Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/160

148 and can be got by "self-alienation," is not "self-alienation," as defined by Mr. Harris, too much to pay for it? Whatever the value of the knowledge, who, for the sake of getting it, could reasonably spend the best years of his life, or any of his years, in trying to make himself a Roman and a Greek rolled into one? And who of all this breathing: world has tried it and succeeded? Has Mr. Harris? Can he himself think in the idioms of the Greeks and Latins, and give his thoughts their forms and words? I do him the credit to believe that he can not, but, if he could, the fact, I venture to suggest; would rather explain his alleged obscurity in the use of his own language than prove the necessity of mastering theirs; for it would be only natural that one who had carried "self-alienation" to this length should not be at home in his vernacular. He who travels out of himself so far will be apt never to get back again. In his case there would be no "Return of the Native." The "grand tour" would finish his education, no doubt, in the primary sense of the word. A kind of culture such a man might have, but it would not be liberal culture, to which, on the contrary, it would bear scarcely more resemblance than a Strasburg goose to the noble fowl apostrophized in the lines of Bryant. It would be an intellectual monstrosity. But "self-alienation" to this degree is happily out of the question. For all, except one in a myriad, it is simply impossible. This explodes the argument as put by Mr. Harris. If the study of Latin and Greek to the only pitch adequate is not a possibility, what is the use of studying them at all? Mr. Harris can have no answer, unless he recasts his argument, which he can hardly do, I think, to any better purpose.

For, is there a modicum of truth in his paradox? In what sense is "self-alienation" in any degree "necessary to self-knowledge," or, which is more to the purpose, self-culture, because the end of liberal education, as President Eliot says, is "not knowledge but power"? The true condition of culture is self-activity, and how far is this determined by that "self-alienation" which consists in projecting one's self into the idioms of a dead language? Nearly as far, perhaps, as would be the corporal activity of one who should take a "header" into the Dead Sea, and essay to cleave its dense waves, beating against his breast like sledge-hammers. A dead language is the Dead Sea of thought, if it may not be more aptly likened to the Sea of Tranquillity in the moon. We think in our mother-tongue only, through which only, therefore, our self-activity is determined, and by which only, for that reason, we cultivate our minds. Our mother-tongue is the sole medium of our mental development. Only by means of it can we even self-alienate ourselves. A dead language is a counteractive instrumentality; for which reason we can no more develop our minds freely in Greek or Latin than we can develop our muscles in "twisted gyves." Studying to think in a dead language is shackling the mind, instead of liberating it, and must lead not to a free but to an arrested