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.