and almost every one of them has his own. With G. E. Schulze, for example, the subject is called "Grundbegriff" the predicate "Beilegungsbegriff;" then there are "Beilegungsschlüsse," "Voraussetzungsschlüsse," and "Entgegensetzungsschlüsse;" the judgments have "Grösse," "Beschaffenheit," "Verhältniss," and "Zuverlässigkeit," i.e., quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The same perverse influence of this Germanising mania is to be found in all the sciences. The Latin and Greek expressions have the further advantage that they stamp the scientific conception as such, and distinguish it from the words of common intercourse, and the ideas which cling to them through association; while, for example, "Speisebrei" instead of chyme seems to refer to the food of little children, and "Lungensack" instead of pleura, and "Herzbeutel" instead of pericardium seem to have been invented by butchers rather than anatomists. Besides this, the most immediate necessity of learning the ancient languages depends upon the old termini technici, and they are more and more in danger of being neglected through the use of living languages in learned investigations. But if it comes to this, if the spirit of the ancients bound up with their languages disappears from a liberal education, then coarseness, insipidity, and vulgarity will take possession of the whole of literature. For the works of the ancients are the pole-star of every artistic or literary effort; if it sets they are lost. Even now we can observe from the miserable and puerile style of most writers that they have never written Latin.[1] The study of the classical authors is very properly called the study of Humanity, for through it the student first becomes a man again, for he enters
- ↑ A principal use of the study of the ancients is that it preserves us from verbosity; for the ancients always take pains to write concisely and pregnantly, and the error of almost all moderns is verbosity, which the most recent try to make up for by suppressing syllables and letters. Therefore we ought to pursue the study of the ancients all our life, although reducing the time devoted to it. The ancients knew that we ought not to write as we speak. The moderns, on the other hand, are not even ashamed to print lectures they have delivered.
