470 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mind into the widest and most effective relation with the entire world 

 of things spiritual and material there is an exquisite absurdity in 

 the time-honored method. To study words before things tends to im- 

 press the mind with a fatal belief in their superior importance. To 

 study expression before subjects of thought have been accumulated, 

 is to cultivate the habit, always prevalent in civilized life, of talking 

 fluently without having anything to say. To direct attention to sets 

 of arbitrary signs before attention has been trained by contemplation 

 of real objects, teaches the mind to place conventional and contingent 

 facts on the same level with necessary truths. We thus weaken in 

 advance the power of belief in necessity and reality. Without such 

 power the mind becomes inevitably the prey to a skepticism generated 

 much less by contradictions in the outside world, than by the weakness 

 of its internal organism. What other result should logically be pro- 

 duced, when, to the opening mind, as it turns eagerly to the wonderful 

 world in which it awakens and finds itself, we offer for contemplation, 

 exercise, and earliest sustenance, the alphabet, the abstruse structure 

 of words to be spelled, the grammar of sentences to be construed, the 

 complex gymnastics of copies to be written ? When to the reading, 

 writing, spelling, grammar, and composition in English, we add that 

 of similar exercises in two or three other languages, we evidently de- 

 scribe the education, first, of the children in our public schools, then 

 of those of the so-called " upper classes " ; and show that all is a pro- 

 longed study of words. 



Words are fossils, which, according to the understanding had of 

 them, are a heap of meaningless stones, or the incarnation of a by- 

 gone life. When the child has once learned to handle present exist- 

 ences, he will be prepared to understand the reflections of a past life 

 in language. When he has had some experience in framing complex 

 abstractions, he can then appreciate the complex abstractions of speech. 

 But, until then, language should not be to him an object of thought, 

 but only an organ of thought. It is not to be driven into him, but 

 only out of him, through the urgent consciousness that something 

 must be said. The inflections, intonations, and emphasis of speech, 

 uttered or written and which include grammar, rhetoric, punctua- 

 tion, style must arise spontaneously, as natural clothing of the idea, 

 which insists upon making itself understood. An idea which is once 

 sufficiently vivid in the child's mind can hardly fail to " climb to a 

 form in the grass and flowers " of picturesque baby-speech. 



On this principle it might be useful to precede study of either 

 spoken or written language by study of gestures and signs. At all 

 events, in my own experiment, the child was taught algebraic signs 

 as a means of concisely expressing certain relations, long before any 

 attempt was made to learn how to write. Thus the important, funda- 

 mental idea was early conveyed to her mind that all arts of expression 

 were subordinate in importance to the subject expressed. Deliberate 



