ublic schools. The definitions
possibly are good enough for the purpose for which they were designed. I
am not quarrelling with the definitions. But, surely, it is not by these
that a child is to learn the meaning of the words. Whether he is told
that "power" means "ability," or "ability" means "power," that "potent"
means "efficacious," or "efficacious" means "potent," in neither case,
nine times out of ten, is any addition made to his stock of knowledge.
It is not until much later in life,--until in fact our knowledge of
words is already very much extended, that we profit much by learning
formal definitions. But in childhood, we must learn the meaning and
power of words, just as the mechanic becomes acquainted with his tools,
by observing their use. A boy, for instance, reads this sentence. "The
drug was very _efficacious_." If the word is quite new to him, and there
is nothing in the clause preceding or following to indicate its meaning,
it is not at all unlikely that he may suppose it to mean "poisonous."
If, however, from the context, he finds that a person who had been sick,
was made suddenly well, and this statement followed by the remark, that
"the drug was very _efficacious_," he will probably get the idea that
the word means "healing," or "curative." He reads again, in another
place, that a certain mode of teaching penmanship was found to be very
"efficacious." Here is a new use of the word, quite different from the
other, and he is obliged to exclude from his idea of its meaning every
thing like "healing." So he goes on, every fresh example cutting off
some extraneous idea which the previous examples had led him to attach
to the word, and every step onward coming nearer to the general idea,
though he may never express it in words, of something which accomplished
its object, whatever that object may be. It is, I believe, chiefly by
observing in this way the manner in which words are used, that children
do and must learn their meaning. It is, in other words, by quickening
and cultivating the habit of attention to the meaning,--by training a
child, when he is reading, to imagine, not that he is reading the words,
but that he is reading the sense, by accustoming him to look through the
word, to the sense, just as he would look at objects out of doors
through the window, and to consider the words, as he would consider the
glass, merely as a medium, through which, and unmindful of it, he looks
at something beyond,--_