knowledge of nature and man and of the achievements of culture which liberates the mind by truth or beauty. At this point we find the immense chorus of the free workings of the spirit, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, pre-history, archeology, history, ancient and modern literature and languages, philology, music, fine arts and so on. That is the very core of the life of the university and the very treasure of the civilized heritage. And this third order is to culminate in a fourth one, which is the highest animating center in the architecture of teaching, and which deals with those sciences that are also wisdom because they are universal by virtue of their very object and of their very essence: the philosophy of nature, metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, ethical philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of culture and of history, theology and the history of religions. 

In such an ideal university, I see the diverse parts of the vast body of teaching divided into Institutes, each one possessing its own complex organization and being organically linked to the others, rather than into separate Departments or Faculties. The Institutes of the first order would compose a teaching City concerned with the technical means of human life, or with the practical domination and utilization of matter. Those of the second order would compose a City concerned with the means which deal with human life itself for its maintenance and improvement. The Institutes of the third order would compose a teaching City of pure knowledge concerned with the intellectual ends of human life which are reached by encompassing in the mind the manifold universe of nature and man and the achievements of human creative power. The Institutes of the fourth order would compose a teaching City of the higher and intrinsically universal knowledge, concerned with those intellectual ends of human life which are reached by grasping the trans-sensible realm of Being, Spirit, and Divine Reality, and the ethical realm or the aims, conditions, and rational ordering of human freedom and conduct. 

Obviously it is not enough that the universality of knowledge and the superior unity of intrinsically universal sciences be embodied in the general architecture of such teaching Cities. It is also necessary that in some measure they actually inspire the intellectual development of that living subject, the student, and become for him an integral part of him, whatever the special requirements of his course may be. Here we are confronted with the main duty and the main difficulty of university teaching. 

The universe of thought we are contemplating in this last stage of formal education is in process of definite differentiation and formulation. Judgment and the intellectual virtues are no longer in the stage of preparation but in the stage of actual acquisition. And it is then, as I pointed out, that specialization necessarily occurs. The intellectual virtues acquired by one student are not those acquired by another, be it a question of techniques, useful arts, and applied sciences, or of practical sciences dealing with human life or of speculative sciences. The knowledge which has to develop during university years is knowledge in a state of a perfected and rational grasping of a particular subject matter. Truth, which is the mental atmosphere and the inspiring force needed more than ever, is henceforth an objectively circumscribed truth, speculative or practical, at which each of the diverse sciences and arts aims. 

How is it possible to assure at this stage the universal inspiration and mental comprehensiveness of which I just spoke? An organic cooperation will be necessary between the diverse Institutes of the university; there will be required of each student, whatever his special training may be, a measure of general training in those subjects which constitute the very core of university life and with which our third and fourth orders of teaching are concerned. As a matter of fact, the use of technical means cannot be really profitable, nor the practical sciences be well directed without general enlightenment about nature and man. Medicine, public sanitation, psychiatry are extrinsically—law, sociology, economics and politics, pedagogy are intrinsically—subordinated to ethics and natural law, and the very truth of every knowledge bearing on human conduct implies sound judgment about the ends of human life, that is to say the actual knowledge of ethical and political philosophy, which in its turn presupposes metaphysics. These requirements proceed from the very objects on which knowledge shapes itself. Even the scientist, as well as the historian, the scholar and humanist, the artist, cannot dispense with some philosophical inspiration; they need philosophical instruction, at least in order to be aware of the exact value and legitimate extent of their own activities among others of the spirit. 

As a result, each university student should be required to attend a certain number of courses in the teaching Cities of pure knowledge and universal knowledge. Part of these courses, for instance in science, history, ancient and modern literatures, or fine arts, would be a matter of free choice, according to the personal inclination of the student, and to the need for complement or contrast in his special training. Other courses should be required for all, namely general philosophy, ethical and political philosophy, the history of civilization. 

But, as Professor Nef rightly points out, such a measure would remain insufficient if it were not completed by an organic structure embodying that sense of unity and universality which should pervade university life. Special committees, composed of professors belonging to various Institutes, should ensure regular cooperation between these Institutes, guide the work of the student and help him scrutinize the connections of his own particular subject with other and more universal fields of higher learning: for instance, the connections of physics, biology, psychology, or medicine with the history of the sciences, the history of civilization, the philosophy of nature, and the theory of knowledge; or the connections of economics, social science, law, education, or of literature and art, with the history of civilization, ethical and political philosophy, and the great metaphysical and theological problems. Thus would be facilitated “study and research in which several disciplines, now separated, would be combined both by students working for higher degrees and by mature scholars in their creative labors.” And the knowledge of each one would be deepened and vitalized by the reexamination of the value, purpose and logical structure proper to the various disciplines vitally brought together in this way. 

Professor Nef wisely observes that, in order to succeed in this progressive work of recasting, “unification could begin modestly, where the need for it appeared, between two or three subjects, considered in so far as possible in relation to philosophy and particularly to ethics.” In connection with these remarks, the initiative taken by the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago is to be pointed out. In order to have the Master’s and Doctor’s degrees prepared under its guidance, this interdepartmental committee combines in various ways courses of study such as social thought, historical fields (ancient Near Eastern civilizations, Far Eastern civilizations, medieval civilization, Renaissance civilization, 293 eighteenth-century civilization, American civilization) and analytical and theoretical fields (anthropology and sociology, politics, economics, jurisprudence and ethics, education, psychology and human development). 

For reasons which it would be too long to discuss here, courses in theology, however important in themselves, would be a matter of free choice. Of course the question of theological teaching crops up with regard to the university as well as with regard to college education. Those who believe that God revealed to mankind His intimate secrets hold theology, or the rational development and penetration of the revealed data, to be in itself real knowledge in the strict sense of the term, though it is rooted in faith and grasps its object by means of concepts which are infinitely transcended and exceeded by it. In order to make philosophy autonomous, Descartes deemed it necessary to consider faith mere obedience, and to refuse to see any character of real knowledge in theology. Thus he threw out the baby with the bath water. I am convinced that one of the main tasks of our age is to recognize both the distinction and the organic relationship between theology, rooted in faith, and philosophy, rooted in reason, and now secure in its sought-for autonomy. For it is not likely, is it, that if God spoke, it was to say nothing to human intelligence? From this point of view, Newman was right in stating that if a university professes it to be its scientific duty to exclude theology from its curriculum, “such an Institution cannot be what it professes, if there be a God.” 

As for the many who do not share in these feelings about theology, they would nevertheless derive great advantage from theological instruction. They would gain horizons of highly rationalized problems thus opened up to them, and better understand the roots of our culture and civilization. 

The practical aspect of the question offers no difficulty for denominational universities. It suffices to refer to the indisputable statements made on this subject by Dr. Gerald Phelan.**** 

In nondenominational universities, this theological teaching would be divided into Institutes of diverse religious affiliation, according to the student population of the university. Such teaching should remain thoroughly distinct from the one given in religious seminaries, and be adapted to the intellectual needs of laymen; its aim should not be to form a priest, a minister, or a rabbi, but to enlighten students of secular matters about the great doctrines and perspectives of theological wisdom. The history of religions should form an important part of the curriculum. 

By these changes and the consequent rediscovery of unity, we may attain a generation of university graduates who will not be lost in the labyrinth of positivism, but, despite differences of opinion, will all be related to a central pattern and heritage of culture, and aware of the resources of wisdom. 

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*John U. Nef. “The Universities Look for Unity.” Pantheon Books. $0.50

**”Education at the Crossroads.” These excerpts are published with the kind permission of Yale University Press.

***With regard to this first order of subjects, as well as to the second, it is to be emphasized that the reason for teaching such subjects in the university and the viewpoint from which they should be ordered and organized as part of the university curriculum must remain solely the university of knowledge. It is as parts of the manifold body of human knowledge and for the sake of (practical) truth that they have to be taught and organized. Everything would be warped if the aim, incentive, and dominating concern of the teaching were directed toward success in the experiences of life and in money-making. The students may take such motives into consideration when they choose to enter a given course of study. But the curriculum itself must be directed only toward a sound and comprehensive organization of universal knowledge, to be taught according to the internal and objective structure of the parts thereof. 292 

****”Theology in the Curriculum of Catholic Colleges and Universities,” in “Man and Secularism” (National Catholic Alumni Association, New York, 1940), pp. 128-140.