Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/331

Rh of jurisprudence, of judicature, and of reformative police! How are we to inculcate the elements of our knowledge upon these topics, which are at once infinitely more essential to the welfare of the people of India than mathematical and physical science, and infinitely more liable to the adverse influence of prejudice and prepossession? Physical science is almost unknown in India, and hence there will be little for us to undo: it stands almost wholly aloof from the turmoil of the passions and interests of men, and hence there will be little difficulty in removing obstructions to fair and patient attention. But the philosophy of life, however ill it is yet understood, has been an object of study in this land for 3,000 years—,in all which the falsest interests, and the most turbulent passions, and the most fantastic opinions have contributed the warp, as nature and experience have the woof, to its net-work. To leave the woof as it is, and to supply a new warp from the schools of European wisdom—hoc opus, hic labor est! To attempt to remove both warp and woof were, I believe, to disorganize society, and to insure our own destruction in its disorganization! Here it is certainly that the countenance and support, real or seeming, of established maxims and examples is most needed and most readily to be had,—most needed, because of the prejudices and passions that are indissolubly bound up with the topics; most easily to be had, because of that universal consciousness and almost universal experience which necessarily supply the ultimate evidence of such topics. High-dated and literary as is the character of Indian civilization, it could not be that their literature should have failed to gather ample materials for the just illustration, in some way or other, of most, if not of all, parts of the philosophy of life, and with respect to the fact, you Sir, need not be told that it has not failed to gather them.”

The following appears to be the substance of the views expressed by these authorities. The vernacular school-books prepared and issued under the authority of Government should embrace religious instruction as far as it can be communicated without engaging in religious controversy or exciting religious prejudice, without inculcating the peculiarities of any one religion or attacking those of another. Perhaps, the best way in which this might be effected would be, without employing any direct forms of religious inculcation, to cause the spirit of religion—its philanthropic principles and devotional feelings—to pervade the whole body of instruction on other subjects. On these other subjects, physical science, moral truths, and the arts and philosophy of civil and social life, the aim should be, not to translate European works into the words and idioms of the native languages, nor to adopt native works without the infusion of European knowledge, but so to combine the substance of European knowledge with native forms of thought and sentiment, and with the