19.  The vain pretensions of several modern simplifiers, contrivers of machines, charts, tables, diagrams, vincula, pictures, dialogues, familiar lectures, ocular analyses, tabular compendiums, inductive exercises, productive systems, intellectual methods, and various new theories, for the purpose of teaching grammar, may serve to deceive the ignorant, to amuse the visionary, and to excite the admiration of the credulous; but none of these things has any favourable relation to that improvement which may justly be boasted as having taken place within the memory of the present generation.  The definitions and rules which constitute the doctrines of grammar, may be variously expressed, arranged, illustrated, and applied; and in the expression, arrangement, illustration, and application of them, there may be room for some amendment; but no contrivance can ever relieve the pupil from the necessity of committing them thoroughly to memory.  The experience of all antiquity is added to our own, in confirmation of this; and the judicious teacher, though he will not shut his eyes to a real improvement, will be cautious of renouncing the practical lessons of hoary experience, for the futile notions of a vain projector.

20.  Some have been beguiled with the idea, that great proficiency in grammar was to be made by means of a certain fanciful method of induction. But if the scheme does not communicate to those who are instructed by it, a better knowledge of grammar than the contrivers themselves seem to have possessed, it will be found of little use.[59] By the happy method of Bacon, to lead philosophy into the common walks of life, into the ordinary business and language of men, is to improve the condition of humanity; but, in teaching grammar, to desert the plain didactic method of definition and example, rule and praxis, and pretend to lead children by philosophic induction into a knowledge of words, is to throw down the ladder of learning, that boys may imagine themselves to ascend it, while they are merely stilting over the low level upon which its fragments are cast.

21.  The chief argument of these inductive grammarians is founded on the principle, that children cannot be instructed by means of any words which they do not perfectly understand.  If this principle were strictly true, children could never be instructed by words at all.  For no child ever fully understands a word the first time he hears or sees it; and it is rather by frequent repetition and use, than by any other process, that the meaning of words is commonly learned.  Hence most people make use of many terms which they cannot very accurately explain, just as they do of many things, the real nature of which they do not comprehend.  The first perception we have of any word, or other thing, when presented to the ear or the eye, gives us some knowledge of it.  So, to the signs of thought, as older persons use them, we soon attach some notion of what is meant;