< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

the Greek and Latin. He neither denies the value or importance of the classical languages, nor contemplates their exclusion from the college curriculum; but he condemns the vicious educational theories that have been put forward to vindicate and maintain their overshadowing supremacy. He is not an enemy of the classical languages, who opposes them as mere blindly venerated superstitions; but he, on the contrary, is their best friend, who would reduce them from this injurious pre-eminence, and leave them to stand on their merits for what they are worth. As important parts of learning to those who devote themselves to scholarship, or as interesting subjects to those who are attracted by their tastes to pursue them, or as badges of distinction in culture to those who prize them for such a purpose, or as bread-and-butter studies for the clerical profession, the dead languages have their defensible uses; but as a superior means of training the human mind, to be forced on everybody who goes to college and aspires to a liberal education, and as, consequently, disparaging other subjects, and standing in the way of far more important knowledge, they are to be resisted and reprobated as of evil influence by every friend of sound and rational education.

In the progress of the modern classical controversy, the practical issue has been most sharply made between the Greek and the German, and this is the issue to which Professor Newton's paper is mainly devoted, although it takes up various collateral points. He says:

Almost without exception in this discussion, the Greek has counted itself, and been counted by its opponents, on the side of the abstract, the disciplinary; while the modern languages have ranged themselves, or been ranged by their opponents, upon the side of the practical merely; grouped in with the sciences as useful knowledge, but lacking all, or nearly all, disciplinary value. But there are not a few fallacies which place the modern languages in opposition to the ancient, that need to be exposed, in order that, in the scheme of a liberal modern education, they may secure their proper time and place. It can easily be shown that many of the arguments used in favor of Greek as against German, both as to discipline and culture, are as true of the German as of the Greek.

Professor Newton then takes up the question of the alleged superiority of the Greek over the German in cultivating the attention and training the memory, and thoroughly exposes the fallacy of the claim. In regard to the processes involved in the exercise of translation, he says:

I believe it can be shown that the power of analysis and the power of synthesis are as much needed, and as much cultivated, by a thorough mastery of the German as of the Greek. For what is translation as a mental process? It is necessary, in the first place, that the mind grasp a thought expressed in words whose relations are shown by terminations, or by order of arrangement, or by particles; by any one, or by all three of these. Then, in the second place, this thought must be wrought over in the mind, fused, and poured out again into the molds or forms of the language into which one is translating, in strict accordance with its vocabulary, its idiom, and its spirit. And the same use of the same faculties is required in every possible translation. But the facility acquired by long practice in translating from one language must not be compared with the stumbling efforts of a beginner in translating from another. Of course, the same proficiency in translating can not be gained in three terms of German as in twelve terms of Greek. And it is not knowing German to be able to work one's way through a foot-note, and just miss the point from not knowing the force of a modal auxiliary.

For various cogent criticisms made by Professor Newton on the alleged superiority of Greek for general disciplinary effect we have no space to speak, but must reproduce what he says about the study of English:

In all these later arguments in regard to the disciplinary efficiency of the Greek there is the insinuation, or the explicit statement, that all modern languages, the English especially, are worthless, or worse than worthless, for purposes of discipline. A writer in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1884, has
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