X.

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

The study of language has ever been considered a study of high importance, regarded merely as a means of intellectual cultivation.

There are obvious reasons for this. The analysis of language is the analysis of thought. Resolving complex forms of speech into simple ones, and again combining simple expressions into those which are complex, and investigating, alternately by logic and aesthetics, the varying properties of words and phrases, are operations which come nearer, perhaps, than any other in which we are engaged, towards subjecting spirit itself to the crucible of experiment. The study of grammar, the comparison of languages, the translation of thought from one language to another, are so many studies in logic and the laws of mind. The subtleties of language arise from the very nature of that subtle and mysterious essence, the human mind, of which speech is the prime agent and medium of communication.

The class of studies under consideration bears nearly the same relation to the spiritual that anatomy does to the bodily part of us. It is by the dissecting-knife of a keen and well-tempered logic, applied to the examination of the various forms which human thought assumes, that we most truly learn the very essence and properties of thought itself. It is this intimate, immediate, indissoluble connection and correlation between mind and language, between human thought and human speech, between the soul itself and the mould into which it is cast, that gives such importance to the general class of studies known as philological.

The study of language, more than any other study, tends to make the mind acute, discriminating, and exact. It tends also, in a most especial manner, to fit a person to train the minds of others to acuteness, discrimination, and exactness. The person who has learned to express a thought with entire exactness and idiomatic propriety in two languages; or where, from the want of analogy between the two languages, he finds this impracticable, to perceive the exact shade of difference between the two expressions; who can trace historically and logically the present meaning of a word from its original starting-point in reason and fact, and mark intelligently its gradual departures and their causes; who can perceive the exact difference between words and phrases nearly synonymous, and who can express that difference in terms clear and intelligible to others,--that person has already attained both a high degree of intellectual acumen himself, and an important means of producing such acumen in others.

The study of language is, in the profession of teaching, like the sharpening of tools in the business of the mechanic. Words are the teacher's tools. Human knowledge, even before it is expressed, and as it is laid up in the chambers of the mind, exists in words. We think in words. We teach in words. We are qualified to teach only so far as we have learned the use and power of words.