Autobiography | Page 6

up to
manhood, except the metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at his
recommendation and was intensely delighted with; as I always was with animated
narrative. Dryden's Poems were among my father's books, and many of these he made me
read, but I never cared for any of them except _Alexander's Feast_, which, as well as
many of the songs in Walter Scott, I used to sing internally, to a music of my own: to
some of the latter, indeed, I went so far as to compose airs, which I still remember.
Cowper's short poems I read with some pleasure, but never got far into the longer ones;
and nothing in the two volumes interested me like the prose account of his three hares. In
my thirteenth year I met with Campbell's poems, among which _Lochiel_,
_Hohenlinden_, _The Exile of Erin_, and some others, gave me sensations I had never
before experienced from poetry. Here, too, I made nothing of the longer poems, except

the striking opening of _Gertrude of Wyoming_, which long kept its place in my feelings
as the perfection of pathos.
During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was experimental
science; in the theoretical, however, not the practical sense of the word; not trying
experiments--a kind of discipline which I have often regretted not having had--nor even
seeing, but merely reading about them. I never remember being so wrapt up in any book,
as I was in Joyce's _Scientific Dialogues_; and I was rather recalcitrant to my father's
criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics, which abounds
in the early part of that work. I devoured treatises on Chemistry, especially that of my
father's early friend and schoolfellow, Dr. Thomson, for years before I attended a lecture
or saw an experiment.
From about the age of twelve, I entered into another and more advanced stage in my
course of instruction; in which the main object was no longer the aids and appliances of
thought, but the thoughts themselves. This commenced with Logic, in which I began at
once with the _Organon_, and read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the
Posterior Analytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I was not yet ripe for.
Contemporaneously with the _Organon_, my father made me read the whole or parts of
several of the Latin treatises on the scholastic logic; giving each day to him, in our walks,
a minute account of what I had read, and answering his numerous and most searching
questions. After this, I went in a similar manner through the Computatio sive Logica of
Hobbes, a work of a much higher order of thought than the books of the school logicians,
and which he estimated very highly; in my own opinion beyond its merits, great as these
are. It was his invariable practice, whatever studies he exacted from me, to make me as
far as possible understand and feel the utility of them: and this he deemed peculiarly
fitting in the case of the syllogistic logic, the usefulness of which had been impugned by
so many writers of authority. I well remember how, and in what particular walk, in the
neighbourhood of Bagshot Heath (where we were on a visit to his old friend Mr. Wallace,
then one of the Mathematical Professors at Sandhurst) he first attempted by questions to
make me think on the subject, and frame some conception of what constituted the utility
of the syllogistic logic, and when I had failed in this, to make me understand it by
explanations. The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time; but
they were not therefore useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and
reflections to crystallize upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me,
by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards. My own
consciousness and experience ultimately led me to appreciate quite as highly as he did,
the value of an early practical familiarity with the school logic. I know of nothing, in my
education, to which I think myself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I
have attained. The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was
dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever
capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in
which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school
logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments
of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when
properly used, to form exact thinkers,