EDUCATION AND ART OF REASONING. I/ 



degree the power to collect and utilize facts. 

 He said the real education of his mind began 

 on the Beagle voyage. And yet he gave a 

 very subordinate place to the vast number of 

 facts with which he became acquainted on the 

 voyage, and assigned supreme importance to 

 the habits of incessant industry and concen- 

 trated attention which were developed in him, 

 and to the necessity of reasoning in the solution 

 of geological problems. 



If the most important and only common ele- 

 ment in education is the development of the 

 power of reasoning, it may seem strange that 

 logic, proudly called the science' of sciences, 

 should play so obscure a role that in many 

 institutions it is practically ignored, and in 

 the rest it is tolerated in a very brief course. 

 The two most probable reasons for this are, 

 first, the general notion that the human mind 

 learns to reason as the human body learns to 

 walk, that there is no need of teaching; that 

 as training in the latter can only produce a 

 Delsartean gait, which for practical purposes is 

 little superior to an awkward wabble, so train- 

 ing in the art of reasoning is likely to produce 

 nothing but over-refinement, which accepts 

 indifferently postulates foolish and wise, and 

 seeks only to draw out their consequences into 

 2 



