United States or Dominican Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


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.

When, for instance, Giraut de Bornelli is said to have gone to "school" during the winter seasons, nothing more is meant than the pursuit of the trivium and quadrivium, the seven arts, which formed the usual subjects of instruction.

The secular knowledge taught in the ordinary schools was that represented by the division of the Seven Arts into the elementary Trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, followed by the Quadrivium of Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy. The scope of the Trivium was much wider than the terms denote.

Arabic grammar and style, prosody, logic, and other preparatory branches, the sacred trivium; canonic law, dogmatics, and mysticism, and, for the more advanced, exegesis of Qoran and Tradition and some other branches of supererogation, are taught here in the mediaeval way from mediaeval text-books or from more modern compilations reproducing their contents and completing them more or less by treating modern questions according to the same methods.

This was a thoroughly rounded course in intellectual training. No wonder that Professor Huxley said in his Inaugural Address as Rector of Aberdeen, "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."

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."

The present comprehensive use of the term is but an extension of the Middle-Age division of the liberal arts into the Trivium, Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectics, and the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy, as expressed in the verse, "Lingus, tropus, ratio, numerus, tenor, angulus, astra." The term Magister Artium Liberalium, so often met with, refers to these.

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.

He was versed not less in the arts of the Trivium than in the sciences of the Quadrivium.

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.