fellowships to competitive examination, and were themselves notable scholars.
Newman was a religiously conservative innovator in philosophy. Arguing
against both rationalism and sensory empiricism, he held that the modes of
concrete individual being are subject only to judgments of probability rather
than logical certainty; one must depend upon an “illative sense” for personally
giving assent to beliefs, equivalent to the pragmatics of action in a world of
concrete existents (the chief of which, for Newman, is a personal God).
Newman represents the first of several cases where pragmatist philosophy
emerged as a sophisticated response by religious conservatives to secularizing
challenges.
Compromise on the issue of religious tests at the universities eventually led
to secularization, not for lack of strong religious commitments, but because
none of the theological factions was willing to see the others’ doctrines en-
shrined in a formal criterion. Unlike Germany or France, where secularization
was carried by an anti-clerical state bureaucracy, in England the stalemate
among plural religious factions led to a de facto secularization that none had
desired.
A series of reform bills passed by liberal parliaments in 1854–1856 and
1872 gradually eliminated religious tests, first for students, then for holders of
fellowships and professorships. Faculties of law, theology, and arts and sciences
were established in the German style. New professorships were founded and
plans made for libraries and scientific laboratories, although funds remained
largely in the hands of the colleges, and efforts to enforce their contribution
to the support of university-level positions were slow to take effect. Although
the German model of research-oriented professorships was not precisely du-
plicated, the English universities opened up an equivalent research base: the
college fellowships themselves. The large number of colleges offset the existence
of only two major universities and paralleled something of the competitive
structure of the two dozen German universities. With the elimination of relig-
ious tests and other restrictions (such as appointments by extra-university
patrons), fellowships became awards for the highest achievers in the honors
exams. In those areas where there were many college positions, especially
philosophy, classics, and history, Oxbridge scholarship quickly blossomed.
Alternative university bases began to be established as well. The civic
universities, most founded after the Oxbridge reforms, were at first generally
poorly funded and had difficulties in attracting students and first-rate faculty.
The most prominent of the pre-reform rivals to Oxbridge were University
College (1827) and King’s College (1831), brought under the degree-granting
umbrella of the University of London (1836); the former of these was domi-
nated by Utilitarian emphasis on practicality and reform, and an explicit
imitation of German secularism. But its initial funds were quickly exhausted,
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^665