This, I must confess, is a one-sided view of the question; it is, however, the view which my subject forces me to take in treating of the means of self-education.
Though it would be absurd to ask you not to read newspapers, it would, in my opinion, be wholly unwise to counsel you to make use of them to any great extent as aids to true cultivation of mind. We grow, morally and intellectually, by association with that which is above us, and not by contact with what is low; and it is not by filling the mind day by day with what is startling, corrupt, sensational, or at best only of passing interest, but by lifting it up into the higher and serener atmosphere, from which the trivial and transitory value of these things is perceived, that it will gain in depth and power.
Except in the line of study which belongs to one's profession, the wisest rule is to confine ourselves to the works of really great minds, which we should not merely read, but study.
In connection with practical self-education, I consider the “conversation evening,” as described in your Report for 1872, excellent. In intellectual pursuits, as in other things, association gives increase of power and the means of progress. The contact of mind with mind develops the latent fire, and strikes into life the slumbering thought. Mind becomes supplementary to mind; and the intercommunion of souls, which constitutes the purest [pg 207] friendship, becomes also the source of the highest pleasure.
I know that the value of mere intellectual cultivation may be exaggerated, and that, in point of fact, the men who, in our day, deny God, insist most upon the developed mind's self-sufficiency.
“In the writings of our great poets,” says Strauss, after having rejected God and the soul, “in the performances of our great musicians, we find a satisfying stimulus for the intellect and the heart, and for fancy in her deepest or most sportive moods.”[73]
Indeed, there is a danger in polite education which we should be most careful to avoid. The love of poetry and music, of the fine arts in general, has, I think, a tendency to make us unreal and visionary, because it separates feeling from acting. We may have high thoughts, fine sentiments, and pleasurable emotions, and yet lie slothfully on our couch. But life is for action, and to this end thought, sentiment, and feeling should all conspire. If science and philosophy be our favorite pursuits, we may acquire inveterate habits of analysis which, by drying up the fountains of feeling, and isolating the intellect from the heart, will convert the mind into a storehouse for abstractions and lifeless formulas. This tendency of the study of science will give us a satisfactory explanation of many of the intellectual errors of the present day.
From abstraction, only the abstract, the unreal, can be inferred, and hence the new philosophy of atheism does not affirm being, but merely the phenomenon.
The exaggerated importance which this age has attributed to mere intellectual cultivation has, amongst other results, produced what may be called over-education—an excessive activity of brain, which threatens to enfeeble the physical health of modern peoples by abnormally developing the nervous system.
I have referred to these dangers, not for the purpose of insisting on them, but rather that I might have an opportunity to say that they are not to be greatly dreaded by us. The church gives us fixed principles of faith, certain rules of conduct, which will prevent the love of literature from taking from us that deep and practical seriousness of mind which is inseparable from the true Christian character, whilst she guides us with an eye that sees the light of heaven through the dark mazes of philosophy; and the fear of over-education should certainly not trouble us.