FACULTY

(In the Universities.) In the origin of the university of Paris (which is considered as the model of all European institutions in the middle ages) the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) seem to have been the subjects of academic instruction. These constituted what was afterwards designated the Faculty of Arts. Three other faculties — those of divinity, law, and medicine — were subsequently added. In all these four lectures were given, and degrees conferred by the university. The four faculties were transplanted to Oxford and Cambridge, where they are still retained; although, in point of fact, the faculty of arts is the only one in which substantial instruction is communicated in the academical course. By an anomaly of ancient date, the English universities also give degrees in what is not properly a faculty, but only a branch of one of the faculties, viz. music. On the Continent, the faculty of arts is synonymous with that of philosophy. In England, that of divinity is not wholly distinct from, but superior to, that of arts; degrees in the latter being preliminary qualifications for those in the former. FACULTY, [s. 450]