they may have been enlisted in the service of lies, they are yet of themselves most true; and that, where the bane is, there the antidote should be sought as well. If Goethe's Faust denounces words and the falsehood of words, it is by the aid of words that he does it. Ask then words what they mean, that you may deliver yourselves, that you may help to deliver others, from the tyranny of words, and, to use Baxter's excellent phrase, from the strife of word-warriors.' Learn to distinguish between them, for you have the authority of Hooker, that the mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.'* And although I cannot promise you that the study of synonyms, or the acquaintance with deriva tions, or any other knowledge but the very highest knowledge of all, will deliver you from the temptation to misuse this or any other gift of God-a temptation always lying so near us -yet I am sure that these studies rightly pursued will do much in leading us to stand in awe of this gift of speech, and to tremble at the thought of turning it to any other than those worthy ends for which God has endowed us with a faculty so divine.

*

See on all this matter in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, chapters 9, 10 and 11 of the 3rd book, certainly the most remarkable in the Essay, Of the Imperfection of Words, Of the Abuse of Words, Of the Remedies of the Imperfection and Abuse of Words.

VII.

Implements of Education.

295

LECTURE VII.

THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS.

AT

T the Great Exhibition of 1851, there might be seen a collection, probably by far the completest which had ever been got together, of what were called the material helps of education. There was then gathered in a single room all the outward machinery of moral and intellectual training; all by which order might be best maintained, the labour of the teacher and the taught economized, with a thousand ingenious devices suggested by the best experience of many minds, and of these during many years. Nor were these material helps of education merely mechanical. There were in that collection vivid representations of places and objects; models which often preserved their actual forms and proportions, not to speak of maps and of books. No one who is aware how much in schools, and indeed everywhere else, depends on what apparently is slight and external, would lightly esteem the helps and hints which such a collection would furnish. And yet it would be well for us to remember that even if we were to

obtain all this apparatus in its completest form, at the same time possessing the most perfect skill in its application, so that it should never encumber but always assist us, we should yet have obtained very little compared with that which, as a help to education, is already ours. When we stand face to face with a child, that spoken or unspoken word which the child possesses in common with ourselves is a far more potent implement and aid of education than all these external helps, even though they should be accumulated and multiplied a thousandfold. A reassuring thought for those who may not have many of these helps within their reach, a warning thought for those who might be tempted to put their trust in them. On the occasion of that Exhibition to which I have referred, it was well said,' On the structure of language are impressed the most distinct and durable records of the habitual operations of the human powers. In the full possession of language each man has a vast, almost an inexhaustible, treasure of examples of the most subtle and varied processes of human thought. Much apparatus, many material helps, some of them costly, may be employed to assist education; but there is no apparatus which is so necessary, or which can do so much, as that which is the most common and the cheapest-which is always at hand, and ready for every need. Every language contains in it the result of a greater number of educational

VII.

Learning and Teaching.

297

processes and educational experiments, than we could by any amount of labour and ingenuity accumulate in any educational exhibition expressly contrived for such a purpose.'

Being entirely convinced that this is nothing more than the truth, I shall endeavour in my closing lecture to suggest some ways in which you may effectually use this marvellous implement which you possess to the better fulfilling of that which you have chosen as the proper task of your life. You will gladly hear something upon this matter; for you will never, I trust, disconnect what you may yourselves be learning from the hope and prospect of being enabled thereby to teach others more effectually. If you do, and your studies in this way become a selfish thing, if you are content to leave them barren of all profit to others, of this you may be sure, that in the end they will prove not less barren of profit to yourselves. In one noble line Chaucer has characterized the true scholar:

'And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.'

Print these words on your remembrance. Resolve that in the spirit of this line you will work and live.

But take here a word or two of warning before we advance any further. You cannot, of course, expect to make any original investigations in language; but you can follow safe guides, such as shall lead you by right paths, even as you

may follow such as can only lead you astray. Do not fail to keep in mind that perhaps in no region of human knowledge are there such a multitude of unsafe leaders as in this; for indeed this science of words is one which many, professing for it an earnest devotion, have done their best or their worst to bring into discredit, and to make a laughing-stock at once of the foolish and the wise. Niebuhr has somewhere noted 'the unspeakable spirit of absurdity' which seemed to possess the ancients, whenever they meddled with this subject; but the charge reaches others beside them. Their mantle, it must be owned, has in after times often fallen upon no unworthy successors.

What is commoner, even now, than to find the investigator of words and their origin looking round about him here and there, in all the languages, ancient and modern, to which he has any access, till he lights on some word, it matters little to him in which of these, more or less resembling that which he wishes to derive? and this found, to consider his problem solved, and that in this phantom hunt he has successfully run down his prey. Even Dr. Johnson, with his robust, strong, English common-sense, too often offends in this way. In many respects his Dictionary will probably never be surpassed. We shall never have more concise, more accurate, more vigorous explanations of the actual meanings of words, at the time when it was published,