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Untitled Article
science taught empirically , by committing to memory its results . Whatever assists in feeding the bjpdy , we can see the use of ; not so if it serves the body only by forming the mind . Is it any worider that , thus educated , we should decline in genius ? That tlje ten centuries of England or France cannot produce as many illustrious na , mes as the hundred and fifty years of little Greece ? The wonder is . that we should have produced
so many as we have , amidst such adverse circumstances . We have had some true philosophers , and a few genuine poets ; two or three great intellects have revolutionized physical science ; but in almost every branch of literature and art we are deplorably behind the earlier ages of the world . In art , we hardly attempt
anything except spoiled copies of antiquity and the middle ages . We are content to copy them , because that requires less trouble and less cultivated faculties than to comprehend them . If we had genius to enter into the spirit of ancient art , the same genius would enable us to clothe that spirit in ever-new forms . Where , then , is the rernedy ? It is in the knowledge and clear comprehension of the evil . It is in the distinct recognition , that the end of education is not to teach , but to fit the mind for
learning from its own consciousness and observation ; that we have occasion for this power under ever-varying circumstances , for which no routine or rule of thumb can possibly mate provision . As the mernory is trained by remembering , so is the reasoning power by reasoning ; the imaginative by imagining ; the analytic by analysing ; the inventive by finding out . Let the education of the mind consist in calling out and exercising these faculties : never trouble yourself about giving knowledge—train
the mind—keep it supplied with materials , and knowledge will come of itself . Let all cram be ruthlessly discarded . Let each person be made to feel that in other things he may believe upon trust—if he find a trustworthy authority—but that in the line of his peculiar duty , and in the line of the duties common to all men , it is his business to know . Let the feelings of society cease to stigmatize independent thinking , and divide its
censure between a lazy dereliction of the duty and privilege of thought , arid the overweening self-conceit of a h ^ l P ^ hiriker , who rushes to his conclusions without taking the trouble to understand the thoughts of other men . Were all this done , there would be no complaint of uny wfant of genius in modern times . But when will that hour come ? Though it come not at all , yet is it not less your duty ^ nd mine to strive for it , —and first to do what is certainly and absolutely iu pur power , to realize it in our owp persons . I am Sir , yoMrs respectfully , Antiqucjs ,
Untitled Article
On Qenius . 659
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 659, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/11/
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