They learn, through the
medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our
colleges learn through those of the Greek and Latin--that is,
grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the
young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled
with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the
young man raw from Oxford--he will talk as fluently about Socrates
and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: (_alias_
Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus, and Bu Ali Sena); and,
what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has
learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through
life.[35] He therefore thinks himself as well fitted to fill the high
offices which are now filled exclusively by Europeans, and naturally
enough wishes the establishments of that power would open them to
him. On the faculties and operations of the human mind, on man's
passions and affections, and his duties in all relations of life, the
works of Imam Muhammad Ghazali[36] and Nasir-ud-din Tusi[37] hardly
yield to those of Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other
authors who have written on the same subjects in any country.
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