its elementary parts is made independent of accident, and
as much carried out of the empire of _luck_ as the manufacture of
woollens or cottons. That it is _mechanic_, is no conditional praise
(as alleged by the author before us), but the absolute praise of the
Madras system: neither is there any just ground of fear, as he and
many others have insinuated, that it should injure the freedom of the
human intellect.]

[Footnote 35: We have since found that we have not room for it; the
case is stated and argued in the Appendix (pp. 220-227); but in our
opinion not fairly argued. The appellant's plea was sound, and ought
not to have been set aside. [At the end of the Paper I have restored
this 'CASE OF APPEAL' from the original work.--H.]]

Of this we may judge by two criteria--experimentally by its result, or
_a priori_ by its internal aptitude for attaining its ends. Now as to
the result, it must be remembered that--even if the author of any
system could be relied on as an impartial witness to its result--yet,
because the result of a system of education cannot express itself in
any one insulated fact, it will demand as much judgment to abstract
from any limited experience what really _is_ the result as would have
sufficed to determine its merits _a priori_ without waiting for any
result. Consequently, as it would be impossible to exonerate
ourselves from the necessity of an elaborate act of judgment by any
appeal to the practical test of the result--seeing that this result
would again require an act of judgment hardly less elaborate for its
satisfactory settlement than the _a priori_ examination which it had
been meant to supersede,--we may as well do that at first which we
must do in the end; and, relying upon our own understandings, say
boldly that the system is good or bad because on this argument it is
evidently calculated to do good or on that argument to do evil, than
blindly pronounce--it is good or it is bad, because it has
produced--or has failed of producing--such and such effects; even if
those effects were easy to collect. In fact, for any conclusive
purpose of a practical test, the experience is only now beginning to
accumulate: and here we may take occasion to mention that we had
ourselves been misinformed as to the duration of the experiment; for a
period of four years, we were told, a school had existed under the
system here developed: but this must be a mistake, founded perhaps on
a footnote at p. 83 whic