Things to be remembered in daily life : with personal experiences and recollections / by John Timbs.
- John Timbs
- Date:
- 1863
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Things to be remembered in daily life : with personal experiences and recollections / by John Timbs. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
138/280 page 126
![may be added, that Cobbett, the most racy and idiomatic of all our writers, and Erskine, by far the greatest of our forensic orators, knew little or nothing of any ancient ]an< guage ; and the same observation applies to Shakspeare.* j Our author has been just to Porson, to whom chiefly- English scholarship owes its accuracy and its certainty; and this as a branch of education—as a substratum on which to rest other branches of knowledge often infinitely more useful in themselves—really takes as high a rank as any of those studies which can contribute to form the chajr^ racter of a well-educated English gentleman. LIBERAL EDUCATION. Dean Hook has written the following able defence of a Liberal Education, as distinguished from the special train- ing for a profession: A Liberal Education is to the present time the characteristic of what is called a University Education. By a liberal education is meant a non-professional education. By a non-professional educational is meant an education conducted without reference to the future pro- fession, or calling, or special pursuit for which the person under edu- cation is desig-ned. It is an education which is regarded not merely as a means, but as something which is in itself an end. The end proposed is not the formation of the divine, or the phj^sician, or the lawyer, or the statesman, or the soldier, or the man of business, or the botanist, or the chemist, or the man of science, or even the scholar ; but simply of the thinker. It is admitted that the highest eminence can only be attained by— the concentration of the mind, with a piercing intensity and singleness - of view, upon one field of action. In order to excel, each mind must have its specific end. A man may know many things well, but there is only one thing upon which he will be preeminently learned, and become an authority. The professional man may be compared to one whose eye is fixed upon a microscope. The rest of the world is abstracted from his field of vision, and the eye, though narrowed to a scarcely perceptible hole, is able to see what is indiscernible by others. When he observes accurately, he becomes, in his department, a learned man ; and when he reveals his observations, he is a benefactor of his kind. All that the university system does is to delay the professional education as long as possible ; it woijld apply to the training of the mind a discipline ana- logous to that which common sense suggests in what relates to bodily exercise. A father, ambitious.for his son that he might win the piize at the Olympian games or in the Pythian fields, devoted his first atten- tion not to the technicalities of the game, but to the general condition and morals of the youth. The success of the athlete depended upon his first becoming a healthy man. So the imiversity system trains the * History of Civilisation in Englajid.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21081244_0138.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
