The classic chapter in Newman's Idea of a University on “University Preaching” remains at many points as timely and convincing as when it was written, in 1855. Its discrimination of real from spurious earnestness—“I do not mean that a preacher should aim at earnestness, but that he must aim at his object … which will at once make him earnest”; its warning against the recondite, remote, and abstract—“The most obvious truths are often the most profitable”; its advice that sermons should be prepared in writing, but spoken without notes—“While then a preacher will find it becoming and admirable to put into writing any important discourse beforehand, he will find it equally a point of propriety and expedience not to read it in the pulpit”—all these counsels and principles, though Newman throughout his preaching at St. Mary's violated the last of them, are as applicable as ever. Yet, on the other hand, the force of Newman's teaching is for many readers limited by his reiterated reference to ecclesiastical authority. What St. Francis de Sales, or St. Charles, or St. Antoninus, may have said about sermons is assumed to be of more significance than the judgments of the not less saintly Newman. The preacher whom Newman has in mind is a Roman priest, who “has before his mental eye the Four Last Things,” and feels “the horror and the rapture of one who witnesses a conflagration.”

A philosophical argument is the attempt to record and communicate a vision. Or, if this phrase appears to fasten upon the philosopher the stigma of a mere visionary, let me say an intellectual perception—intellectual, because what he perceives is not even mainly made up of sense-data; perception, because it shares the directness and the self-sufficiency with which the sheer quality of sounds and sights comes to him. In speaking thus of vision or intellectual perception, I have no intention of setting up any antithesis between seeing and thinking or reasoning, nor do I mean to deny that the most comprehensive and penetrating philosophical visions are achieved, I might almost say built up, only through a toilsome process of reflection and argument. I use vision in the wide sense in which even thinking is a way of seeing, is indeed essentially the effort to see things as they are. There is no need to quote authorities, however great. My appeal is to the whole tradition which, from the earliest days of philosophy, has drawn from the eye and from its medium, the light, the language for expressing the way in which philosophical truth strikes upon the mind.

The American college is a picturesque, a unique, a very vital community. Students are not out of the world—a college is not a monastery; yet it is a world of its own, with peculiar objects and traditions, with a distinct atmosphere. The catalogue shows a curriculum, a faculty, a few hundred names, and the college would seem to be lectures, study, recitations. But around all that and including it, the college is a great fraternity, a mystic circle, a cult. It is Alma Mater, a glorified personality.

That man's social instincts and emotions have been intimately bound up with his religious emotions and ideas is, happily, in no danger of being forgotten. Through the cumulative impact of many motives, we are learning to look to man's social experience for such insight as the analysis of individual experience seemed not to afford. Thus far, the most striking instance of this—at least in the popular mind—is in the domain of morals. Conscience, when viewed as the possession and experience of the individual alone, has every appearance of something sacred and imperious, absolute and inexplicable. But once let conscience be put into the crucible of anthropology and social psychology, and its mysteriousness and absoluteness seem to have vanished. We see its function and we comprehend its genesis. It is simply the echo within the individual of the past experience of the race, an inherited instinct, which has a definite survival value in the struggle for existence. It would hardly be fair to say that every question about the meaning and worth of conscience is forthwith settled. Concerning the ultimate inferences to be drawn from the undoubted fact that conscience has had a history within man's social experience, there is much which may easily escape us in our first enthusiasm for the concepts of history, development, and social experience.