842 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that " few there he that find it." We 

 fully agree, however, with the writer 

 that each of the groups of studies 

 which he mentions contributes im- 

 portant and strictly indispensable ele- 

 ments to a truly liberal and humane 

 education. 



It seems hardly necessary to en- 

 force the claims of language and 

 literature as elements of culture. It 

 is one of the chief triumphs of the 

 human mind to have converted lan- 

 guage, which primarily, no doubt, 

 was merely a crude means for the 

 expression of material wants, into a 

 source at least a possible source of 

 intellectual and aesthetic pleasure; 

 and a great part of education may 

 properly be directed to awakening 

 the minds of the young to a sense of 

 this great fact. The ancients fabled, 

 and wisely, we think, that the Muses 

 were daughters of Memory ; in other 

 words, that litei'ature only arises 

 when man has become able, through 

 language, to contemplate his own 

 thought, and live over again his past 

 experience. It should thei'efore be a 

 distinct aim in education to vindicate 

 the claim of language to be some- 

 thing moi-e than the servant and 

 drudge of mankind, the minister to 

 his lower necessities, or at best a 

 buffoon for the amusement of his 

 hours of hilarity. We should be 

 taught to regard language as an 

 associate, a friend, an equal, from 

 whose intercourse we can gain re- 

 finement of thought, and almost 

 every other form of intellectual 

 benefit. We have sometimes thought 

 that a certain classification might be 

 made among people accordingly as 

 they treat language as a menial, or 

 as a friend and equal. With the 

 former, language takes on the de- 

 graded form that might be expected 

 from the rank to which it is rele- 

 gated ; and the w^ork that it does is 

 of the crude and inferior kind which 

 might also be expected in such a case. 



To this class of persons those distinc- 

 tions of thought which make up the 

 pleasure and interest of intellectual 

 life are nonexistent. In the most 

 ordinary matters it is often difiicult 

 to get a definite statement from them, 

 simply because they do not know 

 what is definite and what is not; 

 they have never put language to any 

 sufficiently fine use to become con- 

 scious of the difference. 



Prof. Ladd emphasizes the fact 

 that it is the study of language, not 

 of languages, which he holds to be es- 

 sential in any system of liberal edu- 

 cation . " It is undoubtedly, " he says, 

 "a very convenient thing in these 

 days to speak in several of the prin- 

 cipal forms of human speech; but it 

 is not an essential, it is not even a 

 very vital and impressive part, of a 

 truly liberal education. The empty- 

 headed hotel clerk, the boorish globe- 

 trotter, the frivolous boarding-school 

 miss, may have this accomplishment 

 and not have the first rudiments of 

 a liberal culture in language." Very 

 much to the same effect does Ruskin 

 express himself in his Sesame and 

 Lilies. " If," he says, '' you read ten 

 pages of a good book, letter by letter 

 that is to say, with real accuracy 

 you are forever, in some measure, 

 an educated person. The entire dif- 

 ference between education and non- 

 education (as regards the merely in- 

 tellectual part of it) consists in this 

 accuracy. A well-educated gentle- 

 man may not know many languages, 

 may not be able to speak any but his 

 own, may have read very few books, 

 but, whatever language he knows, 

 he knows precisely. An uneducated 

 person may know, by memory, many 

 languages and talk them all, and 

 yet not truly know one word of any 

 not even a word of his own." 

 This is strongly said, but we are 

 hardly disposed to dissent from it. 



The principal value, in Prof. 

 Ladd's opinion, to be derived from 



