on should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should
issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue
as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where
there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in
kind. This they call making Education and Instruction "useful," and
"Utility" becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this
nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the
expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the
article called "a Liberal Education," on the supposition that it does not
teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our
lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once
make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least
if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology,
magnetism, and science of every kind.

This question, as might have been expected, has been keenly debated in the
present age, and formed one main subject of the controversy, to which I
referred in the Introduction to the present Discourses, as having been
sustained in the first decade of this century by a celebrated Northern
Review on the one hand, and defenders of the University of Oxford on the
other. Hardly had the authorities of that ancient seat of learning, waking
from their long neglect, set on foot a plan for the education of the youth
committed to them, than the representatives of science and literature in
the city, which has sometimes been called the Northern Athens,
remonstrated, with their gravest arguments and their most brilliant
satire, against the direction and shape which the reform was taking.
Nothing would content them, but that the University should be set to
rights on the basis of the philosophy of Utility; a philosophy, as they
seem to have thought, which needed but to be proclaimed in order to be
embraced. In truth, they were little aware of the depth and force of the
principles on which the academical authorities were proceeding, and, this
being so, it was not to be expected that they would be allowed to walk at
leisure over the field of controversy which they had selected. Accordingly
they were encountered in behalf of the University by two men of great name
and influence in their day, of very different minds, but united, as by
Collegiate ties, so in the clear-sighted and large view wh