ABSTRACT
Under the various terms of growth, change, process, progress, evolution, and development the concept was current in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is only a maturer articulation of the insight achieved thirty years before: “Growth the only evidence of life.” The personal influence of Walter Mayers and the writings of Scott while conducing to the feeling of election to eternal life, also grow out of his longstanding “mistrust of the reality of material phenomena”. John Henry Newman, like Coleridge before him, takes pleasure in pointing out that “with all our intimate knowledge of animal life and of the structure of particular animals, we have not arrived at a true definition of any one of them, but are forced to enumerate properties and accidents byway of description”. Thus Newman advocated the tutorial method because teaching is a pastoral activity and teachers and students form a community of learners.
