Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/488

470 mind into the widest and most effective relation with the entire world of things—spiritual and material—there is an exquisite absurdity in the time-honored method. To study words before things tends to impress the mind with a fatal belief in their superior importance. To study expression before subjects of thought have been accumulated, is to cultivate the habit, always prevalent in civilized life, of talking fluently without having anything to say. To direct attention to sets of arbitrary signs before attention has been trained by contemplation of real objects, teaches the mind to place conventional and contingent facts on the same level with necessary truths. We thus weaken in advance the power of belief in necessity and reality. Without such power the mind becomes inevitably the prey to a skepticism generated much less by contradictions in the outside world, than by the weakness of its internal organism. What other result should logically be produced, when, to the opening mind, as it turns eagerly to the wonderful world in which it awakens and finds itself, we offer for contemplation, exercise, and earliest sustenance, the alphabet, the abstruse structure of words to be spelled, the grammar of sentences to be construed, the complex gymnastics of copies to be written? When to the reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and composition in English, we add that of similar exercises in two or three other languages, we evidently describe the education, first, of the children in our public schools, then of those of the so-called "upper classes"; and show that all is a prolonged study of words.

Words are fossils, which, according to the understanding had of them, are a heap of meaningless stones, or the incarnation of a bygone life. When the child has once learned to handle present existences, he will be prepared to understand the reflections of a past life in language. When he has had some experience in framing complex abstractions, he can then appreciate the complex abstractions of speech. But, until then, language should not be to him an object of thought, but only an organ of thought. It is not to be driven into him, but only out of him, through the urgent consciousness that something must be said. The inflections, intonations, and emphasis of speech, uttered or written—and which include grammar, rhetoric, punctuation, style—must arise spontaneously, as natural clothing of the idea, which insists upon making itself understood. An idea which is once sufficiently vivid in the child's mind can hardly fail to "climb to a form in the grass and flowers" of picturesque baby-speech.

On this principle it might be useful to precede study of either spoken or written language by study of gestures and signs. At all events, in my own experiment, the child was taught algebraic signs as a means of concisely expressing certain relations, long before any attempt was made to learn how to write. Thus the important, fundamental idea was early conveyed to her mind that all arts of expression were subordinate in importance to the subject expressed. Deliberate