And grammars themselves, whose pretended object is to teach the rules of speaking and writing correctly, form but a miserable exception to this sweeping remark.  I defy any grammarian, author, or teacher of the numberless systems, which come, like the frogs of Egypt, all of one genus, to cover the land, to give a reasonable explanation of even the terms they employ to define their meaning, if indeed, meaning they have.  What is meant by an “in-definite article,” a dis-junctive con-junction, an ad-verb which qualifies an adjective, and “sometimes another ad-verb?” Such “parts of speech” have no existence in fact, and their adoption in rules of grammar, have been found exceedingly mischievous and perplexing.  “Adverbs and conjunctions,” and “adverbial phrases,” and “conjunctive expressions,” may serve as common sewers for a large and most useful class of words, which the teachers of grammar and lexicographers have been unable to explain; but learners will gain little information by being told that such is an adverbial phrase, and such, a conjunctive expression.  This is an easy method, I confess, a sort of wholesale traffic, in parsing (passing) language, and may serve to cloak the ignorance of the teachers and makers of grammars.  But it will reflect little light on the principles of language, or prove very efficient helps to “speak or write with propriety.”  Those who think, will demand the meaning of these words, and the reason of their use.  When that is ascertained, little difficulty will be found in giving them a place in the company of respectable words.  But I am digressing.  More shall be said upon this point in a future lecture, and in its proper place.

I was endeavoring to establish the position that all language depends upon permanent principles; that words are the signs of ideas, and ideas are the impressions of things communicated to the mind thro the medium of some one of the five senses.  I think I have succeeded so far as simple material things are concerned, to the satisfaction of all who have heard me.  It may, perhaps, be more difficult for me to explain the words employed to express complex ideas, and things of immateriality, such as mind, and its attributes.  But the rules previously adopted will, I apprehend, apply with equal ease and correctness in this case; and we shall have cause to admire the simple yet sublime foundation upon which the whole superstructure of language is based.

In pursuing this investigation I shall endeavor to avoid all abstruse and metaphysical reasoning, present no wild conjectures, or vain hypotheses; but confine myself to plain, common place matter of fact.  We have reason to rejoice that a wonderful improvement in the science and cultivation of the mind has taken place in these last days; that we are no longer puzzled with the strange phantoms, the wild speculations which occupied the giant minds of a Descartes, a Malebranch, a Locke, a Reid, a Stewart, and hosts of others, whose shining talents would have qualified them for the brightest ornaments of literature, real benefactors of mankind, had not their education lead them into dark and metaphysical reasonings, a continued tissue of the wildest vagaries, in which they became entangled, till, at length, they were entirely lost in the labyrinth of their own conjectures.