Page:Report on public instruction in the lower provinces of the Bengal presidency (1850-51).djvu/17

Rh training the minds of their pupils for entering upon that study. In the colleges of this country, the principle is the same, though the details are different. The English language here supplies the place which is filled in England by the Latin and Greek: inferior for the purposes of education in some respects, far superior to them in others. I do not consider it an overstrained assertion that those languages do not surpass English in majesty and power of diction more than English is superior to them in the real instrinsicintrinsic [sic] value of the knowledge that is to be gained by studying the works of the best classical authors in each. The want, therefore, to which I have referred is not quite so great for the Hindu student of English, as for the English student of Greek; yet still even here something more is needed: some branch of study in which the attention of the learner shall be fixed exclusively or almost exclusively on the truth taught, and little or not at all on the form of the vehicle through which it is conveyed.

"There are three subjects of science which have been prominently put forward for accomplishing this purpose, each of which is preferably cultivated at one of three famous British universities. Without meaning to allege of any of them that its attention is exclusively devoted to its favourite science, I may say that the study of logic has met with most favour at, metaphysics at , and physics, by which term I include mathematics and natural philosophy, at my own university of.

"The advocates of logic, by which is meant the science of pure reasoning, without reference to the subjects of its propositions, seem to consider that they have established their claim to preference when they find that their assertion cannot be denied, that no legitimate reasoning can be carried on, which in any way sins against the rules which it formally teaches.

"There is, however, another question behind, whether most of those rules are not elaborate and complicated expressions for elementary and almost intuitive truths. I frankly own that, notwithstanding the contrary opinion of some eminent persons, I have never been able to bring myself to attach much value to the study of logic as a formal science, at least as usually taught: and I believe that all in it that is of any practical use is learned with much greater facility by every mathematical student, who has advanced as far as to understand the doctrine of simple algebraical equation: and that, as soon as he has mastered the tolerably obvious principle that he must be careful not to change the meaning of his symbols in the course of his investigations, he is as safe