LANGUAGE STUDY AND LANGUAGE PSYCHOLOGY 375 



Scotch Sabbath. And what becomes of solving the language puzzle if 

 we study English? Puzzles enough and to spare in Shakespeare, yes. 

 But the puzzles appear in spots as compared with the somewhat con- 

 tinuous bepuzzlement of the classics, and their solution involves, in the 

 main, only some bit of glossarial definition ; it does not often demand a 

 complete rearrangement of the thought. 



Herein lies a cardinal distinction. As we read or study our own 

 tongue we enjoy immediately something like a three-quarter apprehen- 

 sion of it, because it is English and because it is ours ; and being what 

 we are it is irksome to apply ourselves to getting a full comprehension. 

 The truly educative thing in language study is, I take it, the effort to 

 convert loose apprehension into thorough comprehension, and the 

 greater the immediate apprehension, the less the effort and the less 

 the stimulus to pass on to full comprehension. This point has been 

 well made by Dr. Arnold: 



It has been my wish to avoid giving any pupils any Greek to do on a 

 Sunday. . . . But I find it almost impossible to make them read a mere English 

 book with sufficient attention to be able to answer questions out of it; or if 

 they do cram themselves for the time, they are sure to forget it directly after.* 



Plato-Socrates made this point long before in the Meno by asking 

 whether one would earnestly seek and endeavor to learn what he 

 thought he knew already, not knowing it — until at last, having fallen 

 into embarrassment by being shown his ignorance, he longs to be taught. 



In hearing or reading our own language we largely anticipate what 

 is coming and this is what renders us liable to be bored. Thus the very 

 ease of our apprehension makes us inattentive. With persons who 

 speak like a book and with parsons at sermon, it is often enough to hear 

 the beginning of a paragraph and wake up again at its end, quite sure 

 we have absorbed the contents of a long stretch of discourse. Psycho- 

 logically speaking, we stand in a very different relation to our own and 

 to a foreign language. )Yhat we speak or write our motor currents, 

 starting in the brain, we will say, transmit to our vocal organs or our 

 pens, along nerve-fibers so habituated to such impressions that the 

 consciousness does not become alive till we hear what we have said, or 

 read what we have written. This is proved by the not uncommon 

 experience that, while writing unconsciously, we spell correctly words 

 that we misspell if we consciously attempt them : which shows how trite 

 the native word and phrase become. On the other hand, when we read 

 or listen, our sensory currents, transmitting to the brain what we see or 

 hear, throb the more actively in proportion to the novelty, the strange- 

 ness of the object of consciousness. The only real stimulus is the novel 

 stimulus. Our native speech, whether in motor or sensory transmission, 

 provides less stimulus of novelty. It less quickens the attention. It 

 becomes automatic. In our own language we read along cheerfully, 



•Stanley's "Life of Dr. Arnold," letter No. 8, v. 1, p. 74. 



