Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/932

842 that "few there he that find it." We fully agree, however, with the writer that each of the groups of studies which he mentions contributes important and strictly indispensable elements to a truly liberal and humane education.

It seems hardly necessary to enforce the claims of language and literature as elements of culture. It is one of the chief triumphs of the human mind to have converted language, which primarily, no doubt, was merely a crude means for the expression of material wants, into a source—at least a possible source—of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure; and a great part of education may properly be directed to awakening the minds of the young to a sense of this great fact. The ancients fabled, and wisely, we think, that the Muses were daughters of Memory; in other words, that literature only arises when man has become able, through language, to contemplate his own thought, and live over again his past experience. It should therefore be a distinct aim in education to vindicate the claim of language to be something moi-e than the servant and drudge of mankind, the minister to his lower necessities, or at best a buffoon for the amusement of his hours of hilarity. We should be taught to regard language as an associate, a friend, an equal, from whose intercourse we can gain refinement of thought, and almost every other form of intellectual benefit. We have sometimes thought that a certain classification might be made among people accordingly as they treat language as a menial, or as a friend and equal. With the former, language takes on the degraded form that might be expected from the rank to which it is relegated; and the work that it does is of the crude and inferior kind which might also be expected in such a case. To this class of persons those distinctions of thought which make up the pleasure and interest of intellectual life are nonexistent. In the most ordinary matters it is often difficult to get a definite statement from them, simply because they do not know what is definite and what is not; they have never put language to any sufficiently fine use to become conscious of the difference.

Prof. Ladd emphasizes the fact that it is the study of language, not of languages, which he holds to be essential in any system of liberal education. "It is undoubtedly," he says, "a very convenient thing in these days to speak in several of the principal forms of human speech; but it is not an essential, it is not even a very vital and impressive part, of a truly liberal education. The empty-headed hotel clerk, the boorish globetrotter, the frivolous boarding-school miss, may have this accomplishment and not have the first rudiments of a liberal culture in language." Very much to the same effect does Ruskin express himself in his Sesame and Lilies. "If," he says, "you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter—that is to say, with real accuracy—you are forever, in some measure, an educated person. The entire difference between education and non-education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages, may not be able to speak any but his own, may have read very few books, but, whatever language he knows, he knows precisely. An uneducated person may know, by memory, many languages and talk them all, and yet not truly know one word of any—not even a word of his own." This is strongly said, but we are hardly disposed to dissent from it.

The principal value, in Prof. Ladd's opinion, to be derived from