Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/158

 historical memoirs, affords opportunities for exercising the moral sense in discriminating between the base and the noble, the cunning and the wise, the specious and the great, in public conduct. What we are aiming at is to train the moral taste, not merely as applicable generally to ordinary conduct in a common lot, but as adapted to the trying and complicated circumstances wherein good and evil are commingled, so often, in the course of public life. Besides those sacred principles of morality which a man's character, as a man, should rest upon, there is a specific feeling of the just and fair, applicable to the difficult occasions of a professional career, and destitute of which, homely honesty and virtue get, unawares, into many a wrong position, and are tripped up. That study of history then which the lawyer needs, as a lawyer, is one thing, but that study of it which the man needs, who is to endure the ordeal of the legal profession, is quite another.

Again: it is desirable to provide against the mental short-sightedness not seldom induced by legal studies and practice; or in other words, to impart a more philosophic expansiveness of understanding, as counteractive of the habit of holding to what is merely technical, and of refusing to look at what is broad or abstract. It is usual to recommend mathematical studies as preparatory to a legal education, under the idea that these pursuits afford a good training to the reasoning faculty. But I am inclined to question whether the one species of logic—the mathematical, be indeed a fit preparation for the other—the legal, differing as do the two in their very principles: but waiving this question, it would appear that Natural Philosophy, and especially as it is now prosecuted, affords precisely the sort of intellectual preparation we need for preventing what might be called the anchylosis of the faculties, or that fixedness of the reason which makes the mind the slave of instances, of precedents, and of technical verbosities.