Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

crowds, utterly heedless of the sacred classic soil on which they are so profanely trampling.

The study of the classics and the literature of antiquity has often been objected to by those least qualified to judge of their value. On no subject has ignorance manifested more unblushing impudence, or more arrogantly presumed to decide. Combe in his treatise on education tells us with characteristic modesty, that the views which many entertain of the importance of a knowledge of the Greek and Latin to a right understanding of our own language, are altogether erroneous; asserts that the sounds which the English have invented for themselves are as good as those which were invented by the Greeks and Romans: gravely asks what benefit is derived from knowing that the Latin name for horse, is equus; affects great profundity in assuming the position that the knowledge of this fact will not assist a person in the art of rearing and managing horses: intermingles a train of argument, of the whole of which the above is a characteristic sample, with the most arrogant assertions in respect to the inutility of the study of the ancient languages, and the superior adaptedness for mental training, of cotton mills and glass manufactories to grammar schools and colleges; and finally concludes this whole tirade of shallow nonsense, by solemnly assuring his readers of a fact, which certainly needed no proof, that he never was able to overcome the difficulties and intolerable tedium of Latin syntax, during all the unsuccessful attempts which he made at the high school of Edinburg. Combe is a good sample of this whole genus of practical men, and his profound work embodies the substance of all their arguments. His own writings afford admirable illustrations of his favorite positions that words are mere arbitrary names for things; that each age invents its own language, and has a right to use it too, he might have said, in as many various senses as it pleases. The most wonderful manner in which the terms mind, law, organ, faculty, idea, substance, and others of a similar kind, are there released from their ancient shackles, and restored to that glorious state of liberty in which they mean any thing or nothing according to the exigency of the argument, affords a convincing demonstration of the narrowness of those old scholastic pedants, who would have abridged the freedom of thought by their rigid adherence to the science of words instead of things.

The only reply which such an argument seriously merits is the direct contradiction of what is so ignorantly assumed. Words, with the exception of the lowest proper names, are not the representatives of things but of thoughts. They represent what may be called the intelligible (ra vonta) of things; that which is alone the object of the mind's contemplation; the relations of things; their genera and species; that which makes them the objects of science; that, without which, though man might gaze upon them with all the keen perceptions of some of the lower animals, he would never use his organs of speech, or generalise and classify by application of names, or reduce to the cognitions of science. Sounds may be arbitrary, but words are not mere arbitrary sounds, except in the vocabulary of ignorance and confused thought. They are not invented as an age or nation pleases. The fixed laws of mind, or the inspiration of Heaven, were concerned in their early and original adaptation however much ignorance or depravity may tend to unsettle and destroy it. The wisdom of Heaven in the origin of language, and the preservation of its purity in the face of all corrupting influences is manifested by the fact, that there is no dialect on earth in which the atheist or materialist can converse without contradicting himself. Neither is it true, as this author asserts, that we may have an extensive knowledge of things, and few words by which to express it, unless he means to confuse the meaning of the term knowledge as well as of many others which he uses. We may have an extensive perception of material objects (and so have the brute creation) but no knowledge (scientia) of things or their ideas, except so far as these ideas are represented by accurate symbols. Science cannot even begin without words, and it will only be strictly science according as these are well defined. Even when new phenomena are observed, they can only be named by referring them to some of the known or a priori laws of mind or matter with which they are connected, and according to which they are classified by compositions from existing vocabularies. The oldest language of earth has called things or events by no other term than words, (de-bha-rim) intimating that not things themselves, but that of things which alone words truly represent, constitutes for us, if not the only, yet the highest realities. It is too much to say that this was a mere chance application arising from the poverty of the language. There

is a deep philosophy in it, which manifests it to be the production of Him who employed the same term to designate the act of creation, and used it as a symbol for the highest being.

We would not have dwelt so long on this had not the phrase formed the standing objection of all those who are opposed to the study of the ancient languages. It is the mere study of words, say they, and not of things. It is a relic of the Gothic and scholastic ages, lingering as a useless incumbrance in the march of modern improvement. We find these objections put forth in every variety of form; in systems of phrenological quackery; in schemes of education based upon the false principle of elevating the lower, by seeking to degrade and undervalue the higher departments of science and literature: in the labor saving and thought saving courses of theological study; and in the anti-monopoly and levelling doctrines of some new-light politicians. The more equal and general diffusion of knowledge is the favorite catchword used by ignorant and uneducated men in public stations to gull the popular ear. The sound is reechoed from meetings called ostensibly for the advancement of popular education, but really to enable their projectors to make speeches on a subject for which they care little, and of which they understand less. It is caught up in reports of legislative committees, and the declarations of societies who do nothing but publish their own empty proceedings; whilst all this time the cause of education itself stands still; our district schools are made the theatres of empirical quackery, and the important truth is unheeded, because less popular, that unless an equal or even greater amount of effort is put forth to sustain the higher departments of literature, and a truly learned class to regulate and turn to some good account this floating mass of superficial knowledge, it will resemble more the base currency with which our country has been flooded than a sound circulating medium.

The amount of time required for the acquisition of the physical sciences in their present advanced state presents an objection of more plausibility. The value of those sciences is freely conceded, and yet we cannot acquiese in the claim which is sometimes made for them to be considered the main department of education. It may even be said that many of them are strictly professional and not branches of early education at all. They may load the mind with facts

and phenomena superficially understood, but without the aid of a higher and more substantial training, they can never educate, that is lead out the soul to a knowledge of itself, to an understanding of its own resources, and through this to a proper appreciation of the science of external nature.

Logic is more closely connected with grammar than with mental philosophy. If therefore we include logic with philology, the two sciences, of language and the pure mathematics, may be regarded, not only as the best means of elementary training and for making really practical men, but as the solid foundations on which all definite, substantial and truly useful knowledge must be placed. As the latter of these two to the various branches of natural philosophy, so is the former, to the more important departments of moral, political, mental, and theological science. Without correct mathematical knowledge as their soul or pervading scientific principle, the mind, in the one case, acquires mere naked facts, or successions of phenomena, to which as an apology for ignorance we give the name of laws; and without the close study of language, the other departments which have been mentioned become a jangling Babel, in which true knowledge has no advantage over ignorance, or wisdom over folly. The truly practical teacher will therefore prefer to weary his scholars with the confinement of grammars and black boards, rather than to feed their minds with the empty pleasures of botanical or mineralogical excursions. If he can succed in laying firmly these two foundations, he knows that he can build upon them any superstructure with ease and satisfaction. When they have been laid broad and deep they furnish the student with a vantage-ground from which at any time he may stoop down and make himself master of any of the natural sciences, to which his attention may be called in subsequent business or professional life.

If then the early discipline, and the subsequent expansion of the mind be the great objects of education; if its chief purpose be not so much the acquisition of a wide range of external facts, or knowledge in the sense of Combe, as such a command of the minds internal resources as may secure to it a clear perception of the most valuable truths, and furnish it with a defence against the most plausible and prevailing errors; if in short its great aim be to awaken in the mind a proper appreciation of the comparative value of the various kinds of knowledge, and of their uses in reference to the

soul's higher interests; if other benefits are comparatively of little importance or only to be regarded as subsidiary to these; the issue may be fairly joined on the question, which contributes to these ends most effectually, the theoretical sciences of logic, geometry, and philology, or those practical branches (as they are styled) which are claimed to have a more immediate relation to the direct utilities of life, although this claim is often founded on the most slender and far fetched inferences. Or to present the contrast more strongly by a single case, (in which there is no wish to detract from the value of the science compared,) it may fairly be asked, whether more substantial thought, for the use of which the mind finds daily exercise, is derived from the studies of gases and alkalies, or from those stores of mental and moral science which are called forth in the proper study of the Greek language: the one giving us the composition of the chemical elements of the material things by which we are surrounded, the other when properly pursued being the analysis of primitive thought, and leading more effectually than any professed system of mental philosophy, to a direct acquaintance with the primary exercises of the human soul, as they practically developed themselves in the composition, structure, and syntax of the noblest language on earth.Should we even (as some theorists contend) regard it as evolved from some primitive mental chaos by the laws of mind, as the geologists world arose from the laws of matter, still may it be said, that no where can we better study those laws of mind, than in this their most finished production; and by no course, except the kindred study of the Bible, can we more effectually arrive at a clear comprehension of moral and religious ideas in their native state, than by a careful investigation of those terms, in which they were primitively and naturally presented. If we look upon it as one of the original tongues, miraculously produced at the dispersion (although this may be in opposition to the opinion of those who for some strange reason wish to transfer all primitive truth beyond the Indus) it acquires additional interest as one of the works of God, originally designed and preserved by Heaven as a special instrument for the conveyance of the truths of the everlasting Gospel, of more value as an object of study, and affording a more fertile field of thought, than all the wonders of geology, could we even penetrate to the very centre of the material mass on which we reside.

« AnteriorContinuar »