Thus also the defects acquired in childhood such as dialectic defects or those established by bad habits, become indelible in the adult.
What develops later, the superior language, the dictorium, no longer has its origin in the mechanism of language but in the intellectual development which makes use of the mechanical language. As the articulate language develops by the exercise of its mechanism and is enriched by perception, the dictorium develops with syntax and is enriched by intellectual culture. Going back to the scheme of language we see that above the arc which defines the lower language, is established the dictorium, D,—from which now come the motor impulses of speech—which is established as spoken language fit to manifest the ideation of the intelligent man; this language will be enriched little by little by intellectual culture and perfected by the grammatical study of syntax.
Hitherto, as a result of a preconception, it has been believed that written language should enter only into the development of the dictorium, as the suitable means for the acquisition of culture and of permitting grammatical analysis and construction of the language. Since "spoken words have wings" it has been admitted that intellectual culture could only proceed by the aid of a language which was stable, objective, and capable of being analysed, such as the graphic language.
But why, when we acknowledge the graphic language as a precious, nay indispensable, instrument of intellectual education, for the reason that it fixes the ideas of men and permits of their analysis and of their assimilation in books, where they remain indelibly written as an ineffaceable memory of words which are therefore always present and by which we can analyse the syntactical structure of the language, why shall we not acknowledge that it is useful in the more humble task of fixing the words which represent perception and of analysing their component sounds?
Compelled by a pedagogical prejudice we are unable to separate the idea of a graphic language from that of a function which heretofore we have made it exclusively perform; and it seems to us that by teaching such a language to children still in the age of simple perceptions and of motility we are committing a serious psychological and pedagogical error.
But let us rid ourselves of this prejudice and consider the graphic language in itself, reconstructing its psycho-physiological mechanism. It is far more simple than the psycho-physiological mechanism of the articulate language, and is far more directly accessible to education.
Writing especially is surprisingly simple. For let us consider dictated writing: we have a perfect parallel with spoken language since a motor action must correspond with heard speech. Here there does not exist, to be sure, the mysterious hereditary relations between the heard speech and the articulate speech; but the movements of writing are far simpler than those necessary to the spoken word, and are performed by large muscles, all external, upon which we can directly act, rendering the motor channels permeable, and establishing psycho-muscular mechanisms.
This indeed is what is done by my method, which prepares the movements directly; so that the psycho-motor impulse of the heard speech finds the motor channels already established, and is manifested in the act of writing, like an explosion.
The real difficulty is in the interpretation of the graphic signs; but we must remember that we are in the age of perceptions, where the sensations and the memory as well as the primitive associations are involved precisely in the characteristic progress of natural development. Moreover our children are already prepared by various exercises of the senses, and by methodical construction of ideas and mental associations to perceive the graphic signs; something like a patrimony of perceptive ideas offers material to the language in the process of development. The child who recognises a triangle and calls it a triangle can recognise a letter s and denominate it by the sound s. This is obvious.