Page:The Atlantic Monthly vol. 69.djvu/738

728 taught; the pupil acquires the idea of the interrelation of each locality with every other. Each place produces something for the world-market, and in return it receives numerous commodities of useful and ornamental articles for food, clothing, and shelter. The great cosmopolitan idea of the human race and its unity of interests is born of geography, and even the smattering of it which the poorly taught pupil gets enwraps this great general idea, which is fertile and productive, a veritable knowledge of power from the start.

All school studies, moreover, deal with language, the embodiment of the reason, not of the individual, but of the Anglo-Saxon stock or people. The most elementary language study begins by isolating the words of a sentence, and making the pupil conscious of their separate articulation, spelling, and meaning. The savage does not quite arrive at a consciousness of the separate words of the language, but knows only whole sentences. All inflected languages preserve for us their primitive form of language consciousness, the inflections being the addition (to the roots or stems) of various subjective or pronominal elements necessary to give definiteness of application. The Turanic languages are called "agglutinative," because the power of analytic thinking has not proceeded so far as to differentiate the parts of speech fully. Every sentence is as it were some form of a conjugation of its verb.

Now, the steps of becoming conscious of words as words involved in writing and spelling, and in making out the meaning, and, finally, in the study of grammatical distinctions between the parts of speech, bring to the pupil a power of abstraction, a power of discriminating form from contents, substance from accidents, activity from passivity, subjective from objective, which makes him a thinker. For thinking depends on the mastery of categories, the ability to analyze a subject and get at its essential elements and see their necessary relations. The people who are taught to analyze their speech into words have a constant elementary training through life that makes them reflective and analytic as compared with a totally illiterate people.

This explains to some degree the effect upon a lower race of adopting the language of a higher race. It brings up into consciousness, by furnishing exact expressions for them, complicated series of ideas which remain sunk below the mental horizon of the savage. It enables the rudimentary intelligence to ascend from the thought of isolated things to the thought of their relations and interdependencies.

The school teaches also literature, and trains the pupil to read by setting him lessons consisting of extracts from literary works of art. These are selected for their intensity, and for their peculiar merits in expressing situations of the soul brought about by external or internal circumstances. Language itself contains the categories of thought, and the study of grammatical structure makes one conscious of phases of ideas which flit past without notice in the mind of the illiterate person. Literary genius invents modes of utterance for feelings and thoughts that were hitherto below the surface of consciousness. It brings them above its level, and makes them forever after conscious and articulate. Especially in the realm of ethical and religious ideas, the thoughts that furnish the regulative forms for living and acting, literature is preeminent for its usefulness. Literature may be said, therefore, to reveal human nature. Its very elementary study in school makes the pupil acquainted with a hundred or more pieces of literary art, expressing for him with felicity his rarer and higher moods of feeling and thought. When, in mature age, we look back over our lives and recall to mind the influence that our schooldays brought us, the time spent