Still another incident, taken from actual life, will serve to throw light upon the subject under discussion. In the booming days of the iron industry a laborer had saved and put out at interest twelve hundred dollars. The rate was six per cent., and no interest had been paid for one year and four months. Unable to reckon interest with figures, the toiler asked the principal of the schools to tell him the amount of interest due. Next day he greeted the principal by asking, “Did you not make a mistake in your calculation?” The reply was, “In my hurry to avoid being late at school I may have made a mistake.” He found that the man was right, and curiosity led him to ask how the error had been detected. “I reckoned it,” said the man. This aroused still greater curiosity; for the principal knew that, beyond the ability to count, the man had no knowledge of arithmetic. By agreement they met on Saturday afternoon, so that the man might show his method of reckoning interest. At the appointed hour the man laid six pennies on the floor to denote a year’s interest on one dollar, and then laid two pennies alongside of these as the additional interest on a dollar for four months. The supply of pennies being exhausted, he made strokes with chalk, and proceeded to do this twelve hundred times, and then to count them for the purpose of ascertaining the interest. It was thinking in things with a vengeance. And yet the making of strokes with chalk was a step in symbolic representation, and shows the innate tendency of the human mind to use symbols in thinking.

Even the words used in counting are symbols. In fact, every word that signifies anything is a symbol used by the mind to indicate an idea more or less complex, as well as the thing or things or relation of things in the external world which corresponds to the idea. In advanced thinking the words denote ideas more and more complex as the problems grow in difficulty or involve more of the abstract and general concepts under which the mind classifies the objects of which it takes cognizance. This is more largely true of the words in a developed language than it is of a dialect with little or no literature. A reference to the writer’s early home will be pardoned in this connection. His father, a plain farmer in Eastern Pennsylvania, sent four sons through college and gave each of them a professional or university education. When they gather under the parental roof they use the dialect of their early days in discussing life on the farm and in rehearsing the funny experiences of their boyhood; but when they discuss a question in science or mathematics, in law, medicine, or theology, they drop the dialect of their boyhood and use the instruments of thought furnished by languages having a literature. Some one has facetiously said of one town in the Lehigh Valley that the people pray in seven languages and swear in eight. It is a witty statement of an actual fact. The Welshman can pray as well as swear in his native tongue. The Pennsylvania German can vent his feelings fully in his own dialect when he grows profane. As soon as he says his prayers he reverts to the language of the pulpit and of Luther’s Bible because he there finds the words which express the deepest wants and emotions of the human soul.

When Melanchthon prepared the Saxony school plan he insisted that pupils should read Latin, write Latin, and speak Latin to the exclusion of the mother tongue. If an educator of to-day should advocate this policy in the fatherland, he would be banished. Melanchthon, surnamed preceptor Germaniæ, knew what he was about. He taught at a time when teachers of the humanities lamented that children were born in the homes of parents speaking German. He lectured at a time when Luther and his colleagues were visiting market-places to talk with the peasants for the purpose of gathering words and phrases by which the New Testament might be adequately rendered in the vernacular of the common people. A development extending over one hundred and fifty years was required before the lecturers at the universities found in it enough words and phrases to serve as instruments of thought for purposes of advanced investigation and ratiocination. So rich and flexible has the German become that Voss succeeded in translating Homer into German, using the same metre, the same number of lines, without adding to or subtracting from the ideas of the original. Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare is equally famous and equally successful. Both of these masterpieces show how essential a rich vocabulary is in rendering or in reproducing the best thoughts of the best minds; they show the importance of linguistic development and linguistic teaching. For purposes of thought and culture a rich mother tongue is of untold advantage. It is a great blessing to be born and raised in a home presided over by a well-educated mother. It is an invaluable help to be trained in schools whose teachers speak and write the languages which have felt the touch of the genius of Shakespeare and of Goethe. Next to furnishing ideas or something to think about, the thing of most importance in teaching a pupil to think is to enrich his vocabulary, to train him in language. Dr. Whewell has well remarked that “language is the atmosphere in which thought lives, for there is hardly a subject we can think about without the aid of language. Consequently, without knowledge of the language of a science all thinking with regard to that science is impossible; for although we conceive the world by means of our senses, we comprehend it only in and through the form of language.” In this connection one cannot do better than listen to the conclusions of men who have attained eminence as scholars, thinkers, and writers. Speaking from experience, they can throw light upon the art of correct and efficient thinking.

“Language, we must remember,” says Dr. Morrell, “is not constructed afresh by every individual mind which uses it. It is a world already created for us,—one into which we have simply to be introduced, and in which the process of human development, up to any given period, is more or less perfectly preserved and registered. Recollection, accordingly, by enabling us to appropriate to ourselves a whole system of signs, with the ideas attached to them, initiates us insensibly into the intellectual world of the present, puts us upon the vantage-ground of the latest degree of civilization, and enables us to grasp the ideas of the age without the labor of thinking them out consecutively by our own individual effort.”[11]

“Language,” says Dr. Whewell, “is often called an instrument of thought; but it is also the nutriment of thought; or, rather, it is the atmosphere in which thought lives; a medium essential to the activity of our speculative power, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation; and an element modifying, by its qualities and changes, the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. In this way the influence of preceding discoveries upon subsequent ones, of the past upon the present, is most penetrating and universal, though most subtle and difficult to trace. The most familiar words and phrases are connected by imperceptible ties with the reasonings and discoveries of former men and most distant times. Their knowledge is an inseparable part of ours; the present generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of all the past. And this is the fortune not only of the great and rich in the intellectual world, of those who have the key to the ancient storehouses and who have accumulated treasures of their own, but the humblest inquirer, while he puts his reasoning into words, benefits by the labors of the greatest discoverers. When he counts his little wealth, he finds he has in his hands coins which bear the image and superscription of ancient and modern intellectual dynasties; and that, in virtue of this possession, acquisitions are in his power, solid knowledge within his reach, which none could ever have attained to if it were not that the gold of truth, once dug out of the mine, circulates more and more widely among mankind.”[12]

“The word ‘vernacular,’” says Hinsdale, “is derived from vernaculus, which comes from verna, a slave born in his master’s house; and it means the speech to which one is born and in which he is reared,—the patrius sermo of the Roman, the Mutter-sprache of the German, the mother tongue of the Englishman. Command of a noble vernacular involves the most valuable discipline and culture that a man is capable of receiving. It conditions all other discipline and culture…​. The greatest mental inheritance to which a German, a Frenchman, or an Englishman is born is his native tongue, rich in the knowledge and wisdom, the ideas and thoughts, the wit and fancy, the sentiment and feeling, of a thousand years. Nay, of more than a thousand years; for these languages, in their modern forms, were enriched by still earlier centuries. To come back to the old thought, such a speech as one of these only flows out from such a life as it expresses, and is in turn essential to the existence of that life.”[13]

Parents who wish their children to possess the best instruments of thought cannot be too careful in the selection of teachers for them. Children whose mother tongue is a dialect should be trained in one or more of the languages that have been enriched by centuries of development and literary culture. The best that the people of Pennsylvania-German extraction can do for future generations is to make the transition as speedily as possible from their vernacular—so poverty-stricken in its vocabulary—to the English, with its abundant vocabulary and its unsurpassed literary treasures. In the English they will find the instruments of thought fitted to develop native powers that have been inherited from an ancestry of sturdy husbandmen, and strengthened through heredity by centuries of contact with the soil, even as the giant Antæus, in wrestling with Hercules, is fabled to have gained new strength as often as he came in contact with mother earth. The same advice will apply to the other nationalities who have come to live on American soil, even though they have brought with them a more developed vernacular. The English dictionary contains one hundred and twenty thousand words; but besides these words in common use, the dictionaries of the specialists contain several hundred thousand more, which may be called technical terms, and which serve as instruments of thought in scientific discussions and investigations. To these we next turn our attention.

VI

TECHNICAL TERMS AS INSTRUMENTS OF THOUGHT

It is the power of thinking by means of symbols which demarcates men from animals, and gives one man or nation the superiority over others.

LEWES.

Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors until aptly selected words or phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.

Though most readers, probably, entertain, at first, a persuasion that a writer ought to content himself with the use of common words in their common sense, and feel a repugnance to technical terms and arbitrary rules of phraseology, as pedantic and troublesome, it is soon found by the student of any branch of science that, without technical terms and fixed rules, there can be no certain or progressive knowledge. The loose and infantine grasp of common language cannot hold objects steadily enough for scientific examination, or lift them from one stage of generalization to another. They must be secured by the rigid mechanism of a scientific phraseology. This necessity has been felt in all the sciences, from the earliest periods of their progress.

WHEWELL.