राष्ट्रीय शिक्षा प्रणाली एवं भारतीय मानस (श्री अरविन्द - एकात्म शिक्षा दर्शन)

62 NATIONAL EDUCATION liberty and the syntactical faculties. All this should be done informally drawing on the curiosity and interest, avoiding set-teaching and memorising of rules. The true knowledge takes its base on things, arthas, and only when it has mastered the thing, pro- ceeds to formalize its information.

CHAPTER VIII THE TRAINING OF THE LOGICAL FACULTY The training of the logical reason but necessarily follows the training of the faculties which collect the material on which the logical reason must work. Not only so but the mind must have some development of the faculty of dealing before it can deal successfully with ideas. The question is, once this preliminary work is done, what is the best way of teaching the boy to think correctly from premises. For the logical reason cannot proceed without premises. It either infers from facts to a conclusion to a fresh one, or from one fact to another. It either induces, deduces or simply infers. I see the Sun rise day after day, I conclude or induce that it rises to a law daily

64 NATIONAL EDUCATION after a varying interval of darkness. I have already ascertained that wherever there is smoke, there is fire. I have induced that general rule from an observation of facts. I deduce that in a particular case of smoke, there is a fire behind. I infer that a man must have let it from the improbabi- lity of any other cause under the particular circumstances. I cannot deduce it because fire is not always created by human kindling ; it may be volcanic or caused by a stroke of lightening or the sparks from some kind of friction in the neighbourhood. There are three elements necessary to correct reasoning: first, the correct- ness of the facts or conclusions I start from, secondly, the completeness as well as the accuracy of the data I start from, thirdly, the elimination of other possible or impossible conclu-

TRAINING LOGICAL FACULTY. 65 sions from the same facts. The falli- bility of the logical reason is due partly to avoidable negligence and looseness in securing these conditions, partly to the difficulty of getting all the facts correct, still more to the difficulty of getting all the facts complete, most of all, to the extreme difficulty of eliminating all possible conclusions except the one which happens to be right. No fact is sup- posed to be more perfectly established than the universality of the Law of Gravitation as an imperative rule, yet a single new fact inconsistent with it would upset this supposed universa- lity. And such facts exist. Neverthe- less by care and keenness the fallibility may be reduced to its minimum. The usual practice is to train the logical reason by teaching the Science of Logic. This is an instance of the

66 NATIONAL EDUCATION prevalent error by which book know- ledge of a thing is made the object of the study instead of the thing itself. The experience of reasoning and its errors should be given to the mind and it should be taught to observe how these work for itself; it should proceed from the example to the rule and from the accumulating harmony of rules to the formal science of the subject, not from the formal science to the rule, and from the rule to the example. The first step is to make the young mind interest itself in drawing inferen- ces from the facts, tracing cause and effect. It should then be led on to notice its successes and its failures and the reason of the success and of the failure ; the incorrectness of the fact started from, the haste in drawing conclusions from insufficient facts, the

TRAINING LOGICAL FACULTY 67 carlessness in accepting a conclusion which is improbable, little supported by the data or open to doubt, the in- dolence or prejudice which does wish to consider other possible explanations or conclusions. In this way the mind can be trained to reason as correctly as the fallibility of the human logic will allow, minimising the change of error. The study of formal logic should be postponed to a later period when it can easily be mastered in a very brief period, since it will be only the systematising of the art perfectly well-known to the student.

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