Autobiography | Page 7

who attach a precise meaning to words and
propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted

influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in mathematical processes, none of
the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur. It is also a study peculiarly adapted to
an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the
slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.
They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and
self-contradictory thought, before their own thinking faculties are much advanced; a
power which, for want of some such discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack;
and when they have to answer opponents, only endeavour, by such arguments as they can
command, to support the opposite conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the
reasonings of their antagonists; and, therefore, at the utmost, leaving the question, as far
as it depends on argument, a balanced one.
During this time, the Latin and Greek books which I continued to read with my father
were chiefly such as were worth studying, not for the language merely, but also for the
thoughts. This included much of the orators, and especially Demosthenes, some of whose
principal orations I read several times over, and wrote out, by way of exercise, a full
analysis of them. My father's comments on these orations when I read them to him were
very instructive to me. He not only drew my attention to the insight they afforded into
Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often
illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator--how everything important to his
purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience
into the state most fitted to receive it; how he made steal into their minds, gradually and
by insinuation, thoughts which, if expressed in a more direct manner, would have roused
their opposition. Most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full
comprehension at the time; but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season. At
this time I also read the whole of Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintilian. The latter, owing to his
obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up,
is little read, and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a kind of encyclopaedia of
the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture; and I have
retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of
him, even at that early age. It was at this period that I read, for the first time, some of the
most important dialogues of Plato, in particular the _Gorgias_, the _Protagoras_, and the
Republic. There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his
own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young
students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which
the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting
the errors, and clearing up the confusions incident to the _intellectus sibi permissus_, the
understanding which has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance of
popular phraseology. The close, searching elenchus by which the man of vague
generalities is constrained either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms, or to
confess that he does not know what he is talking about; the perpetual testing of all general
statements by particular instances; the siege in form which is laid to the meaning of large
abstract terms, by fixing upon some still larger class-name which includes that and more,
and dividing down to the thing sought--marking out its limits and definition by a series of
accurately drawn distinctions between it and each of the cognate objects which are
successively parted off from it --all this, as an education for precise thinking, is
inestimable, and all this, even at that age, took such hold of me that it became part of my

own mind. I have felt ever since that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to
those who have been nourished in and have endeavoured to practise Plato's mode of
investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain
dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which
the character of his mind and writings makes it uncertain whether he himself regarded as
anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic conjectures.
In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I could now read these authors, as far as
the language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to