Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/857

Rh with. Distinctions are made first by the finer minds; then they become common to all. Intelligence consists largely in perceiving the difference between similar things. It is imparted, in a certain degree, by language, for, in order to recognize differences which the best endowed were at first the only ones to feel, the view of each one becomes keener.

From what has gone before, we draw the conclusion that language designates things incompletely and inexactly. Substantives are labels attached to things, and include just that part of the truth which a name can contain. The names most adequate to their objects in our languages are abstract nouns, because they represent a simple operation of the mind. When I pronounce the word compressibility or immortality, all that is in the idea is contained in the word; but if I take a real being, an object existing in Nature, it will be impossible for language to put into the word all the notions which that being or that object awakens in the mind. Language is forced to select. Among all the notions it chooses one, and thus creates a name which at once becomes a sign.

There is no reason to fear that the importance of language in education will ever be depreciated. We can trust that to the mothers. Their first impulse is to speak to the child, their highest joy to hear it speak. Then come masters of all degrees and sorts, each of whose art supposes language. In every country, ancient and modern, language has supplied the instrument and the prime material of instruction. This universal agreement is natural. We shall have no difficulty in understanding the nature of the action of language on the mind if we reflect that we do not, any of us, receive it in block all at once, but are each obliged to reconstitute it anew. An apprenticeship takes place which, although it escapes notice and is not recognized even by the one who passes through it, is nevertheless a sort of training school of mankind. Since the best teachers are those who give us the most to do ourselves, what more profitable study can we conceive for the child? What attention is required simply to distinguish the word! We have to disengage it from what precedes and from what follows it; to discriminate between the permanent and the variable elements, and to understand that the permanent element is committed to us to handle in our turn and subject to the same variations. The simplest phrase is an invitation to decompose the thought and see what each word contributes to it. The adjective and the verb are the first abstractions comprehended by the child. Imagine the effort which the ancient languages required even to speak them passably! There was a whole chapter of inner life in it which began again in each person. The people carried within themselves an unwritten grammar, which indeed