“The present state of classical education,” they say, “cultivates the _imagination_ a great deal too much, and other _habits of mind_ a great deal too little, and trains up many young men in a style of elegant imbecility, utterly unworthy of the talents with which nature has endowed them.… The matter of fact is, that a classical scholar of twenty-three or twenty-four is a man principally conversant with works of imagination. His feelings are quick, his fancy lively, and 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.