Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Growth of the German language.

Value of a rich vocabulary.

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.

Dr. Morrell.

“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]

Dr. Whewell.

“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]

Dr. Hinsdale.

“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]

English.