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Updated: June 9, 2025
To the Seven first correspond the Seven Sciences of the Trivium and of the Quadrivium, namely, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astrology. To the eighth Sphere, i.e., to the starry, correspond Natural Science, which is termed Physics, and the first Science, which is termed Metaphysics.
For these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical and physical science, and art. And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does.
At a period, says the same writer, when few were instructed in the trivium, and very few studied the quadrivium, to be master of both was sufficient to complete the character of a philosopher. The propriety, therefore, of adopting the seven liberal arts and sciences as a symbol of the completion of human learning is apparent.
He would not take any amount of quadrivium as a substitute for honest living, and next after honest living he valued a peaceable, meek, conformist spirit, which was not always agape for division and the sowing of discords. He took some pains to compose quarrels elsewhere, as for instance, between Archbishop Baldwin and the monks of Canterbury.
And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern University shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does. The students who had passed through the University course, and had proved themselves competent to teach, became masters and teachers of their younger brethren.
The preliminary training that is the undergraduate work at the universities consisted of the Seven Liberal Arts the trivium and quadrivium, which embraced logic, rhetoric, grammar, metaphysics, under which was included not a little of physics, cosmology in which some biology was studied, as well as psychology and mathematics, astronomy, and music.
The effects of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the consequent dispersion of the accumulated Greek learning of the Byzantine Empire, had, by the end of the fifteenth century, begun to show themselves in a notable modification of European culture. The circle of the seven sciences, the Quadrivium, and the Trivium, in other words, the mediæval system of learning, began to be antiquated.
I have already tried to indicate, in my lecture on the Social Organism, certain doubts that are now arising as to the prophylactic and regenerative powers of education, whether this is based on the old foundation of the Trivium and Quadrivium under the supreme dominion of Theology, or on the new foundation of utilitarianism and applied science under the dominion of scientific pedagogy.
He who was master of these was thought to have no need of a preceptor to explain any books or to solve any questions which lay within the compass of human reason, the knowledge of the trivium having furnished him with the key to all language, and that of the quadrivium having opened to him the secret laws of nature."
In the seventh century, and for a long time afterwards, the circle of instruction to which all the learning of the most eminent schools and most distinguished philosophers was confined, was limited to what were then called the liberal arts and sciences, and consisted of two branches, the trivium and the quadrivium.
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