ready quoted enough to show how vigorously a learned man and a schoolmaster in the sixteenth century took the side of the vernacular against the Latin language. The "Elementaire" is now, of course, a scarce book. There are two copies of it in the British Museum, but none that I have been able to discover of the "Positions."

WORDS AND THINGS.

This antithesis between words and things which constantly occurs in educational literature, from the sixteenth century onward [see page 45], is not very exact. Sometimes the antithesis so expressed is really between the material world and abstract ideas. In this case the study of things which affect the senses is opposed to the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, etc. Sometimes by words is understood the expression of ideas in different languages, and by things the ideas themselves. This is the antithesis of those who depreciate linguistic study, and say that it is better to acquire fresh ideas than various ways of expressing the same idea. Of course it may be shown, that linguistic study does more for us than merely giving us various ways of expressing ideas, but I will not here discuss the matter. Besides the disputants who use one or other of these antitheses, many of those who find fault with the attention bestowed on words in education, mean generally words learned by rote, and not connected with ideas at all.

Several of our greatest writers have declared in one sense or other against "words." First, both in time and importance, we have Milton:

WORDS AND THINGS.

297

"The end of all learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding can not in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God, and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kinds of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the language of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom: so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman completely wise in his mother dialect only."

Soon after we find Cowley complaining of the loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing, or rather casting away, six or seven years in the learning of words only; and he designs a school in which things should be taught together with language. (Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy.) Both Milton and Cowley wished that boys should read

*Tract to Hartlib. [School Room Classics, vi, pp. 7, 8.]

"

such Latin books as would instruct them in husbandry, etc., and so combine linguistic knowledge with "real knowledge.

In the fourth book of the "Dunciad," the most consummate master of words thus uses his power to satirize verbal education:

Then thus since man from beast by words is known,
Words are man's province, words we teach alone.

Cowper, too, says:

And is he well content his son should find
No nourishment to feed his growing mind
But conjugated verbs, and nouns declined?
For such is all the mental food purveyed
By public hackneys in the schooling trade;
Who feed a pupil's intellect with store
Of syntax truly, but with little more;

*

(Lines 148 ff.)

Dismiss their cares when they dismiss their flock;
Machines themselves, and governed by a clock.
Perhaps a father blessed with any brains
Would deem it no abuse or waste of pains,

'T' improve this diet, at no great expense,

With sav'ry truth and wholesome common sense;
To lead his son, for prospects of delight,

To some not steep tho' philosophic height,
Thence to exhibit to his wondering eyes

Yon circling worlds, their distance and their size,
The moons of Jove and Saturn's belted ball,
And the harmonious order of them all;

To show him in an insect or a flower

Such microscopic proof of skill and power,
As, hid from ages past, God now displays
To combat atheists with in modern days;
To spread the earth before him, and commend,
With designation of the finger's end,

WORDS AND THINGS.

Its various parts to his attentive note,

Thus bringing home to him the most remote:
To teach his heart to glow with generous flame.
Caught from the deeds of men of ancient fame.*

On the other side we have Dr. Johnson:

299

"The truth is, that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or for conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong: the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellect, not nature, is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare emergency, that one may know another half his life without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostatics or astronomy; but his moral and prudential character immediately appears. Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians."+

In more recent times the increasing importance of natural science has drawn many of the best intellects

*Tirocinium.

Life of Milton.

into its service. Linguistic and literary instruction now finds few supporters in theory, though its friends have not yet made much alteration in their practice. Our last two School Commissions have recommended a compromise between the claims of literature and natural science. Both reports state clearly the importance of a training in language and literature, to which our present theorists hardly seem to do justice. The Public Schools Report says:

"Grammar is the logic of common speech, and there are few educated men who are not sensible of the advantages they gained, as boys, from the steady practice of composition and translation, and from their introduction to etymology. The study of literature is the study, not indeed of the physical, but of the intellectual and moral world we live in, and of the thoughts, lives, and characters of those men whose writings or whose memories succeeding generations have thought it worth while to preserve."*

The Commissioners on Middle Schools express a similar opinion:

"The 'human' subjects of instruction, of which the study of language is the beginning, appear to have a distinctly greater educational power than the ‘material.' As all civilization really takes its rise in human intercourse, so the most efficient instrument of education appears to be the study which most bears on that intercourse, the study of human speech. Nothing appears to develop and discipline the whole man so much as the study which assists the learner to understand. the thoughts, to enter into the feelings, to appreciate the

Public Schools Report, i. 28. § 8.