700 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



It trains the mind to look, not so much at the thought as at the man- 

 ner of expressing the thought. It deals with the tools of thought 

 rather than the thought itself For years the mind is habituated to 

 work upon those things which must be discarded as soon as school- 

 life is ended ; and this is called education. It is not to be denied that 

 such discipline is better than no discipline. It is conceded that such 

 discipline does aid the student in the use of language. But of what 

 value is a discipline which, while it gives power or facility in the use 

 of language, gives little power to investigate those things for which 

 language was made ? 



Language is the implement of thought, and it would seem that no 

 study of this implement can give the best training, for studying the 

 thought itself, or the reality that lies back of the thought. It is 

 probable that the highest efforts of the mind, those efforts in which 

 new truths have flashed out, then vanished, then returned again, until 

 the investigator has finally made them his own, have been made with- 

 out the aid of language. Language is a medium between man and 

 man, not necessarily between man and Nature. Thoughts which 

 come to us through language must come to us at second-hand. Lan- 

 guage, being the medium of thought, cannot precede thought. 



Not that the study of language, when pursued in relation to the 

 thought, is of little value ; but the folly is in the prolonged study of 

 a language which, with rare exceptions, can never be a highway of 

 knowledge nor a medium of thought. What is the value of words ? 

 Words mean the same to those persons only who have had the same 

 experiences. Words do not convey ideas ; they suggest them. When 

 a word is spoken, the hearer is at first conscious of sound. If he has 

 been accustomed to associate the spoken word with some idea, the 

 mind instantly represents the idea. If the experience of both speaker 

 and hearer has been the same, the word has the same meaning to each. 

 In the mind of the speaker the idea suggests the word ; in the mind 

 of the hearer, the word suggests the idea. No word ever explains 

 any sensation, pleasant or painful, to one who has never felt the sen- 

 sation. By aid of the imagination we may, to an extent, give mean- 

 ing to language that does not directly appeal to experience ; but 

 the imagination can do nothing more than recorabine materials that 

 have been furnished by experience, so that directly or indii-ectlv 

 words derive their meaning from experience ; and words have a 

 common meaning because they suggest ideas of a common experience. 



It seems to follow that the real value of language must depend 

 upon tlie amount of knowledge attained. To make the study of lan- 

 guage the principal means to an education appears as irrational as to 

 gather stores of the implements of husbandry in the midst of a desert 

 waste as irrational as to expect to make a skilled mechanic by set- 

 ting him to study the tools of his trade. Much more irrational does 

 this appear when the language is one in which the mind never does 



