the arts which conduce to the comfort of mankind, is also alluded to here, not simply because it is so closely connected with the operative institution of Masonry, but also as the type of all the other useful arts. In his second pause, in the ascent of the Winding Stairs, the aspirant is therefore reminded of the necessity of cultivating practical knowledge.
So far, then, the instructions he has received relate to his own condition in society, as a member of the great social compact, and to his means of becoming, by a knowledge of the arts of practical life, a necessary and useful member of that society. But his motto will be, "Onward and forward!" The stair is still before him; its summit is not yet reached, and still further treasures of wisdom are to be sought for, or the reward will not be gained, nor the middle chamber, the abiding-place of truth, be reached.
In his third pause, he therefore arrives at that point in which the whole circle of human science is to be explained. Symbols are in themselves arbitrary and of conventional signification, and the complete circle of human science might have been as well symbolized by any other sign or series of doctrines as by the seven liberal Arts and Sciences. But Masonry is an institution of the olden time; and this selection of the liberal arts and sciences as a symbol of the completion of human learning is one of the most pregnant evidences that we have of its antiquity.
In the seventh century, and for a long time afterward, the circle of instruction to which all the learning of the most eminent schools and most distinguished philosophers was confined, was limited to what was then called the liberal arts and sciences, and consisted of two branches, the trivium and the quadrivium.[1] The trivium included grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the quadrivium comprehended arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
These seven heads were supposed to include universal knowledge. He who was master of these was thought to have no need of a preceptor to explain any books or to solve any questions which lay within the compass of human reason; the knowledge of the trivium having furnished him with the key to
- ↑ The words themselves are purely classical, but the meanings here given to them are of a mediæval or corrupt Latinity. Among the old Romans, a trivium meant a place where three ways met, and a quadrivium, where four, or what we now call a cross-road. When we speak of the paths of learning, we readily discover the origin of the signification given by the scholastic philosophers to these terms.
