Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/491

Rh shrinks not from dialectic, that is the very element in which she lives; and she rejoices in the symmetry of demonstration. It is only by presenting knowledge in the form of reason that the teacher can expect to elicit and train the reason of those whom he addresses. Reason in one man listens to nothing except reason in another; thought, genuine thought, in one mind, responds only to the call of genuine thought in another mind. But thoughts, in order to be genuine, in order to have root, must coexist in a vital and organic unity, and not as a tissue of floating fragmentary opinions. And hence it is that it is only by means of the exhibition of systematic thinking on the part of the teacher that lessons of thinking can be taught to those whom he instructs.

8. I do not say that the teacher of philosophy will always succeed in setting to work the minds of his students by showing them in a methodical and concatenated order the workings of his own reason; but when that method fails I certainly know of no other which can succeed, of no other by which the study of metaphysics may be made a practical discipline and a means of developing and cultivating the intelligence of the student. This assuredly is not to be effected by mapping out the human mind into a set of independent faculties, and exhibiting in a desultory manner the facts of an empirical and unsystematic psychology. Such teaching is at the best merely theoretical. It is not discipline: it contributes