The course of instruction followed in the college during his administration {187} was a good one."In the first year, they read Latin and Greek, with the Roman and Grecian antiquities and rhetoric.In the second, continuing the study of languages, they learn a complete system of geography with the use of the globes, the first principles of philosophy, and the elements of mathematical knowledge.
The third, though the languages are not wholly omitted, is chiefly employed in mathematics and natural Philosophy, and the senior year is employed in reading the higher classics, proceeding in the mathematics and natural philosophy, and going through a course of moral philosophy." In addition, Dr.Witherspoon delivered lectures to the juniors and seniors upon chronology and history, and upon composition and criticism, and taught Hebrew and French to those who wished it.During the whole course of their studies, the three younger classes, two or three every evening, were called to pronounce an oration on a stage erected for the purpose, immediately after prayers, " that they may learn, by early habit, presence of mind and proper pronunciation and gesture in public speaking." " The senior scholars, every five or six weeks, pronounce orations of their own composition, to which all persons of any note in the neighborhood are invited or admitted." (" Address by Witherspoon in behalf of the College of New Jersey.") It will be observed that in this last provision, that for public speaking, there is something not found in the European colleges.The course as a whole is good; but the State of New Jersey would not furnish funds, and private benevolence did not supply sufficient means to procure an adequate number of instructors.By means of this instruction, even with its scanty staff of teachers, the college in that age raised, not only a large body of devoted ministers.but a great number of the ablest statesmen and lawyers of which America can boast, and furnished professors to a great many colleges, west and south. Witherspoon took four different departments, composition, taste, and criticism; chronology and history; moral philosophy; and divinity.Many of his pupils have testified to the benefit which they derived from his instructions, so sagacious, so stimulating and practically useful.In particular, James Madison, perhaps the most philosophical of all the founders and framers of the American constitution, acknowledges his obligations to the study of moral philosophy under Witherspoon."The increased attention paid to the study of the nature and constitution of the human mind, and the improvements which had been introduced into this fundamental department of knowledge by the philosophical inquiries of his own countrymen, constituted a marked and most important feature of Dr.Witherspoon's reforms.Mr.Madison formed a taste for these inquiries, which entered deeply, as we shall hereafter have occasion to remark, into the character and habits of his mind, and gave to his political writings in after life a profound and philosophic cast, which distinguished them eminently and favorably from the production of the ablest of his contemporaries." (" Life and Times of Madison," by William C.Rives.)President Ashbel Green tells us, "The Berkeleyan system of metaphysics was in repute in the college when he entered.
The tutors were zealous {188} believers in it, and waited on the president with some expectation of either confounding him, or making him a proselyte.They had mistaken their man.
He first reasoned against the system, and then ridiculed it till he drove it out of the college.The writer has heard him state, that, before Reid or any other author of their views had published any theory on the ideal system, lie wrote against it, and suggested the same trains of thought which they adopted, and that he published his essay in a Scotch magazine." He refers in his moral philosophy to the common-sense school of Scotland." Some late writers have advanced, with great apparent reason, that there are certain first principles or dictates of common-sense, which are either simple perceptions or seen with intuitive evidence.
These are the foundation of all reasoning, and, without them, to reason is a word with out a meaning.They can no more be proved than you can prove an axiom in mathematical science.These authors of Scotland have lately produced and supported this opinion, to resolve at once all the refinement and metaphysical objections of some infidel writers.(" Moral Philosophy," sect.v.) His son-in-law, and his successor as president, Samuel Stanhope Smith, at one time inclined to Berkeleyanism, formally renounces idealism.
" Whatever medium, in the opinion of these philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), nature may employ to connect the object with the organ of sense, whether image or idea, or any other sensible phantasm, it is, beyond a doubt the object itself, not its idea, which is discovered by the sense; any image or phantasm, in the case, being either unknown or unperceived, and at the time wholly unthought of.
An idea is merely a conception of the fancy, or the reminiscence of the object." From this date, the Scottish became the most influential philosophy in America.