Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/164

 be sure, had touched upon certain aspects of the subject. And what did Shakespeare know of the philology of English? It is a common saying that Shakespeare knew everything, and indeed he knew the human mind so well that he easily divined its possibilities, not simply beyond his own positive knowledge, but beyond the positive attainments of the race, the head-light of his genius having thrown a blaze along the track of human progress to the other side of stations that the imperial train has been generations in approaching and which it has not yet passed; but intuition, though divine, can not do much with the hidden roots of a language, which call for the grub-axe of the grammarian rather than for the scimetar of the poet, and it is not too much to say that the man who knew everything knew next to nothing of philology. Other instances need not be adduced. To back these would be to gild refined gold.

Not only is our mother-tongue, then, the instrument of our culture, but the way to master it is to study it, in lieu of any foreign tongue, living or dead. For English-speaking people the "special-culture study" is not Latin and Greek or either, but English. The mother tongue, if I may recur to the botanical figure, is the tap-root of the tree of mind, whereof no other tongue can be more than a rootlet. Neglect it, and you dwarf the intellect; cherish it, and the intellect shoots up into full stature. Our mother-tongue is the source of our mental growth. The time-worn notion opposed to this not only is false, but its falsity is susceptible of demonstration in the strict sense of the term.

A curious question remains: How is it that a notion so contrary to reason and experience has dominated the world for century after century? Of course, there is a cause for this effect. What is it? At the bottom or near the bottom of our mental nature lies a propensity which, as related to the intellect, is called imitativeness, and, as related to the will, may be called sequaciousness. It is, we all have reason to know, an active agent in the formation of whatever we become—the shuttle, if I may so call it, of the loom of man, shooting its double thread back and forth through the warp of his existence. If some order of superior beings, capable by hypothesis of anything, should take it into their heads to strike a medal expressive in a general way of their sense of human character, and drop it from the clouds, it would probably bear the image of a monkey on the obverse face, and on the reverse that of a sheep; and we should all have to acknowledge, with such grace as we could muster, the palpable hit of our celestial satirists. Certain it is that, when we see a thing done by somebody else in the line of our aspirations, we incline to do it ourselves, and to keep on doing it, until some other body, of higher skill or greater force, does some other thing in the same line. The flock follows the first sheep that jumps, and jumps to bis jumps, till he jumps no more, or is overjumped by another. This is the general movement, subject