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Updated: May 25, 2025
Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares nothing for truth, who rebels against personal discipline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of self-education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see himself as he is.
In considering the case from the point of view of mental development we find a similar irresistible drawing toward the apes, as the most spontaneously intelligent of the mammalia. While many of the lower animals are capable of being taught, the ape stands nearly alone in the power of thinking for itself, the characteristic of self-education.
Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell.
One of the most striking examples of self-education in literature is Carlyle's seven years, from the age of thirty-two to thirty-nine, passed at Craigenputtock where his native inclination was enforced by his physical surroundings. Craigenputtock, wrote Froude, is "the dreariest spot in all the British dominions.
Since then I have traveled practically all over this country, and in one foreign country, without once seeing anything that made so deep an impression on me. Simultaneously with this opportunity for self-education came many real hardships to say nothing of imaginary hardships which nearly resulted disastrously to my health. I was poorly clad for the extraordinary winter then setting in.
No person was too high for Edward's boyish approach; President Garfield, General Grant, General Sherman, President Hayes all were called upon, and all received the boy graciously and were interested in the problem of his self-education.
The agreeable working of her intellectual faculties during the early part of her absorbing self-education had kept her senses in abeyance; but when the discipline of all regular routine was relaxed, they were set free to get the upper hand if they would, and now they had begun to have their way a delicate, dreamy way, of a surety, but it was a sensuous way nevertheless, and not at all a spiritual way, as her mother maintained it to be, because of the church-going.
She was beginning to feel her zest for self-education considerably damped. "But," brightening up a little, "we can go on with this, at any rate, until we find out what we ought to learn. It can't do any harm. It looks like history, and I am sure we ought to know history." "Yes," agreed Esther.
Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind. Shut your College gates against the votary of knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your Babel.
Butler before him, by some early bias or some fault of self-education—he, in a review of a work by Mr. Edgeworth on Professional Education, which attracted a good deal of attention in its day, goes leisurely over the same ground, which had already been rapidly traversed by Dr. Copleston, and, though professedly employed upon Mr.
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