Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/116

 justly be boasted as having taken place within the memory of the present generation. The definitions and rules which constitute the doctrines of grammar, may be variously expressed, arranged, illustrated, and applied; and in the expression, arrangement, illustration, and application of them, there may be room for some amendment; but no contrivance can ever relieve the pupil from the necessity of committing them thoroughly to memory. The experience of all antiquity is added to our own, in confirmation of this; and the judicious teacher, though he will not shut his eyes to a real improvement, will be cautious of renouncing the practical lessons of hoary experience, for the futile notions of a vain projector.

20. Some have been beguiled with the idea, that great proficiency in grammar was to be made by means of a certain fanciful method of induction. But if the scheme does not communicate to those who are instructed by it, a better knowledge of grammar than the contrivers themselves seem to have possessed, it will be found of little use.[59] By the happy method of Bacon, to lead philosophy into the common walks of life, into the ordinary business and language of men, is to improve the condition of humanity; but, in teaching grammar, to desert the plain didactic method of definition and example, rule and praxis, and pretend to lead children by philosophic induction into a knowledge of words, is to throw down the ladder of learning, that boys may imagine themselves to ascend it, while they are merely stilting over the low level upon which its fragments are cast.

21. The chief argument of these inductive grammarians is founded on the principle, that children cannot be instructed by means of any words which they do not perfectly understand. If this principle were strictly true, children could never be instructed by words at all. For no child ever fully understands a word the first time he hears or sees it; and it is rather by frequent repetition and use, than by any other process, that the meaning of words is commonly learned. Hence most people make use of many terms which they cannot very accurately explain, just as they do of many things, the real nature of which they do not comprehend. The first perception we have of any word, or other thing, when presented to the ear or the eye, gives us some knowledge of it. So, to the signs of thought, as older persons use them, we soon attach some notion of what is meant; and the difference between this knowledge, and that which we call an understanding of the word or thing, is, for the most part, only in degree. Definitions and explanations are doubtless highly useful, but induction is not definition, and an understanding of words may be acquired without either; else no man could ever have made a dictionary. But, granting the principle to be true, it makes nothing for this puerile method of induction; because the regular process by definitions and examples is both shorter and easier, as well as more effectual. In a word, this whole scheme of inductive grammar is nothing else than a series of leading questions and manufactured answers; the former being generally as unfair as the latter are silly. It is a remarkable tissue of ill-laid premises and of forced illogical sequences.

22. Of a similar character is a certain work, entitled, "English Grammar on the Productive System: a method of instruction recently adopted in Germany and Switzerland." It is a work which certainly will be "productive" of no good to any body but the author and his publishers. The book is as destitute of taste, as of method; of authority, as of originality. It commences with "the inductive process," and after forty pages of such matter as is described above, becomes a "productive system," by means of a misnamed "RECAPITULATION;" which jumbles together the etymology and the syntax of the language, through seventy-six pages more. It is then made still more "productive" by the appropriation of a like space to a reprint of Murray's Syntax and Exercises, under the inappropriate title, "GENERAL OBSERVATIONS." To Prosody, including punctuation and the use of capitals, there are allotted six pages, at the end; and to Orthography, four lines, in the middle of the volume! (See p. 41.) It is but just, to regard the title of this book,