Unlike the
statue which can be wrought only from without, the great work of
education is to unfold the life within. This life always involves
self-action. The scholar is not merely a passive recipient. He grows
into power by an active reception of truth. Even when he listens to
another's utterances of knowledge, what vigor of attention and memory
are necessary to enable him to make that knowledge his own? But when he
attempts himself to master a subject of importance, when he would rise
into the higher region of mathematics, philosophy, history, poetry,
religion, art; or even when he would prepare himself for grappling with
the great questions of life, what long processes of thought! what
patient gathering together of materials! what judgment, memory,
comparison, and protracted meditation are essential to complete success?
The man who would triumph over obstacles and ascend the heights of
excellence in the realm of mind, must work with the continuous vigor of
a steamship on an ocean voyage. Day by day the fire must burn, and the
revolve in the calm and in the gale--in the sunshine and the storm. The
innate excellency of genius or talents can give no exemption to its
possessor from this law of mental growth. An educated mind is neither an
aggregation of particles accreted around a center, as the stones grow,
nor a substance, which, placed in a turner's lathe, comes forth an
exquisitely wrought instrument.
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