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LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOD 
 
 IN THE SCHOOL". 
 
aonUon: C. J. CLAY and SONS, 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVEESITY PBESS WAEEHOUSE, 
 
 AVE MARIA LAKE. 
 
 damStilrsc: DBIGIITON, BELL, AND CO. 
 Eeipjis: P- A. BROCKHAUS. 
 
LECTUEES 
 
 ON 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOL 
 
 IN THE SCHOOL. 
 
 DELIVEBED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBEIDGE, 
 EASTEE TERM, 1889. 
 
 S.^S.i^LAURIE, A.M. Edin., LL.D. St And. 
 
 PEOFESSOR or THE INSTITUTES AND HISTOEY OF EDnOAIION IN THE 
 UNIVEESITY OF EDINBORBH. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE : 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 NEW YORK: MA.CMILLAN AND CO. 
 • 1890 
 
 [All Bights reserved.] 
 
Camfarttg; : 
 
 PRINTED BX C. J. CLAY, M.a. AND SONS, 
 AT THE UNIVEBSITT PRESS. 
 
PREFATOKY NOTE. 
 
 r I iHESE Lectures were delivered at the request of 
 the Teachers' Training Syndicate of the Univer- 
 sity of Cambridge, and re-delivered at the College of 
 Preceptors, London. 
 
 S. S. L. 
 
 Univeksity of Edinbuegh, 
 May, 1890. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 LANGUAGE THE SUPEEME INSTRUMENT IN EDUCATION. 
 
 Education is through the experiences of life. The most potent of 
 experiences is the distinctive national life in aU its forms. 
 Function of the school to focus these national influences. There 
 is however a universal as -well as a national, element present in 
 the education of a human being. Excellence of the individual. 
 Formal discipline of Eeason would seem sufficient for this. This 
 too abstract to be available in the education of the young. A 
 concrete subject must be found which contains the abstract in 
 its purest form and at the same time gives substance of in- 
 struction. This subject also must be universal in its character if 
 it is to be effective for its end in the fullest sense. That subject 
 is Language, (1) As a formal discipline. (2) As a concrete or 
 real study. (3) As an aesthetic or Art study. By Language is 
 meant the Vernacular ' . . 1 — 16 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. DISTINCTION 
 BETWEEN DISCIPLINE AND TRAINING. METHOD. 
 
 Discipline and Training. Language aa substance both feeds and 
 trains the mind. Method applied to teaching of Language as 
 substance, (a) Infant stage of Language-teaching. (J) Primary 
 and upper Primary school stage, (c) Secondary school stage 
 
 17—34 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 METHOD AS APPLIED TO LANGUAGES. 
 SUBSTANCE— CONTINUED. 
 
 1. Word-building, synonyms and ambiguities. 2. History of Words. 
 3. Sentences and Paragraphs. 4. Paraphrasing. 5. Reading 
 and Elocution. Expression of pupil's own thought. 1. Oral 
 Composition. 2. Transcription. 3. Elementary written Compo- 
 sition. 4. Abridgments and narrations. 5. Translation. 6. Imi- 
 tation. 7. Original Essays or Theses and Reproduction 
 
 35—51 
 
vni CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. GBAMMAE. 
 
 Eelation of abstract study to Discipline as opposed to Training. 
 Grammar a system of Abstractions. Method. 1. The When: 
 should not be begun till the 12th year. 2. The How Much. 
 3. The Method to be the Real Method . . . 52—63 
 
 LECTUEE V. 
 
 GEAMMAE OF THE VEENACULAE TONGUE. PUEPOSE. 
 
 Method continued. First Stage: successive steps. Second Stage: 
 successive steps. Psychological process in parsing. Historical 
 Grammar and Comparative Philology . .'■■ . 64 — 80 
 
 LECTURE VL 
 
 LANGUAGE AS LITEEATUEE. 
 
 Eelation of literature to moral, aesthetic, and religious training. 
 Must be begun early. Method : little to be said of a formal kind. 
 Literary criticism. Importance of Literature in the education of 
 the people. Can Literature be taught ? . . . 81 — 104 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 METHOD OF TEACHING FOEEIGN TONGUES. LATIN AS 
 
 TYPE. 
 
 {a) Eeasons for teaching Latin. (6) Method of procedure generally 
 
 105—114 
 
 I 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN— CONTINUED. 
 
 Application of Eules of Method to teaching Latin. Greek and Modern 
 Tongues. Summing up and Conclusion . . . 115 — 144 
 
 Appendix 145 — 147 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 LANGUAGE THE' SUPREME INSTRUMENT OF 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Every human being is educated by the experiences 
 of life. At the same time there can be little doubt 
 that no two human beings are precisely alike in respect 
 of their native capacity to receive these experiences 
 and to utilize them for the building up of their charac- 
 ters. The experiences begin very early. The babe at 
 its mother's breast- is receiving impressions for good or 
 for evil as certainly as a seed, which has just begun to 
 sprout, is already receiving from the soil those influences 
 which are to make it or mar it as a vigorous plant of its 
 kind. As next the child walks non aequis passibus at 
 his mother's side, the whole world of nature is seeking 
 to form him. Earth and sky, the events of his little 
 life, the words and acts, and even the gestures, of those 
 about him are all busy in the work of his education. 
 Unconsciously at first, and thereafter consciously, he is 
 organising into himself the vast and infinite material 
 of impression and feeling. Every human being is under- 
 going this process of education ; and it is not at all a 
 L. L. 1 
 
2 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 question whether he is to be educated or not, but 
 I simply how and to what end he is to be educated. 
 
 Neither the unconscious education of environment, 
 nor the conscious education of the school, however, is 
 independent of native predisposition and inheritance. 
 There is much, very much, a much that is almost in- 
 calculable, in the instincts and aptitudes of race. It is 
 impossible to compare the Chinese child, the Persian, 
 the Hindoo the Hellenic, the Roman, the British, as 
 we find them in history, and not be convinced of this. 
 Next to the instincts and aptitudes of race in deter- 
 mining our education, is the spirit of the race as ex- 
 pressed in its national religion, in its more or less con- 
 scious aims as a political society, in its public life and 
 its national acts, past and contemporary, and in the 
 literary expression of its way of looking at the world. 
 These alone without the help of schools will, under 
 favourable conditions, make a people and a great people; 
 and, whatever may be done of set purpose by schools 
 aad teachers, national life in its various forms will 
 always be, as it ought always to be, the dominant 
 factor in the education of the young. 
 
 It is through the family that all these educative 
 influences are best conveyed; and no State is in a 
 healthy condition where the family life is not always 
 the most potent, as it is the nearest, of educative in- 
 fluences. But as the pressure of life becomes heavier 
 and social conditions more complex, it becomes neces- 
 sary to appoint a substitute for the parent, but not on 
 this account to supersede the domestic school. What 
 is the function of the school in view of these facts ? 
 
 I have said that it is the individual experiences 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 3 
 
 E,nd the national life in all its forms as the most potent 
 f those experiences, that chiefly educate, and from- 
 this I will draw the conclusion that where schools are 
 instituted, their main purpose is to focus, so to speak, 
 the life of the nation and bring its best elements — its 
 language, religion, ethics, ai't, literature, history — to 
 bear on the young whom we gather into our public 
 seminaries. This we do, in the hope that, by so doing, 
 we may make sure that the experiences which educate 
 shall not be arbitrary and uncertain, but assured, and 
 wisely ordered to the making of a good citizen. To 
 this end, it is the best in the life of the nation to which 
 they belong that we have to give to the young. All 
 other languages, literatures, histories are to be regarded 
 as merely contributory to the native elements and the 
 fulfilling of national character. 
 
 It is always character indeed that we as educators 
 bave to keep before us, not knowledge. It is an edu- 
 <;ational truism that however various a man's know- 
 ledge may be, if it does not enter into the texture 
 of his mind, it may as well be on his bookshelves. 
 Knowledge, which is not woven into life and conduct, 
 is so far from being wisdom that it is often an enemy of 
 wisdom and an obstructor of wise counsel. 
 
 But there is an universal element as well as a national 
 element in education. As islanders, we more than other 
 nations have this forced upon us. Even setting aside 
 .all questions of ideal manhood, we yet must grant that 
 io form the good citizen we must first form the good 
 man. So thought the ancient Athenian * so thought 
 the Roman, whether he spoke through the mouth of 
 Cato, or Cicero, or Quintilian ; so assuredly must think 
 
 1—2 
 
4 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [lECT: 
 
 the Christian, for he has to seek first the Kingdom of 
 God. Hence it is that, when the education of the 
 young is not wholly left to casual influences and cus- 
 tom, we are compelled to ask the questions. What is a 
 good man ? and, How shall we form him ? The answer 
 to these questions is contained in the science and art of 
 education. Surely, then, this is a subject worth con- 
 sidering by all, necessary to be considered by those wh» 
 mean to devote their lives to the task of educating. 
 
 Both the universal and the particular national 
 elements in education are passed on to the young 
 chiefly by Language. Language is intensely national ; 
 it is a reflex of the inner mental habit of a people. It 
 is also through languages that we share the lives of 
 other nations and absorb those elements in which we 
 are ourselves defective. This gives rise to self-criticism, 
 and contributes to the growth of the universal in mind 
 and character as opposed to the national, the parochial, 
 and the individual. 
 
 Of the education of man in the universal sense, we 
 may say with the Greeks that our aim is dperij, the 
 excellence of the individual after his kind, and that the 
 action of mind in attaining to this excellence is a-co- 
 (f)poavvrj, if we give it the sense of self-regulation. 
 This self-regulation, which is the wise conduct of life, is 
 dependent on the Will, which, as the dominant charac- 
 teristic of man, sets in motion (speaking broadly and 
 sinking metaphysical questions) his intelligence and 
 selects his motives. But this intelligence and this 
 .will cannot work in the air: materials on which they 
 may exercise their formal activity must be provided,. 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 5 
 
 and it is these which the instincts of our nature and 
 the experiences of life furnish. The school interposes 
 to formulate, enrich, and elevate these experiences, and 
 to supply the principles and aims of life out of which 
 the fabric of motives may be built. The richest mind, 
 however, may be weak in intelligence and will. It is 
 the poiuer of discriminating and of rightly reasoning, of 
 separating the right from the wrong, the true from 
 the false, the good from the bad, the wise from the 
 unwise, which must always govern. 
 
 Now, if this be so, it may plausibly be maintained 
 that, by exercising the intelligence purely as such — as 
 a system of abstract powers, we shall best fit it for 
 coping with the complex materials of experience ; that, 
 by disciplining the powers and mental processes which 
 enter into all knowledge and make it possible, we 
 shall best fit a human being to regulate his life. And 
 why so ? Because these powers and processes of mind 
 are universal and not partial in their application. They 
 cover the whole field of possible human knowledge and 
 activity. But we cannot do this ; because the exer- 
 cise of the abstract faculties of man is not possible 
 at all in their purity. They can be exercised only in 
 and through material of some sort. That material 
 no doubt may be the mind itself in its processes ; but 
 this kind of abstract exercise is not practicable till 
 the period of adolescence, when the great mass of the 
 population has already escaped from scholastic control. 
 Not the formal and abstract, then, by itself (logic and 
 metaphysics), but these as entering into and constitu- 
 ting some real subject, something which has substance 
 in it, must be the instrument of intellectual discipl ine : 
 
6 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [lECT. 
 
 and, of all subjects, that will necessarily be the most 
 effective which is most universal. 
 
 f( 1. The concrete subject which is best suited for 
 training the abstract powers is Language. Here you 
 have mind, in all its formal relations, expressed in a 
 substantial form — as something not purely abstract, but 
 concrete, and capable of being grasped and handled. 
 By the analysis of language, then, you introduce the 
 young intellect to the analysis of its own thinking in 
 its whole range. While engaged in this exercise the 
 abstract powers are so involved in a concrete familiar 
 to all, that the formal discipline is not made obtrusive 
 and distasteful. A boy who is intelligently analysing 
 language is analysing the processes of thought, and is. 
 a logician without knowing it. And this is the reason 
 why the study of language has always been regarded as 
 the best preparation for the logician and philosopher. 
 Hence, too, it is the best preparation for the study of 
 all or any of the sciences. 
 
 The formal study of language is the study of the 
 abstract ; and as abstraction is difficult to the young 
 (and to the old, too, for that matter), it demands an 
 effort such as the " real " or concrete never does, and 
 so gives power. A very young child may receive and 
 enjoy the sentiment of Tennyson's "May Queen," or 
 Wordsworth's "We are Seven," and yet find the formal 
 analysis of the language to present insuperable diffi- 
 culties: now it is this formal and abstract exercise in 
 the mere vehicle of expression that we must give, if we 
 are to give power to the mind. 
 
 That the discipline yielded by the study of the formal 
 or grammatical in language gives to the mind power and 
 
I.j INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 7 
 
 discrimination to find its intellectual way amid the con- 
 flicting experiences and contradictory motives of daily 
 life, all must admit ; but few recognise the close con- 
 nection between this kind of discipline and moral dis- 
 cipline. /Now, what is moral discipline ? It is the, 
 habituatm^ of the will — the dominant fact and func- 
 tion in a human being — to overcome the difficulties of 
 temptation to stray from what is seen and affirmed to 
 be the right path^But it is the same will which I call 
 upon for energizing activity when I present the mind 
 of a boy with the intellectual difficulties of formal 
 studies, and call upon him to overcome these. There 
 are not two wills in a man. The effort, then, which all 
 formal studies demand of the young, that they may 
 overcome intellectual difficulties, is not merely intel- 
 lectual, but moral, in its effects on character. It is an 
 old saying that labour produces ingenuous minds, and, 
 if we translate ingenuous as well-bred, or well-condi- 
 tioned, we see the truth of the apophthegm. 
 
 It may be said with a show of truth that, to attain 
 this great result — intellectual and moral discipline — the 
 language of elementary mathematics, physics, or biology 
 would serve. It would serve, unquestionably, but not 
 so well, because the language of these studies is partial 
 and restricted, whereas the language of which we are 
 speaking — the language of everyday intercourse and of 
 literature — is universal in its sweep, and presents a 
 variety, a delicacy, and subtlety of thinking processes 
 which all the sciences of nature taken together can- 
 not for a moment approach. The language, then, of 
 ordinary human intercourse and of literature is, when 
 pursued as an abstract study — i.e., in its historical 
 
8 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 forms and logical relations — the best of all possible 
 disciplines of the intellect ; first, because it is the study 
 of the intellect itself, but this in a concrete material 
 which brings it within the capacity of the immatvire 
 mind of boyhood ; and secondly, because of its universal 
 character — because, that is to say, all the processes 
 of mind are presented for analysis, and this in every 
 possible relation of simplicity, complexity, and subtlety. 
 
 1/ 
 
 2. This brings us to the second ground of the 
 
 claim which language makes for a supreme place in 
 the education of youth. Language presents to us 
 not merely the process of thinking made visible, the 
 clothed form of thinking, but it is also itself concrete 
 thought on all that concerns the life of man as an in- 
 dividual, and as a member of society. There is no 
 aspect of human life, no complication of human motive, 
 no ethical relation, no human emotion, no religious 
 aspiration, which language, as medium of intercourse, 
 and as literature, does not convey and, while conveying, 
 illumine. 
 
 Accordingly, important as is the formal discipline 
 which the analysis of logical processes gives, as these 
 are embodied in language, still more important are the 
 training and instruction which language, as embodying 
 the substance of thought, yields. It is in and through 
 language that man enters on the inheritance which the 
 past has bequeathed to him. Every word, almost, has 
 a lesson for him. A large proportion of words intro- 
 duce him for the first time to moral and religious 
 truths, others define his social relations, others, again, 
 contain in their bosom the counsels of perfection. Nay, 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 9 
 
 I there are words which bring into his consciousness not 
 merely one thought, but a whole system of thought. 
 If we wish to train a boy in the true, or the good, or 
 the beautiful, how are we to do it ? There is no way 
 but by introducing him to the utterances of the wise 
 and good on those questions, so vital to all, and a 
 right answer to which alone makes humanity worth 
 preserving. Through the perusal of literature alone can 
 man enter into the possession of the hard- won victories 
 of the past, and make himself the fellow and com- 
 panion of the greatest and noblest of his race,— the 
 prophets of all time. The content of literature in its 
 various forms is a moral content, a religious content, 
 and an aesthetic content. It is the substance of mind 
 and the whole of Man. 
 
 The substance of mind is, I hold, of more import- 
 ance in education than discipline in the logical forms by 
 which that substance has been elaborated and expressed. 
 After what has been already said, I shall not be accused 
 of underrating the discipline which the formal or gram- 
 •matical study of language gives; and yet let me say 
 now that there can be no doubt that it has been allowed 
 to obscure the education that lies in the real study of 
 it. The necessity of acquiring the ancient tongues has 
 led to the exaggerated importance assigned in school — 
 especially in the secondary school — to the pursuit of 
 the formal, i.e., grammar, to the exclusion of the sub- 
 ! stance of the language, the real as opposed to the 
 ^formal. Far more effectual in moving and raising the 
 mind than any logical analysis of language can possibly 
 be, is the food, the nutrition of thoughts, which language 
 as literature conveys. What was the Renaissance in 
 
10 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [lECT. 
 
 its influence on the School but the substitution of 
 substance for form — the reading of authors instead 
 of grammars, and rhetorics and logics ? Through sub- 
 stance (it was felt) you may best reach form and the 
 formal itself; through the formal you can rarely, and 
 only by accident, reach substance. 
 
 Let me apply this same conception to the moral 
 and religious sphere. It is to be presumed that in 
 educating a boy you wish to make him familiar with 
 great thoughts and to inspire him with a high ethical 
 spirit. If you do not aim at this, then in what sense 
 and for what end do you educate at all ? Now it is 
 easy, if only you set about it in the right way, to 
 engage the heart of a child, up to the age of eleven 
 or twelve, on the side of kindliness, generositj-, self- 
 sacrifice, and to fill him, if not with ideals of greatness 
 and goodness, at least with the feelings or emotions 
 which enter into these ideals. You thus lay a basis 
 in feeling and emotion on which may be built a truly 
 manly character at a later period. Without such a 
 basis you can accomplish nothing ethical, now or at any 
 future time. But when the recipient stage is past and 
 boys begin to assert themselves, they have a tendency 
 to resist, if not to resent, professedly moral and re- 
 ligious teaching. And this chiefly, because it then 
 comes to them or is presented to them in the shape of 
 abstract precept and authoritative dogma. Now, the 
 growing mind of youth is keen after realities, and has 
 no native antagonism to realities merely because they 
 happen to be moral or religious realities. It is the 
 abstract, preceptive, and barren form, and the presump- 
 tuous manner in which these are presented that they 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 11 
 
 detest. How, then, at this age of puberty to present 
 the most vital of all the elements of education is a 
 supremely important problem. It is my conviction 
 that you can only do so through literature, and the 
 New Testament itself should be read simply as litera- 
 ture. The words, the phrases, the ideals, which litera- 
 ture offers so lavishly, unconsciously stir the mind to 
 lofty motives and the true perception of the purpose 
 of life. We must not, of course, commit the fatal 
 blunder of making a didactic lesson out of what is read. 
 We take care that it is understood and illustrated, and 
 then leave it to have its own effect. In short, just as 
 language treated on its formal or abstract side intro- 
 duces a boy to logic without his knowing that it does 
 so, so language on its real side introduces him to the 
 ethical life in all its relations without his being aware 
 that it is doing so. He gradually forms his own saws 
 out of many instances. 
 
 I will now conclude that language, as formal, is the 
 most effective and universal of all pure disciplines 
 possible in the school ; and that language, again, as real, 
 is the most effective and vmiversal of all educators of 
 the mind of man. 
 
 3. But this is not all: for language is the most 
 universal teacher of Art. Far be it from me to at- 
 tempt to answer the vexed question, What is Art ? 
 But this much, in the interests of my argument, I may 
 venture. Art is the beautiful in a concrete form. 
 What again is the beautiful ? When we say a thing is 
 beautiful we use a word of complex meaning ; no other 
 one word can define it. But this at least is a pro- 
 
12 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 minent factor in the notion which the word conveys — 
 the beautiful is a feeling of the perfection of a thing 
 after its kind, the ideal of its kind. 
 
 In the earlier portion of this discourse I said that 
 we might very well take the Greek dpeTi'/, excellence 
 (or perfection) of a thing after its kind, as summing up 
 in a single word our aim in the educating of a human 
 being, and our own aim consequently in educating our- 
 selves. No man, in whom the process of thinking has 
 been once started, but has an ideal of life for himself 
 more or less consciously expressed. Whether this ideal 
 is truly the dpeTrj, or excellence of Man, it is for the 
 thinkers of the world to say. By the help of these 
 thinkers every nation and every age forms its ideal — 
 the dperr] for it ; and it is to this ideal that we seek, 
 more or less consciously, to train our children. 
 
 We cannot say that a man is educated until he is 
 possessed by a conscious ideal of life. So we cannot 
 say that a man is educated until the ordinary precepts 
 and maxims of the understanding, which regulate the 
 conduct of life, have been conceived by him not as mere 
 judgments, but as ideas. Now to conceive an ordinary 
 maxim of virtue or any form of goodness, as not merely 
 a judicial maxim, but as an idea, is to conceive it in 
 its purity as the Divine law of our being. A certain in- 
 finity and majesty are thereby given to the prosaic and 
 finite maxim ; and the idea — be it of benevolence, or 
 of integrity, or of purity, or justice, or holiness, or for- 
 titude, now stands out in his consciousness as at once 
 imperative motive and ideal end of all his daily life. 
 It is only now that he is a spiritual being as opposed to 
 a merely moral being. If then, we can train so as to 
 
I.] INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 13 
 
 give a conscious ideal of life and so as to raise maxim 
 and precept to the potency of divine ideas, we have 
 attained our chief ethical purpose as educators : the 
 discipline of life must do the rest. 
 
 The study of Art (whatever else it may be) is 
 the study of the idea in the concrete, and the emotion 
 which the perception of the concrete idea evokes is an 
 emotion similar in kind to that which those spiritual 
 ideas that bear on the conduct of life evoke in us. Far 
 be it from me to argue that you can moralise a man by 
 art, or that there is salvation in aesthetics. But I will 
 say this, that however immoral a man may be, yet if he 
 is alive to the beautiful in liature and art, he must be, 
 though perhaps a beast, yet a more refined, a more deli- 
 cate, and altogether a more human beast than he would 
 be without aesthetic perceptions. The unquestionably 
 close alliance between the beautiful and the good, as I 
 have endeavoured, without much success, to indicate it,, 
 was recognised by the Greeks. All aesthetic training, 
 if not put forward as itself moral and spiritual training, 
 but kept in its due place, is to be recognised as ancillary 
 to the spiritual life ; and it may even awaken the spiri- 
 tual in boys and men who are inaccessible to the less 
 sensuous forms of ideas. 
 
 Now, the most universal form of art is to be found 
 in language as literature. Painting has its limits, 
 sculpture has its limits, architecture has its limits;: 
 dados and wall-papers will not do much for the soul of 
 man. Literature is the universal medium for the ex- 
 pression of the whole range of man's nature under the 
 impulse of the emotion of the beautiful. Its highest 
 form is poetry. But it may be said that, wherever we 
 
14 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME [LECT. 
 
 find apt and felicitous expression of mind, whether in 
 prose or poetry, we have so far a work of art to be 
 admired for its beauty. And this, I take it, means that 
 the expression of thought so conveyed not only engages 
 the activity and the assent of our reason, but touches 
 also our emotions — the emotion of the beautiful, the 
 eternal joy in the ideal. 
 
 Thus and so far the teaching of literature is a 
 training in ideals ; and, whether it moralises or not 
 directly, it is a potent indirect force in the formation of 
 spiritual ideals and the pursuit of the spiritual life 
 generally. I shall give an illustration. The brutality, 
 egoism, snobbery of the English schoolboy is part of 
 history — see the records of fagging, &c., and his measure 
 of men and things. Now what I venture to say is this, 
 that even were there no moral or Christian education 
 at all from day to day (and, so far as I can see, there is 
 little consciously aimed at in our public schools, except 
 by an individual here and there), yet, a boy who had 
 been enjoying in his master's company, and that of 
 his schoolfellows, a fine creation of Wordsworth or 
 Tennyson, could not possibly leave the room and go and 
 do a mean or nasty thing ; or if he did, he could not 
 do it without bringing down on his head the reproba- 
 tion of his fellows and his own self-condemnation. And 
 this, not because of the substance of the thought alone 
 in Wordsworth or Tennyson, but because of its form, 
 because of the ideal impulse which it gave. Honest- 
 orum turpiumque nulhrni est consortiv/m, says Quin- 
 tilian; and again Plato in the Republic says, "The 
 Tf ords of truth and beauty are the best garrison of souls 
 whom God loves." 
 
I. J INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 15 
 
 The beautiful in art or language is not only uni- 
 versal in its character, but it is universal in its relations 
 to the human mind as compared with other forms of 
 art. The material used — language — is familiar to all ; 
 all can be made, at least, to understand it; and the 
 great majority may be led by a skilful master to feel 
 it, and so be testhetically trained, brought under the 
 influence of art-forms, of the beautiful in the concrete 
 — of ideals. 
 
 Enough has been said to show that, whether we 
 regard the discipline of intellect, the substance of 
 morality and wisdom, or the growth of the distinctively 
 spiritual life, language as a formal or logical study, as 
 a real study, and as a literary or art study, is, and 
 must always be, the supreme subject in the education 
 of a human being, the centre round which all other 
 educational agencies ought to range themselves in due 
 subordination. 
 
 (In conclusion, when I say that language is the 
 supreme subject in all education, I mean the vernacu- 
 lar language^ It is not, however, my intention here to 
 advocate English as a subject of school instruction, 
 although I am well aware that Ben Jonson, Mulcaster 
 and Brinsley have been crying aloud in vain for three 
 centuries. I nmst here assume that the good example 
 of some schools is universal. But this one argument 
 let me press. Mind grows only in so far as it finds ex- 
 pression for itself; it cannot find it through a foreign 
 tongue. It is round the language learned at the 
 mother's knee that the whole life of feeling, emotion, 
 thought, gathers. If it were possible for a child or 
 boy to live in two languages at once equally well, so 
 
16 LANGUAGE THE SUPREME INSTRUMENT, ETC. [lECT. I. 
 
 much the worse. His intellectual and spiritual growth 
 would not thereby be doubled but halved. Unity 
 of mind and of character would have great difficulty 
 in asserting itself in such circumstances. Language, 
 remember, is at best only symbolic of a world of con- 
 sciousness, and every word almost is rich in unexpressed 
 associations of life-experience, which give it its full 
 value for the life of mind. Subtleties, and delicacies, 
 and refinements of feeling and perception are only 
 indicated by words. The rest lies deep in our conscious 
 or half-conscious life, and is the source of the tone and 
 colour of language, and of its wide-reaching relations 
 with all that is not itself and yet is itself Words 
 accordingly, must be steeped in life to be living, and 
 as we have not two lives but only one, so we can have 
 only one language. To this mother-tongue, then, all 
 other languages we acquire are merely subsidiary ; and, 
 not to speak here of the introduction these languages 
 give us to other literatures, their chief value in the 
 education of youth is that they help to bring into 
 relief for us the character of our own language as a 
 logical medium of thinking, or help us to understand 
 it as thought, or to feel it as literary art. It is the 
 same with the educative influence of the lives of other 
 nations, such as the Greeks and Romans : these are not 
 to be substitutes for our own national life nor yet are 
 they to be simply annexed as alien possessions : they do 
 their work as deepening, broadening, raising the specific 
 national life. If they do not do this, they are better 
 left alone. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. -THE 
 DISTINCTION BETWEEN DISCIPLINE AND TRAIN- 
 ING.— METHOD. 
 
 In my first Lecture I have pointed out the threefold 
 claim of language to a supreme place in education : 
 first, as a formal or abstract study, that is to say, as a 
 logical and historical analysis ; secondly, as a real study 
 conveying the substance of thought; and, thirdly, as 
 literature in which are presented to us the forms of the 
 ideal in Art. 
 
 These three aspects of language will now be looked 
 at more closely ; and first I shall treat of Language as 
 a Real Study, as conveying the substance of thought ; 
 but before doing so, it is necessary to make a few pre- 
 liminary remarks. 
 
 I have said that formal study disciplines the intel- 
 ligence more than the study of the real. Why is it 
 that the study of the formal specially disciplines ? For 
 two reasons: first, because the spontaneous effort 
 demanded of the pupil is greater than in other kinds of 
 work ; and, secondly, because the formal is only another 
 name for the abstract, and as the abstract is removed 
 
 L.L. 2 
 
18 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [lECT. 
 
 to a certain distance, so to speak, from the substance 
 or matter from which it is abstracted, it follows that 
 dealing with the abstract is a purer exercise of the 
 intellectual processes, simply as such, than occupation 
 with the concrete or real possibly can be. Exercise in 
 the abstract thus tends to give power to our intellec- 
 tual processes — a power which, inasmuch as these pro- 
 cesses are always the same, is of universal application. 
 The exercise approaches in its character the exercise of 
 mind on mind. For example, in mathematics, instruc- 
 tion in practical mensuration doubtless trains and dis- 
 ciplines the mind, but the abstract study of geometry, 
 just because it is formal or abstract, disciplines the 
 mind more effectually. 
 
 The formal study of language I shall henceforth,: 
 for shortness, call by the traditionary name. Grammar. 
 It stands, as we have seen, midway between language 
 as a real subject, conveying substance of thought, and 
 Logic. It is thus logic in its concrete form, and it is 
 language in its abstract form. As such it disciplines ; 
 and where there is discipline, there is necessarily also I 
 iramm^f, of the intelligence. ^ 
 
 The question now arises — and it is of great signifi- 
 cance in education — Can I not train the intelligence 
 without disciplining it ? Is there any distinction between 
 training and discipline which can justify us in saying 
 that we can train without disciplining ? I think there 
 is, and the question is so important in its general edu- 
 cational bearings, as well as its linguistic, that the true 
 distinction between these words, which are almost 
 always used as equivalent, merits our attention. 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 19 
 
 Language studied as the substance of thought is 
 food for the mind ; but it is so only in so far as it is 
 comprehended. Now, this act of comprehension carries 
 the intelligence through a mental process. This process 
 is necessarily the grammatical and logical process in 
 the concrete, for language is the reflex not merely of 
 thought but of the thinking process. But there are 
 various stages of comprehension, rising from the vague 
 and indefinite feeling that something or other has been 
 said, to the partial and fragmentary understanding of 
 what has been said (and this stage again has many 
 degrees), and thereafter, to the final grasping of the 
 thought in all its particularity and fulness. When a 
 piece of language is so grasped that the thought it 
 conveys is reduced, in the mind of the reader, to that 
 order and relative subordination of parts which it had 
 when it first took complete shape in words, he has 
 manifestly carried his mind through the mental pro- 
 cesses which originally produced, the thought and its 
 word- vestment. Now, to the extent to which any mind 
 is carried through such processes of thinking, it is 
 being trained as well as fed. This is training : let us 
 now re-state by way of contrast the nature of discip line. 
 
 It is only in so far as we look at the relations of the 
 word-vestment apart from the concrete substance that 
 we deal with the formal in thought and language — the 
 abstract — the logical and grammatical. It is this occu- 
 pation of the mind with form which, as I have tried to 
 show, gives discipline to the intelligence as distinct 
 from training (though ^t necessarily also comprehends 
 training). 
 
 The fixing of the mind on the formal or abstract, on 
 
 2—2 
 
20 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [lECT. 
 
 thinking deprived of the support of the concrete, is a 
 difficult exercise of mind, and rightly not attempted 
 till boys have left school. It is formal logic. The 
 fixing of mind on the generalised character of words 
 and their inter-relations in a sentence is also a difficult 
 exercise ; but this, which is grammar and grammatical 
 analysis, is not beyond the reach of the schoolboy, be- 
 cause his mind is supported by the symbols which we 
 call words, and these are presented to his senses. It is 
 by such exercises that we give what is to be distinctively 
 called discipline. We thus strengthen reason for all 
 particular exercises of whatsoever kind. For the sub- 
 ject-matter of formal exercises is not necessarily this or 
 that particular thought or reasoned statement, but 
 thinking, and reasoning, and the conditions of rational 
 expression through words, simply as such. Formal ex- 
 ercises are thus universal in their relations and extend 
 the range of mental power simply as power, and, while 
 extending, also intensify, the power. 
 
 The distinction between training and discipline is, 
 I hope, made clear. I would wish to press on your 
 attention next, that training has constantly been 
 assumed to be identical with discipline. It certainly 
 is contained in discipline ; but I would point out that it 
 also lies outside it, as is apparent from what I have 
 said. To the neglect of the distinction which I have 
 drawn between these two educational notions is due 
 the corresponding neglect of a whole side of education. 
 Had schoolmasters seen that mental training can be 
 given by the study of language as the concrete embodi- 
 ment of thought, and that accordingly you could give 
 food to the mind, while, at the same time, securing the 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 21 
 
 training of it, school would have been a pleasanter 
 place for boys, and the results of school work, both 
 intellectual and moral, would have been much more 
 satisfactory than they have been. 
 
 For, it is manifest that when a schoolmaster realises 
 that he can truly train the mind by getting it merely 
 to understand literature, he will be the more ready to 
 believe in the real or substance of language as educative 
 than if he regards reading as giving merely the sub- 
 stance of thought. He will then see that the organism 
 of words which constitute sentences has not to be 
 studied with his pupils as an organism in order to 
 secure training. It is enough that they be studied for 
 what they convey. And in this there will be a great 
 gain for his pupils. The most real of all " things " are 
 the thoughts of man. Food is what the hungry want, 
 drink is what the thirsty want, and all human beings 
 hunger and thirst more or less. One true thought, 
 take it whence you will, once fairly rooted in the mind 
 of a boy, will do more for him whether he is to be a 
 shoemaker or statesman, than grammar or the calcu- 
 lus or the syllogism will do. So subtle are the secret 
 relations of the material of feeling and the suggestions 
 of experience which are always flowing into our con- 
 sciousness, that one such rooted thought quickly finds 
 some worthy mate, and is the father of a whole tribe. 
 Nay, even a partial thought which fails to sustain 
 itself, but dies where it took root, is not wholly lost ; it 
 enriches the soil and stimulates future productivity. 
 Mind is not the machinery of thinking only, but it is a 
 complex of substantial thought, and you nourish thought 
 in the young only by thought. 
 
22 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. 
 
 , Let us conclude, then, that by the study of lan- 
 guage as a concrete study, as substance, as reality, we 
 both feed and train the mind ; we enrich the blood of 
 mind, so to speak, and we teach it its courses. 
 
 Now, it will be apparent that, if I had to choose 
 between' the formal or grammatical, and the real or 
 substance of language in educating youth, I should 
 unquestionably prefer the latter, and leave grammar 
 out altogether. For more than two thousand years 
 the formal has in all subjects been too much with us. 
 Definition, precept, dogma can be easily set down in 
 propositions, and prescribed for a boy's learning. The 
 work is memory work. The progress of the pupil thus 
 seems to be something measurable in respect of quan- 
 tity, and the master's task is easy; whereas, as a matter 
 of fact, the true process of education is a matter of 
 quality, and is not measurable. 
 
 You will not conclude from this that I am disposed 
 to set aside the formal in language — grammar. I have 
 shown its bearing on the discipline and strengthening 
 of the mind in all its relations, including the conduct 
 of life. But it is quite consistent with this to hold 
 that in the education of a boy or girl, language is to 
 be regarded mainly as a concrete study, and that, as 
 the medium of all thought, it is to be assigned a much 
 more dominant place in the school than has hitherto 
 been usual. 
 
 What is the actual state of things ? The technical 
 arts of reading and spelling being acquired with more or 
 less success, the teacher's work is thereafter largely re- 
 stricted by himself to the formal or grammatical. You 
 certainly discipline the mind in this way, but, most 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 23 
 
 assuredly, you cannot so best educate it. The growth 
 of mind and the growth of language in the mind go 
 together. There has to be organized in the boy the 
 language of his inner life, so that the language may 
 grow with the life and the life may grow with the 
 language. Now, this great object can only be attained 
 by the pupil's reading and re-reading, and comprehend- 
 ing the thoughts of others as expressed in fitting 
 words, and by his expressing his own observations and 
 thoughts — native or borrowed — in fitting words. Both 
 those intellectual occupations must be carried on to- 
 gether. 
 
 Method applied to Language. 
 
 Let us now consider Method with reference to 
 Language. I. Language as substance of thought. 
 IL Language as form of thought, or grammar. III. 
 Language as art ; or literature. 
 
 I. Method applied to Language as Substance. 
 Let us take for consideration the different stages of 
 language-teaching as these are fairly enough indicated 
 by the external division of school-wjark— ^the Infant (to 
 the age of 7), the Lower and Upper Primary, and the 
 Secondary. 
 
 (a) Infant Stage of Language Teaching in Relation 
 to Thought. 
 
 In the child up to the eighth year the range of 
 language is very small ; he probably confines himself to 
 not more than 150 words. Our business as educators 
 
24 I,ANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. 
 
 is to give to these words definite and clear significa- 
 tions, and to help the child in adding to his stock. 
 For in adding to his stock of understood words we add- 
 to his stock of understood things, and, consequently, to 
 his material for thought an4 the growth of mind. 
 
 In doing this we must follow the method which 
 nature is itself pursuing: — the pupil is daily and almost 
 unconsciously adding to his store in conversing with 
 others and in hearing the names of the common objects 
 which pass daily and hourly before his eyes. The 
 infant teacher, then, will not only respect — taking care 
 that they are clarified, so to speak, and used in a 
 determinate sense — the store of vocables already ac- 
 quired, but will add to the stock in seven ways and so 
 promote the parallel mental growth. 
 
 1. By conversing with the class on any subject 
 suggested by the incidents of the day /or of the class- 
 room in such language as, while it may be in advance 
 slightly of that which the children themselves use, is 
 yet within their comprehension if they make a slight 
 effort. 
 
 2. By telling them simple stories and narrating or 
 reading fairy tales. Some educationalists have objected 
 to fairy stories for children because of their fictitious 
 character. It suffices here merely to point out that 
 the imagination of little children is very active in the 
 sphere of the possible and impossible, that this normal 
 activity of the imagination contributes largely to the 
 growth, culture, and enrichment of mind, and that it has 
 to be taken advantage of by the educator who respeets 
 law wherever he finds it. Where would Homer and 
 Sophocles have been had they not imbibed mythological 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 25 
 
 lore with their mother's milk? Even the genius of 
 Shakespeare would have perished in the thirsty desert 
 of a childhood of bare facts. I would further say, in 
 passing, that what applies to children applies a fortiori 
 to the adult ; and that fiction, the drama, and art ought, 
 in consistency, to be excluded from all life by those who 
 would deny the unreal to children. It might also be 
 shown, were this the place to do so, that in the active 
 imaginations of children and their appreciation of 
 fairy stories, we see at work, in a rudimentary way, 
 the capacity for art and religion. 
 
 3. By means — and this, at the earliest stage, 
 chiefly — of object-lessons. Here words are learnt in 
 close connection with the sensible things they denote. 
 
 4. By means of the reading-lessons and examina- 
 tion on them, or rather conversation about them. You 
 will see the importance of the kind of reading-books 
 which should at this early period be preferred. They 
 must contain all the ordinary words of child-life ; they 
 ought also to contain a gradual and graduated exten- 
 sion of the child's vocabulary ; and give expression and 
 shape to his infant thoughts and growing conceptions 
 of the world and man. 
 
 5. By means of verses — e.g., nursery rhymes first, 
 and thereafter verses regarding incidents of child-life 
 and descriptive of simple, moral and religious story. 
 These should be learnt by heart for repetition and 
 singing. 
 
 6. By calling on the children to give an account in 
 their own words of lessons they have read or stories that 
 have been told to them. 
 
 7. By means of writing in the later stage. The 
 
26 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. 
 
 writing of words, and simple sentences consisting of a 
 few words, does much to lay the foundation of accurate 
 expression — even though such exercises be only tran- 
 scriptions from the book or blackboard. 
 
 (6) Primary and Upper Primary School Stage. 
 (7 or 8 to 14.) 
 
 When the pupil has left the infant-stage behind 
 him, that is to say, when he has got his second teeth, 
 and can take a firmer bite of the outer world (so to 
 speak), and his fingers a firmer hold of all that comes 
 within reach of his sense-tentacles, his instruction in 
 language, as the highway to thought, as the gateway of 
 the humanities, is, so far as the school is concerned, 
 generally regulated by the readiug-books used. These 
 language lessons constitute for the boy (except among 
 the wealthier classes) his whole literary curriculum. 
 How important it is then, that they should be so con- 
 structed as to fulfil the requirements of a literary course. 
 By means of a good collection of prose and poetry we 
 extend the range of thought and language. This is not 
 to be done by reading one book devoted to one subject. 
 Accordingly, collections of good pieces are to be preferred. 
 
 The question of method at this stage resolves itself 
 very much into this — How shall we best use the reading- 
 lesson as a lesson in language, and through language 
 in the humanities? Here, more than anywhere else, 
 the cultivation, the knowledge, the sympathy, the ima- 
 gination, the educative skill of a teacher reveal them- 
 selves. The reading-lesson is the common ground on 
 which the true mind of master and pupil meet. 
 
 I take it for granted that object-lessons, including 
 
11.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 27 
 
 nature-lessons, are always going on, and that, by means 
 of these, the words of the pupils are gradually increasing 
 in number, and in exactness of application. But this is 
 a small matter compared with the training in language 
 as the vehicle of that which is not given to us through 
 the senses, but is the human spirit at work on the things 
 of sense and the facts of human life and conduct. 
 
 We must here bear in mind that every pupil has, as 
 yet, technical difficulties to encounter in reading the 
 lesson prescribed. The lesson is, in fact, not merely a 
 lesson of thought, or feeling, or imagination to him, but 
 also a lesson in the deciphering of words, and in intel- 
 ligent utterance. 
 
 The lesson (we shall say) is on " Courage," or "Truth- 
 fulness," presumably well written as regards form, and 
 illustrated by examples. 
 
 To begin \vith: — What is the subject before me as a 
 subject of instruction and education ? Manifestly the 
 lesson, as a whole, that is to say, the thought, the moral 
 teaching of the lesson in its totality. And next, what 
 are the units of the lesson on which I must base my 
 detailed examination ? Not the individual words, but 
 the sentences. 
 
 Accordingly, we should proceed thus : — 
 
 1. On giving out the lesson, we should tell the sub- 
 ject of it ; we should try to bring the children's minds 
 en rapport with the subject by conversing with them 
 briefly about it ; all in a very informal and easy-going 
 style. This we do in order that we may bring what the 
 pupils already know to bear on the fresh thought or in- 
 formation which they are about to receive. Thereby 
 the unknown lesson grows out of the known, and is an 
 
28 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. 
 
 organic, and not a mere mechanical, extension of the 
 thought of the pupil. " This, now," we say, " is what 
 the lesson you are going to prepare speaks about, and 
 you have now to go. and make out the sentences, and 
 find what the writer has to say about the subject, and 
 how he says it." 
 
 2. We then see whether there are in the lesson any 
 words wholly new, and to these we direct the attention 
 of the class by means of the blackboard, and give their 
 meanings. 
 
 The pupils are then expected to prepare the lesson 
 for the following day. 
 
 A purely narrative lesson is easily disposed of. We 
 do not need in such a case to follow the above mode of 
 procedure, unless there be some special point, moral or 
 other, which the writer desires to bring into prominence. 
 To this we should cursorily allude, and that would 
 suffice : but we ought not to speak of it in such a way 
 as to deprive the lesson of its novelty or its surprises. 
 
 3. On the following day the lesson is read with 
 due regard to the rules of reading, and the master then 
 proceeds to examine on the general scope and import of 
 the lesson as a whole. What is it all about ? What 
 does it mean to tell us or to teach vis ? This is the 
 totality of the reality before him, just as, e.g., the whole 
 apple is the totality of the object in an object-lesson on 
 the apple. This process the teacher goes through with 
 the books (including above all his own book) shut. 
 
 The idea (pray, mark !) at the bottom of the exami- 
 nation on the lesson as a whole, is, that it is a quiet 
 and rational conversation between an instructed mind 
 and less instructed minds. And this idea must run 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 29 
 
 through all examinations on the whole of a lesson, from 
 the infant school up to the age of 17. When this is 
 lost sight of, the art of examination is lost. Think of a 
 man doing this sort of thing with a cane in his hand or 
 with the airs of a don or a beadle ! 
 
 4. The next step is to take the units of language 
 (which I have said are the sentences) in their order 
 with the book open) just as in an object-lesson I give 
 the total object to perception first, and thereafter pro- 
 ceed to look at the units which make up the total 
 object — which units are qualities, so now I take the 
 sentences as parts of the whole. Each sentence is read 
 again, and, after being read, the master asks such 
 questions as will briog into view its various parts and 
 relations, as well as the significance of the individual 
 words. This is the preliminary stage of what, as an ab- 
 stract study, we know as analysis, i.e., it is an analysis 
 in relation to the synthetic or concrete, which must 
 always precede the abstract and formal if the latter is 
 to be intelligent. 
 
 5. The lesson should now again be viewed as a 
 whole, having a beginning, a middle, and an end ; and 
 the children should be asked to give an account of it in 
 their own words. One or two of the more fluent at- 
 tempting this, the rest will be too happy to lie in wait 
 for omissions and errors, with a view to supply and 
 correct them. In this way, the lesson, whether it be 
 descriptive, narrative, or didactic, will be reproduced by 
 the combined efforts of the class. The master will then 
 read the lesson to the pupils himself, as it ought to be 
 read, they having their books shut. 
 
 6. He may now and further, at this stage (and 
 
30 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. 
 
 with the books shut), enter on the familiar and colloquial 
 illustration and extension of the subject of the lesson, 
 in more or less detail, according to the time at his dis- 
 posal. He will call on the pupils for voluntary contri- 
 butions to the subject, in the foi-m of facts drawn from 
 their own experience or for thoughtful suggestions. 
 Thus is the lesson "turned to use" by being made pro- 
 ductive of many deductive or collateral lessons. It is at 
 this stage that the practical application of the lesson, if 
 it be a moral one, comes in. Do not dwell too emphati- 
 cally on this, however, as if children were so constituted 
 that they naturally resented moral and spiritual ideas. 
 Take for granted that they are children of God. 
 
 It may not be possible ever to do all that is sug- 
 gested above, for want of time ; but I have stated in 
 detail what should be aimed at, if we are to do for a 
 complex literary lesson what is done for a complex object 
 of sense, when we give an object-lesson. 
 
 So much for the lesson as a whole, and in its indi- 
 vidual sentences ; but addressing, as I do, those who 
 mean to be teachers, I would go now more into detail 
 with the fourth step in the examination process — that 
 in which we deal with sentences. By so doing I shall 
 make clear what is meant by the teaching of words in 
 relation to thought. I shall here presume that the boy 
 is at the end of the primary stage, that is to say about 
 14 years of age. 
 
 Take the following passage as illustrating how much 
 training as well as instruction, which is the building up 
 of knowledge in the mind, may be extracted from a few 
 lines, bearing in mind that the questions and answers 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. 31 
 
 are merely the skeleton of a prolonged conversation. 
 (The book is, of course, open.) 
 
 " Every atvdent who enters on a scientific pwsuit, especially if 
 at a somewhat advanced period of life, mil fi/nd not only that he 
 has much to learn, but much also to unlearn. Familiar objects 
 and events are far from presenting themselves to our senses in that 
 aspect, and vdth those connectiorfs, under which science requires 
 them to be viewed, and which constitute their rational explanation." 
 
 Q. What kind of student is referred to here ? 
 
 A. The student who enters on a scientific pursuit. 
 
 Q. What is said of such a student ? 
 
 A. That he has much to learn. 
 
 Q. Is anything else said of him 1 
 
 A. That he has much to unlearn. 
 
 Q. The author says that every student of a science has 
 much to learn and unlearn ; but he says that this is more par- 
 ticularly true of a certain class of students ; what class ? 
 
 A. Those who begin at an advanced period of life. 
 
 Q. What is meant by the word " student " ? 
 
 A. One who studies. 
 
 Q. And what do you mean by studying any subject ? 
 
 A. Beading about it, and thinking about it. 
 
 Q. The student referred to is, jou have told me, the student 
 " who enters on a scientific pursuit "—pursuit here means sub- 
 ject : what is meant by a scientific " pursuit or subject " ? 
 
 A. A subject carefully arranged, so as to show its facts, 
 causes, and reasons*. 
 
 Q. This explanation is difficult for you to understand ; you 
 will best explain it by an example. 
 
 A. Astronomy, Geology, etc., are "scientific subjects" or 
 sciences ; that is to say, the real facts about the stars (not 
 merely what seem to be the facts at first sight), arranged so as 
 to show their connections and causes, constitute the science of 
 the stars, or Astronomy (and so of Geology*). 
 
 * Of course an answer of this sort is worked out by the help o£ 
 the master, and must be the result of many leading questions. 
 
32 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. 
 
 Q. Can any of you now, looking carefully at the sentence, 
 shut the book, and give me the substance of it in your own words ? 
 
 A. A person beginning to study a science will find that he 
 has much to learn as well as to unlearn, and this all the more if 
 he is grown up before he begins. 
 
 Teacher. We shall now take the second sentence. 
 
 (The teacher here reads it slowly, iohile the pupils follow with 
 the ejfe.) 
 
 Q. What is here said about "familiar objects and events"? 
 
 A. That they are far from presenting themselves, etc. 
 
 Q. What things are " far from presenting themselves," etc. ? 
 
 A. " Familiar objects and events." 
 
 Q. In the science of Astronomy, for example, what would 
 the " familiar objects and events " be ? 
 
 A. The heavenly bodies and their motions. 
 
 Q. Which are the objects, and which the events? 
 
 A. The bodies are the objects, and their motions are the events. 
 
 Q. Now the author says that these objects and events are 
 "far from presenting themselves in a certain aspect and con- 
 nection : " What do you mean by " aspect " ? 
 
 A. Appearance. 
 
 Q. What by " connection " ? 
 
 A. Their union with each other, or other things, or their 
 relation to these things. 
 
 Q. What kind of appearance and connections do they fail 
 to present themselves to our senses in 1 
 
 A. The appearance and connections under which science 
 requires them to be viewed. 
 
 Q. Does the author say anything else about that " appear- 
 ance " and " connection " ? 
 
 A. Yes. He says that they constitute their rational ex- 
 planation. 
 
 Q. What " constitutes the rational explanation " of what ? 
 
 A. A certain aspect and certain connections of objects and 
 events constitute the rational explanation of these objects and 
 events*. 
 
 * An answer of this sort is worked out by the help of the master 
 and must be the result of many leading questions. 
 
II.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCK OF THOUGHT. 33 
 
 Q. Can we accurately say that an aspect or appearance and 
 certain connections constitute an explanation of anything ? 
 
 A. No. What is meant is that the presentation of them to 
 the mind in a certain light, and with certain connections, " con- 
 stitutes their rational explanation.'' 
 
 Q. What is meant by "constitute their rational expla- 
 nation " ? 
 
 A. That the kind of presentation referred to is such an 
 explanation as satisfies the reason of a man. 
 
 Q. Now, can any of you, looking carefully at this sentence, 
 shut your book and give me the substance of it in your own 
 words ? 
 
 A. The author says, that "things to which we are accus- 
 tomed, are not always seen in such a way as science requires 
 them to be looked at, and that the way of looking which science 
 requires gives us an explanation of these things which satisfies 
 our minds." 
 
 Teacher. Now, take your slates and go to your seats. Your 
 composition lesson to-day will be putting these two sentences in 
 yoiu; own words. In doing this you may make as many sentences 
 of them as you please. 
 
 I select the above sentence from Herschell, because 
 it is representative of the kind of prose reading suited 
 to the age of 14 or 15 — the transition from the upper 
 primary to the secondary stage of education. 
 
 (c) Secondary School Stage. 
 
 Of this Secondary stage all that can be said is, 
 that you go on as you have begun, taking care, when 
 perusing an essay or treatise, to exercise the boys in 
 the analysis of its reasoning as a whole, so as to reach 
 the principles on which the argument ultimately rests. 
 With this one remark I may dismiss the subject of 
 Language in the Secondary School : and I do so all the 
 L.L. 3 
 
34 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF THOUGHT. [LECT. II. 
 
 more readily that it falls again to be considered under 
 the head of Language as Literature. 
 
 An important distinction has been made, in the 
 beginning of this Lecture, between intellectual train- 
 ing and discipline — a vital distinction in its practi- 
 cal bearings on the growth of the child as a moral 
 heiiSg (if this were the place to speak of that) as well 
 as an intellectual being. It is now sufficiently clear 
 that we cannot carry a boy through such a passage as 
 that from which I have quoted a sentence, without 
 giving him intellectual training, as well as substance 
 of instruction. He is led to accompany the writer step 
 by step, in his thought, and so, without being aware 
 of it, he is being exercised in the processes of thought, 
 by identifying his own thought-activity with that of 
 another and more mature mind. If there is intellectual 
 training (as distinct from discipline) to be got anywhere, 
 it is surely to be got here. 
 
 We often hear of the value of translation from a 
 foreign tongue into our own. Such exercises as I have 
 sketched are translations — translations, moreover, in 
 which the finding of equivalent terms by the help of 
 dictionaries will be of little use without a close study 
 of the thought of the writer. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION.— 
 METHOD CONTINUED. 
 
 I TRUST it will now be granted to me that in teaching 
 language as a concrete or real subject we truly train 
 the mind, although we cannot be said, in any strict 
 sense, to discipline it : Logos means Reason as well 
 as Word. The right method of effecting this training 
 in language with a view to the growth of the individual 
 life and thought, through the comprehending of the 
 thought of others, has also been briefly put before you. 
 'The question of method, however, as applied to in- 
 struction in the substance of language, is far from being 
 exhausted. Numerous subsidiary processes may be 
 thought of by the teacher, and some of these I shall 
 now advert to. 
 
 1. Word-building. — The great majority of the 
 "words in use are not English, but Latin. The compo- 
 siteness of the English Language is one of the causes 
 of its value as an educative instrument, as it is of its 
 power of delicate and various expression. Mere custom 
 
 3—2 
 
36 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTEUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 will, of course, give a knowledge of the signification of 
 these foreign words, especially of those which have 
 become thoroughly domesticated. But even with these, 
 and still more with all the others, a thorough acquaint- 
 ance can be gained only by a conscious analysis of 
 their elements. The mere statement of the root helps 
 very little. The word "element," for example, has just 
 been used by me ; but I get little light as to its signifi- 
 cation by being told that its root is elementvmfi. Better 
 tell me the meaning in English at once, and then give 
 me elemental, elementary as derivatives. It is clear 
 that if we are to give boys effectually the derivatives of 
 any simple word, we must introduce them to the pre- 
 fixes and affixes, and exercise them in the precise force 
 of these. This is far more important, and (like every- 
 thing that is important in education) far more interest- 
 ing, than the Latin origin of the word, which in itself, 
 and by itself, is often barren of all intellectual nourish- 
 ment, except, of course, when it is part of a Latin 
 lesson. 
 
 With those words, however, which are fruitful and 
 have a progeny, the root is most instructive. To con- 
 fine ourselves to words used by myself here within the 
 compass of a few lines, let us take "signification." It 
 unquestionably is of great value in the acquisition of 
 the language to know the root, "signum," a sign, and, 
 having understood this, to build on this foundation 
 signal, signify, signification, significant, significance, 
 design, designation, &c., resign, resignation, &c., con- 
 sign, and so forth. All these words are then bound 
 together by a common root-idea, and are thus better 
 remembered, and ever after more correctly used ; and 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTEUCTION. 37 
 
 let US never forget that the correct use of a word is 
 the correct perception of a thing. So, "constitution": 
 here we have stare, to stand, and out of it we have a 
 numerous progeny. Can any one doubt the value of 
 this kind of exercise ? Is it not, indeed, indispensable, 
 if we are to take possession of our native tongue — the 
 sole vehicle of expressing our own thoughts, and under- 
 standing the thoughts of others ? Let it be carefully 
 noted that this kind of instruction is not to be given 
 from text-books and in the form of lessons, but must 
 arise casually out of the daily reading, the pupils having 
 note-books in which they enter all that is of value. 
 Interest disappears the moment you leave the page 
 before you and try to give a formal and didactic cha- 
 racter to word-teaching, apart from the living use of 
 language. The teaching, moreover, is in that case 
 easily forgotten, because of its being divorced from its 
 natural associations. So much for the architecture of 
 words. 
 
 It may be objected that, while prefixes and affixes 
 substantially retain their meanings wherever used, 
 English words derived from the Latin, especially when 
 they have come to us not directly, but through the 
 French, frequently lose their primary meaning. But 
 the fact that this is so, or that the primary meaning 
 has acquired connotations in the course of daily use, 
 gives them an additional claim on our attention, and 
 additional importance as a mental training. The words 
 we acquire by scientific study are like the words we 
 acquire through an object-lesson, as meagre as they 
 are simple. White is white, horse is horse, and there 
 is an end of it. But the words which carry down 
 
38 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. [LECT, 
 
 through the ages the thought of man, and not merely 
 his fact-observation, are complex in their nature, subtle 
 in their relations to each other, full of imagination, rich 
 in history. They are the mind of man in an objective 
 form — nature itself speaking in all its richness and 
 not in scientific formulae ; and were we to substitute 
 for them the boasted exactness of scientific terms we 
 should destroy our inheritance. Mankind would have 
 to begin over again: there would be nothing left but 
 the "prairie value" of our opulent estate. 
 
 Synonyms also, for advanced classes, and ambiguous 
 terms, as in the appendix to Whately's "Logic," fall 
 under this section of method. 
 
 2. History of Words. — These remarks naturally 
 introduce us to our second subsidiary expedient under 
 the head of method — the history of words. This is a 
 most stimulating study for the young, especially in the 
 secondary school stage. It is itself a kind of historical 
 education, and calls forth and cultivates the imagina- 
 tion in a variety of ways. 
 
 The history of words is well handled by Archbishop 
 Trench in his well-known book (whether he is always 
 accurate or not is beside the present question). The 
 moral and intellectual benefit to be derived from this 
 kind of teaching is too obvious to require more than 
 mention. Take for example "idiot," which means 
 originally only a "private person"; then a man either 
 careless of public duties or incompetent to exercise 
 them; hence a man uneducated and with undeveloped 
 intelligence; finally, an "idiot,'' in the present sense of 
 the word. Much significant instruction, surely, for the 
 young citizen here. 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OP INSTRUCTION. 39 
 
 So also many lessons — lessons full of moral sub- 
 stance — may be drawn by the intelligent teacher from 
 such words as "simple," "silly," "virtue," "honour," and 
 so forth. These and numerous other words illustrate 
 the history that is in all words, save those that record 
 a mere sense fact. And yet we are told to teach 
 "things," that is to say, realities of sense and not words 
 in educating the young, and that words are barren ! 
 Why, it is through words first of all, as vehicles of 
 things — things of the mind — that we learn all that is 
 worth learning. Wendell Holmes well says, "By words 
 we share the common consciousness of the race which 
 has shaped itself in these symbols." Again, "Every 
 word we speak is the medal of a dead thought or feel- 
 ing struck in the die of some human experience'." 
 
 In further enforcing this teaching of word-history I 
 cannot do better than introduce Archbishop Trench to 
 plead for it. After speaking of "tribulation" as derived 
 primarily from tero, to rub, from which came tribulwm, 
 a threshing-sledge (which was a wooden platform 
 studded with iron teeth underneath), hence tribulare, 
 to crush and oppress, he says : — 
 
 " This word some Latin writer of the Christian Church ap- 
 propriated for the setting forth of a higher truth ; and sorrow, 
 distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the sepa- 
 rating in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor 
 from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, he 
 therefore called these sorrows and trials 'tribulations,' thresh- 
 ings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there 
 could be no fitting him for the heavenly gamer. Now, in proof 
 of my assertion that a single word is often a concentrated poem, 
 
 1 Elsie Venner, Chap, xxviii. 
 
40 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OK INSTKUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 a little grain of pure gold capable of being beaten out into a 
 broad extent of gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very 
 word 'tribulation,' a graceful composition by George Wither, a 
 prolific versifier, and occasionally a poet, of the seventeenth 
 century. You will at once perceive that it is all wrapped up in 
 this word, being from first to last only the explicit unfolding of 
 the image and thought-which this word has implicitly given ; it 
 is as follows : — 
 
 " ' Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, 
 Until the chaff be purged from the wheat. 
 Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear. 
 The richness of the flour will scarce appear. 
 So, till men's persons great afflictions touch. 
 If worth be found, their worth is not so much, 
 Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet 
 That value which in threshing they may get. 
 For till the bruising flails of GJod's corrections 
 Have threshed out of us our vain affections ; 
 Till those corruptions which do misbecome us 
 Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us ; 
 Until from us the straw of worldly treasures. 
 Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures. 
 Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay 
 To thresh the husk of this our flesh away, 
 And leave the soul uncovered ; nay, yet more. 
 Till God shall make our very spirit poor, 
 We shall not up to highest wealth aspire ; 
 But then we shall : and that is my desire.' " 
 
 I may here aptly interpose the pregnant remark of 
 Emerson — "Words are fossil poetry." 
 
 "Great will be our gains — our pupil's gain and ours," the 
 Archbishop goes on to say, p. 42, " for teacher and taught wiU 
 for the most part enrich themselves together — if, having these 
 treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round about us, so far 
 more precious than mines of Californian gold, we determine 
 that we shall make what portion of them we can our own, that 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. 41 
 
 we shall ask the words which we use to give an account of them- 
 selves, to say whence they are and whither they tend. Then 
 shall we often rub oflF the dust and rust from what seemed to us 
 but a common token, which, as such, we had taken and given 
 a thousand times ; but which now we shall perceive to be a 
 precious coin bearing the image and superscription of the great 
 King ; then shall we often stand in surprise, and in something 
 of shame, while we behold the great spiritual realities which 
 underlie our common speech, the marvellous truths which we 
 have been witnessing /or in our words ; but, it may be, witness- 
 ing against in our lives. And as you will not find (for so I 
 venture to promise) that this study of words will be a dull one 
 when you undertake it yourselves, as little need you fear that it 
 will prove dull and unattractive when you seek to make your 
 own gains herein gains also of those who may be hereafter com- 
 mitted to your charge. Only try your pupils, and mark the 
 kindling of the eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the 
 revival of the flagging attention with which the humblest 
 lecture upon words, and upon the words especially which they 
 are daily using, which are familiar to them at their play or at 
 their church, wiU be welcomed by them. There is a sense of 
 reality about children which makes them rejoice to discover 
 that there is also a reality about words ; that they are not 
 merely arbitrary signs, but living powers ; . . . not innumerable 
 disconnected atoms, but growing out of roots, clustering in 
 families ; connecting and intertwining themselves with all that 
 men have been thinking and doing and feeling from the begin- 
 ning of the world till now. 
 
 " And it is of course our English tongue out of which mainly 
 we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it 
 contains, from which we should endeavour to remove the veil 
 which custom and familiarity have thrown over it. We cannot 
 employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help 
 than will this to form an English heart in ourselves and in 
 others." 
 
 3. Sentences and Paragraphs. — I have already 
 shown in the examination on a sentence from Herschell 
 
42 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 how we should proceed in order to secure full coyi pre- 
 hension of a passage by the pupil, but I introduce the 
 subject here again for the purpose of saying that, as 
 boys grow in years, much more may be aimed at and 
 accomplished than I have yet suggested. If you wish to 
 see what this "more" is, I refer you to Locke's Con- 
 duct of the Simian Understanding — a book too 
 seldom read by teachers and others. And I shall here 
 hold it as read, and so save space and time. 
 
 4. i Paraphrasing. — To facilitate the full compre- 
 hension of difficult sentences and paragraphs, the exer- 
 cise of paraphrasing came into general use in this 
 country about twenty-five years ago. Paraphrasing 
 consists in the turning into commonplace language, 
 which "any fellow may understand," the verses of a 
 poet, or the succinct prose of Bacon and Browne. 'A 
 more detestable exercise I do not know) It is an 
 impious and unholy use of pen and ink. One would, 
 of course, submit to it as an unhappy necessity were 
 there no other way of showing that we understand an 
 author. But this is very far from being the case. To 
 paraphrase Milton or Shakespeare is to turn the good 
 into the inferior or bad, and to degrade literatuieP 
 Moreover.it is false. For the youth who has done it 
 imagines that his bald sentences give all that is to be 
 found in the original passage of Milton or Bacon. If 
 this were so, then there would, alas! be no such thing 
 as literature, no such thing as Art in language. When 
 all is done, you have no longer got Bacon or Milton, but 
 only your much lesser self This exercise is based on 
 a misunderstanding of the whole situation. Teachers 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. 43 
 
 were vaguely groping for some means of assuring them- 
 selves that their pupils really saw their way through the 
 organism of a piece of poetry — terse, elliptical, and 
 frequently inverted in the ordo verhorum. But this 
 object can quite well be attained by a process 
 which might be called "Resolution," or, to please those 
 fond of big words. Dialysis. It simply consists in the 
 writing out of the piece of poetry in grammatical 
 prose order, supplying words understood, but always 
 preserving the language of the poet. This prevents a 
 boy from contenting himself with that vague knowledge 
 which is not knowledge at all, but mere impression 
 supported by dim disconnected images, or, it may be, 
 by the mere musical sounds or rhythm of language. It 
 compels him to be exact, and may, perchance, startle 
 him for the first time into the perception that poets, 
 after all, talk plain sense, and thus awaken his critical 
 faculties. 
 
 5. Reading and Elocution. — To read well is diffi- 
 cult. It is a rare accomplishment: nowhere more rare 
 than among teachers of elocution. 
 
 The secret of good reading lies in the practice {a) 
 of distinct articulation (even a little exaggerated in the 
 case of very young children), (6) of deliberateness, (c) in 
 the full comprehension of the sentence read. These 
 three conditions secure reading that is intelligent, and 
 intelligible, {d) Emphasis comes next — the emphasizing 
 of words in clauses, so as to bring out their relative im- 
 portance, (e) Further I would direct the teacher's at- 
 tention to what I should call Phrasing: that is to say 
 the regulating of the rapidity and intonation of subordi- 
 
44 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 nate clauses so as to bring into view their subordinate 
 character. 
 
 All this is quite teachable and attainable in the 
 lower-primary stage, and may be much improved in the 
 upper-primary. But more than this we cannot expect 
 (save where there is a genius for reading), and we ought 
 not to try to get more. If we call upon children to add 
 to intelligibility and emphasis and phrasing, the emo- 
 tional and imaginative as dramatic elements, we at best 
 secure a wooden imitation of somebody or other — a 
 falsetto elocution. Nothing can be more hurtful or 
 more offensive. The teacher, however, may so read the 
 passage to them as to bring out its full emotional 
 meaning, if he can. 
 
 After the age of puberty, that is to say, in the 
 secondary school stage, we may begin to aim at really 
 good reading. We shall finally attain our aim only 
 when there is a combination of physiological, intellec- 
 tual, and emotional conditions, which, though not so 
 rare as the conditions of good singing, is in truth a gift 
 of nature. We may approximate to it in a good many 
 cases, however. To begin with, it is based on imitation, 
 and yet it is not to be got by the mere imitator. There 
 is always a certain originality in it which your elocution 
 master never respects, but which has to be respected if 
 we are not to call forth mere slavish imitation of a 
 model. This makes reading artificial and false. Good 
 reading comes from within. It is not acting — no, 
 not even when reading a drama. The reader has 
 always to subordinate himself to his author and let 
 him speak. As to the best style of reading, I like 
 much the words of Quintilian, "Reading should be 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. 45 
 
 manly and grave, but grave with a certain sweet- 
 ness." 
 
 As to the reading of ordinary prose, I think we 
 approach nearest perfection when we read what is in 
 the book as if we were speaking our own thoughts. 
 But it is difficult to appropriate from a printed page 
 what another says, and then say it as from oneself. It 
 is, in truth, a complex psj'chological process. 
 
 But all this about reading is intended in the in- 
 terests of language-teaching. For, by reading well, 
 training in language as the expression of thought — as 
 a mental process uttered — is largely aided, not only in 
 the case of the reader, but of those who hear him. Good 
 class-reading is thus one of the most valuable of the 
 imitative processes by which a boy acquires language. 
 
 Expression of a Pupil's own Thought in Language, 
 
 Oral Com/position.^ Transcription, Elementary Written 
 Composition, Abridgments and Narrations, Transla- 
 tion, Imitation, Original Essays and Reproduction. 
 
 The growth of mind, if it is to be an effectual 
 growth, must be at the same time the growth of lan- 
 guage. / In many and subtle ways they act and re-act 
 on each other. This must be so, because language is 
 merely the externalizing of the inner life of mind. / 
 
 1 . Oral Composition. — In giving rules for language- 
 teaching in the infant school I had to include the syn- 
 thetic exercise of putting words together so as to form 
 sentences, as both an oral and a written exercise, but 
 above all, as an oral exercise. 
 
46 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 It would be superfluous to repeat what was then 
 said; but I must assume that, through the whole period 
 of education, the rules which I laid down are daily ob- 
 served. Much may be done to aid oral composition by 
 always requiring a complete sentence from the pupil 
 in reply to questions. However scurvily we adults 
 may treat our noble language, content to convey our 
 meaning in any sort of way, the process of education 
 assuredly demands that language, simply as language, 
 be respected. 
 
 2. Transcription. — To make boys and girls sit 
 down and write out, with due attention to legible 
 writing and punctuation, prose paragraphs and poems 
 from celebrated authors, is an admirable exercise. 
 There is no strain in it. At all ages, but especially in 
 the earlier years of language-teaching, this exercise 
 should be almost a daily one. Why should we dwell 
 on the many advantages that belong to this practice ? 
 Is it because it is so simple that teachers .disdain it ? 
 Much of teaching and much of learning is unnecessarily 
 laborious because teachers will not do what is simple 
 and natural and obvious. 
 
 In connection with transcription we naturally men- 
 tion the learning of good pieces of literature by heart. 
 It is these two exercises, along with much intelligent 
 reading and intelligent conversing, that constitute the 
 imitative in language-education; and they are as re- 
 markable for not overstraining the powers of mind as 
 they are for building up these powers in the healthiest 
 possible, because most natural, way. 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. 47 
 
 3. Elementary Written Composition. — The next 
 stage in training to the expression of thotight is the 
 formation and writing of connected sentences, either in 
 answer to some question naturally arising out of the 
 reading lesson, or in recording some incident of the day. 
 Though I am opposed to the early beginning of formal 
 grammar, I think that at a very early age, say eight, 
 the attention of pupils should be directed to the fact 
 that a proposition or sentence is an affirmation regard- 
 ing something or other, and that the distinctions of "sub- 
 ject " and " predicate " should be taught. By frequent 
 observation of numerous examples on the blackboard, and 
 not by the expounding of the teacher, children quickly 
 learn this logical groundwork of the sentence, and their 
 knowledge can then be used to correct the sentences 
 which they themselves are required to write on their 
 slates. In this way they will very soon get a firm and 
 solid hold of the structure of a sentence. In examining 
 the sentences made, the teacher should invite the chil- 
 dren to inspect each other's productions, and he should 
 always select some sentence shown up to him which 
 contains a typical blunder, and place it on the black- 
 board for the criticism of the class. It is well also to 
 select the sentence or paragraph which he considers 
 the best and write it on the blackboard, and if he 
 can improve on it himself he should do so there and 
 then. I , 
 
 In all such lessons. Composition text-books are to be 
 avoided. They are not only superfluous, but hurtful. 
 Children should learn to express themselves in connec- 
 tion with the ordinary reading-lessons, the lessons in 
 history and geography, and the ordinary events of the 
 
48 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTBUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 day. Exercises should always arise, as a matter of 
 course, out of the day's experience. The moment we 
 formulate processes in a text-book and give the book 
 to the children, the formal, pedantic, and formidable 
 aspect of the subject frightens the pupil, and misleads 
 him into the notion that he is required to do some- 
 thing very hard and uninteresting, whereas he is really 
 engaged in what is natural and pleasant. The elements 
 of composition should be acquired without the children 
 knowing that they are acquiring them'. 
 
 4. Abridgment and Narrative Writing. — The next 
 stage is to accustom the pupils to write consecutive 
 paragraphs which contain an abridgment of the day's 
 reading-lesson, or of the lesson in geography or history, 
 or which reproduce something read to them. The 
 stories read should, up to the beginning of the upper- 
 primary period, be " .lEsop's Fables," and pieces of this 
 class. This for many obvious reasons which it is un- 
 necessary to give in detail. In order to compel the 
 children to see when they have made a complete sen- 
 tence, each sentence should be written for a time as a 
 separate paragraph. Abridgments should frequently 
 be made with the book open. This abridgment and 
 reproduction takes the form of pr^s-ymting in the 
 secondary stage ; and by precis- writing I mean the re- 
 production of some historical narrative or some report 
 so arranged as to bring out its leading points logically, 
 and clearly, and briefly. 
 
 1 The teacher should have one or two text-books for his own 
 private guidance. 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. 49 
 
 5. Translation. — During the secondary stage of 
 education, and indeed also in the last year of the upper- 
 primary, advantage should be taken of the study of a 
 foreign language for the purposes of English composition. 
 The day's lesson should be written out in good English. 
 There is, probably, no exercise so useful as this for giving 
 a command of the native tongue. In the first place, 
 the materials are provided and the pupil has simply to 
 think of the language he shall use : linguistic expression 
 is thus brought into prominence. In the second place, 
 the language to be used is suggested. In the third place, 
 the contrast between the foreign and the vernacular 
 comes into relief and compels attention to the com- 
 parison of the two, thereby evoking that consciousness 
 of language which it is one of our aims to give. In the 
 fourth place, the different turns of expression which 
 must be resorted to, when translating into the verna- 
 cular, leads the pupil to weigh words and phrases and 
 idioms, and to decide as to the right and wrong, the 
 better and the worse. Thus not only is his range of 
 English extended, but the critical faculty, as applied to 
 language, is cultivated. The imagination, as well as 
 the j udgment, is exercised. 
 
 6. Imitation. — About the close of the secondary 
 stage it may not be a bad exercise to require youths to 
 read a good deal of an author, such, say, as Addison, or 
 Macaulay, or Burke, and to write on some subject in 
 their style — not at all with a view to acquire that 
 style but mainly as an exercise. But I cannot attach 
 much importance to imitation, though it had a leading 
 place in the rhetorical schools of the ancients. In the 
 
 L. L. 4 
 
50 LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. [LECT. 
 
 case of a foreign tongue, on the other hand, whether 
 ancient or modem, I am disposed to think that a 
 youth who means to acquire style, in addition to gram- 
 mar, should select a good author, and write in imitation 
 of him. 
 
 7. Original Essays or Theses and Reproductions. — 
 The word Essay is a hateful word : it is associated with 
 so much iu schools — especially girls' schools — that is 
 false and hollow and meretricious. The Romano- 
 Hellenic word Thesis or Theme is perhaps less objection- 
 able. Independent essays on subjects prescribed may 
 be begun as early as the upper-primary period if you 
 confine the subjects to a narrative of what has been ex- 
 perienced, or to a description of something which Aas 
 heen seen. Abstract subjects, such as Patience, Forti- 
 tude, Justice, and so forth, are wholly out of place, and 
 iadeed ridiculous, till the age of sixteen or seventeen 
 at the earliest, and, even then, compositions on such sub- 
 jects should be written confessedly (and not furtively) 
 on the basis of treatises by good writers. They thus be- 
 come essenjiially reproductions, and are harmless. They 
 are also useful in so far as they enable boys to try to 
 fly with their own wings, and if they should fall, they 
 fall much to their own advantage, and not, like Lucifer, 
 "never to hope again." Letter- writing, giving an imagi- 
 nary account of a journey, is a useful form of original 
 composition; and I need scarcely add that no boy or girl 
 should leave even a primary school without being 
 taught to use the ordinary forms of business or social 
 correspondence. / 
 
 But whatever is done, let it arise out of the daily 
 
III.] LANGUAGE AS SUBSTANCE OF INSTRUCTION. 51 
 
 work and occupations, or contemporary events, and be 
 natural and not forced. And always remember that 
 it is chiefly by the extensive and critical reading of 
 good authors that we get possession of our own or 
 any other language. It is true that we cannot be said 
 to possess language, or anything else, till we can use it; 
 but we must first have the language to use : and this 
 we shall never get out of the miserable scraps read in 
 school, even when supplemented by boys' books of ad- 
 venture. 
 
 Let us now look at -language-instruction in its 
 Formal or Absti'act character, i.e., as Grammar. 
 
 4—2 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. GRAMMAR, 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES. 
 
 I HAVE entirely failed in the preceding argument if 
 I have not satisfied every unprejudiced mind that Lan- 
 guage taught as a concrete subject, that is to say, with 
 special reference to the substance of thought, both 
 nourishes and trains the mind — ^nourishes it intel- 
 lectually and morally, and trains it by carrying it 
 through the processes of thinking, which find their 
 body in the forms of utterance. Om' own language, 
 indeed, at once nutrifying and training, is the main 
 instrument of education : it is only by an ample and 
 adequate treatment of it that the teaching of the 
 school can be made contributory to the maintenance of 
 the national Hfe, and above all, to the supreme ethical 
 purpose of man's existence as an individual and as a 
 member of a society. Let the young then read largely 
 with understanding. 
 
 But (as I have also shown) there is such a thing a& 
 Discipline of intelligence ; and this discipline, as dis- 
 tinguished fi-om training, is most directly and effectively 
 insured by formal or abstract studies, such as arithmetic, 
 mathematics, grammar, and logic; and this because 
 
LEGT.IV.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 53 
 
 the occupation of the mind with the abstract is the 
 nearest approach to the occupation of mind with itself 
 as an organism of thinking. Education without disci- 
 pline must be held to be defective, both as an intel- 
 lectual and moral process. Discipline is an essential 
 part of all education, intellectual and moral, of a rationajl/ 
 being ; but it is always to be kept in due subordinatioi 
 to nutrition and training — especially up to the age o^ 
 puberty'. 
 
 Given, then, that we recognise the significance of 
 the teaching of the formal in language with a view to 
 the education of a mind, the question now is, How 
 shall we proceed ? In other words. What shall be our 
 method ? 
 
 Now we cannot adequately deal with method in 
 teaching grammar without applying the principles and 
 rules of Method. Were this the time and place, I 
 should ask you to follow me through an analysis of the 
 movements of the human mind in learning anything 
 whatsoever, with a view to the deduction of these rules 
 from the Science of education. As I am now dealing 
 with the Art of instruction alone, I must assume these 
 ■rules as established. They are not rules applicable to 
 grammar alone, but to all subjects of instruction. I shall 
 draw on them, only so far as necessary. As deduced 
 by me from the Science of education, they will be found 
 briefly summarized in the appendix. 
 
 1 Moral instruction, training, and discipline have to be separately 
 treated. It is only in so far as intellectual training and the study of 
 language bear on them that they enter into our argument in these 
 lectures. 
 
54 LANGUAGE AS A FOEMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 A few words, in addition to what has been said, in 
 past lectures, on the nature of the abstract, will intro- 
 duce us to our fundamental principle of procedure in 
 dealing with the abstract and formal in education. Man 
 does not live upon abstracts. There is no feeding in 
 them. And yet he is for ever abstracting and gene- 
 ralizihg, correctly or incorrectly, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously. He perceives anything only by determining 
 it as a single ; but if he stopped there, the world of 
 knowledge would be a world of isolated atoms. He 
 sees the common in the diverse, and then proceeds to 
 abstract and generalize. But this he does, not for the 
 sake of the abstract or general in itself It is merely 
 a logical device, so to speak, whereby he attains to a 
 true knowledge of the individual real things them- 
 selves, as they truly exist in all their complexity. 
 The general and abstract, in short, reveal to him a 
 community of character and principle in the diverse, 
 and so help to reduce all to a unity of fact and process 
 of which all individuals are only the particular mani- 
 festations or cases. The moment we begin to play with 
 abstractions, without constant reference to things, we 
 find ourselves in a sea of troubles. Accordingly, ab- 
 straction and generalization, while they start from real 
 things, return also to real things : they interpret them 
 by showing their relations and common ground, and 
 find repose ultimately only in the primal unity of all 
 differences — God Himself. 
 
 The occupation of the intelligence with the abstract 
 is, as I have said, a discipline, because in contemplating 
 the abstract we are not far from the contemplation of 
 mind itself in its nakedness as a living process, and 
 
IV.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 55 
 
 are thus making an almost direct acquaintance with 
 the organon of all knowledge. But this is not (as I 
 have shown) in the truest sense education, but only 
 that part of it which we call discipline: it is to be 
 compared to the sharpening of the edge of a tool and 
 the strengthening of the body of it for some practical 
 purpose. 
 
 Now, Grammar, like every other science, is a system 
 of abstractions. And like all other abstractions it must 
 be always kept in close intimacy with the real on which 
 it rests — the real of words and sentences, if the ab- 
 stractions are to have any significance at all for the 
 mind of a boy ; or, for that matter, of a man. 
 
 This remark gives the key to the leading principle 
 of method in the teaching of the abstracts and generals 
 of all sciences as well as of grammar. The subject- 
 matter may be abstract, but the method must be the 
 B,EAL method. The formal must grow out of, rest on, 
 and continually refer back to the matter of words and 
 sentences. If this be not done, the teaching fails as 
 a discipline in the abstract, and it fails also of its 
 ultimate aim, — the acquisition of power over language. 
 Our method, then, must be the real method if we are 
 to give our teaching life and meaning to the learner. 
 
 1. The formal or abstract in language — in other 
 words. Grammar — should not be begun until the mind 
 of the pupil is sufficiently advanced to be able to grasp 
 it. "Of course not," will be the general response to 
 this obvious proposition. And yet this rule of method 
 is scarcely ever attended to in practice. My own 
 opinion is (but this is a matter on which there will be 
 
56 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 difference of view) that the beginning of the twelfth 
 year is quite the earliest age at which grammar can be 
 effectively taught — taught so as to be educative in its 
 effects. At an earlier age it is hearsay knowledge. 
 Prior to the age of eleven, and indeed very early, a 
 child should, by the help of numerous examples, be 
 taught to recognise the subject and the predication 
 regarding it — the ivhole logical subject, that is to say, 
 and the whole predicate — as going to constitute a sen- 
 tence or proposition. This formal condition of a pos- 
 sible sentence can not only be taught very early, but it 
 is for practical reasons desirable to teach it early \ A 
 recognition of this fundamental fact of both grammar 
 and logic is very helpful in enabling children to under- 
 stand what they read, and to express what they desire 
 to express. Beyond this one grammatical fact we should 
 not go until the pupil has entered his twelfth year. 
 Before this age, grammar has no place, either in the 
 infant school or the lower primary, that is not usurped. 
 The first objection which will meet us is this : 
 Inasmuch as a subsequent rule of method demands 
 that foreign grammars should be based on the native 
 grammar, we should, by beginning native grammar 
 only in the twelfth year, postpone Latin and French 
 till the thirteenth at the earliest. To which my answer 
 is : By all means ; why not ? In the case of boys and 
 girls who were intending to study French and Latin, 
 there would be no objection to giving them, by the 
 help of the blackboard, a certain number of French or 
 Latin vocables before the thirteenth year — names of 
 the familiar things of ordinary experience. But more 
 ^ In a previous lecture I have said at eight years of age. 
 
I V.J LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 57 
 
 than this it is not desirable to do. I am speaking of 
 general school education ; the merely imitative acqui- 
 sition of elementary conversation in French or German 
 which children may acquire in the nursery — mere 
 memory work at best — lies outside my present argu- 
 ment. But let me say here, in passing (as a private 
 conviction of my own), that children should be made to 
 live in the atmosphere of their mother-tongue alone, | 
 and think through the vehicle of it alone, if we are to 
 promote in them depth and solidity of nature and unity 
 of character. 
 
 2. As the first rule of method concerns the "when," 
 so a second rule of method to which I shall advert 
 concerns the "how much." The rule of method to 
 which I refer is that which requires us always to keep 
 the practical aim in view. "Turn everything to use 
 which you teach, and teach nothing which you 
 cannot turn to use." This is a large question, and 
 would afford materials for much interesting discussion 
 were I writing a big book on method instead of a brief 
 course of lectures. I must be excused for dealing here 
 somewhat dogmatically with this, as indeed with some 
 other, requirements of method. 
 
 You at once see that you would not shovel the 
 whole of grammar, even in the restricted school range 
 of this subject, into the mind of a child in his first year 
 of studying it. And yet we all know that in the 
 department of Latin this was done for hundreds of 
 years, and still is done in many places — not only the 
 whole of the formal generalizations, but the exceptions 
 to boot. 
 
58 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 It may be advisable to turn aside for a moment 
 -from the main current of my argument to meet the 
 obvious remark which all of us can for ourselves put 
 into the mouth of the fossilized teacher, "all of 
 the olden time," before he utters it: "And yet they 
 got up their grammar somehow, and knew it too, 
 perhaps better than any of your modern boys brought 
 up on your new-fangled methods." To this I reply 
 "Did they?" Who were the "they." The teaching 
 of Great Britain, in its secondary schools, has been till 
 quite recently, exclusively the teaching of Latin and 
 Greek. A few clever boys out of the thousands who 
 have passed through the schools — boys whose brains 
 were such that they would have mastered Egyptian 
 hieroglyphics and Etruscan inscriptions, with all that 
 has been written about them, if these had been pre- 
 scribed — have, of course, overcome the defects inherent 
 in the no-method of the past through the innate 
 energy of their own minds. But what of the rest? Is 
 it not high time that classical masters should cease to 
 humbug the public on this subject? I use a strong 
 expression, but I use it deliberately and in cold blood. 
 
 In this connexion I would have you observe an 
 irresistible claim of sound method. It is this: it always, 
 and at every point secures the education of the mind. 
 By this I mean that at whatever point a boy's study 
 of a subject may be arrested, he has yet received from 
 the study, so far as it has gone, that hind of education 
 in the exercise of the processes of mind which is not 
 measurable by the standard of quantity of material 
 annexed, but is yet the most potent of all disciplinary 
 influences in his future intellectual life. If method 
 
IV.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINK. 5& 
 
 as opposed to no-method does not accomplish this, but 
 merely makes the acquisition of this or that subject 
 quicker and surer, it can have little interest for the 
 philosophical educationalist, though it may still retain 
 its attractions for the practical instructor. 
 
 As regards mere acquisition, I affirm that "no- 
 method" has been a scandalous failure. 
 
 Let us return to the "how much," as determined by 
 practical use. What is the practical use of English 
 grammar as distinguished from pure intellectual disci- 
 pline, which intellectual discipline may be called a 
 theoretical use ? I answer, first, the enabling a boy 
 better to grasp the language of literature ; and, secondly, 
 the enabling a boy better to express his own experi- 
 ences and thoughts (when he has thoughts to express). 
 Do you think you do this by the detailed analysis of 
 sentences now in vogue ? Beyond that general analysis 
 which brings into relief the logical construction of a 
 complex sentence, you do not help the boy. You pre- 
 sent him with linguistic riddles to solve, and make his 
 native tongue as offensive to him as was Latin when it 
 meant a mass of Latin rules in Latin. Let us protect 
 our vernacular literature, at least, from this barbaric dis- 
 section, and not defeat the literary purpose we should 
 always keep prominently before us in teaching lan- 
 guage. 
 
 We have been speaking of the "how much" we 
 should teach in all, that is to say, up to the close of 
 the secondary school course, the age of 17 complete, 
 at which point I place the proper termination of the 
 secondary school. But it is evident to you that the 
 "how much" applies equally to each successive year of 
 
60 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 study, and that we must limit each year of study by 
 the age of the pupil, and by what we can turn to use. 
 All else is useless; all else is positively hurtful. 
 
 Here now enter the subsidiary rules of method: 
 "Little at a time, and that little well." "Little by 
 little, step by step." " Without haste, but without 
 rest;" and so forth. 
 
 It may seem strange to you that one lecturing on 
 method should (especially after what he has said in his 
 first lecture) insist so strongly on the practical, and 
 keep out of view the theoretical aim, the pure discipline 
 of the intelligence. It would be too long a task, and 
 carry me too far into the psychology of method, to 
 explain this. But if I did, you would find the result 
 to be this, that a sound theory or philosophy of instruc- 
 tion and education is always practical, both in its 
 instruments and its aims. Further, that a sound 
 method of mere instruction is also a sound method of 
 mental discipline; that the one secures the other, and 
 thus the two duties of the teacher — discipline and 
 instruction — are harmonized. 
 
 3. The method of procedure must be Real. The real, 
 the real, and again the real — that is the one governing 
 word, nob only in all matter of education, but also in 
 educational method, even in the sphere of the formal 
 and abstract. In teaching real subjects, such as litera- 
 ture, geography, science, it is manifest enough that the 
 method must be real : but what I say is that in teach- 
 ing formal or abstract subjects, such as grammar, arith- 
 metic, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, the method must be 
 real — that is to say, the abstract must rest on the 
 
IV.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 61 
 
 concrete, be led up to through the concrete, and return 
 to the concrete. For, in truth, there is no abstract in 
 the universe, and there is no abstract in the mind of 
 man which is not an abstract of, and in, the concrete. 
 Hence the rule of method to which I am directing 
 your attention, viz., the abstract and general must 
 always be taught through the concrete. 
 
 I have spoken above of the abstract in general ; this 
 is a fitting place to repeat the substance of what I then 
 said in specific relation to the subject of language. 
 Language, as an abstract or formal school study, is the 
 study of those generalizations of likenesses and differ- 
 ences in vocables and in the organic relation of these, 
 which, with the addition of the external history of 
 word-forms, we sum up under the name Grammar. 
 When, again, we generalize the characteristics of con- 
 tinuous composition, its logical sequence and persuasive 
 development — all viewed in relation to the attainment 
 of its end, whatever that end may be, whether to please 
 or convince — we call the body of generalized rules 
 and maxims of composition which the analysis yields, 
 Ehetoric. Grammar and Rhetoric alike necessarily 
 tend to become a complicated body of organized rules, 
 and as such to become an object of study with a view 
 to correct expression in the one case, and eloquent 
 expression in the other. Now the learning of the body 
 of grammar, even with examples tagged on, will not 
 make a correct writer, nor will the learning of the rules 
 of rhetoric, with illustrations tagged on, make an elo- 
 quent writer. Nay, I go further than this, and hold 
 that neither the one nor the other will even enable 
 you to appreciate grammatical accuracj'' and nicety on 
 
62 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 the one hand, or literary form and the secret of orato- 
 rical or poetical beauty on the other. 
 
 To be of any utility, either as a discipline, or as 
 training, or as a knowledge, grammar and rhetoric have 
 to be studied through examples. Grammar has to be 
 studied in and through sentences, and to be extracted 
 from sentences by the pupil if it is to be really taught; 
 and, so also, rhetoric has to be studied in and through 
 the masterpieces of literature, and extracted from them, 
 if it is to be really taught. This last sentence sums up 
 the true significance of the Revival of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries in the department of education. 
 The meaning of the Revival was not always fully com- 
 prehended by the teachers of the time. Hence the 
 belief in style simply as style, and the craze of the Cice- 
 ronians. Hence, too, the inevitable reaction and retro- 
 gression in the school to words, rules, and forms, to the 
 neglect of the realities of literature and of observation. 
 Accordingly the Baconian school, when it arose, was 
 perfectly justified in its assault on "words;" and to this 
 day it is justified. 
 
 It is, in truth, in the interests — the perennial 
 interests — of the revival of letters that we call on 
 teachers to note that grammar and rhetoric, if taught 
 as abstract systems, are a mere aggregate of names, 
 dead names. These so-called "arts" must be taught in 
 close connexion with the living body of flesh and 
 blood on which they rest. To illustrate this in detail 
 would carry me beyond my present purpose. I am 
 content thus far to have brought before you the dis- 
 tinction between language as a real study and language 
 as a formal or abstract study, and to have emphasized 
 
IV.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 68 
 
 the further fact that in teaching the formal we should 
 do so really, if we desire to succeed in our educative 
 aim. "Matter before Form," says Comenius. 
 
 All this is said in vindication of what I consider to 
 be the leading rule of method in all formal subjects, 
 which is that they should be taught, much more than 
 they are, as real subjects, and that the methods should 
 be real. Grammar, in brief, should always be taught 
 in close relation to the use to which words are put in 
 expressing a thought, and the functions of each word 
 and phrase in the thought as expressed. 
 
 The above remarks on the teaching of grammar are 
 of general application. I would now pass to the teach- 
 ing of the grammar of our native tongue. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 GRAMMAR OF THE VERNACULAR TONGUE.— 
 PURPOSE AND METHOD. 
 
 It is apparent from the nature of an examination in 
 a sentence of English, with a view to the thorough 
 understanding of it — an examination which I gave you 
 in a former lecture — that the pupil who fully compre- 
 hends it, has already analysed words and clauses in 
 relation to thought, and performed an important ana- 
 lytico-synthetic exercise. He may now be said to have 
 an implicit knowledge of the grammar and analysis of 
 the sentence. Our object in teaching grammar is to 
 make the implicit knowledge explicit and conscious, 
 and to do this we classify words and clauses under 
 certain abstract generalizations or heads which we call 
 Noun, Adjective, and so forth, according to the function 
 they respectively discharge in the expression of a 
 thought. We then generalize the logical connexion 
 of the words and the rules observed in connecting 
 them, and we call this Sjmtax. 
 
 Grammar, then, is the analysis of words and sen- 
 tences, with a view to collecting together all those words 
 and relations that are like each other under a common 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 65 
 
 designation or name. The exercise, accordingly, is pre- 
 eminently analytico-synthetic, or inductive. 
 
 At the risk of repetition let me say: we are not now 
 teaching concrete realities by means of their symbols — 
 words and sentences ; we are teaching the generalized 
 and abstract relations of words and sentences ; and our 
 instruction is therefore formal, and no longer concrete. 
 It is Grammar. 
 
 When we carry this analysis further and deal with 
 the inner logical development of any writing, and still 
 further to its assthetic characteristics, we train (as I 
 have said above) in formal logic and rhetoric. 
 
 The scope of our grammar teaching is limited by 
 what is practicable within the years of school life, and 
 must therefore be so taught that at whatever stage a 
 boy's education ceases, he shall have obtained the benefit 
 which gra'mmatical teaching is supposed to give; in 
 other words, that the purpose of teaching it shall be 
 so far attained. 
 
 Now this purpose is to give discipline by means of 
 a highly analytico-synthetic exercise of an abstract or 
 formal kind, whereby we make him conscious, through 
 the concrete, of intellectual processes ; and further, to 
 give greater command over words and their relations, 
 as used by others and by himself. 
 
 Method : First Stage. 
 
 1. I think that the first rule of method, which 
 requires us to adapt subjects of instruction to the 
 growth of mind, demands special attention in our 
 consideration of the way of teaching grammar, or the 
 analysis of language. We must not burden the young 
 L. L. 5 
 
66 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 with this abstract work too early. By the perusal of 
 simple literature as a synthetic study after the method 
 already laid down, and by the practice of composition 
 as an imitative exercise, a boy is subjected to the 
 training which language gives without deliberately dis- 
 secting it. My opinion is that we should rely on these 
 exercises almost solely till a boy enters his twelfth year. 
 Prior to this, however, and solely with a view to obviate 
 the blunders that pupils constantly make in imitative 
 composition, I have said that the division of every sen- 
 tence into subject and predicate should be given even 
 as early as the ninth year, and constantly applied on 
 the blackboard to correct errors in the sentence-making 
 of the pupils. Nothing more than this, I repeat, should 
 be taught up to the beginning of the twelfth year, and 
 then the dissection of language should be set about as 
 a daily exercise. In what way ? 
 
 2. We are dealing with generalizations, conse- 
 quently we ought not to give these general words 
 called the parts of speech, or rules of syntax, to our 
 pupils, but guide them in the attempt to find them 
 out for themselves. This is what is meant by the 
 real method. You have, however, to propound to your 
 pupils the object of search, just as a science professor 
 would propound the object of search to his pupils in a 
 laboratory. For example, the proper analytic exercise 
 consists in seeking for those things among a multitude 
 that have a common character, and collecting these 
 together under that common character to which you 
 give a name. This is a generalization. But' in teaching 
 the very young we must lead the way by telling them 
 the character which we are seeking : e.g. this sentence. 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 67 
 
 "the warm sun shines by day, and the bright moon 
 and twinkling stars by night " having been written on 
 the board, we ask for those words that are names of 
 things. These being picked out and arranged in columns 
 by themselves on the board, we next give a few addi- 
 tional sentences and proceed in the same way. The 
 words thus brought together as " Name-words " in the 
 column are then revised, and the first lesson in grammar 
 is given. The child has brought them together himself 
 with your co-operation and guidance. 
 
 Thus we fulfil two rules of sound method, for we 
 teach generalizations as generalizations, i.e. through 
 particulars, and we get the pupil to instruct himself 
 
 3. The next step is to pick out name-words from 
 the day's lesson, and to give this as a slate exercise in 
 school or to be done at home. Thus we fulfil the rules 
 of sound method which require us to repeat and revise, 
 and further, to turn to use, what has been acquired. 
 We may at this stage substitute the word noun for 
 ■"name-word," but we should, in the whole course of 
 grammatical teaching, be continually testing the pupil 
 in the knowledge of the simple meaning and force of 
 all the technical words used, and this because they are 
 Latin and highly abstract terms. — 
 
 The greatest difficulty you will meet with at this 
 stage of teaching will be the recognition by the boy of 
 those nouns which are names of things not sensible. 
 This is because a certain power of abstraction is neces- 
 sary to the mere identifying of them. You overcome 
 this and other difficulties only by frequent repetition 
 of the same sentences and continual construction of 
 similar ones on the blackboard, taking care to confine 
 
 5—2 
 
68 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 yourself to simple, or at most compound, sentences. 
 Exposition will not be of much use. 
 
 Never give a lesson of more than ten minutes' 
 length. Two lessons of ten minutes each daily are of 
 far greater advantage than one of sixty minutes. Thus 
 we fulfil the rule, " Little by little : a short step at a 
 time.'^ 
 
 4. We now proceed gradually in the same way 
 {i.e. step by step, little by little, repeating and revising, 
 and turning to use daily) with adnouns (or adjectives), 
 then for-nouns, then verbs, and then adverbs, giving 
 five or six lessons, at least, to each new part of speech. 
 A verb should be introduced as a "doing or telling 
 word," and an adverb as qualifying a verb. But a 
 mechanical help may be given (in the case of verbs) 
 by suggesting to them to try a word by putting "/" 
 before it and see if it makes sense. 
 
 5. Having reached this point we should pause a 
 while until we are satisfied that these generalizations 
 are thoroughly known ; in this way obeying the rule 
 demanding exactness as necessary if there is to be a 
 sure foundation for the next step, knowledge being an 
 organic growth; obeying too the further rule which 
 requires us to dwell long over the beginnings of a 
 subject. [If we put "a" and "the'' among the ad- 
 nouns, which is the simplest way of doing, as well as,, 
 perhaps, the most correct, we reduce the parts of speech 
 to seven, for interjections do not count ; and of these 
 seven the five most important are now acquired.] 
 
 In the course of three or four weeks from the date 
 of beginning, provided there is continual turning to use 
 of the knowledge gained, we may go on to prepositions. 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 69 
 
 and thereafter to conjunctions. When the words under 
 a class-name are limited in number, as in the case of 
 conjunctions and prepositions, I would have the children 
 make a list of them as they occur, and enter them in a 
 grammar note-book, with which each child should be 
 provided. In this way the child gradually makes his 
 own grammar-book, and the rule as to self-instruction 
 is fully operative. 
 
 The pupil, before he has begun this grammar course, 
 is presumed, remember, to be familiar with the things 
 and names, "subject" and "predicate." If he is not, 
 you must interpose this instruction before you can 
 rationally teach conjunctions. 
 
 6. The next step is to teach number. This we do 
 by asking the children to make the plural, and then 
 putting down such words as they may make — e.g. 
 horse, horses; church, churches — on the board. The 
 pupils quickly see that the one word denotes a single 
 thing, and the other a more-than-single thing ; and we 
 may now teach the terms " singular " and " plural," as 
 more convenient. Thus we follow the rule of teaching 
 through the senses, and the further rule of constructing 
 the abstract out of particulars already implicitly known. 
 
 7. Having become familiar with singular and plural 
 in a single lesson followed by a home exercise, we can 
 now put on the board and have an amusing, exercise in 
 exceptional words, such as mouse, ox, sheep, and so 
 forth. Thxis you follow the rule, " The prominent or 
 salient facts of a subject should be taught first ; details 
 and exceptions afterwards." /lo bother children with 
 rules for the formation of the plural, and to require 
 them to learn by heart lists of exceptions which they 
 
To LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 already know through colloquial usage, seems to me a 
 perverse attempt to make difficult what is easy, and to 
 disgust children with what is, when properly taught, a 
 pleasing and even amusing exercise. You are entitled 
 to ask for the plural of child, or ox, &c., but not to ask 
 for a list of irregular plurals. This last is rote-memory 
 work.\Many examination papers are constructed on 
 this mse principle ; and not only in grammar : and not 
 only in schools, but in universities. 
 
 8. Gender is in English a very easy matter. I 
 would, however, for a time use the terms male, female, 
 and neither, and employ the word kind instead of the 
 Latin term gender. I think you may, without danger 
 to the child's intellectual and moral progress, omit the 
 feminine of " Landgrave " and certain other words of 
 this class. 
 
 9. The knowledge up to this time acquired by the 
 pupil — and I use the word acquired advisedly, for it 
 has not been put into him, but brought out of himself 
 by himself, with your guidance and co-operation — 
 being thoroughly revised, the pupil is now in a position 
 to name the class of each of the words in four or five 
 lines of the reading-lesson of the day. Occasionally he 
 should do this on the slate in columns. From day to 
 day he is adding to his stock of prepositions and con- 
 junctions, which he inserts in his note-book. He may 
 now learn the distinction between proper and common 
 nouns, but further distinctions should be scrupulously 
 avoided. The salient and prominent are to take prece- 
 dence of the rare and exceptional. Note that we are 
 daily turning to use what has been acquired; and in 
 order to maintain an intelligent connexion with past 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 71 
 
 teaching, and the organic character of our teaching, we 
 must be constantly going back, by the help of the black- 
 board, to our past introductory teachings and thereby 
 ■testing intelligence. 
 
 A short daily lesson during one school term ought 
 to bring a class composed of pupils in their twelfth 
 year as far as I have yet got. A fair familiarity with 
 the parts of speech, the numbers and genders, will now 
 have been obtained, and we then enter upon the second 
 stage of grammar-teaching, which involves us in syntax ; 
 and syntax is unintelligible save as analysis. 
 
 Second Stage. 
 
 1. You now bring more conspicuously forward the 
 knowledge the pupil already has of subject and predi- 
 cate, thus: 
 
 The child sleeps. 
 
 The child cries, 
 
 The child dresses her doll, 
 
 and so on. Keep in mind the rule of method that 
 generals are to be formed out of known particulars. 
 
 The verbs having been named, you now call for the 
 difference between cries and dresses, and bring into 
 view the fact of transitive verb and the noun as an object. 
 And why ? Because the verb does not express by itself 
 a complete sense. 
 
 2. For the next week or two (taking care mean- 
 while to observe the memory rule of method, and 
 daily to revise briefly all the child as yet knows), you do 
 nothing but exercise your pupils in this distinction of 
 subject with intransitive verb, as the principal word in the 
 
72 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 predicate, and transitive verb as the principal word in 
 the predicate, but requiring an object. In the course 
 of these exercises the change of form which the verb in 
 the present tense undergoes, when we substitute a 
 plural subject for a singular one, is apparent. By 
 dwelling long on this I obey the rule of Exactness as 
 necessary to a sure and solid foundation for further 
 knowledge. 
 
 Observe that at this stage we still continue to give 
 the whole subject and the whole predicate, but we have 
 now begun to distinguish the subject-noun and the 
 object-noun. The words in italics in what follows are 
 the whole subject : " That fierce nation, the Goths, 
 emerging with daring plans from the northern regions 
 of Europe, armed with sword and spear, advanced 
 slowly but steadily southward.' 
 
 Subject-noun and object-noun are the terms to be 
 used instead of nominative and objective case. 
 
 I need not further illustrate this stage to those who 
 have studied the analysis of sentences. 
 
 3. The pupil next turns to use the above instruc- 
 tions and all his previous instructions (thus revising and 
 repeating) ; for he now parses lines from his daily read- 
 ing-lesson — that is to say, he names first the whole 
 subject of a sentence and the whole predicate ; he then 
 selects the predicative verb, and next the leading sub- 
 ject-noun, and the object-noun in relation to the verb 
 when it is transitive. He then names each part of 
 speech successively, points out the nouns which the 
 adjectives qualify, also their number, gender, and so on. 
 The second term of the school year is now at an end. 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 73 
 
 Third Stage. 
 
 1. You next direct the pupil's attention to the fact 
 that the words called prepositions, which he has been 
 gradually collecting in his note-book, do not make a 
 complete sense any more than transitive verbs do, with- 
 out an object ; and you exercise him in this with the 
 help of the blackboard and embrace this piece of syntax 
 in your parsing lessons henceforth. 
 
 2. When you enter on tense, you follow the rule 
 that in teaching we are raising vague and implicit 
 knowledge to clear and explicit knowledge, by begin- 
 ning thus : — " When you leave school you say, ' I go 
 home,' but you left school yesterday also, and would you 
 say, ' I go home yesterday ' ? To-morrow also you will 
 leave school and you say, 'I shall go home to-morrow.'" 
 They know the tenses implicitly already, and you are 
 now simply raising the vagueness of the implicit to the 
 clearness of the explicit; [the word time being always 
 used instead of the word tense^ Every fresh step is to 
 be written on the board, and in some cases, as in that 
 of time, illustrated to the eye. But only present, past, 
 and future should at this stage be taught. All this 
 will carry you well into the third school term ; for an 
 endless variety of simple exercises are needed at this 
 stage, and you cannot go fast. /(Step by step: little by 
 little: be exact: repeat.)] Moreover, remember that you 
 are parsing daily as far as the pupil can parse, and so 
 applying all knowledge as yet acquired. 
 
 3. Observe now that the pupil has been gradually, 
 as the result of his own observation, acquiring a few 
 general rules of Syntax, viz. : " A verb agrees with its 
 
74 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 subjeet-noun"; "A transitive verb and a preposition 
 require an object-noun." These, after they have been 
 inscribed on the blackboard, should be written out by 
 him in his note-book. 
 
 4. You now decline the pronouns, introducing them 
 in connexion with the verbs and not by themselves: 
 thus, you say, " I learn my lesson," but if you are speak- 
 ing to another you say — what? " You learn your lesson." 
 [Here explain about ' thou ' as the true-singular.] If 
 speaking of another you say, " He or she learns his or 
 her lesson." 
 
 In this way you pick out the personal pronouns and 
 write them out fully declined on the board, and get 
 the pupils to copy them down in their note-books with 
 a view to a home-lesson. 
 
 5. The pupil is then led to extend his knowledge 
 of time or tense and then moods, you using such words 
 as telling-mood, commanding-mood, " may "-mood. You 
 work out the verb in all its tenses and moods on the 
 blackboard in the same way, i.e., by drawing them out of 
 the children and getting them, after a few slate exercises, 
 to write them out in tabular form in their note-books. 
 
 A thorough knowledge of the above course gives 
 a child as extended and definite a knowledge of the 
 foundations of grammar as any boy or girl need have. 
 Revise and re-revise, and apply the knowledge in every 
 possible way; above all, forcing your way through words 
 to realities ; e.g., gender is kind, singular is single, verb 
 is word, tense is time. Use these words indifferently, 
 or repeat them ; e.g., " What time or tense is it ?" 
 ' You will have observed that I have assumed that 
 
V.j LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 75 
 
 you teach orally by the aid of the blackboard and the 
 ordinary lesson-book only, the child making notes in 
 his book, and, in point of fact, constructing a Grammar 
 for himself. But you yourself should be guided by 
 some Httle text-book y this for the sake of the exercises 
 and as a relief to your own mind and memory. 
 
 The pupil has now reached his thirteenth year (twelve 
 complete) and may have some cheap text-book put into 
 his hands. I speak of the mass of children. He will 
 now, at the beginning of his second year, very quickly 
 run over the text-book with you: revising all he has 
 acquired in one term : but the chief addition to his 
 knowledge in doing so will be in the relative pronouns. 
 There is really little or nothing more to do except to 
 confirm what has been already acquired by means of 
 a daily brief exercise. The pupil will now begin a 
 foreign language with confidence, while daily parsing 
 his Englisfi and extending his knowledge of analysis, 
 step by step and slowly. But let me beseech you not 
 to go beyond what is called general analysis. Analysis 
 of sentences is unquestionably overdone. The value of 
 it will be found to consist in the correct application of a 
 little thoroughly known. For example, if a boy, even at 
 fourteen, can readily distinguish the enlargement of the 
 subject, the extension of the predicate, the principal 
 and subordinate clauses, the noun clause, the adnoun 
 clause, and the adverb clause, he knows the logical or- 
 ganization of a complex sentence, and this is enough. 
 Avoid minute distinctions which draw attention away 
 from the broader and more uniform relations of clauses ; 
 but take care that the boy is thoroughly familiar with 
 these and ready in discriminating them. I need 
 
76 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 scarcely say that analysis, like ordinary grammar, should 
 -be extracted from sentences by the pupil with your help, 
 not learned from a book. 
 
 The purpose you have in view must never be lost 
 sight of. It is a disciplinary purpose ; but besides this, 
 and chiefly, you wish to increase the boy's power of 
 seeing through the meaning of long and complex sen- 
 tences, especially in poetry, and so extending his grasp 
 and comprehension of literary language. You have 
 the further practical purpose of giving him a more 
 exact grasp of the language he himself daily uses, with 
 the view to his employing it in his set compositions. 
 
 As a help I would be disposed to draw up a wall- 
 sheet of the chief points in grammar and analysis to be 
 constantly referred to. Do not buy somebody else's 
 wall-sheet. I do not know what may be best in train- 
 ing mechanical engineers, but in general education the 
 master and his boys should not only make the machine, 
 but also their own tools as they need them. 
 
 Historical grammar may occasionally be referred to 
 by yourself to illustrate peculiarities, such as oxen, 
 kine, &c. ; but no historical grammar should be formally 
 taught before the age of fifteen. If you attempt it in 
 the early stages of study you will hopelessly confuse 
 the child's mind. His business is to learn what is, and 
 not either what was, or may be, or will be. 
 
 I have not spoken of the whole of grammar. It 
 would be an insult to the intellect of teachers were 
 I to enter into details of method over the whole 
 field. 
 
 The importance of method, moreover, in abstract 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 77 
 
 subjects lies in the initiation into the subject, the lay- 
 ing of the foundations of the new knowledge in its 
 organic relations to what is already known — already in 
 the mind of the pupil. 
 
 The principal defect found in the teaching of gram- 
 mar in schools is want of accuracy and precision on the 
 part of the teachers. This prevails to a scandalous 
 extent. This defect manifestly vitiates the whole 
 teaching, and makes it worse than useless. Every 
 schoolmaster thinks he knows English. The import- 
 ance of grammar, remember, for boys and girls lies in 
 this, that it is a valuable exercise of mind in analysis 
 and in the making of verbal distinctions and relations, 
 and therefore cultivates the power of distinguishing in 
 general ; and, above all, of distinguishing between 
 things which are objects of reflection (notional), and 
 not merely the more easily distinguished things of 
 external observation. Now, if the distinctions made 
 cross each other, or are vague and indefinite, parsing 
 and analysis of sentences are illusory. And, again, 
 however accurate the distinctions may be, if they are 
 too numerous, they defeat their own end. 
 
 Grammatical teaching, I have said, can have only 
 three possible objects in a school — the formal discipline 
 of mind, the more thorough understanding of reading- 
 lessons, and the art of composition. The first is not 
 only not promoted, it is unquestionably retarded, by 
 vagueness of definition or the slurring over of difficul- 
 ties; the second and third are not to be attained by 
 mere parsing, unless it take the form of analysis and 
 be supported by actual practice in the construction of 
 sentences and paragraphs. 
 
18 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. 
 
 Merely "fair" results in a subject of a formal kind 
 be it grammar or logic or mathematics, are of little 
 practical value, discipliaary or other. 
 
 In conclusion, let the teacher, or the man of science 
 who does not always fully appreciate grammar, consider 
 for a moment the mental processes a boy is putting 
 himself through when he parses a sentence, and he 
 will see that there is in intelligent and accurate parsing 
 a true discipline of the understanding. Take one of 
 the simplest exercises — the parsing of "shall have seen." 
 The boy first selects the word to which the others are 
 auxiliary, referring it to a class in respect of the func- 
 tion it discharges in the sentence — a process first of 
 analysis and then of deductive reasoning ; he refers the 
 auxiliary portions to their proper "time," — an act of 
 discrimination among possible times or tenses; he relates 
 the whole to its antecedent subject and its sequent 
 object, which involves a perception of relations among 
 separate thoughts and symbols of thoughts. Each 
 successive word attacked is, in truth, a separate pro- 
 blem; and it is this characteristic which gives a sub- 
 ject of school instruction disciplinary value. Realize 
 this and you cannot fail to realize at the same time 
 the importance of the exercise and the necessity for 
 exactness. Analysis of sentences is a repetition of 
 the same kind of intellectual process in relation to the 
 clauses of a complex sentence as that which we apply 
 to words alone in ordinary parsing. 
 
 On this special branch of grammatical teaching 
 known as analysis of sentences, I have not time here 
 to do more than repeat what I have already said : It 
 should be restricted within narrow limits; and secondly. 
 
v.] LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. 79 
 
 //the terms applied to words should also be applied to 
 clauses, viz., noun, adnoun or adjective, adverb &c. f 
 
 In dealing with grammatical teaching I have been 
 restricting myself to the upper primary school which 
 begins at the age of 11. 
 
 If pupils continue at school during the strictly 
 secondary period of instruction, 14 to 17 or 18, the 
 formal grammatical studies find their completion in 
 the elements of comparative philology. By this time 
 both boys and girls have some knowledge of two or 
 three languages, and whether it be Romance or Teu- 
 tonic or Classical philology which we teach, we are 
 exercising the young scholar in scientific work — work 
 as scientific in all its aspects as physics — more scientific 
 in the large sense than chemistry or zoology. No man 
 is a competent linguistic teacher in a secondary school 
 who has not made a study of the comparative science 
 of language. But bear in mind that the teaching of 
 comparative philology and the genesis of English is not 
 instruction in the English language, but a teaching of 
 the science of language as illustrated by the particular 
 case of English — a most interesting study, but a science 
 like any other science. 
 
 About the age of 16, boys and girls who have had 
 a good foundation laid, begin to reason actively, and 
 are not only fit for inductive and deductive scientific 
 studies, but, if these are kept within due limits, they 
 are attracted by them. Here, as everywhere else, all 
 depends on the teacher, on his fulness of knowledge 
 and on his method. Text-books and rules, got up and 
 applied deductively, reduce even the elements of com- 
 
80 LANGUAGE AS A FORMAL DISCIPLINE. [LECT. Y. 
 
 parative grammar, naturally so fresh and stimulating, 
 to the dreariness and aridity which characterized all 
 our teaching in the past, and afflict very much of it 
 now. The desire to attain to a measurable result in 
 acquisition is ruinous. What we should aim at is 
 a natural and pleasing activity of intelligence in the 
 direction and on the lines of the various subjects we 
 teach. (Let us have quality, and quantity will take care 
 of itself,) This, I think, is certain, that if we fail to 
 arouse intellectual interest and a voluntary and happy 
 mental activity in connexion with the subjects we teach, 
 either we are, as educators, entirely on the wrong 
 track, or our pupils are hopelessly stupi^ 
 
 I am well aware that there are some things boys 
 . must learn, whether they can be led to take a living 
 interest in them or not. Out of this compulsory learn- 
 ing arises a certain discipline and training of the 
 commonplace boy in submission to conventionality and 
 external rule, which lead to the formation of a safe 
 habit of mind and help to make him a respectable 
 law-abiding citizen when he grows up — a result not to 
 be despised. I fully recognise this ; but my business 
 in these lectures is to speak of education in its true 
 living sense, as an ianer movement of mind from igno- 
 rance to knowledge, and, were I dealing with moral 
 education I would add, from anarchy of feeling to 
 ordered character. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 
 
 The third claim which language makes as a subject of 
 instruction in the school is that as literature it gives 
 culture. Here, as in preceding lectures, we speak of 
 our native tongue alone. 
 
 As substance of thought, language instructs and fills 
 the mind of youth with the words of wisdom, with the 
 material of knowledge, and guides it to the meaning 
 and motives of a rational existence, and while doing all 
 this, it at the same time traiiis the intelligence : as a 
 formal study, it further disciplines the intelligence, and 
 gives vigour and discriminative force to intellectual 
 operations in all the relations of the human mind to 
 things, and therefore to the conduct of life ; as literature, 
 in which aspect we would now regard it, language 
 cultivates, by opening the mind to a perception of the 
 beautiful in form and the ideal in thought and action. 
 It does this by bringing the prosaic truths of goodness 
 and duty into the sphere of the idea, and so evoking 
 and directing those aspirations, native to every human 
 breast, which find their highest expression in spiritual 
 realities. 
 
 L. L. G 
 
82 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 In an excellent paper by Mr Courthope-Bowen I find 
 the following remark : — " If we were to inquire in any 
 hundred English schools, taken at random, whether 
 literature formed a part of the regular school course, 
 I think we should get positive, very positive, answers 
 in tlie afiSrmative from at least ninety-nine. And yet 
 I am prepared to maintain that at least ninety-eight of 
 the ninety-nine answers would be wrong." I believe 
 Mr Bowen to be right, and I say the same of Scottish 
 schools. 
 
 The question, What is literature as distinguished 
 from the straightforward, logical, and lucid expression 
 of thought ? is, like the question " What is poetry ? ", 
 one excessively difficult to answer. One thing is 
 certain — that literary expression is not merely gram- 
 matical and logical and fit expression, but " beautiful " 
 expression. Thus far all may agree, and we may 
 amble out of the difficulty on that uncertain and 
 bright-winged Pegasus, the Beautiful, leaving each 
 man to attach to the word his own more or less 
 vague conceptions, but always definite feelings. The 
 Revival of letters, as we know, restored to men the 
 perception and enjoyment of the beautiful in language ; 
 and we do not misjudge the apostles of the Revival if 
 we say that in their conviction the most beautiful 
 language always embodied the highest thoughts and 
 the deepest realities of life. Barbarisms in Latin or 
 Greek meant barbarisms and crudities in thought. 
 The inevitable result of this view was that men strove 
 after eloquence and elegance of expression, and style 
 governed. Now to cultivate style for style's sake is the 
 Pharisaism of the intellect. The great masters of style, 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 83 
 
 Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, did 
 not do this. With them, as with all writers who live 
 in the esteem of generations, thought comes first, and 
 style is nothing more than the apt and felicitous expres- 
 sion of prior thought. Style is not to be compared to 
 the vesture which covers a man's body, but rather to 
 the native and natural covering of the beasts of the 
 field. The play and elasticity of the close-fitting lion's 
 hide is very different from any vestment with which 
 Poole covers the lion's master. In fact, a beautiful 
 thought and a beautiful expression either occur as one 
 in a man's mind, or the thought remains as a vague 
 possibility or anticipation only (on the plane of feeling), 
 until it finds fitting words. At this point a man, to use 
 the words of Montaigne, is only "licking the formless 
 embryo of thought." When the thought is born, it 
 is born with its natural vestment. It is that natural 
 vestment which, looked at apart fi-om the thought, we 
 call style. 
 
 My business here and now, however, is not with the 
 principles of literary aesthetics, but only with so much 
 of the literary, in contradistinction to the merely 
 grammatical, as concerns the education of boys and 
 girls. And I have said enough in my first lecture, to 
 show that you cannot bring a pupil to the perception 
 and appreciation of a beautiful and felicitous phrase 
 without admitting him thereby to the comprehension 
 of the beautiful and felicitous thought. It is through 
 words that we educate to things, for >vords are the 
 records of the past conquests of humanity over things : 
 they have been called " the fortresses of thought ; " and 
 but for them, each generation would have to begin all 
 
 6—2 
 
84 LANGUAOE AS LlTJfiUATUiUC, [LEOT. 
 
 ()V((i' again, iuk] baibiuiHiii would Ix) |)oniiant>nt. VVoihIm 
 are the title-doddH of' iho inhoi'lUuuui of mxvU vhiUl (if 
 man. After what I have Hiii(i, now and provioiiwly, on 
 stylo and litorature, I may, in a(UM)i'(liui(^o with lliin viow 
 of the bigniiioanoo oi' woiiIh in (Mluoation, nay that it is 
 by dwollin^ on boautil'ul ianjjuago that wo roach tha 
 beauty of thl^ I'cwility, the thoi4j,dit. By tiiiH road alono 
 can wo enter into th(^ tonqilo ol' tho Uoautifui, 
 
 But to Icavo litoratnro with tho dodnition— tho 
 beautiful in utterances — in unHatiHructory, liocaiiNo of 
 its vaguonoHH. And it Ih irn|)orativo on uu^ to inil'old 
 that portion of tho contont of this hir^nt oxpregsioii 
 which c(jnnoctH litoratnro with tho odnciition of th* 
 young mind, and j^ivon it a place in the wijiool, 
 
 The truo man of xoniuH, as o|)poH(td to tho littera- 
 teur, who livcH by Hirri|)ly borrowing tho clothoM of tho 
 groat and wearing tliom in a flaunting froo luid amy 
 way aH if thoy had boon niad() for liini, in alwayH in 
 Hcarch oi' the idea, Do not conc^iddo, howove^r, that all 
 who aro in Hoarch of tho idoa arc nion of g((iiinH. Tiat 
 idea Hitnply meariH the p(srf{j(!te(l truth of things, and of 
 each thing-- be it the law of tlu! Htarn, the law of the 
 luiitnal organiHHi, or the "trnr^Ht trnth" of the oncMinnter 
 of man'H mind with nature and human life. ThiH trid.h, 
 put in a concHite form, Ih then the idea, mitterialized — 
 the ideal. Jlence tho paradox, the ideal Ih the real; for 
 tho idea in th(i ultimate truth, and the ultimate trul/h 
 in tho Hol(! reality. What Lord Haeon, iii a wt<ll-knewn 
 paHHage, HavH of the highcHt form of litoriLture in l/rno in 
 dno degree of all literiiinro, " Poetry," ho Hayn, "doth 
 raiso and (srect the mind by Mubmitting the mIiowm of 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 85 
 
 things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth 
 buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." 
 This aim of poetry does not weaken the mind, as Plato 
 would seem to say, but admits us to the truth and 
 reality of things by admitting us to their idea, to which 
 Plato would force an entrance by means of philosophy. 
 Doubtless there ai'e some nations whose youth would 
 be best tx-ained by the prosaic teachings of hai-d fact and 
 the sevoro discipline of science ; but the British nation 
 is certainly not one of these. By convorso with litera- 
 ture in its purest forms wo olovate the chai-acter without 
 weakening it. Nay, elevation is itself sti-ength. 
 
 Without dwelling longex on this question than is 
 necessaay for my purpose, let me now assume that 
 liteiuture — ^the beautiful in expression — is the ideal. 
 It is the striving after the highest and truest truth of 
 things finding at last fit utterance. As in the pursuit 
 of the ideu, so in the contemplation of it, there is 
 a lai'ge element of emotion. There is an excitement 
 of feeling which intellect by itself could not give. 
 
 Pass now then to the minds of boys and girls when, 
 after they have reached the age of puberty, there begins 
 to be felt the undergreund swell of ethical emotion, and, 
 along with this, the tendency to idea and ideals. We 
 a.s educatora have to meet, to satisfy, to dii-ect this into 
 proper channels. Several agencies suggest themselves, 
 but 1 here speak only of Language. It is at this point 
 in the growth of a mind that laiiguage as litemtnre 
 exhibits its supreme powei* as an insti-ument in the 
 hands of a sensible teacher. 
 
 Grant all this : yet the i-esult of all convei-so with 
 litei-ature, it may bo said, is. after all, only i\n Ksthetic 
 
86 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 result. It adds to the happiness of life, and increases 
 the pleasures of the imagination. This is a desirable 
 thing, as all legitimate pleasure is, but it is not essential 
 to a good life, nor even to a noble and heroic life. 
 True so far ; but it is precisely because it contributes 
 so powerfully to the good life, the noble life, the true 
 life, that I beg the teacher to take possession of litera- 
 ture as the most potent of all ethical influences at 
 every stage, and especially in the critical years of 
 adolescence. 
 
 The condition of the spiritual as opposed to the 
 merely moral man is that the former lives in ideas and 
 the ideal as the true and ultimate expression of the 
 reason of man — as the God-given reality of his nature. 
 Ideas may be said to be the thought of God in man, — 
 the "words that proceed from the mouth of God;" — and 
 by living in ideas we truly live in Him and with Him. 
 So potent indeed is the spiritual life — the life in ideas; 
 so much does it transcend the merely moral relations of 
 the hearth and the market-place, that men of strong 
 spiritual tendencies have been frequently led to regard 
 the ordinary duties of the family and the State as 
 superseded by spiritual emotions and ideal aspirations. 
 There are, in truth, very few strongly spiritual natures 
 which have not had at some period of their lives a 
 serious fall. They have forgotten that man's feet are 
 on earth, and that the true ideal is the ideal of the 
 ordinary and the commonplace, and, as such, the true 
 real. They forget that all idealism of emotion, all 
 religious aspiration, is spurious except in so far as it 
 grows out of the soil of the domestic and civic virtues, 
 and is dominated by Law. The true ideal can never 
 
yi.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. St 
 
 transcend Duty, for at the very best, it is always the 
 recognition of Law — the true law of our nature. As a 
 matter of metaphysical fact, the spiritual life, the life 
 in ideas, the life in God, bears the same relation to the 
 real of common duty as the abstract in the sphere of 
 the purely intellectual bears to the real and concrete 
 of things. Except in so far as the general and abstract 
 is seen in things, except in so far as things are seen in 
 the general and abstract, both are, in their isolation, 
 unmeaning and unfruitful. 
 
 It is only after he has reached the age of puberty 
 that a youth begins to be alive to ideas, and it is gene- 
 rally at the end of the secondary period of instruction — 
 about the age of eighteen — that they begin to take pos- 
 session of him as the potent factors of his life. It would 
 seem that many boys and girls, and men and women, are 
 constitutionally unfitted for ideal conceptions, and con- 
 sequently for the ideal in living. But this is a wrong 
 way of looking at the actual facts. The finer organiza- 
 tions, by their innate force, pass from the preceptive 
 morality of the boy-life into the ideal life of adolescence 
 without effort and without teaching. The mass have 
 to be educated into it. The passage from the one 
 mental condition into the other is what old theological 
 writers described as conviction and conversion and re- 
 generation. This it is to be born again. This is, funda- 
 mentally, Christianity. This is to escape from the 
 schoolmaster the law, into the freedom of the spirit, the 
 liberty of the child of God. Are parents and teachers 
 to let this transformation come or not as it pleases? 
 If so, then I ask what I have asked before. What do 
 
88 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 they mean by education, and why do they educate 
 at all? 
 
 If you think that physical science will work this 
 change, you are mistaken. Plato, Christ, St Paul, nay 
 Zoroaster and Mahomet, knew a secret hidden from 
 the so-called "wise:" nay, sometimes to babes the 
 divine inspiration is given which is denied to the 
 learned. I daresay you have heard this before. Our 
 business as educators is to try to give this inspira- 
 tion, to help the seed to become the bud and the bud 
 to unfold itself to the light and warmth of the sun. 
 A very difficult and delicate task. 
 
 But however difficult and delicate, it maj^ be, our 
 business is to look about among the materials of school 
 education and see if we can find an instrument suited 
 to our purpose. Direct instruction in the truths of 
 religion does not seem often to succeed. Now we shall 
 find that instrument in language as literature ; for 
 literature is the ajsthetic expression of ideas, and by 
 habituating the mind to live in this atmosphere we 
 predispose it to all things spiritual. We do not call 
 forth the antagonism of the young mind by dogmati- 
 cally repressing its egoism, and trying to overawe it. 
 We turn the eye of the mind to look at what is beauti- 
 ful and to enjoy it, and Plato truly tells us that with 
 the eye the whole mind turns and not merely a part 
 of it. We thus lead the human spirit by . the green 
 pastures into the life in ideas ; and we believe that that 
 life will then move forward by its own innate force of 
 aspiration, its own inherent vitality, until it has become 
 the conscious life in God^the religious life. 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITEKATUKE. 89 
 
 Language as literature belongs chiefly to the latter 
 half of the secondary period ; and it is not till a boy is 
 about sixteen at least that I should endeavour, of set 
 'purpose, to interest him in literature for its own sake 
 as an ideal expression of human life. 
 
 But this does not mean that we are not to bring the 
 young mind face to face with literature before the age of 
 puberty. Even in the infant school we begin our work. 
 In this, as in everything else in education, we begin at 
 the beginning. The simple verses which give fit and 
 sweet expression to simple childlike thoughts are to be 
 read and learned by heart. What is not literature, in 
 the best sense, to us, is literature to a child. Every 
 stage of mental life has its literature; and at each stage, 
 as one succeeds another, we take care that the prose 
 and poetry set before the child are, though simple, good 
 of their kind. We take care, further, that he under- 
 stands; and by our own good reading of the pieces and 
 by requiring them to be learned by heart, we gradually 
 make our pupils feel the good in literary expression,. 
 We seek, in fact, for many years simply to make im- 
 pressions of the right kind, deferring criticism, that is 
 to say, the conscious discrimination of the beautiful, 
 until a later period. In religious education all surely 
 feel how important it is that good hymns be learned 
 and sung by children. Hymns, aided by the simple 
 story of the life of Christ, will together accomplish 
 more for the religious education of the young than 
 all the catechisms and church-going in the world. 
 I might illustrate this; but I am dealing with litera- 
 ture as part of secular instruction only, if indeed 
 there be such a thing as secular instruction. . Let 
 
90 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 me give one or two pieces which belong to the child- 
 stage : — 
 
 Take Hood's "Past and Present"— 
 
 "I remember, I remember 
 The house where I was born," 
 
 the l^t stanza of which runs thus : — 
 
 "I remember, I remember, 
 The fir-trees dark and high; 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 Were close against the sky ; 
 It was a childish ignorance. 
 But now 'tis little joy 
 To know I'm further off from heaven 
 Than when I was a boy." 
 
 This now is retrospective, and therefore may be said to 
 anticipate the experience of a child ; but I am far from 
 thinking this an objection in a piece so easily under- 
 stood as regards language. It is sufficiently understood 
 at the time of learning, and it comes back after many 
 days. 
 
 Take again Mrs Hemans' "Child's First Grief," which 
 I need not quote. Then Wordsworth's " Robin " — 
 
 "Art thou the bird whom man loves best, 
 The sweet bird with the scarlet breast 
 
 Our little English robin — 
 The bird that comes about our door 
 When autumn winds are sobbing? 
 
 ***** 
 
 The bird that by some name or other 
 
 All men who know thee call thee brother?" 
 
 Keble's "Book of Nature,'' Logan's "Cuckoo," 
 Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," "Alice Fell," and "Pet 
 
VI.j LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 91 
 
 Lamb," and Tennyson's " May Queen," and many others 
 of this class at once suggest themselves. All these, 
 ■with the best of Longfellow's poems, not to speak of 
 the riches of ballad literature, national songs (see also 
 "The Children's Garland," by Palgrave), the natural 
 and breezy poetry of Scott, good prose pieces, which 
 are almost innumerable, will fill the waking mental 
 life of a boy up to the age of fifteen, till he, "by 
 ever dwelling on great thoughts, becomes like greatest 
 men." 
 
 Up to this point — the age of fifteen or so — we have 
 been daily guiding the pupil in making acquaintance 
 with words, that through them he may know things — 
 the things of thought, the things that determine con- 
 duct. Mind and language have been growing together. 
 Our object has been the nutrition and training of 
 mind through language as a Real. Formal discipline 
 of intelligence through grammar (in the large sense in 
 which we have used that term) we have not neglected, 
 but we have always subordinated it to the claims of the 
 Real. The pupil now not only comprehends language 
 in a wide and various range, but he can use it for the 
 expression, if not always of his own thoughts, yet for 
 the reproduction with grammatical correctness of the 
 thoughts of others. But in addition to all this, he has, 
 if wisely educated, received in abundance literary im- 
 pressions from simple and good poetry, and these have 
 been gradually moulding his life. 
 
 Mr R. L. Nettleship, in expounding Plato, speaks 
 of the influence of plastic art on the young — ^the pro- 
 ductions of those men who "have the genius to track out 
 
92 LANGUAGE AS LITBBATUEE. [LECT. 
 
 the nature of what is fair and shapely" and to embody 
 it in their works. Young citizens, he says, "should 
 be like men living in a beautiful and healthy place ; 
 from everything that they see and hear, loveliness, like 
 a breeze, should pass into their souls and teach them 
 without their knowing it the truth of which it is a 
 manifestation." What is true of the plastic arts is still 
 more true of literature^ 
 
 But now we may venture a step further, and go 
 beyond mere impressions. In our readings with our 
 pupils we^ may now attend not merely to the analysis 
 of the thought, but to the beauty of expression, and 
 its felicity in conveying the complex emotions of 
 human experience, or, it may be, its failure to do so. 
 We do not at this stage part with our past training 
 and discipline: we carry it with us into the higher 
 literary exercise. It all helps us to see that aptness 
 of phrase, balance of rhythm, grace of structure, are 
 not by themselves good literature; that, on the con- 
 trary, the inner truth of the thing before us, and its 
 logical coherence, are the necessary foundations of the 
 best literary art. 
 
 It will be said, by a few, that this is to turn the 
 young mind into the field of literary criticism — a pre- 
 mature occupation. It certainly is literary criticism, 
 because it is an attempt to see in what respects the 
 piece of prose or poetry before us is good or bad, or 
 middling. But why, I should like to know, should a 
 growing mind be asked to accept phrases for . realities, 
 a jingle of words for truth, a sensuous blotch for nature, 
 and be arbitrarily arrested by the will of. another in 
 
•VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 93 
 
 its growing desire to discriminate, and gradually to 
 form its own standard of the good and true? Is not 
 the very object of all education to guide and help 
 the action of mind in its successive stages of compre- 
 hension of the world around it, and all that this various 
 world presents to its experience, either directly or 
 through the interpretation furnished by other and 
 greater minds ? This is the " criticism of life." 
 
 Doubtless such literary exercises may be overdone, 
 or, more likely, may be underdone and raw. In the 
 hands of a pedant they will become pedantic, in the 
 hands of a fool they will be foolish, in the hands of 
 a one-sided fanatic who can appreciate only one form 
 of art — to whom Keats is perfection and Wordsworth 
 prosy — harm may be done. But not so much harm, 
 «ven then, as the good that will result from rousing the 
 interest, and stimulating the activity, of mind, in its 
 inherent longing for the ideal. 
 
 Perhaps I may illustrate from a personal experience, 
 not three weeks old, what I mean by an elementary 
 literary exercise. I was in a remote country school 
 frequented by boys and girls, the children of ploughmen 
 and crofters. The highest class, composed of five boys 
 and four girls, of the average age of thirteen, had read 
 to me a piece selected from their class-book by myself, 
 but already partially known to them — Longfellow's 
 "Building of the Ship." When they had finished, it 
 occurred to me to say, 'fNow, instead of going to the 
 subject and predicate and extension, and all the rest of 
 it, go to your seats, sit apart from each other, read the 
 poem carefully to yourselves, compare one part with 
 another, and mark the lines you think the most beau- 
 
94 LANGUAGE A8 LITEEATURE. [LECT. 
 
 tiful." J They did so, and it was to me, as an education- 
 alist, a pleasant sight to see the intentness of counte- 
 nance with which these rough and awkward country 
 lads and lasses applied themselves to this,; their first 
 lesson in literary criticism. After about ten minutes had 
 elapsed, I called for their opinions. One boy and one 
 girl had selected lines which suggested sadness; the 
 remaining three girls had selected those which had 
 reference to marriage — the bride and bridegroom; a 
 second boy selected the most striking image, while the 
 remaining three had selected the lines which had to do 
 with intense action.; Each read aloud the part which 
 he had selected ; when this was over, I made a few con- 
 versational remarks on one or two points in the poem 
 suggested by their own selections. These they listened 
 to with avidity. This is what I call a literary lesson;! 
 and I shall be much surprised to learn that any teacher 
 does not see how much more educative and fruitful 
 this simple and natural treatment of a piece of good 
 prose or poetry must be than any amount of sentence- 
 analysis, or even Latin grammar. 
 
 I know that some will say, "Do not be in a hurry; all 
 the needed appreciation of literature, and the culture, 
 and the ideas it brings with it, will come in time." Now 
 what I maintain is that they will not come any more 
 than religion comes of itself, or a scientific habit of 
 miad comes of itself; and is it not notorious that, as 
 a matter of fact, they do not come ? In language as 
 literature we have to begin, as in all other subjects, 
 low down. We have to lay the foundations early, and 
 let them settle, if we are to build on them to any 
 good purpose. Setting aside the exceptional boy, it is 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATUKE. 95 
 
 certain that if I suddenly introduce a boy of sixteen or 
 seventeen to Wordsworth, who prior to that has had no 
 education in the language of literature and no training 
 in feeling its beauties, I shall fail to interest him. So 
 it is in other studies ; I should fail to interest the same 
 boy in a truly scientific book on Physics, or Geology, if 
 I had not planted and daily nurtured in him a habit 
 of interest in nature, directed his attention to its 
 more ordinary and superficial phenomena, and to the 
 explanation of these. I speak, of course, of the ordinary 
 boy, which means 95 per cent, of boys. With boys of 
 genius the educator has little to do, save to guide and 
 control. It is notorious that the mass of boys said to 
 be educated take no interest in nature, and if we add 
 to this that they take no interest in pure literature — 
 that is to say, in the best thoughts of the best of their 
 own species expressed in fitting form— what is the 
 use of all our educational machinery? Surely there 
 is a blunder somewhere. I am not such a cynic as 
 to believe that the human animal is so constructed by 
 his Maker as to have an aversion to the contemplation 
 of the beautiful and various world in its causes and 
 harmonies, and to the perusal of the greatest thoughts 
 on things and men as these are beautifully expressed 
 by the prophets and seers of his race. 
 
 It follows from what has been said that at all stages 
 of language-teaching we should read largely. At the 
 stage of which we are now speaking, our reading must 
 be varied and liberal with a view to fill a boy's mind 
 with masterpieces. This is what the teaching of 
 English literature in the school ought to be. And by 
 such teaching he may be gradually led to recognize, as 
 
96 .LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 Plato thought, the forms of goodness through what is 
 presented to sense and imagination. 
 
 •As regards Method, we have done little as yet but 
 apply the great rule that a subject should be begun' 
 from the beginning, and, as we proceed, be brought 
 into fit relation with the stage of mental progress the 
 pupil has reached. Step by step, step after step. In 
 truth, however, there is scarcely a rule of method 
 which is not as applicable to the teaching of literature 
 as to the teaching of any other subject. Only, one is a 
 little averse to be guilty of the pedantry of applying 
 them in detail. For of literature, as of religion, it may 
 be said that rules of procedure, which may be of great 
 use to a teacher in matters of the pure intellect, are of 
 little value unless he is himself inspired. , The genuine 
 love of literature, the sympathetic living with the 
 growing minds of the young, and the impulse to give that 
 which you enrich yourself by giving, supersede all rules 
 of method. Still, a word or two may be profitably said 
 in correction of obvious faults, although the result 
 may be merely negative. 
 
 Here let me quote again from Mr Courthope- 
 Bowen: "By the study of literature as literature, I 
 mean the study of a poem or prose-work for the sake 
 of its substance, its form, and its style ; for the sake 
 of the thought and imagination it contains, and the 
 methods used to express these; for the sake of its 
 lofty, large, or acute perception of things ; its power of 
 exposition ; the beauty, force and meaning of its meta- 
 phors, its similes, its epithets ; the strength and music 
 of its language." I quote this because I think it well 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 97 
 
 said, and also because it describes the working of the 
 second governing rule of all method, "Let your process 
 be analytico-sjnathetic." To work this out in detail is 
 not my intention, but you will find most of the sug- 
 gestions for teaching a piece of prose as substance 
 of thought, applicable also in the domain of pure 
 literature. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is notorious that the school- 
 master cannot shake off his hardness, his formalism, his 
 pedantry, in this field of instruction any more than in 
 religion; and the result is that literature in the school 
 resolves itself into a list of literary names, and sinks 
 into the examination of words, and of grammatical and 
 historical forms and facts. A play of Shakespeare or 
 Milton's "Lycidas" is read with a view to its anatomy, 
 not to what the poems convey to the intellect and 
 emotions — their satisfaction of the ideal in man. In 
 the editions used the product of the artist is lost in a 
 monstrous superfetation of notes, /^hy do teachers 
 make lessons of everything ? 
 
 Thus it is that the majority of boys at this secondary 
 school stage care nothing for books, except books of 
 impossible adventure or comic presentations of serious 
 things. In these they find relief from the dissection of 
 a great writer, whether the writer be English or Latin 
 or Greek) And they are justified in the course they 
 take. lEow can we expect any one to enjoy "Lycidas," 
 or Portia's speech, or Hamlet's soliloquy, or Tintem 
 Abbey, if they read ten lines a day, have to learn by 
 heart a lot of notes (philological or antiquarian), and 
 then begin to mangle the passages by writing out 
 parsing and analysis tables — finally, perhaps, resorting 
 L. L. 7 
 
98 LANGUAGE AS LITEKAT0RE. [LECT. 
 
 to the degrading process of paraphrasing ? This would 
 be to expect an impossibility. You, the teacher, are 
 ostensibly giving him literature, whereas truly you are 
 cheating him and giving him grammar — words, words, 
 words. You are ostensibly giving him the real of 
 literature; you are truly palming off upon him the 
 formal and abstract. I would rather have the exclusive 
 Latin training back again in all its aridity. There are 
 plenty of corpora vilia in the English tongue on which 
 the dreary experiments of grammar and analysis may 
 be made. But be honest here, and if you affect to 
 give him literature, give him literature. For one boy 
 who enters with spirit into the formal, there are ten 
 who appreciate the real. And do you not see that, 
 if out of a class of forty boys you can send out even 
 thirty inspired by the great writings of great men, you 
 have educationally accomplished more for them than 
 by sending them out with the most exact notions 
 of grammar and analysis, while dead to literature? If 
 you have ever realized to yourself that the final aim 
 of all education, both of the school and the world, is 
 an ethical aim, you will not doubt this for a moment. 
 
 Select then the books which are within the com- 
 prehension of your class, and read them liberally, 
 generously. There is a superabundance of English 
 literature of this class, not to speak of good transla- 
 tions from other languages. Then, read the book with 
 the pupils at large. Let them read, and do you also 
 take your turn of reading. Enjoy the book together 
 — not as a lesson, but as a pleasant sjnnposium. This 
 is the sum and substance of the method. When you 
 come to a particularly fine passage, direct attention 
 
"VI.J LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 99 
 
 to it, ask them to point out its artistic beauties, and 
 then read it to them a second time as it ought to be 
 read. That is to say, if you can read, which possibly 
 you cannot. 
 
 I do not mean to say that in such literary school- 
 banquets you are to eschew all questionings. /If a 
 difficult phrase or allusion occur, ask in a friendly and 
 conversational way what the precise force of it is : 
 above all, let it be understood that you are there to be 
 questioned. If it be poetry you are reading, encourage 
 the boys to learn beautiful passages by heart, but avoid 
 prescribing the^iJ This is no task-work in which you 
 are engaged. Says Quintilian (l. 8), " Point out the 
 beauty of the arrangement, the charms of the subject- 
 matter, the appropriateness of the words to the cha- 
 racters represented, what is worthy of praise in the 
 substance, what in the words used," and so forth. It 
 is now, if ever, that you are living with your boys. 
 Now truly mind meets mind. It is now, and through 
 this literary sympathy, that you lay deep the founda- 
 tions of your moral influence on the whole future lives 
 of your pupils. It is now that you are truly developing 
 the religious possibilities of the little men and women 
 before you. This, and not the spelling out with tears and 
 vexation a dozen lines of Virgil, is the "Humanities." 
 
 That obstructive the " practical" teacher, and most 
 of all, strange to say, the classical expert who usurps 
 the title of "Humanist" on the strength of his imitative 
 powers, will tell me, " Ah ! this is theory ; you don't 
 know boys : why, even with the best teaching, one-half 
 of them would find even this a bore." To which I reply 
 that I think I do know boys, and that if one-half of them 
 
 7—2 
 
100 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT, 
 
 find such intercourse as this with their master a bore, 
 it is due to previous neglect of the real, or to you the 
 master. Perhaps you put on your gown and college cap, 
 and come down on them with a magisterial air, and with 
 the aspect of omniscience. Even the luminous charm 
 of Tennyson, or the deep calm communings of Words- 
 worth, cannot drive the superiority and the pedantry 
 out of you. Who would accept " II Penseroso " out of 
 the mouth of the parish beadle ? You come to your 
 class-room to teach these poets, forsooth ! to patronise 
 them, and, through them, your boys. Now it is clear 
 that this kind of work is too fine, too delicate for you ; 
 the college cap is out of place ; the work must be done 
 in your shirt-sleeves, if it is to be done at all. The 
 boys are to lead, and you are to follow. Pray, how 
 much more do you know than your boys in this field ? 
 lit will be a stupid class that cannot puzzle yoG in 
 the first five minutes by its questions. And you are 
 no true educator if you do not rejoice to be puzzled by 
 them?) 
 
 A certain percentage of inferior organisms will 
 doubtless be found in every class, and they will get no 
 good; but how much larger is the percentage who 
 resist and reject your formal and grammatical teaching ? 
 And yet you go on with it, and rightly so in its proper 
 place, which, however, is not here in the sacred literary 
 hour. Such things belong to the outer porch ; we are 
 now withia the Temple of the Muses. 
 
 The question was recently debated in connexion 
 with Oxford University, Can Literature be taught ? 
 It seemed to me that, as was natural in the case of 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. 101 
 
 xiniversity dons, the question was mixed up with a 
 quite different one : Can Literature be examined on ? 
 "Chatter about Shelley and Harriet" — this was the 
 description of the essays that would be sent up for 
 degrees. There is much truth in the criticism which 
 the bitter phrase would convey. I think that literature 
 can never be an examination subject ; and if it could, it 
 ought not to be so degraded. But it certainly can be 
 taught — taught in the Infant school, and in the High 
 school, and in the University, and all through life. 
 Nor should any curriculum for an Arts degree be held 
 to be adequate which does not include attendance on a 
 course of literary history and criticism, as is the case in 
 the Scottish Universities. 
 
 The man who doubts whether literature can be 
 taught must have strange notions of the meaning of 
 the word teaching. Is it not one of the pleasantest 
 occupations in the world to read a good piece of prose 
 or poetry with a young and ardent mind, and, by dwell- 
 ing on its true meaning and its beauties, to introduce 
 that mind to the humanities and thereby raise higher 
 the plane of his daily life — spiritualizing him by 
 humanizing him ? Why then is it not done ? The 
 answer perhaps is, because it is very difficult to do. 
 The teacher who will do the work successfully must be 
 himself a man of humane culture, and of sympathy with 
 the nascent and adolescent life of mind. If some so 
 endowed have notwithstanding failed, it is because the 
 foundations in the minds of their pupils, as I have said, 
 have never been laid : the way has not been prepared. 
 As summer is waning and autumn approaches, you 
 hurry on with a view to a harvest, not only in literature. 
 
102 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. 
 
 but in all that pertains to the spiritual life. You 
 forgot to break up the soil in early spring, and to sow 
 the seed, and to harrow. The warm summer sun con- 
 sequently played ineffectually on a hard surface, and if 
 anything has been produced at all, as will certainly be 
 the case where the native qualities of the soil are worth 
 anything, it is weeds or wild oats. 
 
 If you think it necessary in the later years of the 
 secondary school to give some instruction in the history 
 of literature, you will give it in connexion with the 
 history of your country. You will give the minimum 
 number of dates and. the maximum of inner logical 
 connexions. When this is done, the reading of a nar- 
 rative of English literature will at least do no harm. 
 But read an author before you read about him ; 
 " Matter before Form." 
 
 Is it not the fact that the general result of all our 
 education is that boys and girls, youths and maidens, 
 do not as a rule, even after they have grown up, read 
 anything except narratives of events, real or imaginary, 
 which have a power of exciting the mind, like wine or 
 gin ? They care also, perhaps, for accounts of proposals 
 that affect their own iTn/mediate material well-being. 
 As regards literature, they are barbarians. Listen to 
 the drawing-room songs that are sung and applauded. 
 Are our upper classes — the pure product of the great 
 Public Schools — really above the level of the Music 
 Saloon ? No use complaining of this ; so it will be to 
 the end of time, as regards a section of every population. 
 But if an enjoyment of literature and a genuine interest 
 in the beauties of various nature be the marks of 
 a cultivated mind, then the culture and civilization 
 
VI.] LANGUAGE AS LITERATUEK. 103 
 
 of a nation may be fairly measured by the proportion 
 of the population who love literature and who have 
 an open mind for the show of things, and the moral 
 meaning of the world. This — not Latin and Greek — is 
 the Humanities ; Latin and Greek are the Humanities 
 only in so far as they are this, and no further. As 
 educationists, our duty is to increase the proportion of 
 those so humanized in each successive generation ; and 
 this, because the ethical life of a people is largely 
 determined by their interest in such things. And I 
 venture to affirm that, in the sphere of religion and 
 morality, nothing can so surely promote and sustain 
 purity of feeling, reasonableness of opinion, and eleva- 
 tion of standard, as love of literature and a feeling for 
 nature. 
 
 The extent to which such great results are attainable 
 in the school depends on the conception which the 
 teacher forms of his spiritual function, and the methods 
 by which he gives effect to his conception. Let it not 
 be supposed that I advocate the undue fostering of the 
 emotional and ideal in youth. I merely wish to satisfy 
 and direct what God has given. No man is more pro- 
 foundly convinced than I am that the education of the 
 human spirit is not completed when it is merely per- 
 meated by feeling and elevated by emotion. Reason, 
 whose function it is to raise into the sphere of abso- 
 luteness and duty the ideal teachings of emotion, must 
 be exercised and strengthened. The heart has to be 
 subdued by the intellect, life and its purposes have to 
 be rationalized by each for himself, and the vagueness 
 of sentiment has to become the certitude of the science 
 of conduct. Law must regulate and govern emotion, 
 
104 LANGUAGE AS LITERATURE. [LECT. VL 
 
 but it is law within the sphere of emotion, and does not 
 supersede it. 
 
 I have now dealt, as briefly as I could, with lan- 
 guage in the school in its concrete, its formal, and its 
 literary aspects. It is the mother-tongue of which I 
 have been speaking, and I hope I have made it clear 
 that no subject, or combination of subjects, approaches 
 the mother-tongue as an educational instrument. It is 
 the centre round which the life of every earnest mind 
 revolves : it is the soil in which alone it can truly live ; 
 and so also, and I may say therefore, it is and must be 
 the centre round which all true education of the young 
 mind must revolve, the soil into which every growing 
 mind must strike its roots deep, if its growth is to be 
 vigorous, native, national and humane. 
 
 ) I will now speak of foreign tongues and the method 
 of teaching them, taking Latin as type. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 FOREIGN LANGUAGES— LATIN AS TYPE. 
 
 I HAVE already shown you that the best culture which 
 a man receives through language is to be obtained only 
 through his mother-tongue. While he seems to be de- 
 riving culture from a foreign language, it is in fact 
 chiefly from the comparisons, similarities, contrasts of 
 the forms of thought and expression in that language 
 with the forms already familiar to him, that he receives 
 intellectual and moral benefit and a finer aesthetic per- 
 ception. The foreign tongue, accordingly, will be of 
 substantial advantage in his education, apart from its 
 practical uses, only in so far as he, more or less con- 
 sciously, transmutes its forms, its thought, its images, 
 its delicacies into the familiar vernacular which is, and 
 must always be, the vesture and expression of his own 
 inner life. Language, as I have frequently said, is a 
 necessity for the gi'owth of mind. Growth depends on 
 finding fit utterance for those complex mental states 
 which succeed each other in the history of the race and 
 of the individual, and are ever deepening their signifi- 
 cance and widening their range. If the form or mould 
 into which each man's mental life runs, and by means of 
 which he feels and thinks as a self-conscious being, be 
 
106 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 his own vernacular, then Latin, Greek, or French, or 
 German, can never be a substitute for this, but only con- 
 tribute to its richness, explicitness, fulness, and fitness. 
 Now, fortunately, it is impossible -to learn any 
 foreign tongue whatsoever without the constant dis- 
 crimination of difference and recognition of likeness as 
 between that tongue and the vernacular, thus forcing 
 the latter into clear consciousness, and making us 
 critical of our own utterances. The result is that 
 native words, phrases, syntactical forms, metaphorical 
 expressions are no longer known and used by the 
 student in a merely rote or imitative way, but with 
 due regard to their true significance as symbols. And 
 although to be conscious of language is not to be 
 conscious of thinking as such, it is the next thing to 
 it: and thus a great step is made towards a thinking 
 life of intelligence, as opposed to a rote, imitative, and 
 conventional life. Consciousness becomes self- conscious- 
 ness. In brief, it is just because the conscious exercise 
 of thought on the necessary vehicle of thought is the 
 nearest approach to the exercising of thought on thought 
 itself, that it is so highly educative, both as a training 
 and as a discipline. 
 
 I select Latin as type of foreign tongues for many 
 reasons unnecessary to detail here. Our first question 
 when we admit a subject to the school curriculum must 
 always be, '' Why do we teach it ? " " It is the province 
 of a teacher," says Mr Thring, " to know why he teaches 
 as well as what he teaches and how to teach." A 
 modest demand to make of the teacher surely: is it ,an 
 impertinence to suggest that, while still young and not 
 
VII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 107 
 
 yet hardened in scholastic vices, he should be trained to 
 know all this ? 
 
 (a) Reasons for Teaching Latin. 
 
 Other reasons than those which influenced the 
 fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries must be 
 sought for. And there must be valid reasons of another 
 kind which have operated powerfully on the side of 
 natural conservatism : for mere conservatism itself could 
 scarcely have done all that some attribute to it. Other 
 reasons, and, as I think, sufficient reasons, there are. 
 
 I am not going to discuss the question whether a 
 foreign language should be approached from the imi- 
 tative or grammatical side. I content myself with 
 giving, dogmatically, my own conclusion, reached in 
 the light of the objects we have in view in teaching 
 a foreign tongue, as well as of some experience. That 
 conclusion is, that every foreign tongue should be 
 approached from the grammatical, or formal, side. 
 
 The question remains. How is the grammar of the 
 foreign tongue to be taught ? The general answer 
 must be, Just as !^Jnglish grammar is taught. The 
 method which I explained and illustrated in the teach- 
 ing of English grammar can be applied by any one, 
 without extraneous help, to Latin or French or German, 
 if he will only think it out. There are certain differ- 
 ences, it is true, but these generally arise out of the 
 specific reasons for teaching this or that foreign tongue. 
 Accordingly, I ask you to go with me into the reasons 
 for teaching Latin in these modern times, and I shall 
 then illustrate the method. I would only further 
 
108 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 premise that, as we have to approach a foreign tongue 
 formally or grammatically, it is impossible to separate 
 the real from the formal in our instruction. These 
 advance pari pasm. 
 We teach Latin — 
 
 (1) Because as a formal and grammatical study it 
 has peculiar advantages, and, more effectually than any 
 other language (except Greek)', gives discipline to the 
 intelligence, and the result of discipline, viz. intellectual 
 power. 
 
 (2) The study of Latin gives (to an Englishman at 
 least), more than any other language can do, a training 
 in words — the relative values and the functions of words, 
 and, consequently, training in the thought-things which 
 words denote. The shades of meaning in vocables are 
 brought into high relief 
 
 (3) The analysis and subsequent synthesis whereby 
 we truly comprehend an English sentence, and which is 
 a direct training of the processes of mind in knowing 
 (in the scientific or any other field),' are most effective 
 as training when it is a foreign tongue that we are 
 teaching; and, above all, when that foreign tongue is 
 Latin. This because, in order to give the English 
 translation, a pupil is forced, whether he will or not, 
 deliberately and of set purpose to consider the mutual 
 relations of the parts of a complex sentence; and, 
 secondly, because of the exactness and precision with 
 which these logical relations are brought into prominence 
 in a highly synthetic knguage. In this relation, Latin 
 is better than Greek, because there is less deviation in 
 
 1 For boyi, Greek is inferior to Latin, in my opinion, especially 
 for British boys. 
 
VII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 10& 
 
 it from a normal type. There is breadth, strength and 
 simplicity about its grammar. 
 
 (4) The working out of a translation from a foreign 
 tongue is a training of the imagination, which has to 
 bring itself into play in order to unite into a whole, in 
 their true signification, the parts of a sentence. Latin 
 in a special sense gives this training because of its 
 remoteness. The imagination, moreover, is checked 
 and kept within the wholesome bounds of truthfulness 
 by comparing the result achieved with the original. 
 
 (5) Latin is, to a very large extent (to the extent 
 of two-thirds at least), our own tongue. In studying 
 Latin, therefore, we are studying our own tongue in its 
 sources, and getting all the discipline and nutrition of 
 mind which flows from the study of the origin and 
 history of words. Latin enables us to revivify our own 
 tongue for ourselves. Nay, we are studying our ov^n 
 Ij^guage in much of its syntactical mould also, as may 
 be' seen by reading our early prose writers, and even 
 those of the eighteenth century. 
 
 (6) It follows from the preceding reason that, in 
 studying Latin, we are brought face to face with 
 modem conceptions as to moral duties, social relations, 
 and legal obligations in their origins, and that we thus 
 undergo a kind of unconscious philosophical training 
 suited to the, as yet, immature mind, and moulding its 
 conceptions from the foundation. Dr W. T. Harris, 
 Education Commissioner for the United States, says: — 
 
 " One may say that of a hundred boys, fifty of whom had 
 studied Latin for a period of six months, while the other fifty 
 had not studied Latin at all, the fifty with a smattering of Latin 
 would possess some slight impulse towards analysing the legal 
 
110 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 and political view of human life, and surpass the other fifty in 
 this direction. Placed on a distant frontier with the task of 
 building a new civiUzation, the fifty with the smattering of 
 Latin would furnish law-makers and political rulers, legislators, 
 and builders of the State." 
 
 This may be an exaggeration, but there is an element 
 of truth in it. In any case, Latin is not a dead lan- 
 guage. Its influence is still living in our own tongue, 
 our thought, our feeling, our institutions, our law, our 
 policy. A language does not cease to live because it 
 ceases to be spoken. 
 
 (7) In studjdng Latin we are taking possession of 
 the key of the Romance languages, shortening the time 
 needed for acquiring these by at least one-half. 
 
 (8) The study of Latin introduces the pupil in its 
 later stages to a conscious discernment of Art in lan- 
 guage — the artistic or beautiful in expression. And 
 this to a degree which no modern tongue can do, be- 
 cause, first, of its chaste severity of form; and secondly, 
 because being so far removed from our own time we 
 can look at it as a fresh and alien object. Thus, by 
 contrast, our implicit feelings regarding literary form 
 in our own tongue are brought into explicit conscious- 
 ness — raised, in short, from mere feeling into know- 
 ledge. 
 
 (9) The study of Latia, as a dead tongue, espe- 
 cially in its later stages, when it is accompanied by 
 the study of the life, art, and literature of the 
 Roman, has a remarkable influence on the tone of 
 thought and character. It has this influence by con- 
 necting us in a living way with what seems, but truly 
 is not, a dead past, and thereby expanding our intel- 
 
VII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. Ill 
 
 lectual and moral sympathies so as to embrace that 
 past as part of our own life. It makes us members of 
 a larger human society. Modem cotemporary language 
 and life are too near to our own to have this cultivating 
 influence to the same extent, and do not teach us to 
 see things in a true perspective; they may be said to 
 broaden our lives, but they do not lengthen them. 
 Neither the Hindu nor the Chinese language and life 
 would serve, because these are not our past. The 
 ancient life, by thus stimulating the historical imagi- 
 nation and carrying it out of the present, tends to give 
 balance of mind, checks sciolism of opinion and crude- 
 ness of judgment based on a narrow induction of things 
 which, as being close at hand, are apt to assume undue 
 importance. The true humanity of the growing boy is 
 thus deepened and strengthened. 
 
 I do not here speak of the larger culture which 
 Latin, as literature and as the embodiment of the 
 attitude of the Roman mind to life and social order, 
 gives to the university scholar who has mastered these. 
 The education of the people is not to be regulated in 
 the interest of either literary or linguistic or historical 
 experts. We have to think of boys and the school only. 
 All else can take care of itself 
 
 It might be said, and has been said by certain arid 
 utilitarians, that the study of the history of Rome would 
 do much that I attribute to the study of the language 
 of Rome. But this is a mistake. Ry the perusal of the 
 history and by the study of translations, much could be 
 done doubtless; but the result would fall far short of 
 our aims. The true history of a country is the thought 
 
112 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 and literature and art of that country; and I know very 
 little of any people if I know it merely in its annals of 
 events, even if I also exhibit ia bold and effective relief 
 its great characters (which is not always done). I know 
 a people only by living contact of mind with mind, of 
 humanity with humanity, and this is alone possible by 
 contact with its language. This is to know its true 
 history, its true significance as a factor in the world's 
 progress, because this alone is to know its inner life by 
 ourselves living with it. 
 
 At the same time, I am not concerned to defend the 
 past and present expenditure of time on Latin and 
 Greek. Even a god may in a degenerating race become 
 nothing but a fetich. 
 
 The reasons for the study of Latin which I have 
 given might be very much amplified and elaborated; 
 but I am not here defending against opponents the 
 importance of this special kind of linguistic instruction. 
 My sole object is, by bringing before you the reasons 
 why we learn Latin, to introduce you, in a rational way, to 
 the question how we should teach and learn Latin. Each 
 one of the reasons which I have above assigned has a 
 direct bearing on method, because method is a way, a 
 road to certain ends. Think, then, of these ends, and 
 try to inquire the road to them for yourselves, and 
 you will, so far as these ends at least are concerned, 
 have constructed for yourselves a method of teaching 
 Latin. 
 
 It will be observed that I have not included among 
 the reasons for teaching Latin the reading of the Latin 
 classics in after-life. Those who know the facts would 
 laugh at a man who in these days used such an argu- 
 
VII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 113 
 
 ment in good faith, or would be indignant with him 
 for attempting to impose on their presumed simplicity. 
 The "far-off interest of years" is never realized by the 
 boys who spend 8 to 10 years on Latin and Greek, be- 
 cause there is no capital, and save in a few cases there 
 never was. Just as little would I be disposed to try to 
 make you believe at this time ^ of day that Latin and 
 Greek are synonymous with a liberal education. On 
 the contrary, a man of exclusive classical training is 
 illiberally educated, so illiberally educated that he does 
 not even know it. The cause of the ancient tongues is 
 lost if we rest it on untenable grounds. Least of all 
 would I maintain that classical men can alone write 
 English. This is contrary to fact. They are generally 
 poor writers of English, and that just in proportion to 
 their devotion to the ancient classics. There is I 
 admit a certain wholesome severity of intellect about 
 classically trained men in their treatment of all subjects, 
 whereas in the scientific man we find this only in 
 strictly scientific subjects. This result is a great gain ; 
 but it is just possible that it might be generated by 
 an equally thorough training in English, French, and 
 German. There is little opportunity of trying the ex- 
 periment : for, young men who wish to combine intel- 
 lectual work with cash-rewards must take to the paying 
 subjects — Greek and Latin. 
 
 This is not an essay on classical education. Not- 
 withstanding what I have said above, I may also now 
 say, — Can any one, who has had personal experience of 
 their effects on his own mind, doubt that the highest 
 and best education must always include Greek and 
 Latin ? Were I to criticise, in a hostile spirit, the 
 L. L. 8 
 
114 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. VII. 
 
 claims of classical and humanistic education, my first 
 objection to it would be that in the school the boasted 
 education is not classical, and not humanistic; and 
 my second would be that it is anti- Hellenic. We do 
 not take up the Greek attitude of mind by dissect- 
 ing Greek, any more than we become of the same 
 spirit as Christ by virtue of our knowledge of New 
 Testament philology. Do you imagine, for a moment, 
 that if the Athenians had discovered Sanskrit they 
 would have trained their boys on the Vedic hymns 
 and the Mahabhar^ta? Can you think of a Pericles 
 or a Plato burying the nine Muses out of sight and 
 careftilly eschewing music, art, national literature and 
 history, and guarding their boys from such frivolous 
 society by involving them in Sanskrit and Zend and 
 putting all the money on these ? In the manner of our 
 i devotion to Latin and Greek we are conspicuously un- 
 Greek. To have a frank open eye for all that is beau- 
 tiful, to give a hospitable reception to all that presents 
 itself as knowledge, to train in past heroisms and in 
 present civic duties, this is to be Hellenic. In education 
 the Athenian gave boys what nourished and enlarged 
 the mind. But I forego these polemical temptations 
 and turn to my immediate subject, the method of 
 teaching Latin. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 METHOD OF TEACHING LATIN. 
 
 In teaching Latin, we have to keep the reasons for 
 teaching it always in mind. They yield rules and direc- 
 tions for procedure which, to a large extent, are peculiar 
 to the teaching of Latin. But we have also to keep 
 in mind that the majority of our pupils must leave us 
 for the business of life before they have acquired, even 
 fairly well, the language or languages we teach them. 
 Consequently, the rtile which is applicable to every sub- 
 ject is specially applicable here — viz., that our method 
 he such as to give to every pupil the full benefit of the 
 training and discipline which the language is presumed 
 to afford and which the pupil's age admits of, at whatever 
 point he may cease to study it. Herein lies one of the 
 claims which all method permanently makes on the 
 teacher — that it secures this admirable result. 
 
 Those of you who remember the first lecture of this 
 course will see that the functions of Lang^iage as an 
 instrument of education, as giving food and training, 
 as giving discipline, and as giving cultivation of the 
 aesthetic perceptions, are all included in the reasons 
 assigned for teaching Latin; and, in due degree, any 
 other foreign tongue. 
 
 8—2 
 
116 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 Were there time and space, I should here introduce 
 all the rules of method, as deduced (see appendix) from 
 the facts of psychology, and apply them to the teaching 
 of Latin. I content myself with the more important. 
 
 1. Teach one thing on the basis of another which is 
 already known; for the mind advances to new knowledge 
 on the basis of what it already knows. Knowledge is 
 an organic growth, not a mechanical one. 
 
 The old knowledge out of which the new language 
 must grow is the knowledge of the vernacular. 
 
 As regards vocables, this is clear enough. Mtisa 
 and dominus have no meaning to anybody except in so 
 far as a "song," or "muse," or a "lord" are already 
 known. We must know the "thing," whatever it may 
 be, in our own tongue before we seek to know it in 
 another. 
 
 If the new is to grow out of the old, Latin grammar, 
 no less than Latin vocables, ought to grow out of 
 English grammar. A boy should be able to parse 
 fairly well, and be familiar with the relations of clauses 
 in English sentences, before he begins Latin. 
 
 I hear the sound of the usual stock objections, from 
 a certain type of classical teacher, now nearly outworn, 
 when I say this — e.g., "There is no English grammar, 
 properly speaking;" "Boys never learn English gram- 
 mar thoroughly till they know Latin grammar;" "Boys, 
 in fact, cannot do it." In brief, English grammar is- 
 Latin grammar: for I suppose that is what it all 
 amounts to. Even to deny this is now I hope an 
 anachronism. That the boy who knows German will 
 thereby know English gi-ammar better than the boy 
 who does not know German, is true; still more certain 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 117 
 
 is it that the boy who knows Latin will know English 
 grammar better than the boy who does not know Latin. 
 Everybody will admit this; but it is an absurd inference 
 that the knowledge of English grammar depends on a 
 knowledge of German or Latin. All that it means at 
 bottom is, to use the words of Goethe, "A man who 
 knows only his own language does not know even that." 
 
 Enough on this point. I stand by the Rule ; and 
 maintain that the new should grow out of the old ; 
 and that, therefore, a boy should not be introduced 
 to Latin at all until he has a firm hold of English 
 accidence, parsing, and general analysis. We should 
 find boys in this way make much more rapid, certainly 
 surer, and always more intelligent, progress with Latin. 
 What they did would have meaning. 
 
 In connexion with this, let me say that the arrange- 
 ment of tenses and moods in the conjugation of English 
 verbs.should, as mudh: as possible, correspond with that 
 adopted in the Latin grainmar. I think that the Latin 
 ought to meet the English here half-way, and that, for 
 example, the subjunctive mood should- always be called 
 "Potential and Subjunctive." In this way it would be 
 seen clearly that it was used both for the English 
 Potential, "I may be," and the English Subjunctive, 
 "If Ibe;" andsoforth\ 
 
 In syntax a good deal more in the way of preparing 
 for Latin can be done than is generally admitted. 
 Thorough English parsing, in which the relations of 
 the predicative verb to subject and object, &c., are 
 
 ' Parallel Grammars recently published by Sonnenschein & Co. 
 try to give effect to this idea. I have not examined them, but they 
 are well spoken of. 
 
118 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 fully brought out, would do very much to promote 
 a clearer and quicker comprehension of Latin syntax 
 than we at present find, as being not something alto- 
 gether alien to English, but only different. Remember, 
 too, that if we forfeit the discipline obtained by con- 
 trasting English and Latin, we imperil the teaching of 
 Latin altogether, for we thus abolish one of its chief 
 uses for boys. 
 
 It follows from what has been said that quite the 
 earliest age for beginning Latin should be the second 
 year of the upper-primary period, viz., the thirteenth 
 year, save in exceptional cases. 
 
 2. The reed, or concrete, should precede the abstract, 
 as this order accords with the natural growth and 
 operation of mind. 
 
 As regards vocable s, for example; a certain number 
 of these should be supplied in connexion with every 
 declension and conjugation as the paradigm of each is 
 acquired, but they should, in the first instance, be re- 
 stricted to things of sense; e.g., the names of the more 
 common animals should be given, and in connexion 
 with these, the parts of the animal. You give tauriis 
 and vacca; give next cornu, pes, os, Cauda, and so forth. 
 Then bring in those adjectives which are fitly and 
 usually applied to these things, viz. forms, colours, &c. 
 Thereby also you fulfil a further rule of method which 
 requires that you "associate teachings." A boy will 
 remember with ease all the Latin words you can use 
 in speaking of a cow if you have a picture of a cow be- 
 fore him and keep to its external characters. No Latin 
 words should be given in the earliest stages, except 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 119 
 
 those which denote things already familiar. Do not be 
 afraid of interesting your boys too much in their work. 
 This Rule, however, is best illustrated under Rule 3. 
 
 3. " Teach generalizations as generalizations." 
 
 That is to say, we must base all generalization on 
 the particular and concrete, which alone gives the 
 general and abstract any meaning. Rules of syntax are 
 generalizations, and they are to be constructed out of 
 the initiatory reading lessons by the pupil with the 
 help of the master. As the pupil gradually acquires 
 them, he will write them down as formulated for him 
 by the teacher on the blackboard, and enter them at 
 home in a grammar note-book. Here again the associa- 
 tion with concrete instances helps the memory. And 
 still again (for all sound rules of method help each 
 other), you evoke the will of the pupil, and by giving 
 him a sense of power in construction, you elicit intel- 
 lectual interest. 
 
 I know it will be said that if the boys are told to 
 learn the generalizations by heart at once, and apply 
 them as occasion arises, they will learn them sooner. 
 But this old-fashioned notion is simgly^ not true. Very 
 few ever learn them at all so as to see their true 
 bearing on the concrete. By the inductive method 
 they must see this ; their memory, also, as I have said, 
 is helped by the rationality of the connexion and by 
 association with particulars, and they thus cannot help 
 learning more quickly. Besides, quickness of acquisi- 
 tion is not everything : the course of instruction must 
 be solid and sure, as well as quick. 
 
 Then, there is the question of intellectual training 
 
120 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 and discipline, one of our chief reasons for teaching 
 Latin at all. The inductive method gives these in 
 addition to all its other advantages. Is it to be 
 supposed that the method of teaching any subject 
 which is the most educative, is the most ineffective ? 
 This would be a strange contradiction in nature. Let 
 the teacher always remember that he is teaching a 
 mind, and not this or that subject to a mind. I would 
 repeat here what I said in speaking of English gram- 
 mar: it is by constant examples, not by rule or pre- 
 cept or laboured exposition, that boys realize the 
 generalizations of grammar. 
 
 It is not, of course, meant that a boy is to wait till 
 he sees a very large number of " instances " before he 
 completes his induction. He is not a grammatical 
 investigator, save in a boy sense. The rules of the art 
 of education provide for this as well as for other things. 
 The boy, if his will is to be evoked, must be self- 
 instructing ; but the teacher is to be his " guide and 
 co-operator," and so lead him to a result which, left to 
 himself alone, he would never reach. This is what 
 teaching means. 
 
 When Latin is properly taught, every lesson is an 
 inductive investigation: every translation if taught in 
 the same spirit, is a fresh problem demanding the ana- 
 lytico-synthetic operation of intellect. 
 
 The success of a teacher is not to be measured by 
 the success with which he stifles all intellectual vitality 
 in his pupils. 
 
 4. Turn to Use. 
 
 We never truly know even a word or form, much 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 121 
 
 less a linguistic rule, until we have used them. "By 
 playing on the lyre we become lyre-players," says Aris- 
 totle. Every acquisition in the shape of words or 
 generalizations, accordingly, must be turned to use, 
 from the very beginning, for the making of Latin. No 
 lesson in Latin is a complete lesson which does not em- 
 brace this. Oral composition, and composition by the 
 help of the blackboard, must be a part of every lesson 
 from the first. Give the boy est and sunt and non, 
 and you can begin before the end of the first week. 
 Masters, who wisely do this, are yet apt to trust too 
 much to books. Now books, especially good ones, are 
 very useful in their own way and place. But teachers 
 will never understand teaching till they learn to regard 
 books as merely subsidiary; and as always necessary 
 evils. No man certainly has a right to teach any sub- 
 ject whatsoever until he is independent of books. It 
 must all be in him. He must be saturated with his 
 subject. I am well aware that such teaching as I refer 
 to is more laborious for the teacher, and, as a matter 
 of course, we have his indolence finding arguments 
 against it. One thing is certain, that such teaching 
 attains its end ; that the other way, which, under more 
 or less of disguise, is the rote-way, has utterly failed, 
 requires no evidence. Gircumspice. Prize pigs from 
 Belfast are unsatisfactory evidence that all, or even the 
 majjority of, the pigs in Ireland take on fat. So with 
 a few university scholarship hunters : what of all the 
 other boys ? 
 
 The boy, remember, has learnt, or is daily learning, 
 the more common Latin vocables, under each declen- 
 sion and conjugation, which have reference to things 
 
122 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 of the sensible world and of ordinary life, and these 
 can at once be utilized. The making of Latin will ad- 
 vance with the growing knowledge and growing intel- 
 ligence of the boy, just as English does or ought to 
 do. All the vocables acquired should be turned to 
 use by being thrown into living connexion one with 
 another, and not be left in columnar isolation. If our 
 aim were simply to fit boys to make acquaintance with 
 Latin literature in the original, it would, perhaps, be 
 difficult to maintain the imperativeness of this early 
 necessity of Latin composition; but this is not our sole, 
 or even our chief, aim. Even professed scholars do not, 
 as a rule, read Latin literature, after they have gradu- 
 ated, except as business. These early exercises should 
 be oral in the first instance, and embrace gradually 
 some of the common concerns of life. If a proper 
 selection of vocables to be learned by heart is given (in 
 accordance with Rule 2), and if a few verbs are early 
 thrown in, this practice of oral composition is quite 
 feasible. Only simple sentences are to be attempted, 
 to begin with. In training to synthetic and imitative 
 composition in the vernacular, I pointed out the im- 
 portance of requiring the boy to answer questions in 
 complete sentences, and this rule might, perhaps, be 
 attended to also in Latin with advantage. Let me 
 add: teach nothing in the grammar that is useless. It 
 is a mistake to suppose that a thing is of educational 
 importance in proportion to its remoteness from ' use ' 
 or its oflfensiveness to boys. 
 
 5. Present to Sense. — The eye should he appealed to 
 whenever practicable. 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOEEIGN LANGUAGES. 123 
 
 I am ashamed to quote Horace's "Segnius irritant," 
 &c. (A. P. 180.) 
 
 Strange that men should have been so slow in 
 applying a precept so obvious. A Latin class without 
 the use of a blackboard, on which every new word and 
 sentence and rule may be written distinctly, is an 
 anachronism. You have not taught anything capable 
 of being presented to the eye until you have taught it 
 through the eye, as well as through the ear. Were it 
 possible to smell it and taste it and touch it, you should 
 also teach it through the nose, the mouth, and the skin. 
 The senses thus establish their own associations, and 
 aid memory. 
 
 Before leaving this rule of method, I would, by way 
 of subsidiary suggestion, say that it would be well were 
 the Latin declensions and conjugations exhibited in 
 black letters on wall-maps, so as to catch the eye, and 
 be taught in school from these maps, after they have 
 been first constructively worked out on the blackboard. 
 In exercising the boys in elementary composition, oral 
 or written, and in parsing, an indication of any error 
 made, by simply pointing with the rod to such a wall- 
 map, would be very efficacious. The correction of the 
 error would be thus associated with locality, and with 
 the eye, as well as the ear. 
 
 In reading Caesar, or any other historian, graphic 
 maps of the country should be constantly present and 
 constantly referred to. In battles, the master should 
 draw on the blackboard the position of the opposing 
 forces. In other reading, antiquities should be repre- 
 sented by drawings wherever possible — not by words. 
 
 In conclusion, nothing new should be taught which 
 
124 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 is not presented to the eye on the board. How foolish 
 is a master to give for the first time sdndo, and merely 
 tell the conjugation of it, and yet how universal the 
 practice ! 
 
 6. Step by step: step after step. The teacher of Latin 
 should set down in his school diary (which should be a 
 kind of appendix to his Instruction-plan of the school) 
 the curriculum through which he means to carry the 
 boy, and the definite amount to be taught in successive 
 months, terms and years. Little, and that little well, 
 should be his motto. Any other mode of procedure is 
 loose and vague, and there is a want of genuine earnest- 
 ness about it. 
 
 7. Evoke the Will. 
 
 In order that any subject of instruction, or any 
 part of a subject, may be really grasped, the boy must 
 bring his own will to bear on it, with a view to appre- 
 hension, and comprehension. He must not sit passively 
 and have things placed before him by his teacher. 
 You have to pump out of him, not to pump into him. 
 The teacher is the caterer, guide, and co-operator; but 
 that is all. His duty is simply to direct the pupil 
 what to do in due order and succession, and to get the 
 pupil to do it. Apply this to the getting-up of pre- 
 scribed lessons : — 
 
 The master having, after due thought as the guide 
 of his pupil, "set the lesson," the boys should be required 
 to attack it in the schoolroom under his guidance. 
 The present practice of converting schools into repeti- 
 tion halls, where the work done elsewhere is merely 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 125 
 
 " said over,'' the master relieving himself of all true 
 effort to educate, and indeed even to instruct, by- 
 letting boys pit themselves one against another for 
 places, while he merely keeps the game going, is 
 not education — not even instruction. The true work 
 is done elsewhere. As caterer and co-operator, then, 
 the master should put the next lesson before the 
 boys, and, supposing it be a new conjugation, get 
 the boys to follow him as he writes it down on the 
 board, requiring them to find out for themselves, 
 and to point out, its resemblances to, and diflFer- 
 ences from, what has been already acquired. Those 
 resemblances and differences being thus worked out, 
 should be written down in bold characters by the 
 master on the board. A few minutes spent asking 
 questions on what is thus written down, secures that 
 instruction in the lesson has been given— and how ? 
 By the boys to themselves — with the co-operation of 
 the master, and organically out of the old. They 
 have had an intellectual exercise, and the result is 
 intelligent perception. This, observe, is discipline so 
 far as it goes, and if the boy left school for good that 
 very day, he would yet carry with him something better 
 than knowledge. It is only now, after the above pro- 
 cess, that memory comes into requisition ; and the 
 boy should be expected to prepare overnight nothing 
 save what has been first done and understood in the 
 school. 
 
 So with translation : the master, having heard a 
 few read the lesson of the previous day and having 
 done the parsing carefully, should state generally the 
 substance of the next chapter, and turn the boys on to 
 
126 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 the learning of it under his guidance and co-operation 
 — sentence by sentence. After a pause, he calls for 
 translation, and if there be considerable difficulties, he 
 points out the leading clause of the sentence, and gives 
 such other limited assistance as he considers necessary. 
 The passage being thus worked out in co-operation, the 
 master should then require the boys to bring a written 
 translation on the following day. While the other boys 
 look on, this written translation should be read by one 
 or two of the cleverer boys, who might then collect the 
 other exercises and correct them. This being done — and 
 it ought not to take more than fifteen minutes — there 
 should be oral construing of the passage. The teacher 
 should then make the boys parse one sentence in full 
 detail, repeating, word for word, every rule hitherto 
 learned, confining himself in this exercise to the worse 
 half of his class. The verbs of the rest of the lesson 
 having been conjugated, he proceeds to the preparation 
 of the next lesson. 
 
 By thus working out the lesson along with the 
 master, with a view to the working of it out by himself 
 at night with the help of a dictionary, the boy more 
 truly does his share in the learning than by the present 
 plan, according to which a few boys prepare their work 
 independently, but the great majority are dependent 
 either on tutors or on cribs, or oij( copying down the 
 master's reading of the next lesson (which, of course, 
 is a crib), or on their neighbours. 
 
 If you do not think the above a good plan, and 
 are of opinion that boys really instruct themselves 
 best by getting their lessons to prepare without any 
 previous assistance, and by using the school simply as 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 127 
 
 a repetition and testing place, 3'ou will at least see the 
 importance of causing the boy to write out his trans- 
 lations daily. By so doing he cannot shirk his work : 
 he truly must apply his mind to the bit of Latin before 
 him in order to reproduce it in written language ; and 
 so far he instructs himself You may say, How can I 
 know in that case that a boy instructs himself ? He 
 may have a tutor, or use a crib, in his own home. To 
 which the answer is : For the former you are not 
 responsible, and the latter you can find out with perfect 
 ease. You test him by the oral construing which 
 follows the reading, and, further, you have simply oc- 
 casionally to require the written exercise to be done in 
 the school under your own eye. In any case a test will 
 be applied at your regular written class examinations, 
 which should be fortnightly. Masters talk against cribs, 
 but there can be no doubt that they purposely wink 
 at the use of them, or at least are indiiferent about it. 
 It is very easy for them to detect the practice, if they 
 choose to try ; and when morality begins to be delibe- 
 rately aimed at in our secondary schools, the masters 
 will quickly find out the boys who are not doing honest 
 work. So much for daily written translations, which 
 should be clearly and carefully done. If you think the 
 lesson too long to be written out, you can give the most 
 important part of it. 
 
 Consider, further, the bearing of this practice on 
 another of our reasons for teaching Latin — its utility in 
 giving a comprehension of English. These written 
 translations are English composition exercises of the 
 very best kind, because they are regulated, as to their 
 form, by a language whose syntactical construction is 
 
128 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 close and logical, and because the matter of the compo- 
 sition is, as is right at this stage, supplied. 
 
 Finally, with a view to instruction in shades of 
 meaning and exact and literary reproduction, as dis- 
 tinguished from close construing, you should conclude 
 the lesson by reading a translation made by yourself 
 in your best style, taking advantage of the best cribs 
 in doing this. 
 
 9. " Be exact and thorough," for all knowledge as it 
 is acquired must be exact, if it is to afford a sound basis 
 for further organic progress. 
 
 Note the importance of this, not only as making 
 progress possible, but in view of one of our reasons for 
 teaching Latin — that it is a formal discipliiie of intel- 
 lect. How can there be any discipline where there is 
 no exactness and thoroughness ? This is all-important. 
 And yet how loosely Latin is taught ! That lax trans- 
 lation which boys make in a class, trusting to some 
 sudden inspiration, or to a prompter, or to the master, 
 is a training in inexactness, and is positively hurtful 
 both to the intelligence and the moral nature of a boy. 
 With a view to exactness; observe again the advantages 
 of much writing. A boy in writing out his lesson 
 ascertains his own ignorance : in oral work he never 
 knows (save in a few exceptional cases) whether he 
 has accomplished it or not. 
 
 This habit of writing also, let me add, gives a sense 
 of power and progress, and of independent activity. 
 Thus it is that one good rule of method supports every 
 other rule, and is supported by them in turn. Observe 
 again, for example, how this rule of writing out with a 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 129 
 
 view to exactness gives effect to the rule " Present to 
 Sense." In the written exercise, the boy creates for him- 
 self a thing to look at, and does it with an intentness 
 and application which ensures its being retained: for he 
 recognises his Latin through a fresh sense (as it were) 
 — the sense of touch, by the manual act of writing. 
 Still once more, observe how a sound rule of method 
 tells in every direction : the habit of writing extends 
 the number of associations with the work done, and so 
 helps the memory. 
 
 Exactness in the knowledge of the day's translation 
 means that no boy shall leave it till he thoroughly 
 knows it'i 
 
 10. Confine your teaching to the leading outlines or 
 salient facts in the first instance, and gradually fill in 
 details. 
 
 This rule is based on the psychological fact that thus 
 we perceive and conceive. 
 
 In Latin, then, confine yourself to a few rules at 
 first, until they are sufficiently understood, and then go 
 on to others. The boy has his own grammar note-book, 
 and enters them as they occur. 
 
 If this requirement of method apply to the ordinary 
 rules of syntax, how much more does it apply to idioms, 
 and exceptions, and irregularities ! And yet the old 
 practice (old, though not yet antiquated) was to cram 
 them all down together. With what result ? 
 
 11. Again I recur to the important rule, TuEN TO 
 
 ^ The question of " Removes" falls to be considered here, but may 
 be passed by, as having to do with school organization. 
 
 L.L. 9 
 
130 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 USE : this time in connexion with more advanced work — 
 the translation of a Latin author. 
 
 You have read a chapter of Nepos, or of Csesar, 
 having prepared it in the manner explained above 
 (Rule 7). You have parsed all the verbs, and also such 
 portion of the lesson in extreme detail as there is time 
 for. But you have not done yet with the chapter. 
 What is the significance of the chapter in view of the 
 reasons for teaching Latin, and the acquisition of the 
 Latin tongue ? It is clear to me that you have not 
 used the chapter until you have extracted from it (1) 
 all the vocables, (2) all the syntax, (3) all the making 
 of Latin, (4) all the English, which it will yield. 
 
 (1) Vocables : I do not mean to say that you are 
 to build up on the foundation of the words occurring 
 in the lesson all their derivatives, but that you are 
 to build up all the more commonly used cognates and 
 derivatives. It is extraordinary what a mass of voca- 
 bles the first book of Caesar's " Gallic War" will thus 
 yield. These groups of cognates the boy will enter 
 either at the end of his grammar note-book, or in a 
 separate book. 
 
 (2) So we proceed with syntax. The lesson must 
 deliver up to the boy all the syntax he has as yet 
 learned and extend his knowledge. 
 
 (3) So also we proceed with the making of Latin. 
 To-day we make Latin out of yesterday's chapter, in a 
 free and varied way. No exercise in Latin composition 
 excites the interest or supplies the discipline which re- 
 troversion of the English of past chapters into Latin does. 
 On this, indeed, we mainly rely for Latin composition, 
 using composition books as mere accessories and helps. 
 
Till.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 131 
 
 (4) The English that lies in the Latin has to be 
 taught. For great numbers of English words are now 
 to be seen in their origins and primary significance; 
 and thus one of the chief reasons for our teaching Latin 
 is satisfied. 
 
 I am well aware that some boys will be left behind, 
 however good the teaching; but they will learn some- 
 thing at least, and they will be disciplined. I am also 
 well aware that there may not be always time to exhaust 
 every lesson. But have the right mode of procedure as' 
 your aim. This is the essential thing. 
 
 A single chapter of Csesar thus thoroughly and ex- 
 actly known (or " lessoned," to use Milton's word) is 
 worth twenty loosely, or even fairly, gone over. As a 
 discipline you will at once admit that this is so. But 
 what I further maintain is, that every part of sound 
 method helps every other, and that the so-called practi- 
 cal outcome is also thus best secured. With such 
 thoroughness and exactness as I demand, the boy would 
 take a considerable time to get over the fifty-four 
 chapters of Lib. L of, say, the " Gallic War." I admit 
 that he would do only twelve chapters per month ; but 
 are five months, or even six months, too much to 
 devote to the first book of Csesar, if at the end of that 
 time a boy truly knows it, and has constructed his own 
 note-books out of it ? He will have learned more, quite 
 apart from discipline, than by four books read as they 
 are too commonly read. To Latin, as to other studies, 
 the rule of Quintilian is applicable : " cito scribendo non 
 fit ut bene scribatur, bene scribendo fit ut cito '' (x. 3, 
 9). 
 
 9—2 
 
132 TEACHING FOEEIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 12. Exercise the Memory. Revise. 
 
 All the above rules make remembrance easy, for 
 they presume understanding, and they give free course 
 to association. But, apart from these rules, consider 
 the importance of constant revision with boys if they are 
 to remember. What a grown man will remember after 
 one telling, has to be told twenty times to a boy. A 
 day once a week should be set apart for revisal, and a 
 "grand" day once a month. When the pupil begins 
 Latin poetry, prescribe the learning by heart of lines. 
 Not too many. A few, well learned — this is all that is 
 needed. 
 
 What has now to be said concerns the middle of 
 the third year and thereafter. 
 
 13. I would refer you now to our ninth reason for 
 learning Latin, and deduce this rule : A pupil must he 
 so instructed that he shall attain a grasp of the sweep, 
 characteristics, and genius of the language, and a general 
 acquaintance with the literature and history, of the 
 Roman people. 
 
 In the earlier stages of study little can be done 
 in this direction, it is true. More, however, than is 
 generally supposed may be accomplished. The slow, 
 exact, and critical way in which the regular Latin 
 lesson should be done may possibly weary boys. To 
 obviate this, and to give your pupils relief and some 
 acquaintance with Latin literature, and a larger com- 
 prehension of the sweep and character and capacity of 
 the language than they can otherwise get, there ought 
 to be cursive reading in every class above the second. 
 For example, while engaged closely and critically on 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 133 
 
 the first book of Caesar, the master should read with 
 the hoys some such book as Eutropius or Cornelius 
 Nepos — translating a sentence, calling on some one to 
 ■do it after him, and then hurrying on to the next 
 sentence. In this way the whole of Eutropius and the 
 Latin lives in Cornelius Nepos might be read during 
 the year in which the boys are working critically at 
 Csesar and Ovid. In the following year, when the boys 
 are engaged on Sallust and Virgil, or some of the sim- 
 pler orations of Cicero, all the more interesting portions 
 of the eight books of the " Gallic War " might be cur- 
 eively read — the substance of those portions omitted 
 being narrated by the master. While Livy, again, is 
 being studied, Curtius's " Life of Alexander the Great " 
 might be read in the same way. While Horace is being 
 critically and exactly studied, much of Ovid might be 
 cursively read. I would also encourage, for cursive and 
 private reading, editions with the Latin or Greek on 
 one side and the English on the other. In short, every 
 means should be taken to make the boy familiar with a 
 large mass of the language and literature which he is 
 studying. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say under this rule that 
 when a new book, say the twenty-second book of Livy, 
 or a book of Tacitus, is begun, it is necessary to give 
 wholeness and fulness and unity to a boy's conceptions, 
 if you are to engage his rational interest. Therefore, 
 give him an account (with a good map before him)^ of 
 
 ' I know -well, too well, the petty objections whioh a certain class of 
 dead-alive teacher (always a 'practical' man) makes to every rational 
 suggestion. At this point the duU man will of course say I have not 
 got maps in my school. The answer is, ' Make them; chalk is cheap.' 
 
134 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 the history of Eome or Greece, dwelling on the great 
 events that happened prior to the date at which they 
 begin to read. Let them know also about Livy and 
 Tacitus, and lead them to take a living interest in 
 their writings, not as so many word-puzzles constructed 
 two thousand years ago for schoolboys, with a view to 
 deterinine who is, or who is not, to be head boy of 
 a class on a certain day in the nineteenth century. 
 Ample introductions, more than once repeated, to 
 the books read critically, will be the certain means of 
 interesting boys, if anything will, in the Latin lan- 
 guage through its literature and history. For the 
 teacher, too, it is valuable : it connects him through 
 the humanities with the hearts and intellects of his 
 pupils, and establishes his moral influence. If Latin 
 be not taught in this large spirit, even that admir- 
 able tongue, with all its great educative advantages, 
 will not permanently hold its own against the intru- 
 sion of science teaching accompanied by modern lan- 
 guages. 
 
 By the end of the fourth year your boys, if taught in 
 accordance with the above suggestions, will have read, 
 with much more exactness and thoroughness, all the 
 usual material, they will have written or spoken a hun- 
 dred Latin translations and Latin prose exercises for one 
 now written, have thoroughly worked out the English 
 bearing of the Latin tongue, and in the course of this 
 have constructed their own syntactical grammar and 
 idiom book : nay, over and above, they will have read 
 cursively, or with the help of translations, the whole of 
 Eutropius, of Cornelius Nepos, of Caesar's " Gallic War," 
 (the passages omitted being orally related) and all the 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 135 
 
 more interesting legends of Ovid's "Metamorphoses;" 
 and, although they may have read only one book of the 
 "^neid" critically, you, the master, will have found 
 time to read to them the whole of some good poetical 
 translation. Compare this with the miserable scraps 
 and disconnected fragments which at present constitute 
 the Latin diet of boys. And yet the men who from 
 day to day give these scraps and word-puzzles tell you 
 that they do so in the name of the Humanities ! 
 
 You see, then, that while I advocate much more 
 verbal thoroughness and much more Latin composition 
 than is at present practised, in the interests at once of 
 discipline and acquisition, I also advocate much more 
 looseness. The mode of procedure suggested is more 
 intensive, and at the same time more extensive. It is 
 scarcely necessary to point out how the exact and critical, 
 as well as more extensive, reading of Latin gives oppor- 
 tunities for complying with the requirements involved 
 in our third reason for studying Latin — the analysis of 
 the shades of meaning between words. 
 
 Doubtless, those of you who have already taught 
 Latin will say that the carrying out of this system of 
 constant writing, and of Latin composition, would be 
 extremely difficult with a class exceeding thirty-five, or 
 composed of boys at different stages of progress. To 
 which the answer is, that classes should not be com- 
 posed of more than thirty-five, and that they should 
 not be at different stages of progress. 
 
 If I hold that all this can be done to introduce boys 
 into the life and spirit and genius of the Roman people, 
 by the end of their fourth year in Latin, presuming 
 that they begin in their twelfth or thirteenth year, 
 
136 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 I need scarcely say that I should expect much more 
 when the study of Latin is prolonged two years beyond 
 this. 
 
 The exercises in the making of Latin should now 
 he more varied. Retroversion should still be practised, 
 but the boys should also be required to reproduce the 
 substance of several chapters of the Latin author they 
 are reading ; and to prevent too much reliance on the 
 book, these exercises should be done as much as possible 
 in school. 
 
 By following the procedure which I have above in- 
 dicated, we associate the study of a language with the 
 realities and humanities of which all literary language 
 is the vehicle, and bring ourselves into accord with our 
 eighth as well as our ninth reason for teaching Latin. 
 In continuing our course of instruction further, we 
 follow the same method, and are led into a still higher 
 sphere of the humanities, encountering our eighth 
 reason for teaching Latin, which yields us a rule of 
 method, as the other reasons do: viz. 
 
 14. So instruct in more advanced Latin as to culti- 
 vate the (Esthetic and art perceptions of your pupils. 
 
 You read Horace and Virgil and Livy, we may 
 assume, and require written translations, if not of the 
 whole lesson read, of a part of it, daily, and maintain 
 your daily exercises in Latin composition, oral and 
 written, on the basis of the passages read. You also 
 continue your cursive reading, and encourage the boys 
 to continue it at home with the help of translations. 
 But this is not enough. When you have read an elo- 
 quent passage in Cicero, or a fine passage in Virgil or 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 137 
 
 Horace, you should ask your boys to note its eloquence 
 or its beauty. Their attention should be directed to 
 the art with which the thought is expressed. And what 
 is literary art ? It is the adequate expression of an idea 
 — neither more nor less than adequate — in language 
 worthy of the idea and controlled by the feeling of the 
 beautiful. And the beautiful, whatever else it may be, 
 is severe, is chaste, is self-controlled, balanced like a 
 Greek statue ; and it is all this because it is simplicity 
 and harmony. State the idea in your own or ask them 
 to do it in their words, and then point out how nobly, 
 and yet with what chaste simplicity or eloquent rhythm, 
 the orator or poet has given expression to what in their 
 limited utterance is mean enough. The boys should 
 continue, of course, to learn the finer pieces of poetry 
 by heart. 
 
 Then, when you have read a piece of Horace or 
 Virgil, pronounce to them, with fit elocution, the best 
 poetical translations in our own tongue. Dryden, Con- 
 ington, Martin, will, as a matter of course, be in the 
 library and schoolroom of every classical teacher who is 
 not a mere gerund-grinder. I would almost go so far 
 as to say that no man ever became fully aware for the 
 first time of the beauty, the so-called "classical" flavour 
 of any piece of Latin or Greek except through a good 
 tr9,nslation. If he is an expert, he may doubtless by 
 the time he is five-and-twenty make this for himself; 
 but what has this got to do with schools and 999 out 
 of 1000 of Latin and Greek pupils ? If you want a 
 boy of 17 or 18 to feel the Greek of the Hippolytus, 
 for example, he must read with you Fitzgerald's trans- 
 lation. He will certainly not discover it by the help 
 
138 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 of the dictionary. It is at this stage that parallel 
 passages are in place. 
 
 In home exercises, elegant English renderings will 
 now be encouraged, and much, very much, educational 
 value attached to them. 
 
 At the same time, do not forget at this stage to 
 deepen and broaden the pupil's knowledge of the history 
 and life of Rome. Every lesson in Latin is a starting- 
 point for all that it suggests of Roman civilization. Read 
 to him translations of the best passages in the Livian 
 History ; present to his eyes maps of the geography 
 of the ancient world ; exhibit photographs of Rome, of 
 its great buildings, of its works of art. The room should 
 be adorned with casts from the British Museum. The 
 whole atmosphere should be classical. Remember, too, 
 that in the most brilliant period of Roman literature 
 with which you are now dealing, it was Greece which 
 was the mother of Roman arts. You are now on 
 Grecian soil, and as boys have by this time begun 
 Greek, and made some way in it, you can improve on 
 the Roman lesson. 
 
 A boy who, after six years in Latin begun at the 
 age of about twelve, to which he has given an average 
 of eight school hours per week, has not, either in the 
 original tongue, critically or cursively, or by means of 
 translations, read the whole of Cajsar's " Gallic War," 
 Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, seven or eight 
 orations of Cicero, all the best books of Livy, all Tacitus, 
 all that is best in the " Tristia," " Epistolse ex Ponto," and 
 "Metamorphoses" of Ovid, and two or three plays of 
 Plautus and Terence, and a selection from Catullus, Ti- 
 bullus, Martial and Lucretius, has not, in my opinion, 
 
VIII.J TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 139 
 
 been taught in the best possible way. And need I add 
 that the master who is incompetent to extract from 
 Latin study all its historical teaching and all its aesthetic 
 and moral culture, as well as its logical discipline, is 
 not a true builder of the Temple of Education, but 
 a mere hodman-^a carrier of bricks and mortar, out of 
 which others are to redr the stately and beautiful 
 edifice, if it is to be rear^ at all ? 
 
 I think that the application of any one of the above 
 rules of method will touch the intelligence and evoke the 
 interest of boys : much more all of them taken together. 
 Do not be afraid to see your boys happy and interested 
 in their work. There is absolutely no reason in the 
 nature of things why the schoolroom should be regarded 
 by a boy as part of "that estate of sin and misery where- 
 into men fell " through Adam. 
 
 Note. — As to Latin verse-writing, I presume that 
 as an universally prescribed exercise, and consequent 
 engine of immorality, it is now gone out. But I cannot 
 agree with those who wholly condemn it. For the 
 highest stages of progress, for which alone, like elegant 
 prose, it is suited, it does much, if pursued in modera- 
 tion, to enable a youth to realize the genius of the 
 ancients and to appreciate literary form. 
 
 Greek and Modern Tongues. 
 
 I might now go on to deal with Greek, but I should 
 simply have to repeat what I have said about Latin. 
 The only warning to be given is, that the " old " out of 
 which Greek instruction grows is Latin. To bother 
 
140 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 boys, for example, with Greek syntax rules which are 
 the same as those in Latin, is palpably absurd. It is 
 differences and contrasts the teacher has now to bring 
 out. 
 
 I would also say that Epic and Ionic dialects should 
 not be touched by the boy (still less learned in the 
 grammar) until an Attic foundation has been securely 
 laid. By that time the great mass of the boys ^vill 
 be gone from school. Why teach Greek at all to boys 
 who cannot prosecute it beyond Anab. B. I.? One 
 would think that many classical masters had never 
 heard of English or French or German or Physical Geo- 
 graphy, or Elementary Science or History ? And if you 
 do teach Greek, is it not shameful that boys of 17, who 
 leave school without proceeding to the university, have 
 not read with you the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey, 
 and the whole of the Anabasis and of Arrian, and half-a- 
 dozen Greek dramas (in English of course) in supplement 
 to their Greek reading ? 
 
 In modern languages the rules of method are the 
 same as in Latin, and, for that matter, the same as in 
 English — always, of course, mutatis mutandis. Substi- 
 tute the word French for Latin, and the rules are mani- 
 festly the same. The chief point of difference in modem 
 tongues is, that as we have to do with living speech, the 
 ear should be from the first cultivated without the help 
 of the eye, and that what in Latin is oral composition 
 should, in German and French, take the form of ele- 
 mentary conversation — chiefly based on the lesson of the 
 day. I cannot, however, pass from this subject — one of 
 growing importance — without expressing my surprise 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 141 
 
 that any master or parent should expect boys to get a 
 thorough knowledge of French or German with less 
 instruction than five hours a week. Here too as in 
 Latin and Greek I would read translations. As soon 
 as the pupils had got as far as the requirements of 
 the university local examinations, Molifere, &c., might 
 be read to them in English as a foretaste of the 
 French. 
 
 Go7iclusion. 
 
 My object in this brief course of lectures has been 
 to demonstrate that Language must always be the 
 governing subject in all education worthy of the name. 
 
 I have endeavoured to show that, properly taught, 
 it provides real nutrition for the mind, without which it 
 cannot live; it provides a vehicle, ever growing with 
 the growth of mind, for the expression of the inner life, 
 without which definite expression the deeper emotions 
 and the spiritual suggestions of our complex nature, 
 are like the clouds on a windy sky, ever changing their 
 fleeting forms, and finally vanishing altogether. Only 
 when shaped into words do these feelings and emotions 
 get for themselves a body, and become to us a per- 
 manent possession. They then react upon our lives, 
 and are the steps to higher things. Thus it is that 
 language, as a concrete subject, feeds, and by feeding 
 makes the evolution of mind in us possible. Again, 
 language as a real and concrete subject not only feeds, 
 but, if it is understood, it trains: it trains the processes 
 of intelligence without strain or effort, and whether 
 
142 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 
 
 a boy will or not. Further, language, as a formal 
 or abstract subject, disciplines; and I have endea- 
 voured to point out the distinction between training 
 and discipline with a view to your seeing that, while, 
 without grammar, the study of language, as vehicle of 
 thought and feeling, trains, with grammar, it also dis- 
 ciplines: thus its claims as an educational instrument 
 become irresistible. 
 
 But not only does language feed, train, and dis- 
 cipline : it also at all stages, if properly taught, culti- 
 vates in us the beautiful and ideal through the forms of 
 literature — as compared with which all other forms of 
 art are of secondary and only ancillary importance. It 
 is possible — as you, I hope, now see — to teach litera- 
 ture, though it may be undesirable to examine on it. 
 An external examination, though, in most subjects, 
 inevitable in these days, can never be allowed to 
 tarnish and degrade those more delicate instruments 
 of education which have to do with the spiritual in 
 any form, whether it be literature or religion. It is 
 death to them. 
 
 In speaking of the Method which is to be followed 
 in teaching language if it is to be an educational in- 
 strument, I have given you rules, but I have not sought, 
 I hope, to dwell on these unduly. Enough has been 
 done, however, to show how the teacher may apply the 
 rules for himself But he must first cast them aside 
 as rules, and work from within. Let him realize fully, 
 and by much thought, the aim, the purpose, the 
 idea of his daily work. Let him understand that he 
 is using language in its various aspects in order to 
 
VIII.] TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 143 
 
 enrich and form, as well as to inform, the minds com- 
 mitted to him, and he will quickly find a method 
 of procedure, which may or may not embrace all the 
 rules of method which another may advocate, but 
 which, though occasionally erring, will yet be better 
 than any system imposed on him from without, because 
 it will be a living, and not a mechanical, system. " The 
 transmission of life from the living through the living 
 to the living is the highest definition of education'." 
 Method is a good servant but a bad master. In a 
 teacher, however, as in men of every other occupation 
 and profession, a man's originality is of little worth 
 until he has first learned all that can be taught him ; 
 but when he has once learned this, let him then live 
 his own professional life freely, for "it is the letter that 
 killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 
 
 My purpose in these lectures, I need hardly say, has 
 not been to attack science-teaching. On the contrary, 
 there ought to be found in every school a graduated 
 and organized system of realistic teaching from the 
 infant-school to the gates of the university — the 
 object-lesson being in this department the key to all 
 method. We do not need to be afraid of as much 
 encyclopsedism as will place an educated youth in a 
 rational attitude to nature. What God has thought it 
 worth His while to make, is probably worthy of man's 
 attention without derogating from his dignity, or in- 
 sinuating an insult to Greek. Still, the centre round 
 which all education of a man must revolve is, in my 
 1 Thring, p. 27. 
 
144 TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES. [LECT. VIII. 
 
 opinion, a humanistic centre, and I have, therefore, 
 in these lectures ventured to restate the case for 
 language, and say a Word for Words. 
 
 Many things which I have suggested will seem 
 small and trivial to some masters, but Quiatilian says 
 that he is not a good teacher to whom anything in edu- 
 cation seems small : in truth, are not the very greatest 
 things made out of a large number of small ones, 
 by which alone they become possible, as the physical 
 universe is made up of atoms ? And what we educators 
 aim at is a very big thing in its result, for "in very 
 deed, in the end," as excellent Ascham simply says, 
 " the good or ill bringing up of children doth as much 
 serve to the good or ill-service of God, our Prince, and 
 our whole country, as any one thing doth beside." 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 METHOD: OR THE RULES O^F THE ART OF 
 INSTRUCTION. 
 
 {Deduced from Pysdwlogy as Science of Education^ 
 
 I. Follow the Oeder of Mind-Gkowth. 
 
 (1) The general curriculum of instruction is to be regulated 
 by the order of mental growth. The Concrete first : the Abstract 
 afterwards. 
 
 (2) Every subject of instruction must be graded so as to 
 accord with the gradual and slow process of mind in grasping it. 
 
 Coroll. — (1) The teaching of a subject must he step after step, 
 (2) Step by step, i.e. a short step at a time. Education is a slow 
 process: ^without rest, hut without haste' is the Teacher's motto. 
 
 [Note. — This Eule requires that the teacher should mark out 
 carefully how much of a subject he means to teach in a year, a 
 month, a week, and a day: and that he (generally) restrict himself 
 by his own limitations.] 
 
 II. Follow the Analytico-Synthetic Way : for every 
 subject should be taught in accordance with the way or process 
 by which the mind grows in knowledge. 
 
 (1) Mind grows by raising existing vague attuitions into 
 clear and distinct percepts and concepts. The teacher, accord- 
 ingly, must aim at making the crude contents of the pupil's 
 mind clear and distinct. 
 
 (2) Teach one thing on the basis of another : for the mind 
 advances to new knowledge on the basis of what it already knows. 
 
 L.L. 10 
 
146 APPENDIX. 
 
 Knowledge is an organic and dynamic growth, not a mechanical 
 one. 
 
 4 (3) All knowledge, as it is acquired, must be exact, if it is 
 to afford a sound basis for further organic growth. 
 — Coroll. — Dwell long over the elements of a suhjeat. 
 
 (4) Teach percepts as percepts, concepts as concepts, generali- 
 zations as generalizations, and reasonings as reasonings. Carry 
 the mind through these various steps in the acquisition of a 
 subject in so far as the subject admits of this being done. For 
 the mind truly grows in knowledge first through percepts ; then 
 through concepts ; then through generalizations ; and then 
 through reasonings (inductive and deductive), and causal per- 
 ceptions. 
 
 J (5) In all subjects confine your teaching to the leading out- 
 lines in the first instance. For the mind grows in knowledge of 
 a subject by apprehending the salient or prominent features 
 first, and then proceeding to detail. 
 
 Coroll. — Proceed from the general to the detailed, and from 
 the siTTiple to the complex. 
 
 ■ III. Evoke the Will. For the Mind acquires knowledge 
 not by receiving it but by taking it through an act of Will. 
 
 The pupil should be so taught as to instruct himself : — the 
 master being only the guide, co-operator, and remover of ob- 
 structions. 
 
 [Note. — This mode of procedure gives a sense of power and self- 
 achieved progress to the pupil which are stimulating in the highest 
 degree.] 
 
 IV. Present to Sense. For the mind is dependent on 
 the outer and inner sense for the primary material of its. 
 knowledge. 
 
 Coroll. — Appeal to every sense, wherever practicable, in the 
 teaching of every subject. 
 
 V. Exercise the Memory. For memory is a condition of 
 the growth of knowledge and of mind. 
 
 Coroll. — Revise and re-revise lessons, and. exercise the memory 
 in the repetition of things worth remembering. [Bepetitio mater 
 studiorum.] "^^ 
 
APPENDIX. 147 
 
 VI. Cultivate the Imagination. All that we acquire is 
 reproduced through the imagination; and thereby impressed on 
 the mind and used to create fresh combinations. 
 
 VII. Associate Teachings. For the mind grows in know- 
 ledge by associating one thing with another. 
 
 Coroll. — Support and enrich the teaching of a subject with as 
 many natural and relevant associations as possible. 
 
 [Note. — This aids memory and gives breadth and elasticity of 
 mind.] 
 
 VIII. Present a Good Model. For the mind grows in 
 knowledge largely by imitation, especially in its earlier stages. 
 
 IX. Use what is learned. For the purpose of all know- 
 ledge is the regulation of life ; i. e. Conduct (Action). 
 
 Coroll. — (1) Turn everythitig to use from day to day as you 
 teach it. (2) Teach nothing that is useless. (3) Connect what is 
 taught with the ordinary life of the pupils. 
 
 [Note. — The first test of knowledge is the power of reproducing 
 it; the second and higher test, the power of using or applying it.] 
 
 CAMBRIDCb : PRINTED BV C. J. CLAV, M.A. & SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
WORKS BY PROFESSOR S. S. LAURIE. 
 
 METAPHYSICA NOYA ET YETUSTA: A Return to 
 
 Dualism. By Scotus Novanticus. (Professor S. S. Laubie.) 
 200 pp., 8vo., Cloth, 6s. 
 
 " ■'■ ^^^'^Sratulate you very sincerely on the production of this remarkable little book. 
 Its results are among the best in philosophy ; at the same time that your deduction of 
 them from the simple act of percipience is at once original and happy. "—JFrom 
 Dr Hutchison Stirling. 
 
 "The book is an analysis of Perception mdependently undertaken, but with full 
 
 Knowledge of, and reference to, the Kantian investigation The whole is worked out 
 
 with much sureness of touch and with real philosophical insight. The author's know- 
 ledge and use of German thought is flavoured by a certain sturdy Scotch independence 
 as well as by an infusion of Scotch caution. , . . The book makes the impression of 
 having been written by one who has held himself at some distance from the philosophical 
 schools, and who has embodied in his work the results of his mature thought. . . . 
 
 Relativity (with the author) is something quite different from Relatednesa What is 
 
 said by the author is said with admirable clearness."— J^'j-om " Mind" October, 1884. 
 
 "... As a connected reasoned body of doctrines, the explanation offered by ' Scotus 
 Novanticus ' constitutes a new pliilosophical theory. ... By the help of this versatile will- 
 force, the writer endeavours to solve the great problems of philosophy. ... If the reasonings 
 and conclusions are not always satisfactory, the book will still be interesting to the 
 readers of philosophy on account of the light it throws on several important points of 
 speculative inquiry, and also for the thoroughness with which the doctrmes are 
 developed and carried out."~i''j*om " The Scotsman." 
 
 "The anonymous work 'Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta,' by 'Scotus Novanticus,' well 
 deserves the careful attention of all who can appreciate a sustained piece of reasoning. 
 . . . The book displays much maturity of thought throughout, and the author, whoever 
 he is, possesses a complete grasp of philosoi>hical distinctions. . . . Though he works out 
 liis theory forcibly in his own way, he has evidently been largely influenced by Kant and 
 the ^ost-Kantian Idealists, particularly perhaps by Fichte. ... It may be described as a 
 succmct but comprehensive sketch of a metaphysical psychology." — From " The Contem- 
 porary Review." 
 
 "... In the instance before us, while the subj ect handled is a large one, the treatment 
 it receives (notwithstanding the brevity of the book) is wonderfully full. * Scotus 
 Novanticus' wastes none of his space in rhetorical verbiage nor in wordy excursions into 
 the picturesque fields adjoining his subject proper, but confines himself strictly to the 
 province within which it lies. His style is terse yet lucid, and his book, though hard 
 reading, as it is almost bound to be from its nature as from its succinctness, never fails 
 to be mteresting. ... In this little work the anonymous author attempts nothing less 
 than to trace the genesis and historji of our knowledge— our knowledge of the outer world 
 as well as of the workings of mind itself. ... It would be impossible for us here to give 
 anything like a full and explicit account of the contribution which is here offered. 
 'Scotus Novanticus' wastes no words, and his treatise reads like a mathematical 
 demonstration. . . . The work will well repay a careful study, and is a valuable con- 
 tribution to the subject with which it deals. We heartily commend it to students of 
 Philosophy whether they be materialists or not."— From " The Scottish {Quarterli/J 
 Beview." 
 
 "Wliile, as we shall afterwards point out, we consider this work a failure as an 
 argument for Dualism, we cannot help congratulating the author on the production of a 
 
 work BO distinguished by subtle analysis and philosophic jjower We say his Dualism 
 
 is illogical, because in no work have we seen the activities of the mind more clearly 
 exhibited or their necessity for the constitution of knowledge more convincingly argued. 
 More than this, he has freed himself from the paralogisms, which strangled Kant when 
 dealing with such notions as Being, Causality, and the Absolute. ... It only remains to 
 add that the style is clear, terse and vigorous."— J*^-om " The Glasgow Herald." 
 
 " This is the work of a powerful and original thinker."— From " The Modern Revieiv" 
 October, 1884. 
 
 " . . . . Professor Laurie's ingenious and original little book. . . . Comprehensive 
 treatise ... it abounds in admirable expositions and acute criticisms : and especially 
 indicates a clear insight founded upon accurate knowledge into the insuflficiency of the 
 empirical psychology as a base of metaphysical philosophy."— ii>'OJ« a " Study of Reli- 
 gion" by Br James Martineau, 1888. 
 
 '■Elle [la M6taphysique] a attirS I'attention apficiale des critiques par la finesse des 
 analyses, la profondeur des deductions et la rigueur, un peu tendue, de la mSthode 
 dialectique." — From La Revue PMlosophiqite (Feb. 1890). 
 
Notices of the Press. 
 
 ETHIOA, OR THE ETHICS OF REASON. By 
 
 ScoTus NovANTicus, Author of '* Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta." 
 
 "About twelve months ago the author of this volume published a work entitled 
 ' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta : a return to Dualism,' in which he. advanced a notable 
 theory regarding the origui and nature of human knowledge. . . . 
 
 " In the ' Ethics of Reason ' the direct influence of Kant and Hegel is especially evident ; 
 still these old elements of doctrine, as well as the terminology, are here used in an 
 independent way by a writer who elaborates a theory marked by distinctive features 
 
 "To understand fully the doctrines thus propounded by 'Scotus Novanticus,' his 
 reasonings must be studied in his own expositions, and as he has reasoned them out and 
 connected the different parts into a system. All that we can say is that the various 
 branches of the subject are unfolded with ability and ample knowledge of existing moral 
 theories. . . . 
 
 " The work is the production of an original and profound thinker who is well aware of 
 the difficulties of his thesis. The argument is managed with skill and dialectic power. The 
 treatise is well entitled to the attention of students of Philosophy."— /rom " The 
 Scotsman." 
 
 The 'Ethica' repeats the characteristics of the 'Metaphysica,' and is an equally 
 noteworthy contribution to the determination of ultimate philosophical positions. The 
 book is not controversial in character, and is as sparing as its predecessor in the specific 
 allusions to other writers ; but we are able to feel that the abstention is advised, and 
 that the author's theory has been elaborated in full view of modern discussions. As he 
 proceeds on his own way, doctrines receive their correction, amplification, or quietus, 
 though their authors are not referred to. . . . 
 
 " Enough has perhaps been said to prove that the argument deserves to be studied by 
 all who aim at clear thinking on ethical questions."— i*'j*om " Mind" October, 1885. 
 
 " As we expected, the acute and logical author of ' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta' baa 
 followed up that work with another, in which his leading principles are applied in the 
 field of ethics. Here, as in his former work, he is very close and cogent, scorning to 
 allow himself any of the easy and rhetorical illustrations with which some writers in 
 philosophy are prone to make up their chapters. Whatever may be said of his ideas, his 
 style, it will be admitted, is one that is to be commended alike for its directness, 
 simplicity, and serviceableness. We have read the book with an increasing conviction of 
 the author's originality and power, and of the benefit that his books may confer, even in 
 this regard, on philosophical students. So carefully is his main argument drawn out 
 that we cannot find space to outline it here, but must content ourselves with indicating 
 one or two of his salient positions. ... 
 
 " The author's application of his principles to the development of the Altruistic 
 Emotions, to Law, ana Justice is admirably consistent and suggestive ; though, of course, 
 in the process he has to deal somewhat severely with the definitions of the moral sdns^ 
 the moral faculty, and conscience, which have been given by not a few writers on 
 philosophy, ethics, and theology. Many of Kant's positions are incisively criticized, and 
 lacuntB, as the author conceives, supplied. As a criticism of ethical systems, no less than 
 as a piece of dialectic, and a positive contribution to ethical science, it is suggestive and 
 thorough. We can cordially commend the book. It will raise questions no doubt, and 
 answers will be forthcoming on various points j but the questioners would do well to take a 
 hint from the author in the style of answering them. '—JPVom " The British Quarterly 
 Review." 
 
 " Instead of the psychological method of inquiry formerly so much in fashion in the 
 treatment of ethics, we have here a method which is transcendental in character. . . . 
 
 "Here, as indeed throughout the volume, 'Scotus Novanticus' shows how ably he 
 can conduct a process of reasoning throughout its various stages, avoiding every 
 temptation to depart from the definite line of argument which he has marked out for 
 himself. ... 
 
 " This is an exceedingly able work. It contains much forcible writing, and shows the 
 autlior to possess a singular power of sustained thought. We admire the way in wliich 
 he keeps himself free from entanglement in view of side issues, and at the same time is 
 able to indicate their bearings on the main theme. For the expression of abstract 
 thinking the style could hardlv be better. It is direct, and hence forcible, and, though 
 using the language of philosophy, is free from unnecessary technicalities."— i^rom " The 
 Glasgow Herald," April 10, 1885. 
 
Notices of the Press, 
 
 ♦iio'o^'*! *JJ*'**9n.'^ mode of working out his thought may seem to symbolize his ethical 
 oLQ^y ? V. ^^ ^®"^® °^ ^*^°^' "^** '^ ^ P*^' "^ ^'1 moral action ends, as he shows, in 
 a. sense 01 tiMinony. Now 'Scotus Novanticus* requires from iiis readers a distinct 
 intellectual effort in order to grasp his thought ; but if they are willing to make this 
 enort, they are really rewarded by liaving in their minds an idea of a coherent system 
 7 vl'^tu many features of originality, and which, regarded as a whole, produces 
 (Whether we agree with it or not) that sense of power to contemplate the world and 
 action trom a general point of view which is characteristic of the philosophic attitude as 
 .matingiushed Irom the attitude of science and common sense."— Ji^-om "The Westminster 
 Kevteiv. 
 
 "(This volume is characterized, we need hardly say, by all the excellent qualities that 
 diabnguished our author's previous work. ... 'Scotus Novanticus' is a sldlful and 
 patient analyst of the phenomena of mind, and writes in a style that conveys very clearly 
 what he wishes to express. It is a case of clear thought mirroring itself m clear 
 language We remarked in regard to his 'Metaphysica* that it read like a mathe- 
 matical demonstration: we have the same to say of this. 'Scotus Novanticus' has 
 evidently a wholesome horror of 'padding.' 1-Iis argument is about as condensed as it 
 could well be. Then he is so careful in the use of his terms that we run a risk of 
 misleading our readers by employing them without also giving his precise definitions of 
 them. We refer our readers, therefore, to the work itself. It will amply repay careful 
 
 study, and only by careful study can the argument be fully appreciated 'Ethica ' is 
 
 a careful study, and a valuable contribution to ethical saence."~Fi'om " The Scottisli 
 iQuarterli/) Review." 
 
 "The present treatise contains a very close discussion of the chief points in debate 
 between the different schools of moralists ; and the author seems, in my Judgment, to be 
 remarkably successful in harmonizing the elements of truth in each. ... It is not possible 
 here to do more than single out a few points from a book wliich rewards a careful 
 study."— i-^i-OHi " The Contemporary Review." 
 
 ON THE "METAPHYSICA" AND "ETHICA" 
 TOGETHER. 
 
 "There is notliing absolutely new in [Dr Martineau's] doctrine [as to necessity of 
 conflict, &c]. ... It has been admirably expounded in a recent volume of great force 
 of thought and scientific precision of analysis, under the title of ' Ethica, or the Ethics of 
 Reason.' This volume bears to be by 'Scotus Novanticus,' author of a preceding 
 volume entitled 'Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta.' Both volumes are marked by much 
 vigour and lucidity, grasp of philosophic distinctions, and capacity of following and 
 combining threads of thought to their end. . . . We have pleasure in recommending them 
 to the attention of all students of Philosophy."— iiVom " The Edinburgh Review" 
 
 "Das erste dieser beiden eng zusammengehOrigeu BUcher desselben ungenannten 
 Verf. (des Prof. S. S. Laurie) lasst sich als eine Phenomeuologie des Geistes behufs der 
 Constituirung einer erkenntnisstheoretischen Metaphysik bezeichneu, die von Kantischen, 
 streng rationalistischen Gesichtepuukten ausgehend, sich von da mit HUlfe weiterer an 
 Fichte und Hegel erinnernden Elemente zu eiuer vollst&ndigen, eigenthUmlichen Ansicht 
 der Sache erhebt." 
 
 "In der Behauptun^ der Idee der Persflnlichkeit steht der Verf. durchaus auf 
 Kantischem Boden ; sem Streben ist aber die theoretische und praktische Seite der 
 Yemunft eiuander mdglichst zu nS.hern, um eben aus ihr als einem einheitlichen Princip 
 eine vollstSndige systematische Erkenntnisseinheit zu deduciren, wobei er sich dem 
 absoluten Idealismus der nachkantischen deutschen Philosophie aunMiert. Das Unter- 
 nehmen des ' Scotus Novanticus ' kann als einer der achtbarsten Versuche unserer Zeit, 
 "in Ankuttpfung an die durch Kant begonnene philosophische Bewegung zu einer, mehr 
 als bisher geschehen ist, abschliessenden Form eines speculativen Systems zu gelangen, 
 betrachtet werden." C. S. (Pkopessor Schaakschmidt). From "Die philosophische 
 Monatshejte" xxii. 6, 7. 
 
 "....deux Merits rficents fort remarquables sign6s du ijseudonyme de 'Scotus 
 Novancicus.' Ce sont des essais fort ing€nieux de conciliation entre les mSthodes 
 objective et subjective appliqu6es 2. la recherche des origines de la connaissauce et de la 
 loi morale." M. G. Bolin-Jacquemyns. From "La Reviie de Droit international" 
 
 Williams and Norgate : London and Edinburgh. 
 
Notices of the Press. 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES ON EDUCATIONAL 
 SUBJECTS. 
 
 Cambridge University Press. 
 
 '* Professor Laurie is our greatest living writer on education. . . . Even in popular 
 addresses he never loses sight of his philosopliic principles."— /owrnai of Education, 
 London. 
 
 "This volume contains ten addresses by a writer of world-wide reputation on 
 educational topics." — Journal qf Education, Boston^ W. 8. A. 
 
 '' Tills admirable book .... a thoroughly practical book in the best sense. ...The 
 work of a real expert,"— TAe Academp. 
 
 THE LIFE AND EDUCATIONAL WRITINGS OF 
 JOHN AMOS COMENIUS. 
 
 Third Edition. — Cambridsb University Press. 
 
 THE TRAINING OF THE TEACHER AND OTHER 
 EDUCATIONAL PAPERS. 
 
 C. Kbgan Paul and Co. 
 
 THE RISE AND EARLY CONSTITUTION OF 
 UNIVERSITIES, WITH SURVEY OF ME- 
 DIAEVAL EDUCATION.— LECTURES. 
 
 C. Kegan Paul and Co. 
 
 PRIMARY INSTRUCTION IN RELATION TO 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Fourth Edition. J. Thin, University Bookseller, Edinburgh. 
 
 NOTES ON BRITISH THEORIES OF MORALS. 
 
 T). Douglas, Edinburgh.