The Art of Teaching and Studying Language (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ...the figurative language after having assimilated it unconsciously; if it can make this assimilation take place regularly and methodically; if, in fine, it can cause this last part of the language to be attached logically and harmoniously to the two others and to form with them a homogeneous whole, then Art will have 1 The absence of conscious knowledge of the root of the metaphor, and the employment of figurative expressions as simple " relative phrases," is, of course, the cause of the use of mixed metaphors by unskilled rhetoricians (Trans.). done what Nature does not accomplish, and cannot accomplish other than roughly; that is, Art will have conquered Nature. And Art can do this. Our metaphorical themes will first make plain the unnamed symbols from which they borrow their development; then the diverse pieces of these themes will be set in order and organised in the direction indicated by the nature of the symbolic fact itself. It therefore only remains to discover between the figurative language and the objective language a natural relation which permits the exercises of the one to be harmoniously allied to the exercises of the other. To study the figurative language indeed, in itself and for itself, separately and in the abstract, would be a perfectly barren labour, if not an impossible one. It would be simply to repeat our early experience with the dictionary. In the everyday practice of life the metaphorical expressions are mingled and interlaced continually with those of the language proper, coming one after the other, and linked together according to the secret dialectic of the natural facts upon which these expressions depend. But how are we to discover the relation which we need to carry out the synthesis of the two languages...