Intellectual interest

“ As one engages in his practical or tested and understood interests still another set of incidental interests is developed, the theoretical or intellectual. Interest in objects as they help us to realize our practical interests is usually generated when we fail in a successful use of them. ”

“ The greatest contrast is between what belongs to intelligence, and what belongs to the feelings and the will. The more strictly intellectual department comprises Mechanical Art, Language, the Sensible World, the Sciences, Fine Art ”

“ To understand, we have analyzed the intellectual world into two classes, good and evil; and to discover the members of each class, we fix their qualities, not by the hypothetick, but the practical mode of reasoning. ”

“ We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body or basis. ”

“ Hence it is that what is called a practical education is set above the mere enlargement and enrichment of the mind; and the possession of the material is valued, and the intellectual life is undervalued. ”

“ But the possession of an intellectual and moral nature which responds to appropriate stimulations implies, also, that as man develops intellectually, he will find meaning in human life as realized in himself and others. Thus he becomes able to recognize worth in human life and to determine the conditions which favour its highest growth, or development. ”

“ They issue in the promotion of a certain living and, as it were, bodily communication of knowledge from one to another, of a general interchange of ideas, and a comparison and adjustment of science with science, of an enlargement of mind, intellectual and social, of an ardent love of the particular study, which may be chosen by each individual, and a noble devotion to its interests. ”

“ EDUCATION COMPLETE. Thus have we sketched, on a small scale, a complete scheme of education. How to live?—that is the question. How to use all your powers to the glory of God and the greatest advantage to yourselves and others—how to live completely? The intellectual part of your nature is superior to the physical; the moral higher than the intellectual ”

“ The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford. ”

“ INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. The desire, the duty, the necessity of the age in which we live is education, or that culture which developes, enlarges, and enriches each individual intelligence, according to the measure of its capacity, by familiarizing it with the facts and laws of nature and human life. ”

“ And as he aspires to exhibit models of education, possessing higher excellencies than mechanical dexterity or mere intellectual acuteness; his anxious aim will be to make instruction in art and science, the culture of the understanding, and of the physical powers, subservient to the nobler intention of fostering and maturing the virtues of the heart. ”

“ Intellectual and Moral Education.--"The object of intellectual education is to create such indissoluble associations of our ideas of things, in the order and relation in which they occur in nature; that of a moral education is to unite as fixedly, the ideas of evil deeds with those of pain and degradation, and of good actions with those of pleasure and nobleness." ”

“ Lists of questions are published, wonderful for their range and depth, variety and difficulty; treatises are written, which carry upon their very face the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious information; what then is wanting for mental culture to a person of large reading and scientific attainments? what is grasp of mind but acquirement? where shall philosophical repose be found, but in the consciousness and enjoyment of large intellectual possessions? ”

“ Let us eliminate the intellectual and moral qualities characteristic of each group, which establish notable differences between them, and let us consider only their inventive capacity as applied to practical life. ”

“ There is a vast commerce of ideas; there are marts and exchanges for intellectual discoveries, and a wonderful fellowship of those individual intelligences which make up the mind and opinion of the age. Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation. ”

“ Here, also, through the copious stores of literature at our disposal, we can arrive at something definite regarding the various forms assumed by these passions, when allowed free scope for development in the midst of refined and intellectual civilisation. ”

“ The law that human intellects will seek their own intellectual level, providing the person is sound in principle, had worked out in her case, and, once she had made her decision, she clung to it with all the steadfastness of a strong and passionate nature. ”

“ He not only personally appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the creations of poets and artists in all departments, deeming them, by their mixed appeal to the sentiments and the understanding, admirably fitted to educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the intellectual horizon of people of the world. ”

“ We regret that such crude ideas of what constitutes education, and such a narrow conception of utility, should still be prevalent. Saying nothing on the need for a systematic culture of the perceptions and the value of the practices above inculcated as subserving that need, we are prepared to defend them even on the score of the knowledge gained. ”

“ The objective mind, it will therefore be seen, is potentially selective, that is to say, the measure of its quality is its capacity to select at will intellectual nourishment from the whole range of humanity and nature, free from the oppression of its psychic environment. ”

“ Material facts, which we are apt to consider the most easily measurable, include quantity and distribution of population, production of wealth, the consumption of food and luxuries, the standard of life. Intellectual facts include both the diffusion and degree of instruction and creative activity in genius. Moral facts include the prevalence of honesty, justice, pity, and self-sacrifice, the position of women and the care of children. They are the most important of all for the quality of a civilisation. ”

“ Positive Education, adapting itself to the requirements of the Organism with which it has to deal, subordinates intellectual conditions to social. Social conditions are considered as the main object, intellectual as but the means of attaining it. ”

“ As, throughout life, not what we are, but what we shall be thought, is the question; so in education, the question is, not the intrinsic value of knowledge, so much as its extrinsic effects on others. ”

“ CHAPTER V THE MORAL CRITICISM OF FINE ART There are certain human activities which not only are of special interest on their own account, but also hold a position of pre-eminence in civilization. Such are science, philosophy, the love of nature, politics, friendly intercourse, and fine art. ”

“ I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. ”

“ Nor can any lack of final verbal correction much diminish the intellectual value which many of the more thoughtful passages of the present work derive from a long, keen, and practical study of political phenomena, guided by personal experience of public life, and enlightened by a large, instinctive knowledge of the human heart. ”

“ It is an effort of prime importance to trace exhaustively the inducements and allurements to intellectual exertion. What are the intrinsic charms of knowledge, whether in pursuit or in possession? The difficulty of the answer is increased rather than diminished by the flow of fifty years' rhetoric. ”

“ Whether to comprehend the real interest of a people, and the means to procure it, doth not imply some fund of knowledge, historical, moral, and political, with a faculty of reason improved by learning? ”

“ Is there any one element which communicates the decisive impulse to all the rest,—any predominating agency in the course of social evolution? The answer is that all the other parts of social existence are associated with, andDecisive Importance of Intellectual development. drawn along by, the contemporary condition of intellectual development. ”

“ Special studies carried on without regard for the encyclopædic principles which determine the relative value of knowledge, and its bearing on human life, will be condemned by all men of right feeling and good sense. ”

“ And the range of topics is very wide; it embraces science and art, history and philosophy; above all, the knowledge of human nature that teaches how the mind he addresses is to be convinced and persuaded, and how a willing ear is to be won to his discourse. ”

“ This, then, it seems, is Culture—knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world—not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment—reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system. ”

“ We are attempting generalization about a class of remarkably peculiar and difficult persons. They are persons either of great intellectual power or simply of great imaginative power, whose bias and quality it is to apply these exceptional powers not directly and simply to their personal advancement and enrichment, but primarily through philosophical, scientific, or artistic channels, to the increase of knowledge or of wisdom or of both. ”

“ In the light of these great centres of intellectual activity, parents of intellectual products, there is nothing pertaining to the subject before us, however curious, which may not be intelligibly explained, seen naturally to spring out of certain conditions of man's mind and experience as related with the life of society and the phenomena of the world. ”

“ In no single instance, as far as can be ascertained, has nobility of character, or the possession of genius, or soundness of judgment, or even beauty of diction in literature, been attributable to the grind in grammatical rules, the fact-cramming, and the mental gymnastics which go to make up what is called 'a liberal education.'
In science, where the highest intellectual qualities are brought into play, most of the great discoverers have owed their entire scientific knowledge to self-taught methods of investigation. ”

“ In this Discourse I gave expression to many thoughts and opinions which had been accumulating in me through life, respecting the various studies which belong to a liberal education, their uses and influences, and the mode in which they should be pursued to render their influences most beneficial. ”

“ The interest theory, then, would not eliminate hardship or discipline, but, to my understanding, by making education serve actual life, would substitute a natural for an artificial and externally imposed hardship. Not hardship, but real achievement makes the educated man. ”

“ Whereas in the advocates of modern knowledge as the object and instrument of education, and in its teachers, there is none of this unreality, or want of connexion with the thought, and with the work, of the world that is stirring around us. ”

“ The mind thinks with what it knows; and, if you alter the knowledge in any one whit, you alter the thinking instrumentality in proportion. Our whole practice of education is based on this idea, and yet somehow the idea is allowed to lurk. ”

“ Their intellectual powers are very limited, as they enter into no abstruse meditations, or abstract ideas; but what they know in the narrow range of supplying their wants, and combating with their fellow men, they know thoroughly, and are thereby led to consider themselves the standard of excellence. ”

“ Many reasons make it necessary and proper to render an account to the public at large, which has not made the study of philosophy its particular business, concerning the latest attempts to raise philosophy to the dignity of a science. ”

“ Men of the profoundest learning, of the sublimest genius, and of the purest integrity, after devoting their lives to the research, finally differed in their ideas upon many great points, both of doctrine and discipline. ”

“ If education were first of all experimental and practical, reserving speech only to explain, summarize, and coordinate work; if those who cannot learn with imagination and memory were permitted to learn with their eyes and hands,—soon we should witness a multiplication, not only of the forms of labor, but of capacities; everybody, knowing the theory of something, would thereby possess the language of philosophy; on occasion he could, were it only for once in his life, create, modify, perfect, give proof of intelligence and comprehension, produce his master-piece, in a word, show himself a man. ”

“ Either they will pursue some liberal study which brings them in nothing, or they will practice some art; and in general, they will be capable of taking an objective interest in things, so that it will be possible to converse with them. ”

“ He should feel in some measure the power of that group of studies which have to do with mental and moral processes considered apart from the world of outward phenomena, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion. He needs to relate his individual activity to the larger life of the whole by some genuine grasp of fundamentals in his thinking. ”