Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/721

Rh its work, and which contains at best but the literature, philosophy, and fables of a past age.

I do not mean to disparage language as a means of influencing action and recording thought; but why spend years in the study of languages which we never use to influence action or record thought, under the plea that this study disciplines the mind for useful work? Can useless work produce useful habits? It must not be forgotten, however, that the power of language is greatest where there is least knowledge. It is not difficult to show that the influence of oratory declines as intelligence increases. Men seldom engage in oratory where positive knowledge leaves no play for the imagination. Indeed, science is constantly devising plans to avoid the verbiage of ordinary statement; hence the mathematics. The same general truth appears in the proverb, "A word to the wise." The very word "demagogue" is a warning that we should beware of the specious arts of the orator. Language presupposes thought; a community of language presupposes a community of thought and experience. While correct thinking may exist without correct speaking, it needs but the observation of every day to show that correct and truthful speaking never can exist without correct thinking.

It is pertinent to inquire here by what discipline society has progressed toward the most excellent things. Undoubtedly by the discipline of experience, or it might be called the discipline of environments. Men have not marked out the course of human progress, nor have they, to any considerable extent, been able to forecast it. Two thousand years ago, who would have believed that the northern barbarians would surpass Greece and Rome?

We cannot go back to the ultimate cause, and tell why one class of the human family should progress and another retrograde or remain stationary. We may point out some of the conditions of progress; but the germ of that progress we do not know. We may believe that the best organized and most intelligent communities, by resulting strength, overcome the more poorly organized and less intelligent. We still ask. How came these communities better organized? Why did not this organization occur a thousand years earlier or a thousand years later? We reply, the conditions were not favorable. What do we mean when we say the conditions were not favorable? We mean that there is a certain correspondence or relation between human activities and outlying natural forces. These correspondences and relations are the problems of progress. As yet, we can do little toward their solution.

This much we observe, that in all progress discipline has not been an end but an incident of study. The discipline was attained by man in studying his environments and in altering his relation to those environments. Further, men attained a comparatively high state of mental discipline before schools existed at all.