Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/152

 for shifting upon others every strenuous mental effort, such a man is good for nothing, but to receive his rents from the trusty hands of an agent; or to sign his name, and get his dividends twice a year.

A very different issue of our educational course is here kept in view; and therefore, over and beyond the conveyance of what is to be acquired, and which may be conveyed without any very painful assiduity, besides this, the power of keeping his footing with others, on the tread-mill of mental labour, must be acquired by the learner. After what has already been said on the subject, it can hardly be needful to add a caution, not to go beyond the point at which the animal system begins to sustain real injury by continued application.

If a well trained and intelligent youth of fifteen could but be put at once into possession of the detailed practical knowledge—the experience, which in fact is only to be slowly acquired, he would often have the advantage of his teacher, in readiness and rectitude of judgment, upon subjects any way connected with those vivid interests that attach men to this side, or to that, of party controversies. And this advantage would arise not merely from the clear, unimpaired freshness of the faculties, but from the freedom of the mind from the strong, though unconscious influence of personal, and gradually formed, ill habits of reasoning. An ingenuous mind is indeed conscious of the presence and operation of certain well defined motives for thinking, or for professing to think, so and so; and probably guards itself against its known partialities; but how few are at all aware of the number and the force of those unimpassioned and noiseless habitual misjudgments that actually overrule their every mental operation! The process of thinking, or reasoning, as often conducted, might be compared to the process of calculating astronomical events,