Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/145

 How far marked aptitude for mathematical studies is indicative of general intellectual superiority has, been the subject of much controversy. Lord Macaulay kept an exhaustive catalogue of senior wranglers who always remained juniors in every thing but mathematics, and Sir William Hamilton estimated the disciplinary value of the study at a very low rate. The truth, however, seems to be that the gift or knack which enables one man to manipulate algebraic quantities so much more readily than another may or may not co-exist in the mind with other, it may be, greater endowments. One thing only is very certain,—the process of intense ratiocinative specialization, to which wranglers must necessarily subject themselves, cannot fail to seriously dwarf their other faculties. Off their special topics the writings of great mathematicians have nearly always struck me as peculiarly bloodless and uninteresting, and it is no small praise to Mr. Courtney to say that he is an exception to this rule. In point of both reasoning and style, his contributions to "The Fortnightly," for example, and his reported speeches, bear but few traces of the depletory process to which I have alluded. This exemption may, to some extent, be accounted for by the fact, that, on completing his university curriculum, he broke vigorously into intellectual fields and pastures new.

In 1858 he was called to the bar by the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn; and in 1872 he became professor of political economy at University College, a post which he retained for nearly three years. During that time he acquainted himself with all the best writers on the subject, and became a warm advocate of the special views of John Stuart Mill. From Mill it is