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Pattison made his imprint on public controversy chiefly in the debates on university reform; and that meant, above all, the reform of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford was his home from the age of eighteen to his death, but this was no merely parochial concern. His thinking about the reform of Oxford was informed by a profound knowledge of the history and present state of European universities. Moreover, although he loathed the Victorian passion for being busy, he willingly lent his support to newer universities, and university colleges, in England and Wales: he examined for University College London, served on the Council of University College Aberystwyth, and chaired the Committee of Management and subsequently the Council of Bedford College. He was a good friend to Owens College, Manchester, and became a member of the Court of the Victoria University at its inauguration in 1880. As we have noticed, he was also an active supporter of the higher education of women. There is a further point: the reform of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge was a hugely important issue in Victorian politics and public life. This was partly because at the beginning of the nineteenth century they were Anglican monopolies, and the principal route to ordination in the established church. Steps to remove confessional restrictions, or to secularize the universities, inevitably awoke the passions of denomination and churchmanship that were the motors of so much of Victorian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘It may be said with deliberation, and without fear of contradiction from any competent authority, that in Mr Mark Pattison the University of Oxford has lost by far the most distinguished of her resident members.’ So wrote the Saturday Review in August 1884, on the death of the rector of Lincoln College. This was a strong assertion to make at a time when the University housed Benjamin Jowett, Max Müller and John Ruskin, but the spirit of the remark was echoed in other obituaries in the national press, and it captures the extraordinary reputation Pattison enjoyed at the end of his life. He occupies a shadowy presence in Victorian studies today, but his contemporaries would have been surprised to find that his intellectual distinction has been lost from view by historians. In his last decade he enjoyed nationwide renown for the exceptional qualities of his mind; and that renown reached continental Europe too. Even his antagonists recognized that they were dealing with a man of rare ability. Jowett, who was more aware than most of his personal deficiencies, could nevertheless call him a genius. Pattison lived through a formative period in the history of the modern university in England, and in his person he embodied many of the transformations that occurred in the half century he spent at Oxford. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “organization of knowledge” is a large and diffuse topic which can be studied at many different levels, ranging from the way an individual orders his or her understanding of the world privately or in publications, to the ways in which communities or institutions order knowledge, notably in pedagogical curricula and textbooks, professional structures, libraries and library catalogs, and other collective projects. Although a few modern philosophers have addressed the problem of classifying knowledge, current practices of classification are mostly studied by anthropologists and sociologists. Modern cultures and subcultures engage in both explicit and tacit classifications of knowledge, but today any particular organization of knowledge is generally acknowledged to involve a number of arbitrary choices and its success is often measured by pragmatic criteria of effectiveness, such as ease of use and economic efficiency. But this skeptical attitude toward the possibility of any organization matching the reality of knowledge or of the world is a fairly modern development, articulated for example in Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's “preliminary discourse” to the Encyclopédie of 1751. In Renaissance Europe, on the contrary, many thinkers harbored the ambition of implementing the perfect organization of knowledge, though pragmatic, notably alphabetical, arrangements were also widespread in certain contexts. During the Renaissance the difficulty of ordering knowledge was greatly exacerbated in almost every field by the massive influx of material to be included, stemming from newly discovered worlds and newly recovered ancient texts as well as newly printed texts of all kinds, and by concurrent social and cultural changes associated with the development of printing, a rapid growth in higher education, and shifting patterns of patronage and social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant view of historians was once that the philosophy of Aristotle, after spreading throughout Latin Christendom in the wake of the great wave of translations from Greek and Arabic begun around 1125, reached its greatest diffusion in the thirteenth century, came to a profound crisis in the fourteenth, and then suffered in the fifteenth under the challenge of Platonism. As a result, Aristotelianism in the Renaissance survived in only a few “conservative” strongholds - such as the universities of Padua, Coimbra, and Cracow - before it was finally swept away by the coming of modern philosophy and science. Thanks to the work of historians like John Herman Randall, Eugenio Garin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Charles Schmitt, and Charles Lohr, research in the last sixty years has shown that such an image of the development of European thought is so one-sided as to be substantially false. The point here is not merely to insist on the notable expansion of Aristotelianism in the fourteenth century - for in that century, far from declining, Aristotelian philosophy reinforced its position by consolidating its fundamental role in university instruction, by linking its fate to that of influential philosophical and theological schools, and by obtaining for the first time the explicit support of the papacy. One must go still further and insist that, if the greatest intellectual novelty of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of little-known and forgotten philosophical traditions, Aristotelianism nevertheless remained the predominant one through the end of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Renaissance, the term philosophy could still denote learning in general: thus Gregor Reisch named his encylopedic textbook (published first in 1503 but reprinted extensively in northern Europe as well as in Italy throughout the sixteenth century) Margarita philosophica, a work which served as an introductory compendium of learning from the most elementary reading to theology, normally regarded as the pinnacle of knowledge. At the same time, however, Reisch focused on the subjects which had, in the course of the Middle Ages, come to constitute philosophy as an academic discipline: logic, natural philosophy (meaning natural sciences), morals, and metaphysics. Up to the twelfth century, when Europe witnessed the emergence of specialized institutions of higher education - now known as universities but usually called studia or studia generalia in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance - philosophy, as an academic discipline, regularly formed part of a unitary curriculum, beginning with elementary reading and grammar and terminating with theology, all of which was taught within one institution or school. Such schools usually had an ecclesiastical affiliation, often with a monastery or a cathedral. The best of these schools (e.g. at Chartres) embraced a remarkably catholic range of knowledge. William of Conches, for example, a great teacher who taught in the French schools during the first half of the twelfth century, left a series of commentaries reflecting his teaching activity: from grammar (on Priscian, in two different redactions) to moral philosophy, physics, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology (on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Macrobius, and Plato's Timaeus). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers who come to David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) equipped only with the taxonomies provided by modern histories of philosophy - “British empiricism” versus “continental rationalism,” scientific versus scholastic, ancients versus moderns - are likely to be taken aback at the way Hume in his first chapter, “Of the Different Species of Philosophy,” anatomizes the philosophy of his time. He distinguishes first a moral philosophy that “considers man chiefly as born for action,” which regards virtue as the most valuable of objects and “paint[s] her in the most amiable colours, borrowing all helps from poetry and eloquence,” treating the subject “in an easy and obvious manner.” Moral philosophers of this kind “make us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments; and so they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.” But there is a second species of philosophers who “consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavor to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners.” This kind of philosopher does not address the generality of men but “aim[s] at the approbation of the learned and the wise,” seeks “hidden truths” rather than an improvement in the behavior of mankind. Hume claims the first species of philosophy, being “easy and obvious,” will always be preferred to the “accurate and abstruse,” as is shown by the relative popularity of the first: “the fame of CICERO flourishes at present; but that of ARISTOTLE is utterly decayed. LA BRUYERE passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of MALEBRANCHE is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And ADDISON, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when LOCKE shall be entirely forgotten.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business of the Society as I sayd before [is] three fold to wit the perusall of Bookes, the consulting of men & the Examination and tryall of things … acquisitions shall be brought into and Read in the Society at the usuall place & time & then recorded in their proper place there to be perused at any convenient time by the members of the Society & by none els whatsoever. READING IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE Back when everyone accepted that the Scientific Revolution was something that had actually happened, one of its defining features was always said to be a turning away from the world of ‘words’ towards that of ‘things’. The existence and importance of the shift seemed incontrovertible. It was everywhere visible and prominent. All the new philosophies of the seventeenth century, however erudite, obscure or occult they may have seemed to modern eyes, loudly claimed to be abandoning slavish and idle adherence to ancient authority in favour of active and powerful engagement with the powers of nature themselves. The general trend was exemplified by an anecdote that Johann Joachim Becher, an enterprising mid-seventeenth-century chymist, economic innovator and natural philosopher, was fond of telling to anyone who would listen. The anecdote described an alchemical adept who, on hearing a scholastic professor lecture on the impossibility of transmutation, got up in front of the class and turned lead into gold there and then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1770 Sweden entered upon a period of crisis: a crisis which was not resolved until Gustav Ill's coup d'état of 19 August 1772. That event represented, in one aspect, the triumph of a royalist tradition whose origins reached back to the sixteenth century. But it represented also a success for those who from the 1740's onwards had seen the need for constitutional reform. And lastly it involved the abrupt termination of a movement by the non-noble Estates for self-determination, equality, and the curtailment or abolition of the privileges of the nobility: a movement which had first been apparent in 1650, again in 1723, which had been gathering strength since 1765, and which in 1772 seemed on the point of attaining its objectives. In 1772 there was not one revolution but two – a political revolution which succeeded; and a social revolution which was (temporarily) aborted, but of which also Gustav III would make himself the patron and beneficiary in 1789. In the half-century between 1720 and 1770 royalism might at times seem dormant; and when it was active its objectives might have a narrower or more extended scope; but it was always there. For it was in fact implicit in the Constitution of 1720: one does not build defences against non-existent dangers; and no eighteenth-century monarch – save perhaps a King of Poland – was likely to be content to live under the restraints which the constitution imposed upon him. Frederick I, translated from a successful military career in which he had especially distinguished himself at Blenheim and Malplaquet, could certainly not be expected to take kindly to the insignificance which was the destiny of a King of Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of parliamentary parties, and their swift maturing after 1740, was one of the most remarkable features of the Age of Liberty. Nowhere else in Europe, save in England, did a comparable development occur. It proved, indeed, but a short-lived episode; it left no permanent traces behind it; but while it lasted it imparted to the age a hectic quality which grew more intense as the regime neared the final catastrophe. It has been said that the emergence of parties is an inevitable consequence of parliamentary government; that as soon as a legislature begins to decide important questions by voting, parties will be organised in order to secure a majority. But there was nothing inevitable in the appearance of parties in Sweden; and the Constitution of 1720 had been in operation for almost twenty years before they can be said to have begun to take shape. Swedish parties were born of personal ambitions and personal rancours: with differences of opinion on high political questions, with clashes arising from issues of principle, they had – at first – very little to do. No ancient controversies, constitutional or religious, provided them with historic roots; and though they came fairly soon to appeal to persons of differing types of temperament, they were not in origin the vehicle or expression of such differences. The first Swedish party was rather an artefact, a device imposed from above to forward the ends of its devisers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over a hundred and fifty years European historical research has been exercised by the question of absolutism. The term may either be taken, as it customarily is, in its restricted sense, to refer to the period from the middle of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution – the age of absolutism proper – or, in the broad sense, as relating to that movement in the early modern period which saw the development of post-feudal absolute monarchy and gave the modern state its pre-revolutionary form. The term itself is a relatively late coinage, having arisen in liberal circles in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century; in liberal constitutional and social thought it designated the undesirable aspects of unrestricted power wielded by a ruler. It has since entered most European languages, though it has not acquired everywhere the positive sense associated with the development of the modern state on the continent. The phenomenon is generally viewed unsympathetically in England, as the preference for the pejorative synonym ‘despotism’ indicates, though it is striking that the fifth volume of the New Cambridge Modern History, entitled ‘The Ascendancy of France’ (1961) and describing the great period of French absolutism, avoids the term ‘despotism’. The term ‘absolutism’ may derive from the puissance absolue, the immense power and authority, enjoyed by the monarch, as it was interpreted in the history of political ideas, or it may come directly from the famous formulation of Jean Bodin, who in 1576 credited the prince with ‘summa in cives ac subditos legibusque soluta potestas’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of German unity from the Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution, as it affected both internal and external politics, is characterized by ‘German liberty’ and Austro-Prussian dualism. For the two great developments of the period are the expansion of Austria-Hungary as a great power beyond the Empire and the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia above the condition of a mere imperial territory. These two became independent European powers and took their place within the international system of the balance of power. The creation of new states in the south-east and the north-east had direct consequences for the constitution and political order of the Empire. To an even greater extent than before, German disunity became a European problem, and the scope for foreign interference, by no means diminished, took on a new character. The idea of ‘German freedom’, of the liberty of the imperial estates, was invoked again and again until the Holy Roman Empire came to an end. It was a fundamental principle of German life – in the first place a constitutional principle which safeguarded the jus statuum, the privileges and prerogatives enjoyed by the electors, princes, counts, and towns vis-à-vis the Emperor. These privileges and prerogatives dated from medieval times and were consolidated during the period of imperial reform around the beginning of the sixteenth century. The idea of German freedom was not confined to the legal sphere, but affected the general sentiment of the age and was deeply lodged in German consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]