Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from On Self-Culture: Intellectual, Physical, and Moral, a Vade Mecum for Young Men and Students
Thinking first, and plenty to think about, and then ask the logician to teach you to scrutinise with a nice eye the process by which you have arrived at your conclusions. In such fashion there is no doubt that the study of logic may be highly beneficial. But as this science, like mathematics, has no real contents, and merely sets forth in order the universal forms under which all thinking is exercised, it must always be a very barren affair to attempt obtaining from pure logic any rich growth of thought that will bear ripe fruit in the great garden of life. One may as well expect to make a great patriot - a Bruce or a Wallace - of a fencing master, as to make a great thinker out of a mere logician. So it is in truth with all formal studies. Grammar and rhetoric are equally barren, and bear fruit only when dealing with materials given by life and experience. A meagre soul can never be made fat, nor a narrow soul large, by studying rules of thinking. An intense vitality, a wide sympathy, a keen observation, a various experience, is worth all the logic of the schools; and yet the logic is not useless it has a regulative, not a creative Virtue it is useful to thinking as the study of anatomy is useful to painting; it gives you a more firm hold of the jointing and articulation of your framework but it can no more produce true knowledge than anatomy can produce beau tiful painting. It performs excellent service in the exposure of error and the unveiling of sophistry but to proceed far in the discovery of important truth, it must borrow its moving.
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