” In true liberal educaiton…the essential activity of the student is to relate the facts learned into a unified, organic whole, to assimilate them as…the rose assimilates food from the soil and increases in size, vitality, and beauty.”
”logic is the art of deduction, while rhetoric concerns the choices a speaker or writer makes from the options grammar and logic offer”
3 – “The liberal arts denote the seven branches of knowledge that initiate the young into a life of learning. The concept is classical, but the term liberal arts and the division of the arts into the tribium and the quadrivium date from the Middle Ages.”
3 – “trivium pertains to arts that pertain to the mind and the quadrivium those that pertain to matter.”
Trivium = logic, grammar, and rhetroic
Quadrivium = arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy
3 – “Logic is the art of thinking; grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance.
7 - “The trivium, in itself a tool or a skill, has become associated with its most apropriate subject matter—the languages, oratory, literature, history, philosophy.”
8 – “The function of the trivium is the training of the mind for the study of matter and spirit, which together constitute the sum of reality.
8 – “The fruit of education is culture…”
9 – LOGIC is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known, GRAMMAR is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized, and RHETORIC is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated.
9 – “Rhetoric is the master art of the trivium, for it presupposes and makes use of grammar and logic; it is the art of communicating through symbols ideas about reality.”
11 – The intellect itself is perffected in its operations by the five intellectual virtues, three speculative and two practical.
1. Understanding is the intuitive grasp of first principles.
2. Science is knowledge of proximate causes.
3. Wisdom is knowledge of ultimate causes – metaphysics in the natural order, theology in the supernatural order.
4. Prudence is right reason about something to be done.
5. Art is right reason about something to be made.
26,27 – “In a natural object the following are similar but distinct; substance, essence, nature, form, species. The knowledge of these is the concept, which is expressed fully in the definition and symbolized by the common name.”
