Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/337

Rh useful than that of speaking. The same is also true of reading, for we rarely have occasion to speak foreign languages, while we may read them daily with profit. In reading, as in listening, we always learn something, and especially the language. In speaking we learn nothing, not even the language; the mind is not enriched with a word or an idea. The habit of following, in reading and hearing, the logical connection of ideas which characterizes serious discourse, forms the mind to all modes of reasoning, to all kinds of argument. But the habit of speaking, to the exclusion of listening and reading, implies a loss of judgment. The least instructed are often those who talk the most. It was not by speaking French, but by reading it, that the Prussians learned what they needed to know to insure their success against us.

It is infinitely more useful to read modern than ancient languages. The latter are seldom read after the period of school; but we read the former throughout life, not only for the intellectual pleasure they afford, but to gather knowledge needed in the professions and in our social relations.

—The child learns successively the four arts of his language. He first seizes the phraseology that interprets to him the language of action which accompanies the first words addressed to him. Gestures, expressions of the face, tones of the voice, are equivalent to phrases, not to words. So he understands the sense of phrases long before the words that form them. By the aid of these natural signs the infant listens and understands, then he imitates and speaks. It is only when articulate sounds awaken in his young intelligence the ideas of which they are the signs, that he seeks to reproduce them as he heard them. He owes his progress to example, not to precept; to practice, not to theory. Such is the method of Nature, admirable in simplicity and infallible in results. The nearer we come to it the surer will be our success.

Articulate and written words, the signs of ideas, being conventional, we can apply them justly only so far as we have received the impression associated with the ideas they represent, only so far as they are made familiar by the habit of reading and listening. In other words, the double talent of understanding the written and spoken foreign language conduces respectively to the arts of writing and speaking. Just as in learning our native tongue, it is by the judicious exercise of imitation founded on this double talent that we easily acquire the arts of speaking and writing. On this point the laws of our constitution and the nature of language are profoundly in accord.

In fact, we possess, as means of improvement, two powerful instincts, curiosity and imitation, which urge us ever toward the end Providence has assigned, and assure our success in the acquisition of language. Curiosity is the source of progress in the arts of reading and listening; imitation, which comes after curiosity, is the source