Part 15

It is not much more than seventy years since Bishop Watson, a man of no mean abilities and of no slight distinction, turned the science of geology into open ridicule. He said that the geologists who attempted to speculate on the internal formation of the globe reminded him only of a gnat which might be perched upon the shoulders of an elephant, and might, by the reach of its tiny puncture, affect to tell him what was the whole internal structure of the majestic animal below.[77] Listen now to the language of an eminent man of the present day, Sir David Brewster, on the same great subject: “How interesting must it be to study such phenomena—to escape for a while from the works of man—to go back to primeval times, and learn how its Maker moulded the earth—how He wore down the primitive mass into the strata of its present surface—how He deposited the precious metals in its bowels—how He filled it with races of living animals, and again buried them in its depths, to chronicle the steps of creative power—how He covered its surface with its fruit-bearing soil, and spread out the waters of the deep as the great highway of nations, to unite into one brotherhood the different races of his creatures, and to bless them by the interchange of their produce and their affections!” And again, referring to the discoveries of the great Cuvier in connexion with geology, he says: “In thus deciphering the handwriting of nature on her tablets of stone, the same distinguished naturalist discovered that all organised beings were not created at the same period. In the commissariat of Providence the stores were provided before the arrival of the host that was to devour them. Plants were created before animals, the molluscous fishes next appeared, then the reptiles, and last of all the mammiferous quadrupeds completed the scale of animal life.” Such are the terms in which able men now refer to geological science.[78]

Fortunately, the science of Geology is an eminently popular one. The arguments which go to establish its leading doctrines require no long course of previous study to make them intelligible, and its professors, in this country at least, have been no way disposed to confine their teaching to the sanctuaries of learning. Wherever an audience can be gathered together, some eminent geologist is always ready to discourse for the benefit of the gentiles of science, who have rewarded their instructors by a larger share of popularity than is generally bestowed on the professors of other branches of physical knowledge. The consequence is, that a smattering of Geology is now very generally diffused amongst the upper and middle classes in this country—an excellent thing in itself, since even a smattering of natural science helps to enlarge and elevate the mind, but sometimes inconvenient, because few learn enough to get a correct idea of the extent of their own ignorance as compared with the smallness of their knowledge. In the interest of science, the main point to be gained is that, out of the large number who approach the threshold, a sufficient number should be induced to enter into her service, and that each of these should find work fit for his strength and his special faculties. Measured in this way, the progress of Geology seems to be sufficiently satisfactory.[79]

Footnote 77:

Mr. Watson, among other qualities, which certainly contributed to his advancement in life, possessed a happy confidence in himself, and an opinion of his own fitness for any situation to which he should think proper to aspire, though totally destitute at the time of every qualification requisite to the discharge of its functions. On the 19th of November 1764, he informs us, “I was unanimously elected by the Senate, assembled in full congregation, Professor of Chemistry. At the time this honour was conferred upon me _I knew nothing at all of chemistry_; had never read a syllable on the subject, nor seen a single experiment in it.”—_Quarterly Review_, vol. xviii. p. 233.

Footnote 78:

Sir John Pakington, M.P.

Footnote 79:

_Saturday Review._

THE BEST EDUCATION.

Philip de Mornay enjoins: “The best thing to be instilled into the minds of children, is to fear God. This is the beginning, the middle, and the end, of wisdom. Next, they ought to be induced to be kind one to another. Great care ought to be taken to guard against speaking on improper subjects in their presence, since lasting impressions are made at a very early age; on the contrary, our conversation ought to be on good and instructive topics. Imperceptibly to themselves or others, they derive great benefit from such discourse; for it is quite certain that children take the tinge either of good or evil, without the process being discovered.”

True excellence is only to be arrived at by the true Education; for in Education, as in all the rest of life, there are two ways of acting. “The one way, when the learner looks upon his powers as his own, and works them in a self-confident, hard spirit; which is by far the quickest way to temporary success. The other, when the learner, looking upon all his powers as given to him, works humbly in a tentative spirit, distrusting self, keeping the heart open to improvement, thinking that every body and every thing can teach him something; putting himself, in fact, in God’s hand, as a learner, not as a judge. To such a spirit belongs the promise that he shall be led into all truth. Directly we imagine we know a thing, we close our stores, and shut the gates against fresh treasures; but whilst laying up truth, still think that all is incomplete, still humbly think, however broad and firm and deep the foundation we have laid may be, that eternity shall not suffice for the superstructure; in fact, still hold the vessel to be filled, and God will ever fill it; still use that fulness in His service, and at the right time the right thing shall come. Nothing but pride shuts out knowledge. Who is not conscious, taking only the merest intellectual work, how little really depends on himself, how many thoughts are direct gifts, how much precious material _comes_ into his hands, is given—is given—not his own; who will not admit, if nothing more, that a headache, a qualm, may destroy his cherished hopes, so little can he rely on self?”[80]

The late Baron Alderson, writing to his son, says: “I have sent you to Eton that you may be taught your duties as an English young gentleman. The first duty of such a person is to be a good and religious Christian; the next is to be a good scholar; and the third is to be accomplished in all manly exercises and games, such as rowing, swimming, jumping, cricket, and the like. Most boys, I fear, begin at the wrong end, and take the last first; and, what is still worse, never arrive at either of the other two at all. I hope, however, better things of you; and to hear first that you are a good, truthful, honest boy, and then that you are one of the hardest workers in your class; and after that, I confess I shall be by no means sorry to hear that you can show the idle boys that an industrious one can be a good cricketer, and jump as wide a ditch, or clear as high a hedge, as any of them.”

Footnote 80:

Thring’s _Sermons delivered at Uppingham School_.

ADVICE TO THE STUDENT.

Dr. Arnold has given this sound counsel: “Preserve proportion in your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and, _depend upon it, a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one;_ as far as it goes, the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only narrow but false.”

It is a great mistake to suppose that full employment shuts out leisure. The secret of leisure is to have eight hours a day entirely devoted to business, and you will then find you have time for other pursuits; this for some time to come will seem to you a paradox; but you will one day be convinced of the truth, that the man who is the most engaged has always the most leisure.

KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM.

That Knowledge is not True Wisdom cannot be too strongly urged upon youth. “There is a heaping up of knowledge just as amenable to this censure as the ignorance of the unlearned, not indeed so censured by man, but equally worthy of it in a true judgment. The intellectual fool, full of knowledge but without wisdom, whose way is right in his own eyes, is no less a fool, nay, more so, than the ignorant fool, and as far from true wisdom. For knowledge is a very different thing from wisdom; knowledge is but the collecting together of a mass of material at best, whilst wisdom is the right perception and right use leading to further riches. The mere heaper-up of knowledge digs, as it were, ore out of the earth, working underground in darkness; whereas the wise man fashions all his knowledge into use and beauty, praising and blessing God with it, and receiving from Him a fuller measure in consequence. Wisdom is knowledge applied to life and to the praise of God,—a thing of the heart, the heart controlling and using all the head gathers; knowledge by itself is a mere barren store of the head, quite separable from goodness and love,—a thing capable of being possessed by devils. For this we must mark, the humblest good heart which loves God alone can attain to the knowledge of God. No mere intellectual power and pride can do that. And hence we may see why the man whose way is right in his own eyes is a fool.”[81]

Montaigne thus points out an educational error, common in our time as well as in that of this charming writer, whom a gentleman is ashamed not to have read:

The care and expense our parents are at have no other aim but to furnish our heads with knowledge, but not a word of judgment and virtue. Cry out of one that passes by to our people, “Oh, what a learned man is that!” and of another, “Oh, what a good man is that!” they will not fail to turn their eyes and pay their respects to the former. There should then be a third man to cry out, “Oh, what blockheads they are!” Men are ready to ask, “Does he understand Greek or Latin—is he a poet or prose-writer?” But whether he is the better or more discreet man, though it is the main question, is the last; for the inquiry should be, who has the best learning, not who has the most. We only take pains to stuff the memory, and leave the understanding and conscience quite unfurnished. Of what service is it to us to have a bellyful of meat, if it does not digest—if it does not change its form in our bodies—and if it does not nourish and strengthen us? We suffer ourselves to lean so much upon the arms of others, that our strength is of no use to us. Would I fortify myself against the fear of death, I do it at the expense of Seneca; would I extract consolation for myself or my friend, I borrow it from Cicero; whereas I might have found it in myself, if I had been trained up in the exercise of my own reason. I do not fancy the acquiescence in second-hand hearsay knowledge; for though we may be learned by the help of another’s knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own wisdom. Agesilaus being asked what he thought most proper for boys to learn, replied: What they ought to do when they come to be men.

Footnote 81:

Thring’s _Sermons delivered at Uppingham School_.

EDUCATION ALARMISTS.

That a little learning is a dangerous thing, is an old saying, which has been fearfully repeated in these days; but a little learning every one will have, and the only way of averting the danger is, by providing the people with all facilities for acquiring more.

Lord Stowell was no admirer of the prevailing rage for universal education, and made a remark with which Lord Sidmouth was much struck: “If you provide,” he said, “a larger amount of cultivated talent than there is a demand for, the surplus is very likely to turn sour.”

Sir John Coleridge, in expressing his high sense of the obligations of the country to the University of Oxford for their recent aids to Middle-Class Education, says: “If the lower orders are to be raised in political power in this country, to make that a blessing you must cultivate the lower orders for discharging the duties to be thrown upon them. Therefore it is that I think the University of Oxford conferred the largest benefit that it had in its power to confer upon this country at large, when, passing simply from the education of the higher orders and those who were destined for the Church, it spread out its hands in a frank and liberal spirit to all classes of society, and offered to connect every body with itself, in a certain measure, who would only fit himself for it by proper application.”

YORKSHIRE SCHOOLS.

The disappearance from our newspapers of strings of “Education” advertisements of Schools with low tariffs in Yorkshire, shows the effect of satiric humour in correcting abuses of our own time. The dietary of a school in Yorkshire, barmecide breakfasts and dinners, was often held up _in terrorem_ to refractory boys, who heard the threat of “I’ll send you to Yorkshire,” with fear and trembling. Mr. Dickens gives an admirable exposure of this Spartan system in his tale of _Nicholas Nickleby_, in the preface to which he says:

I cannot call to mind now how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools, when I was not a very robust child, sitting in bye places, near Rochester Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza; but I know that my first impressions of them were picked up at that time, and that they were, somehow or other, connected with a suppurated abscess that some boy had come home with in consequence of his Yorkshire guide, philosopher, and friend having ripped it open with an inky penknife.

Before the book was written, Mr. Dickens went into Yorkshire to look for a school in which the imaginary boy of an imaginary widow might be put away until the thawing of a tardy compassion in that widow’s imaginary friends. Then some stern realities were seen; and we are told also, in the preface, of a supper with a real John Browdie, whose answer as to the search for a cheap Yorkshire schoolmaster was, “Dom’d if ar can gang to bed and not tellee, for weedur’s sak’, to keep the lattle boy from a’ sike scoundrels, while there’s a harse to hoold in a’ London, or a goother to lie asleep in!”

BOOKS FOR THE YOUNG.

Great mistakes have been made in writing books for children. When Sir Walter Scott was about to write his _Tales of a Grandfather_, he remarked: “I am persuaded both children and the lower class of readers hate books which are written _down_ to their capacity, and love those that are composed for their elders and betters. I will make, if possible, a book that a child shall understand, yet a man should feel some temptation to peruse should he chance to take it up.... The grand and interesting consists in ideas, not in words.” Again, “the problem of narrating history is at once to excite and gratify the curiosity of youth, and please and instruct the wisest of mature minds.”[82]

Footnote 82:

Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

The treasures of our tongue, says Dr. Richardson, the lexicographer, are spread over continents, and cultivated among islands in the northern and the southern hemisphere, from “the unformed Occident to the strange shores of unknowing nations in the East.” The sun, indeed, now never sets upon the empire of Great Britain. Not one hour of the twenty-four in which the earth completes her diurnal revolution, not one round of the minute-hand of the dial, is allowed to pass, in which, on some portion of the surface of the globe, the air is not filled with “accents that are ours.” They are heard in the ordinary transactions of life, or in the administration of law, or in the deliberations of the senate-house or council-chamber, or in the offices of private devotion, or in the public observance of the rites and duties of a common faith.

Dr. Richardson’s _Dictionary of the English Language_, the foremost work of its class, we owe greatly to the judicious energy of Mr. Pickering, the publisher, who laid out two thousand pounds in books, specially for this great labour, before it was commenced. If publishers would imitate Mr. Pickering’s liberality oftener than is done, there would be fewer incomplete and abortive compilations than are yearly issued from the press. Dr. Richardson acknowledges this valuable aid in his Preface, where he justly makes his boast of bringing within the circle of his reading a large number of books which had never been employed for lexicographical purposes before; and Dean Trench acknowledges that the virgin soil which Richardson has tilled has often yielded him large and rich returns.

Of the uselessness of our legions of words to be found in dictionaries, a writer of the day observes:

Dictionary English is something very different not only from common colloquial English, but even from that of ordinary written composition. Instead of about 40,000 words, there is probably no single author in the language from whose works, however voluminous, so many as 10,000 words could be collected. Of the 40,000 words there are certainly many more than one-half that are only employed, if they are ever employed at all, on the rarest occasions. We should any of us be surprised to find, if we counted them, with how small a number of words we manage to express all that we have to say either with our lips or even with the pen. Our common literary English probably hardly extends to 10,000 words, our common spoken English hardly to 5000. And the proportion of native or home-grown words is undoubtedly very much higher in both the 5000 and the 10,000 than it is in the 40,000. Perhaps of the 30,000 words, or thereabouts, standing in the dictionaries, that are very rarely or never used, even in writing, between 20,000 and 25,000 may be free of French or Latin extraction. If we assume 22,500 to be so, that will leave 5000 Teutonic words in common use; and in our literary English, taken at 10,000 words, those that are non-Roman will thus amount to about one-half. Of that half 4000 words may be current in our spoken language, which will therefore be genuine English for four-fifths of its entire extent. It will consist of about 4000 Gothic and 1000 Roman words.[83]

The Rev. Dr. D’Orsey has shown, by coloured charts and elaborate tables, the proportion of the Teutonic and Romanic elements in the spoken language of England, and in the writings of our great authors. Thus, out of 100,000 words, at least 60,000 were Teutonic, 30,000 Romanic, and 10,000 from all other sources.

It would be almost impossible to compose a sentence of moderate length consisting solely of words of Latin derivation. But there are many which can be rendered wholly in Anglo-Saxon. It would be easy to make the Lord’s Prayer entirely, as it is in present use almost entirely, Anglo-Saxon. It consists of sixty words, and six of these only have a Latin root. But for each of them, except one, we have an exact Saxon equivalent. For “trespasses” we may substitute “sins;” for “temptation,” “trials;” for “deliver,” “free;” and for “power,” “might.” Dr. Trench proposes for “glory,” “brightness;” but this we think is not a good substitute.

The gradual changes in language are very remarkable. Dean Trench, in one of his popular manuals, observes: “How few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language of their early youth and that of their old age; that words, and ways of using words, are obsolete now which were usual then; that many words are current now which had no existence at that time. And yet it is certain that so it must be. A man may fairly be supposed to remember clearly and well for sixty years back; and it needs less than five of these sixties to bring us to the period of Spenser, and not more than eight to set us in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. How great a change, how vast a difference in our language, within eight memories! No one, overlooking this whole term, will deny the greatness of the change. For all this, we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together had filled up this time, intelligent men, but men whose attention had not been especially roused on this subject, each in his turn would have denied that there had been any change at all during his lifetime. And yet, having regard to the multitude of words which have fallen into disuse during these four or five hundred years, we are sure that there must have been some lives in this chain which saw those words in use at their commencement, and out of use before their close. And so, too, of the multitude of words which have come into being within the limits of each of these lives.”

Footnote 83:

_Dublin University Magazine._

WHAT IS “ARGUMENT”?

The origin and proper value of the word “Argument” has been thus explained by the Rev. Dr. Donaldson, in a paper read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society:

The author first investigated the etymology and meaning of the Latin verb _arguo_, and its participle _argutus_. He showed that _arguo_ was a corruption of _argruo_ = _ad gruo_; that _gruo_ (in _argruo_, _ingruo_, _congruo_) ought to be compared with κρούω, which means “to dash one thing against another,” especially for the purpose of making a shrill, ringing noise; that _arguo_ means “to knock something for the purpose of making it ring, or testing its soundness,” hence “to test, examine, and prove any thing;” and that _argutus_ signifies “made to ring,” hence “making a distinct, shrill noise,” or “tested and put to the proof.” Accordingly _argumentum_ means _id quod arguit_, “that which makes a substance ring, which sounds, examines, tests, and proves it.”

It was then shown that these meanings were not only borne out by the classical usage of the word, but also by the technical application of “argument” as a logical term. For it is not equivalent to “argumentation,” or the process of reasoning; it does not even denote a complete syllogism; though Dr. Whately and some other writers on logic had fallen into this vague use of the word, and though it was so understood in the disputations of the Cambridge schools. The proper use of the word “argument” in logic is to denote “the middle term,” _i. e._ “the term used for proof.” In a sense similar to this the word is employed by mathematicians; and there can be no doubt that the oldest and best logicians confine the word to this, which is still its most common signification.

The author shows, by a collection of examples from the best English poets, that the established meanings of the word “argument” are reducible to three: (1) a proof, or means of proving; (2) a process of reasoning, or controversy, made up of such proofs; (3) the subject-matter of any discourse, writing, or picture. He maintains that the second of these meanings should be excluded from scientific language.

By this we are reminded of Swift’s dictum, of much wider application—that “Argument, as generally managed, is the worst sort of conversation; as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.”

HANDWRITING.