BLOOMINGTON, Ill., Feb. 12 (AScribe Newswire) -- Like most scholars of Abraham Lincoln, Illinois Wesleyan University English professor Robert Bray is familiar with the "What would Lincoln do?" syndrome. From the energy crisis to war with Iraq, the question is often raised.

For his part, Bray has found it useful to consider the way that Lincoln would arrive at a decision rather than simply what that decision might be. When he poses that question, Bray is struck by the way Lincoln designed his own formative education along lines that would now be considered in the liberal arts tradition.

"If you look at Lincoln's self-education, it seemed to follow classical lines of liberal arts learning," says Bray, the R. Forest Colwell Professor of American Literature at Illinois Wesleyan. "In my work on Lincoln, I followed him through some of the classic texts of 19th century education as it was before the Civil War."

According to Bray, Lincoln began with English grammars, moved to a textbook on logic, and then worked with a number of "preceptors," which were meant to teach rhetoric and morals. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the areas of the medieval trivium, the lower division of the seven liberal arts, which formed the basis for all subsequent study.

"The way Lincoln went about this seemed to me indicative of a person who very early understood the necessity for close scrutiny of phenomena and texts, which is at the core of the liberal arts," Bray says. " Just as I think it does for students in the liberal arts today, those studies gave Lincoln the mind power to march into the world."

Consequently, Lincoln's habit was to think about a problem long and deeply, says Bray. He was mistrustful of passionate responses in any situation.

"Lincoln was perhaps a colder person than some might have liked," Bray says. "He really did think that to go off half-cocked was the worst thing that you could do."

Bray notes that Lincoln also demonstrated another hallmark of a liberal education - the ability to learn how to learn - in his understanding of military strategy in which he had no formal training.

"Lincoln became a pretty fair military strategist who could talk to his generals and advise them in fairly authoritative ways," Bray says. "Not even the generals who went to West Point were better prepared for the demands of the Civil War than Lincoln was, and I attribute that to the way in which he had trained his mind and the fact that he knew how to approach any problem directly because he felt that his mind was trained to do that."