Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / [Amariah Brigham].

  • Amariah Brigham
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / [Amariah Brigham]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    113/166 (page 107)
    I the praise and censure, reward and punishment, con- nected with early mental culture, is calculated to awaken rivalry, envy, and hatred. Moral culture is sacrificed, in early life, to intellectual, and the bad passions are called forth to aid the mind s improvement, I and then what originates from a faulty or neglected I moral education is considered the fault of nature itself. [ But nature has not had fair play. Example is also of great importance in the educa- tion of children, in consequence of their natural propensity to imitation. The influence of this strong I propensity is not sufHciently attended to by parents I and teachers. Dugald Stewart has very ably treated , this subject, and shown its great importance in educa- I in one point—in the strictness of that intellectual discipline which H may prepare them for the worldly stations to which the parental I ambition has been unceasingly looking for them, before the filial 1 ambition was rendered sufficiently intent of itself! To such persons I the mind of the little creature whom they are training to worldly |i stations for worldly purposes, is an object of interest only as that f without which it would be impossible to arrive at the dignities ex- * pected. It is a necessary instrument for becoming rich and power- j ful; and, if he could become powerful, and rich, and envied, without . a soul, they would scarcely feel that he was a being less noble than d now. In what they term education, they have never once thought I that the virtues were to be included as objects ; and they would truly I feel something very like astonishment, if they were told that the 1) first and most essential part of the process of educating the moral I being whom Heaven had consigned to their charge, was yet to be i begun—in the abandonment of their own vices, and the purification Jof their own heart, by better feelings than those which had corrupted it—without which primary self-amendment, the very authority which is implied in the noble office which they were to exercise might be a source, not of good, but of evil, to him who was unfortunate'if > ] born to be its subject.”—Brown's Philosophy, vol. 2.