Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Spike: or, Victoria College Review, October 1906

6. Arts—

6. Arts

The term arts in the phrases master of arts, faculty of arts, etc., is an abbreviation of liberal arts. Arts in the generic sense meant sciences, departments of knowledge, the Latin ars being the equivalent of scientia. The artes liberales (originally so called as being those which were worthy of free men) were those sciences which were the appropriate subject-matter of a general education, as opposed to those which pertained to particular learned professions, namely law, medicine, and theology. These liberal arts were seven in number, viz. grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Grammar meant in reality the study of the Latin language; we can hear a reminder of this usage in the grammar schools of England. Logic included philosophy, it being through logic that the mediæval mind found its way into the mysteries of metaphysics. This second of the liberal arts, therefore, may be said to correspond to what we in New Zealand unfortunately choose to call mental page 13 science—a term which suggests either the study of lunacy in general, or of that particular branch of it known as faith-healing. Just as the term art thus came to be limited to the liberal as as opposed to the technical arts, so the term science tends in modern times to be appropriated for the exclusive use of the physical sciences.