From “Some Lessons of Antiquity.”

WITH the light which the study of the antiquity of language has shed on the past, the whole world has been changed. We know now not only what we are, but whence we are. We know our common Aryan home. We know what we carried away from it, and how our common intellectual inheritance has grown and grown from century to century till it has reached a wealth, unsurpassed anywhere, amounting in English alone to two hundred and fifty thousand words. What does it matter whether we know the exact latitude and longitude of that Aryan home, though among reasonable people there is, I believe, very little doubt as to its whereabouts “somewhere in Asia.” The important point is that we know that there was such a home, and that we can trace the whole intellectual growth of the Aryan family back to roots which sprang from a common soil. And we can do this not by mere guesses only, or theoretically, but by facts, that is, historically. Take any word or thought that now vibrates through our mind, and we know now how it was first struck in countries far away, and in times so distant that hardly any chronology can reach them. If anywhere it is in language that we may say, We are what we have been. In language everything that is new is old, and everything that is old is new. That is true evolution, true historical continuity. A man who knows his language, and all that is implied by it, stands on a foundation of ages. He feels the past under his feet, and feels at home in the world of thought, a loyal citizen of the oldest and widest republic.

  It is this historical knowledge of language, and not of language only, but of everything that has been handed down to us by an uninterrupted tradition from father to son, it is that kind of knowledge which I hold that our universities and schools should strive to maintain. It is the historical spirit with which they should try to inspire every new generation. As we trace the course of a mighty river back from valley to valley, as we mark its tributaries, and watch its meanderings till we reach its source, or, at all events, the watershed from which its sources spring, in the same manner the historical school has to trace every current of human knowledge from century to century back to its fountain head, if that is possible, or, at all events, as near to it as the remaining records of the past will allow. The true interest of all knowledge lies in its growth. The very mistakes of the past form the solid ground on which the truer knowledge of the present is founded. Would a mathematician be a mathematician who had not studied his Euclid? Would an astronomer be an astronomer who did not know the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, and had not worked his way through its errors to the truer views of Copernicus? Would a philosopher be a philosopher who had never grappled with Plato and Aristotle? Would a lawyer be a lawyer who had never heard of Roman law? There is but one key to the present—that is the past. There is but one way to understand the continuous growth of the human mind and to gain a firm grasp of what it has achieved in any department of knowledge—that is to watch its historical development.

  No doubt, it will be said, there is no time for all this in the hurry and flurry of our modern life. There are so many things to learn that students must be satisfied with results, without troubling themselves how these results were obtained by the labors of those who came before us. This really would mean that our modern teaching must confine itself to the surface, and keep aloof from what lies beneath. Knowledge must be what is called cut and dry, if it is to prove serviceable in the open market.

  My experience is the very opposite. The cut-and-dry knowledge which is acquired from the study of manuals or from so-called crammers is very apt to share the fate of cut flowers. It makes a brilliant show for one evening, but it fades and leaves nothing behind. The only knowledge worth having, and which lasts us for life, must not be cut and dry, but, on the contrary, it should be living and growing knowledge, knowledge of which we know the beginning, the middle, and the end, knowledge of which we can produce the title deeds whenever they are called for. That knowledge may be small in appearance, but, remember, the knowledge required for life is really very small.

  We learn, no doubt, a great many things, but what we are able to digest, what is converted in succum et sanguinem, into our very lifeblood, and gives us strength and fitness for practical life, is by no means so much as we imagine in our youth. There are certain things which we must know, as if they were part of ourselves. But there are many other things which we simply put into our pockets, which we can find there whenever we want them, but which we do not know as we must know, for instance, the grammar of a language. It is well to remember this distinction between what we know intuitively, and what we know by a certain effort of memory only, for our success in life depends greatly on this distinction—on our knowing what we know, and knowing what we do not know, but what, nevertheless, we can find if wanted.

  It has often been said that we only know thoroughly what we can teach, and it is equally true that we can only teach what we know thoroughly.