Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/494

478 authors, because, for the most part, these extracts contain not a phrase or an idea that would aid in conversation. In this work, the attention is directed exclusively to words, and the memory is aided by their juxtaposition. By means of repetition they are revived in the mind in their order of succession, each word suggesting that which follows. The more we repeat the lesson in order to retain it, the more easy and rapid the recitation, the more the text escapes analysis and the will. Excellent as the exercise may be in pronunciation and oratory, it is inefficacious as a means of learning to speak. To learn a model by heart, no more teaches to speak, than tracing a drawing-model teaches to draw.

The monotonous repetition of a text is a mental operation diametrically opposite to that employed in the expression of thought. To speak is an act of judgment, to recite is an act of memory: the first is spontaneous, the second mechanical; by this we associate words with ideas, by that we associate words with each other; in the one we are masters of an ever-changing phraseology, in the other we are the slaves of an invariable text. In speaking, the mind is exclusively occupied with ideas; words present themselves as consequences. In reciting, on the contrary, it is words that absorb the attention, ideas following in their suite, and sometimes even are not present to the mind; children often fail to understand what they know by heart. Montaigne said, with reason, "To know by heart is not to know."

As to dialogues or exercises in conversation, whatever the number of them with which the student has charged his memory, he can say nothing beyond some trivialities which it has pleased the compiler to group together. His individuality disappears, and he is only the servile echo of phrases that have been imposed upon him. It is manifest that the art of speaking, of managing a language at will for all the needs of conversation, consists less in remembering a great number of ready-made phrases, than in the power of constructing at will, and instantly, those that meet the necessities of the moment. It will be more profitable, then, to follow the process of Nature, which consists in constructing phrases for one's self, on a given model, by analogy.

The time given to learning dialogues profits little; for, most commonly, they are forgotten long before there is occasion to use them. Phrases learned by heart are rapidly forgotten. Not only are these lessons worthless, but they require painful labor and considerable time; they are, for young people, an incessant cause of disgust and punishments, which can only inspire aversion for the study. They do not even serve usefully to cultivate the memory; for the power to retain these words in a given order is of no use except to actors in learning their parts.

We cannot by special processes obtain the general improvement of a faculty. The power or aptitude of a faculty never transcends the limits assigned to it by the special exercise to which we submit it.