farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard or his own occupations, although
he can reason as well as ever about politics; can not discuss coin or bills, but can
talk of financial policies and securities, or about health and wealth generally.
The reason obvious. It is because concrete thinking has two forms, the word and
the image, and the latter so tends to take the place of the former that it can be
lost to both sense and articulation without great impairment, whereas conceptual
thinking lacks imagery and depends upon words alone, and hence these must
persist because they have no alternate form which vicariates for them.
In its lower stages, speech is necessarily closely bound up with the concrete
world; but its real glory appears in its later stages and its higher forms, because
there the soul takes flight in the intellectual world, learns to live amidst its more
spiritual realities, to put names to thoughts, which is far higher than to put names
to things. It is in this world that the best things in the best books live; and the
modern school-bred distaste for them, the low-ranged mental action that hovers
near the coastline of matter and can not launch out with zest into the open sea of
thoughts, holding communion with the great dead of the past or the great living
of the distant present, seems almost like a slow progressive abandonment of the
high attribute of speech and the lapse toward infantile or animal picture-thinking.
If the school is slowly becoming speechless in this sense, if it is lapsing in all
departments toward busy work and losing silence, repose, the power of logical
thought, and even that of meditation, which is the muse of originality, this is
perhaps the gravest of all these types of decay. If the child has no resources in
solitude, can not think without the visual provocation, is losing subjective life,
enthusiasm for public, social, ethical questions, is crippled for intellectual
pursuits, cares only in a languid way for literary prose and poetry, responds only
to sensuous stimuli and events at short range, and is indifferent to all wide
relations and moral responsibility, cares only for commercial self-interest, the
tactics of field sport, laboratory occupations and things which call be illustrated
from a pedagogic museum, then the school is dwarfing, in dawning maturity, the
higher powers that belong to this stage of development and is responsible for
mental arrest.
In this deplorable condition, if we turn to the child study of speech for help, we
find that, although it has been chiefly occupied with infant vocabularies, there
are already a very few and confessedly crude and feeble beginnings, but even
these shed more light on the lost pathway than all other sources combined. The
child once set in their midst again corrects the wise men. We will first briefly
recapitulate these and then state and apply their lessons.