his taste good. Talents for
_speculation_ and _original inquiry_ he has none, nor has he formed the
invaluable _habit of pushing things up to their first principles_, or of
collecting dry and unamusing facts as the materials for reasoning. All the
solid and masculine parts of his _understanding_ are left wholly without
_cultivation_; he hates the pain of thinking, and suspects every man whose
boldness and originality call upon him to defend his opinions and prove
his assertions."

5.

Now, I am not at present concerned with the specific question of classical
education; else, I might reasonably question the justice of calling an
intellectual discipline, which embraces the study of Aristotle,
Thucydides, and Tacitus, which involves Scholarship and Antiquities,
_imaginative_; still so far I readily grant, that the cultivation of the
"understanding," of a "talent for speculation and original inquiry," and
of "the habit of pushing things up to their first principles," is a
principal portion of a _good_ or _liberal_ education. If then the
Reviewers consider such cultivation the characteristic of a _useful_
education, as they seem to do in the foregoing passage, it follows, that
what they mean by "useful" is just what I mean by "good" or "liberal:" and
Locke's question becomes a verbal one. Whether youths are to be taught
Latin or verse-making will depend on the _fact_, whether these studies
tend to mental culture; but, however this is determined, so far is clear,
that in that mental culture consists what I have called a liberal or
non-professional, and what the Reviewers call a useful education.

This is the obvious answer which may be made to those who urge upon us the
claims of Utility in our plans of Education; but I am not going to leave
the subject here: I mean to take a wider view of it. Let us take "useful,"
as Locke takes it, in its proper and popular sense, and then we enter upon
a large field of thought, to which I cannot do justice in one Discourse,
though to-day's is all the space that I can give to it. I say, let us take
"useful" to mean, not what is simply good, but what _tends_ to good, or is
the _instrument_ of good; and in this sense also, Gentlemen, I will show
you how a liberal education is truly and fully a useful, though it be not
a professional, education. "Good" indeed means one thing, and "useful"
means another; but I lay it down as a principle, which will save us a
great deal of anxiety, that,