I'HE EVOLUTION OF LIBERAL EDUCATION. 153 
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sore the same introductory relation to the quadrivium which grammar 
sore to the trivium. The others were music, geometry, and astronomy— 
sames which mean to us somewhat different things. For their scheme 
of sciences on the nature side was of course hopelessly crude. Their 
writhmetic oddly but not unnaturally included chronology ; optics came 
ander geometry, geography under geometry, and acoustics under music 
—things afterward differentiated from what they had been awkwardly 
attached to at first. But though the scheme was in an embryonic stage, 
structural lines were appearing, and, most important of all, two distine- 
sions were spontaneously recognized. The first was the distinction be- 
cween the trivium, or the humanities, and the quadrivium, or the nature 
studies, the artes reales. The second was the order in which these were 
to be pursued as liberal studies, the humanistic studies coming before the 
sciences. The seven arts completed, then came ‘¢ philosophy,” to com- 
sine and codrdinate trivinm and quadrivium in a higher union. thus con- 
stituting the great triad that lasts still. 
The age of scholasticism was the best of the middle ages. It founded 
our universities. “The priceless pearl of knowledge is sought in the 
scholastic field,” is the characteristic opening of many a medieval univer- 
sity document. That ideal knowledge rested on the seven arts, and was 
philosophy, and its language was Latin. 
Was not this outline, though meagerly bodied and crudely colored, a 
aoble one ? At worst, was it not the damaged skeleton of the ancient liv- 
ng form, but still the reminder of its true structure ? New life had to be 
oreathed into these bones that they might live again, and in the Revival 
»f Learning this happened. 
The spirit of the Greeks revived, and humanism arose to clothe the 
lifeless skeleton with living tissues. But only in part. In its reaction 
against the barbarous Latin and barren formalism of scholasticism 16 
olunged into Greek antiquity and filled literary studies with new life. It 
really developed the trivium. Its legacy is the humanistic studies, and its 
language is Greck. No new movement comparable to the humanistic 
revival appears in the modern world until we approach the nineteenth cen- 
jury, the age of science. Modern sciences—physical, natural, social, polit- 
cal—are the educational material developed in our age. Science has 
developed the quadrivium, formerly inchoate and feeble. Its gift to edu- 
sation is itself, and it speaks in the modern tongues. 
Here we may sum up our results. Western liberal education has gone 
through stages as marked as the stages of life in an individual or the 
history of types in biology. The ancient world spontaneously evolves a 
concept of liberal education which it hands down to medieval times. The 
form lingered, though the spirit, if not dead, was sleeping. The ancient 
form consisted of the humanities and sciences coordinated in one scheme 
and issuing in philosophy. Scholasticism awakened the philosophic sense,