Thomas Hughes

“ In putting dictation down as not being the ideal form of teaching in the Society, I do not speak of the proper use of dictation. The Ratio itself leaves room for it. It is the abuse of dictation that merits and receives a protracted examination of its value, at the hands of the critics. The discussion is of the highest importance. In analyzing a style of instruction, with which they are not in harmony, they bring out the essential elements of all true teaching. ”

“ There are three lines of activity, in which the ability and energy of Ignatius Loyola stand out before the world. One is the capacity he showed as a governor or leader of men; another is a similar competency to direct souls in the spiritual life; the third is that, which we are considering at present, his legislative genius in the intellectual order. Admitting the innate talent which must have been the basis and foundation of his gift for governing, we may affirm of all the rest, that the best part of his sagacity and tact had been acquired by personal experience. ”

“ In both of them, the varied elements of richest thought are brought into contact with the undeveloped, but developing nature of the youth; glimpses of human life, individual, social, and political, favor his inquiring eyes, and lead him to feel the finest springs of human sentiment. Better still, he feels these springs as touched by the greatest masters of expression; and he conceives thought as rendered in a style worthy of the greatest thinkers ”

“ Hereupon, intellectual concord is felt to be the result in the entire teaching body. Of this concord the critics say, that it is the condition and cause of a wider and profounder learning in the faculties at large. Each Professor is engaged, "not in tilling some patch of his own, but in contributing his industry to the general field of all." Where is the gain, they ask, "if what one establishes, another upsets, not as if he had always excogitated something better, but for fear he should be thought to profit by the fruits of another's genius? ”

“ In philosophy, the occasions for dispute spring off at every turn. Theology, as every one knows, is made to bristle with them. And, among men who are themselves educated to the highest degree of mental culture, interests and questions like these are far more absorbing than money, place, or power elsewhere. If anywhere ideas rule, it is among men of profound thought; as the intense intellectuality of the mediæval universities had shown, with all the consequences of unlimited vagaries in an unbridled scholasticism ”

“ In forty or fifty years such an investment of talent, character, and virtue, had been made, by management within the Order, and by that power to which Ignatius always appealed, Divine Providence, that Rome had seen pass through this house the most distinguished men of the age, in every line of intellectual life, of moral eminence, and of all that could elevate the thoughts of noble and generous minds. ”

“ And, if they were kept more before the eyes and mind, we should not see issuing from the press, day after day, so many productions of talented men, with a diction and style no less novel and singular, than are the thoughts and opinions to which they give expression. The commonalty regard them with admiring awe and stupor; but men of knowledge and correct taste look with commiseration and grief on these unmistakable signs of an eloquence, no less depraved than the morals of the times. ”

“ All the time since then he had spent in extreme poverty, in the practice of austerity, in the laborious travels of a pilgrim, in the more laborious pursuit of letters, under the stress of persecution, prisons, and chains, and under the relentless fatigue of a universal foresight, vigilance, and administration. He had proved himself a leader and commander of men, as nature had made him to be, and as history shows that he was. ”

“ It seems an apt distribution of our subject, to consider, first, the formation of the Master, and secondly, the formation of the Scholar. The Master's development will conduct us chiefly through the higher studies; the Scholar's, rather through the lower. Thus the two persons, about whom the science of education revolves, will be directly under inspection; while the elements which go to form them will, at the same time, pass under review.
Without theorizing on pedagogy, the Jesuit system itself, merely as observed and realized, results in the formation of Professors. ”

“ Consider the 10,000 at Bologna, which was the centre for Law studies; the 30,000 at Oxford; or the 40,000, all at one time studying, or reckoned to be studying, in Paris, the acknowledged centre for Theology.
An indiscriminate mass of humanity like this, pressed, thronged, and crowded together, stimulated with all the ardor, and alive with all the passions of youth, could not fail to be little better than a nursery for indiscriminate license. ”

“ The Society of Jesus has many a time been elegantly blessed and cursed by the same eloquent lips and pens.
The secret of this magisterial ascendency, as Ignatius of Loyola projected it, was to be found in the Masters' intellectual attainments, which naturally impressed youthful minds; and also in a paternal affection which, of course, won youthful hearts. Does anything more seem necessary for the full idea of authority? ”

“ If we suppose that the teacher's art lies, not in giving forth the lucubrations of his own private thoughts and theories, but in imparting solid results, approved and ascertained, to those who come for such results, and wish to receive them in the most approved way, then the Professor in his chair ought not to mistake himself for the author in his study, nor should he practise on living men, whose life is all before them, what he might, with more propriety, first practise on the leisured world, and test elsewhere, either in the printed page, or in conference with his equals. ”

“ The first is, that since, from the school of virtue and religiousness, vice can still issue forth, and, as the General Vitelleschi says, a good education, though almost omnipotent, may, like the morning dew, evaporate and be lost in the first heat of manhood's passions,111 what would be the results of the system, if it had less piety to enlighten, or less of an organized practice of virtue to confirm, the minds and hearts of the young? ”

“ Thus then the faculty, a competent and a permanent one, is installed. It is not one conspicuous for leisured ease. Professors and Scholastics alike are working for a purpose. They are a "college," in the sense of the Society of Jesus. Yet, if there is not leisured ease, but a life of work and self-denial, the system has been found to result in all the consequences which may be looked for in literary "ease with dignity"; and perhaps in more, since no one does more, than he who, in his own line, has as much as he can well do, and do well. ”

“ For this moral strengthening of character, no less than for the invigorating of mental energies, the system of Ignatius Loyola prescribes an education which is public,—public, as being that of many students together, public as opposed to private tutorism, public, in fine, as requiring a sufficiency of the open, fearless exercise both of practical morality and of religion. ”

“ But, often enough, we see where the real power lies; when young men, scarcely as yet approaching the prime of life, exercise over impressionable and brilliant youths, not much beneath themselves in age, such a personal influence as bids fair to rank them among the greater forces of human nature—forces which are great in leading, because they know so well how to follow. That other form of ascendancy, more purely intellectual, and originating in wide learning and maturity of scholarship, belongs to the University Professor of a later stage of life. ”

“ The understanding and enjoyment of an entire masterpiece, taken as a whole, is by every law of nature and of art an easy resultant of understanding the parts. If any writers on pedagogy have thought that no student could "understand and take pleasure" in an original classic, and therefore have advocated the reading of translations as a means of receiving the "literary impressions," I fear that we need only point to the style of literary writing which seems to have resulted from doing things in this second-hand fashion—if indeed it is even second-hand. ”

“ In the higher schools or in the treatment of the graver studies, it is a subject of lamentation with prudent men that there is no solidity but much show,—an ill-arranged mass of superfluous knowledge, very little exact reasoning—; that the sciences, if you except Physics and Mathematics, have not made any true progress, but are in general confusion, so that where the final results of truth are to be found scarcely appears. The study of Logic and severe Dialectics is almost in contempt, whence errors come to be deeply rooted in the minds of men who are not otherwise illiterate ”

“ In a boy's mind, there is needed a suppleness of general powers, as only the young mind can be made supple, while at the same time it is preëminently apt to be general. It is what Seneca calls curiosum ingenium, "an inquisitive genius," open to everything, and prying to open everything. Memory is then at its flourishing stage, ready to be cultivated throughout the extent of a potential vastness, which will never again be experienced in life. ”

“ And now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the same forces of repulsion and attraction, of devoted love on the part of friends, of intense hatred on the part of enemies, have been seen operating as always before. It has become a commonplace in the philosophy of history,—this hatred which has been sworn against the Order of Jesus, and the multitude of enemies whom it has made. ”

“ Something of everything: nothing in the end.355 Running through the courses of letters in no time, tender in age, with minds as yet untrained, they take up the gravest studies of Philosophy and the Higher Sciences; and, possessing themselves therein of scarcely any real fruit, they are only captivated by the enjoyment of greater liberty; they run headlong into vice, and are soon to become teachers themselves of a type, which, to put it as gently as possible, I will call immature. ”

“ But, pedagogically, too, the day may come, when gathered to the other remains which moulder in the past, it can look down from a grade and place of its own in evolution, and look out, like others, on a progeny more favored than itself, the fair mother of fairer children; even as the old university system of mediæval Europe, particularly that of the great University of Paris, can look down286 from its silent and solemn place in history, as the direct progenitor of the Ratio Studiorum. "We, too, have been taught by others," said Possevino in 1592. ”

“ The250 opening judgment also is receptive of the thoughts and wisdom, which other minds have thought out and handed down, encasing it, as they did so, in a style worthy of their own vigor, and presenting it as the heritage of the past to the present, of the wise old age of the world to its youth, which may be wiser still. And thus in each individual youth, the judgment being tenderly nursed, and learning ripening with age, what was before in the memory passes gradually into the whole character and competency of the man. ”

“ When Ignatius became a responsible leader with associates, he had recourse more than once to the process of justice, to clear his reputation in full form. But, beyond the cases which rendered such defence prudent and necessary, his practical policy was expressed in a practical maxim, which after him his successor, James Laynez, had often in his mouth: Deus faxit ne unquam male loquantur et vera dicant! "God grant they never talk ill of me and be saying the truth!" ”

“ Were the men not formed, the best system would settle into an inert state; and, the more consistency and vitality of its own it offered to contribute, the more inept and inert would it look, a memorial of what it might do, dead to what it can. ”

“ There is no hot-house raising in this world which will keep off that blast. Every child, while keeping on the royal road of innocence, has enough in himself, and in the choicest of surroundings, to know the realities of life and its warfare. ”

“ Paris beheld the great old orders of Augustinians, Benedictines, Carthusians, the Carmelites, the Bernardines, all establishing monasteries or colleges; no otherwise than the newest order of Trinitarians, which was chiefly made up of university men. Two institutes arose, those of the Dominicans and Franciscans; who with men at their head, like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, placed themselves right in the heart of these intellectual centres; and they became bulwarks of sound learning, as opposed to the inanities of a false scholasticism. ”

“ All these call for an endowment of learning not common, but excelling in its degree.
To acquire such learning, it is of supreme consequence that we set before ourselves what path we enter on, what arts we employ, and what means we use; because, unless a ready and tried method be adopted, ratio facilis ac solers, much labor is spent in gathering but little fruit; whereas, if the labor of studies be guided by some sage rule, great results are compendiously obtained, at the cost of little research. ”

“ Just six years after the foundation of his Order, when he sent Francis Villanova to open a house at Alcalà, not only did he find men of the university embracing his Institute, but, two years after that, the whilom persecuted pilgrim received, in a single twelvemonth, thirty-four Doctors into the Society, all from that one seat of learning. The mere passing by of Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, who had become an humble25 follower of Ignatius, made the choicest spirits flock to his standard; and, all over Spain, colleges sprang up as if from the soil. ”