mute. But can he deny that the ability to
express what one may know, and in speech, as well
as in production, is at once the final proof, and
in a very real sense the indispensable consummation
of such knowing? Language is the counterpart
and complement of Science. The two are
but two sides, and either separately an incomplete
one, of one thing; that one thing we may name definite
and practical knowledge; and it is the only sort
of knowledge that has real value. Language is
yet larger than all the sciences proper which it embodies,
namely, those clustering about Philology, Grammar,
and Rhetoric. Of these, all deal with words, or
those larger words—sentences; but under
these forms they deal, in reality, with the objective
world as perceived or apprehended by us, and as named
and uttered in accordance with subjective aptitudes
and laws. In language, then, there stands revealed,
in the degree in which we can ascend to it, all that
is yet known of the external world, and all that has
yet evolved itself of the human mind. Can we decry
the study of that which, whether as articulate breath,
or through a symbolism of visible forms, mirrors to
us at once all of nature and all of humanity?
But if we yield this claim in behalf of language,
noting meanwhile that the mathematics are already
well represented in our courses of instruction, then
much of Mr. Spencer’s eloquent appeal is simply
wasted by misdirection. All that he had really
to claim is, that a disproportionate time is now surrendered
to the studies of the symbols, as such, and too often
to characteristics of them not yet brought in any
way into scientific cooerdination, nor of a kind having
practical or peculiarly disciplinary value. If
Mr. Spencer had insisted on a more just division of
the school studies between the mathematical, physical,
biological, and linguistic sciences, he would have
struck a chord yielding no uncertain sound, and one
finding response in a multitude of advanced and liberal
minds. If he had gone yet deeper, and disclosed
to his readers the fact that the fundamental need
is, not that we study what in the more restricted
sense is known as Science, but that we begin
to study all proper and profitable subjects, as we
now do hardly any of them, in the true scientific
spirit and method, he would not merely seem to
have said, but would have succeeded in saying, something
of the deepest and most pressing import to all educators.
The volume of republished papers from Mr. Barnard’s able Journal of Education—the first of a series of five under the general title of ’Papers for the Teacher’—will afford to those desirous of investigating the second of the problems above proposed, some useful material and hints. Especially will this be true, we think, of the first series of articles, by Mr. William Russell, on the ’Cultivation of the Perceptive, Expressive, and Reflective Faculties;’ and of the second, by Rev. Dr. Hill, now President of Antioch College,