His ideas on education are liberal and advanced.He is opposed to corporal punishment, and declares that the grand aim of education should be to foster good habits.Giving a high place to the study of the mind, he maintains, as did all the great masters of the Aberdeen school who came after him, that mental science should not be taught to young men till their minds have been other-wise well furnished.He gives logic a somewhat large and wide field;, in this respect, too, like the Scottish metaphysicians who came after him.Its province is to " examine the power and faculties of our minds (favorite phrases of Reid's), their objects, and operations; to inquire {103} into the foundations, the causes of error, deceit, and false taste;and, for that effect, to compare the several arts and sciences with one another, and to observe how each of them may derive light and assistance from all the rest.Its business is to give a full view of the natural union, connection, and dependence of all the sciences." Like Reid, and Stewart after him, he sets a high value on the study of " the nature and degrees of moral, probable, or historical evidence," and complains that it is left out in the logical treatises.The teacher should aim to make his pupil look at things, instead of words.At the same time, he recommends the study of languages with the study of things employing language in an enlarged sense, as embracing the different methods of expressing, embellishing, or enforcing and recommending truth, such as oratory, poetry, design, sculpture, and painting.He complains that in education the arts of design are quite severed, not only from philosophy, but from classical studies.The object contemplated by him in his work on " Painting " was to bring these various branches into union: he thinks that paintings may teach moral philosophy.The essential elements of painting are represented by him as being truth, beauty, unity, greatness, and grace, in composition.He dwells fondly on the analogy between the sense of beauty and moral sense; and on the inseparable connection between beauty and truth.His works on " education " and on the fine arts are clear and judicious, written in a pleasant and equable, but at the same time a commonplace style; and they seem never to have attracted the attention which they deserved, and which would have been freely given to works of greater pretension, eccentricity, or extravagance.
But, after all, we are most interested in noticing the points in which Turnbull seems to have influenced Reid.We have already had some of these before us.We have seen that Turnbull announces as clearly as Reid that the human mind is to be studied by careful observation.Both are averse to abstruse scholastic distinctions and recondite ratiocinations on moral subjects.Turnbull ever appeals, as Reid did after him, to consciousness as the instrument of observation.Both are fond of designating mental attributes by the terms ,powers " and "faculties." Both would give a wide, and I may add a loose, field to logic, and include in it the inquiry into the nature of probable evidence.{104}