"In the higher schools or in the treatment of the graver studies, it is a subject of lamentation with prudent men that there is no solidity but much show,--an ill-arranged mass of superfluous knowledge, very little exact reasoning--; that the sciences, if you except Physics and Mathematics, have not made any true progress, but are in general confusion, so that where the final results of truth are to be found scarcely appears. The study of Logic and severe Dialectics is almost in contempt, whence errors come to be deeply rooted in the minds of men who are not otherwise illiterate; and these errors, by some fatality or other, are made much of, as if they were ascertained truths, and they are lauded to the skies, because nothing is treated with strictness and accuracy, no account is made of definitions and distinctness of reasoning. Thus, tasting lightly of philosophical matters, young men go forth utterly defenceless against sophistry, since they cannot even see the difference between a sophism and an argument. "In the lower schools, the object kept in view is to have boys learn as many things as possible, and learn them in the shortest time, and with the least exertion possible. Excellent! But that variety of so many things and so many courses, all lightly sipped of by youth, enables them to conceive a high opinion of how much they know, and sometimes swells the crowd of the half-instructed, the most pernicious of all classes to the Sciences and the State alike. As to knowing anything truly and solidly, there is none of it. Something of everything: nothing in the end.[355] Running through the courses of letters in no time, tender in age, with minds as yet untrained, they take up the gravest studies of Philosophy and the Higher Sciences; and, possessing themselves therein of scarcely any real fruit, they are only captivated by the enjoyment of greater liberty; they run headlong into vice, and are soon to become teachers themselves of a type, which, to put it as gently as possible, I will call immature. "As to the methods, ever easier and easier, which are being excogitated, whatever convenience may be found in them, there is this grave inconvenience; first, that what is acquired without labor adheres but lightly to the mind, and what is summarily gathered in is summarily forgotten; secondly, and this, though not adverted to by many, is a much more serious injury, almost the principal fruit of a boy's training is sacrificed, which is, accustoming himself from an early age to serious application of mind, and to that deliberate exertion which is required for hard work. "In some points, however, which do not concern the substance of education, the necessities of our times require us to modify the practice of our predecessors. And to consult the requirements of such necessities, far from being alien to our principles, is altogether in keeping with the Institute.