producing an appearance of understanding without the
reality. To give the net product of inquiry, without the inquiry that
leads to it, is found to be both enervating and inefficient. General
truths to be of due and permanent use, must be earned. "Easy come easy
go," is a saying as applicable to knowledge as to wealth. While rules,
lying isolated in the mind--not joined to its other contents as
out-growths from them--are continually forgotten; the principles which
those rules express piecemeal, become, when once reached by the
understanding, enduring possessions. While the rule-taught youth is at
sea when beyond his rules, the youth instructed in principles solves a
new case as readily as an old one. Between a mind of rules and a mind of
principles, there exists a difference such as that between a confused
heap of materials, and the same materials organised into a complete
whole, with all its parts bound together. Of which types this last has
not only the advantage that its constituent parts are better retained,
but the much greater advantage that it forms an efficient agent for
inquiry, for independent thought, for discovery--ends for which the
first is useless. Nor let it be supposed that this is a simile only: it
is the literal truth. The union of facts into generalisations _is_ the
organisation of knowledge, whether considered as an objective phenomenon
or a subjective one; and the mental grasp may be measured by the extent
to which this organisation is carried.

From the substitution of principles for rules, and the necessarily
co-ordinate practice of leaving abstractions untaught till the mind has
been familiarised with the facts from which they are abstracted, has
resulted the postponement of some once early studies to a late period.
This is exemplified in the abandonment of that intensely stupid custom,
the teaching of grammar to children. As M. Marcel says:--"It may without
hesitation be affirmed that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the
finishing instrument." As Mr. Wyse argues:--"Grammar and Syntax are a
collection of laws and rules. Rules are gathered from practice; they are
the results of induction to which we come by long observation and
comparison of facts. It is, in fine, the science, the philosophy of
language. In following the process of nature, neither individuals nor
nations ever arrive at the science _first_. A language is spoken, and
poetry written, many years before either a grammar or proso