The Calcutta University and science.

  • University of Calcutta
Date:
[1865?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Calcutta University and science. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    accepted on the dictum or have stereotyped from the opinions of those whom we make our gurus? We hold ourselves to be vastly wiser than our forefathers, because we believe that the earth moves round the sun, while they believed that the sun moved round the earth, but can most of us give a single philo¬ sophical reason for our own view of the matter? And if not, in what respect as intellectual beings are better than they ? True, we have matter more at our command, we have a greater variety of objects to pursue, and improved and more rapid means of gaining them, and we can emancipate ourselves to an extent un¬ dreamt of by them, from the trammels of restricted experience in space. We can flash the expression of our thoughts and wishes in a few seconds from continent to continent, and we can see more forms and phases of social custom in a couple of years than our ancestors could in a decade. But these achievements do but facilitate self-education ; they do not compel it. The fool who has been sent to Rome, is not less a fool than he who has remained in his ancestral halls. The difference of the two cases is that of the swallow and the apteryx, not that of the sage and the boor. He 1 who has seen the cities of many men/ only becomes a better anfl nobler being for his experience, in so far as he culti¬ vates the faculty of unbiassed observation to discern, and a disci¬ plined judgment to reason. To become an experienced man, he must first be an educated man in the sense in which we here use the term; he must start with a desire to learn, and with a deep and ever present sense of the fallibility of his own precon¬ ceptions. There are but few who have the natural gift of this self-knowledge; but many are capable of acquiring it; not in¬ deed to its highest degree, as no man can be fashioned at will into that which is utterly at variance with his inherited nature, but still to such an extent as to make them wiser and better men; happier themselves, and more potent to confer happiness on others. To this end, nothing is more efficacious than a study of history, —the history of men and opinions. But a mere record of plots, intrigues, and battles, with name, date, and circumstance duly eli¬ cited from old traditions, private memoirs, or state papers, after more or less controversy, will serve but little to the purpose. Whether Mary Queen of Scots, was virtuous, or how far the early history of Rome is mythical and allegorical, are proper and interesting questions for the antiquarian and historian, but may be profitably excluded from consideration in History as a means of Education, for, if our view be correct, Education of the Mind is the real object of University teaching, and History, Philosophy, and Theologies are mainly to be treated as means to that end, .
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