Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/487

Rh say, is that which looks not so much to the conveyance of knowledge as to the growth and culture of the faculties by which that knowledge is received.

4. These, then, are the two inseparable ends which all properly directed education keeps in view. It does not aim at either, to the exclusion or prejudice of the other. But if it gives a preference to either, it rather aims at overtaking the end by which the mind is disciplined, than the end by which the mind is stored. It endeavours to be theoretical, that is, to impart knowledge; but it labours above all things to be practical, that is, to discipline the faculties. Hence it is that mathematics and the dead languages occupy so early and so prominent a place in our systems of academical instruction. Valuable as these are as an acquisition, they are still more valuable as a training; they are to be regarded rather as practical than as theoretical instruments of tuition. If you were all to awaken suddenly some fine morning and to find yourselves expert mathematicians and accomplished scholars without having made any effort to become so, you would have lost the best part of the benefit which these studies are fitted to convey. Your minds might be filled with knowledge, but your own faculties and your powers of attention, of judgment, of comparison, of generalisation, and of reason, would be in abeyance.

5. The case I have just put is a fanciful and