Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/378

Rh of the profoundest Oriental scholars of his day, and being also conversant with European literature and science, he was peculiarly qualified and entitled to deliver an authoritative opinion. Accordingly, in a memorial and remonstrance against the establishment of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta, addressed to Lord, we find the following emphatic passages:—“This seminary” (the proposed Sanskrit College), “similar in character to those which existed in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon, can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practical use to the possessors or to society. The pupils will there acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since produced by speculative men, such as is already commonly taught in all parts of India. The Sanskrit language, so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its acquisition, is well known to have been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge; and the learning concealed under this almost impervious veil is far from sufficient to reward the labour of acquiring it. If it had been intended to keep the British nation in ignorance of real knowledge, the Baconian Philosophy would not have been allowed to displace the system of the Schoolmen, which was the best calculated to perpetuate ignorance. In the same manner, the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep this country in darkness, if such had been the policy of the British Legislative.” And when, to the useless, the frivolous, and the puerile acquisitions of Sanskrit lore, which, instead of truly bracing and invigorating the mental faculties, tend rather to dilute and rarefy them info a vain and subtilizing spirit of error, we add the louring pride thereby engendered, the callousness of feeling, the total insensibility to the wants and miseries of man, together with the defence which it involves and entails of all that is blasphemous in literate pantheism and all that is revolting in the popular idolatry;—we have a picture in which the resemblance of each better light is wholly shrouded and eclipsed by the reality of the darksome shadows.

Whether, therefore, we look at the wholly uninstructed majority, or the partially instructed minority of the people of this land, we cannot help concluding that the work of education, in any right and proper sense of that term, has, with very few isolated exceptions, yet to be begun. For, by education, we mean that process by which the faculties are not only developed but improved and set to work in the right way—which does not teach merely but train—which regards oral precepts, however excellent, when unaccompanied with wholesome restraint, discipline, and good example, as altogether insufficient guides for child-