On The Art of Reading | Page 4

started, with a passage from Browning's, "A Death in the Desert," supposed (you will remember)--
Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene
narrating the death of St John the Evangelist, John of Patmos; the narrative interrupted by this gloss:
[This is the doctrine he was wont to teach, How divers persons witness in each man, Three souls which make up one soul: _first,_ to wit, A soul of each and all the bodily parts, Seated therein, which works, and is _What Does,_ And has the use of earth, and ends the man Downward: but, tending upward for advice, Grows into, and again is grown into By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, Useth the first with its collected use, And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,--is _What Knows_: Which, duly tending upward in its turn, Grows into, and again is grown into By the last soul, that uses both the first, Subsisting whether they assist or no, And, constituting man's self, is _What Is_-- And leans upon the former
(Mark the word, Gentlemen; 'leans upon the former'--leaning back, as it were felt by him, on this very man who had leaned on Christ's bosom, being loved)
And leans upon the former, makes it play, As that played off the first: and, tending up, Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man Upward in that dread point of intercourse, Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him. _What Does, What Knows, What Is;_ three souls, one man. I give the glossa of Theotypas.]
_What Does, What Knows, What Is_--there is no mistaking what Browning means, nor in what degrees of hierarchy he places this, that, and the other.... Does it not strike you how curiously men to-day, with their minds perverted by hate, are inverting that order?--all the highest value set on _What Does--What Knows_ suddenly seen to be of importance, but only as important in feeding the guns, perfecting explosives, collaring trade--all in the service of _What Does,_ of 'Get on or Get Out,' of 'Efficiency'; no one stopping to think that 'Efficiency' is--must be--a relative term! Efficient for what?--for _What Does, What Knows_ or perchance, after all, for _What Is_? No! banish the humanities and throw everybody into practical science: not into that study of natural science, which can never conflict with the 'humanities' since it seeks discovery for the pure sake of truth, or charitably to alleviate man's lot--
Sweetly, rather, to ease, loose and bind As need requires, this frail fallen humankind ...
--but to invent what will be commercially serviceable in besting your neighbour, or in gassing him, or in slaughtering him neatly and wholesale. But still the whisper (not ridiculous in its day) will assert itself, that What Is comes first, holding and upheld by God; still through the market clamour for a 'Business Government' will persist the voice of Plato murmuring that, after all, the best form of government is government by good men: and the voice of some small man faintly protesting 'But I don't want to be governed by business men; because I know them and, without asking much of life, I have a hankering to die with a shirt on my back.'
VI
But let us postpone What Is for a moment, and deal with What Does and _What Knows._ They too, of course, have had their oppositions, and the very meaning of a University such as Cambridge--its _fons,_ its _origo,_ its [Greek: to ti en einai]-- was to assert What Knows against What Does in a medieval world pranced over by men-at-arms, Normans, English, Burgundians, Scots. Ancillary to Theology, which then had a meaning vastly different from its meaning to-day, the University tended as portress of the gate of knowledge--of such knowledge as the Church required, encouraged, or permitted--and kept the flag of intellectual life, as I may put it, flying above that gate and over the passing throngs of 'doers' and mailed-fisters. The University was a Seat of Learning: the Colleges, as they sprang up, were Houses of Learning.
But note this, which in their origin and still in the frame of their constitution differentiates Oxford and Cambridge from all their ancient sisters and rivals. These two (and no third, I believe, in Europe) were corporations of Teachers, existing for Teachers, governed by Teachers. In a Scottish University the students by vote choose their Rector: but here or at Oxford no undergraduate, no Bachelor, counts at all in the government, both remaining alike in statu pupillari until qualified as Masters-- _Magistri._ Mark the word, and mark also the title of one who obtained what in those days would be the highest of degrees (but yet gave him no voting strength above a Master). He was a Professor-'Sanctae Theologiae Professor.' To this day every country clergyman who comes up to Cambridge to record his _non-placet,_ does so by virtue of his capacity