The Principles of Intellectual Education
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. EXACTNESS. We have now to consider more at length what is meant by the two leading aims which we assigned as the proper general ends of intellectual education?flexibility and exactness, and to see what practical guidance they afford in the choice of subjects or method of teaching. Let us take exactness first, for that is the simpler of the two, itself necessary to render really valuable such flexibility as we may be able to attain. In educational writings we have many homilies preached upon the virtue of a regard for the great goddess, Truth, and are told that exactness in intellectual work is but one side of the worship we owe to her divinity. It is true that exactness in intellectual pursuits runs up into morality, and that fullness of morality is impossible of attainment without so deep a r
...egard for truth as presupposes, not only that we never make a statement we know to be false, but also?a rarer and harder virtue?that we conscientiously do our best to arrive at all the facts and to view them in a clear atmosphere undistorted by the mists of prejudice. And yet the homilies often preached seem to some extent to ring false, chiefly perhaps because intellectual truth and moral truth, though akin, are not one: and though both deserve our admiration and worship, the ordinary sane man is not prepared to pay to intellectual virtue the depth of reverence he extends?and willingly?to the snow- clad peaks of pure morality. Here then it is necessary to put forth a claim to the importance of intellectual exactness on simple practical grounds?the ease and smoothness of life itself. And how strong an appeal on such grounds may be made ! Who does not know the grave inconvenience caused by a message wrongly delivered?the misinterpretation of a clear statement?ideas rea...
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