Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/241

Rh He is aware that raspakhnut' sa, "to open," is related to the word pakh, and he recognizes the laws of the formation of words better than you do because more new words are invented by children than by any one else. What then is the good of this nomenclature and demand for philosophic definition which are above their powers? Except the demand at examinations, the only explanation for the necessity of grammar may be discovered in its application to a regular evolution of thought.

In my personal experience I never found this application, I never find it in the example of men who, without knowing grammar, yet write correctly, and of candidates in philology who write incorrectly, and I can point to scarcely one illustration of the scholars at Yasnaya Polyana finding a knowledge of grammar of any practical use.

It seems to me that grammar goes of itself, like a mental gymnastic exercise, not without utility, while language—the ability to write, read, and understand—also goes of itself.

Geometry and mathematics in general present themselves at first also as merely a mental gymnastic exercise, but with this difference, that each geometrical proposition, each mathematical definition, leads to further, indeed to an infinite number, of deductions and propositions; while in grammar, even if you agree with those who see in it the application of logic to language, there is a very narrow domain of these deductions and propositions. As soon as the pupil, by one route or another, masters a language, all applications from grammar fall away and perish like something which has outlived its usefulness.

We personally cannot as yet divest ourselves of the tradition that grammar, in the sense of the laws of language, is indispensable for the regular development of thought; it even seems to us that there is a need of grammar for young students—that they have in them, though unconsciously, the laws of grammar; but we are convinced that the grammar which we know is not at