In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of NEW YORK. STEREOTYPED BY F. F. RIPLEY, NEW YORK. PREFACE. In compiling the theory of this work, I have constantly kept in view the capacity and understanding of those for whom it is principally intended, consequently I have written it in a plain, familiar and easy style; adapted to the understanding of the minds of the young, who are destined in a few years to become the sovereignty of this happy and enlightened country. Those highly cultivated, classical, and intellectual minds, who have passed through their juvenile studies, cannot have forgotten the difficulties that attended them in the acquisition of knowledge in the morning of life, when the attainment, of those principles of literature, which habit has now rendered familiar, was like scaling the clifted side of a mountain, or riving the gnarled oak. Neither can they forget that out of every hundred students who have commenced the study, not more than five have ever gone beyond the Parts of Speech, but have abandoned it in despair; and while it may be said of those five, that it certainly must be said of the ninety-five, that With the heart of a man, He has the soul of a child." So difficult has it been to comprehend the simple truth, that "beings exist and act," when veiled in the technical language of the monasteries of the dark ages, and monkish superstitions of the thirteenth century. There are now extant, nearly one hundred works on the subject of Grammar; all of which are works of Theory, containing the elementary principles of language : but as I apprehend, most of them are defective in practice. The student has been informed, that Grammar is "the art of speaking and writing correctly;" and with a view of becoming master of Elocution, he is required to spend years in committing rules and definitions to memory, and repeating to his teacher, the jargon and rosary of "common noun, neuter gender, third person, singular," " irregular verb, active, indicative mood, present tense, third person singular" and is then told that his knowledge of language is complete. But mark the result. The student of our common schools, after spending time enough to graduate from any well-regulated college, finds himself at the age of twenty-seven, surrounded by a thick cloud of grammatical ignorance, through which no rays of light can find their way to the darkness of his understanding, and illuminate the path of his future literary existence. Indeed, so defective is his practical knowledge of the use of language, when appplied to "existing and active life," that it becomes necessary for the student to tell you that he has studied grammar for some eight or ten years; as no one who had ever heard him deliver his thrilling orations, or read his spirit-kindling essays, would accuse him of looking into an English Grammar, from his wonderful knowledge of the "ART of SPEAKING and Writing correctly!!" Now, reader! is this true, or is it fiction? If it be fiction, all that I can say, is :-that thirteen years practice, in my profession, in the different literary institutions of our country; and the personal instruction of more than fifteen thousand students, have only made me ignorant of the truth, in relation to the subject. Now, I would be expressly understood to say, that I find no fault with either teachers or students: the evil not originating with them, but from the want of a sufficient practice in our Grammars, which this work is intended to supply. Let a student commit all the rules of the best written Arithmetic, without ever seeing a slate, or being able to demonstrate one single rule in it; or commit the whole of Morse's Geography to memory, without knowing that such a thing as a globe, map, or atlas, is in existence ;and you would place him on a footing with the student in ་ English Grammar,—that is, after all his Theory those sciences would be involved in a mystery. But the moment you accompany your Arithmetic with demonstrations, your Geography with an Atlas, or your Grammar with its Analysis, or practice-from which the Theory is inferred; his mind at once becomes enlightened, and the truth breaks in upon him, with its irresistable force and beauty. The following syllogisms, will serve as examples to the student, and should be carefully consulted, from time to time, during his progress through the Grammar; he should recollect that it is reason alone, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world, and that he who cannot reason is not far advanced in intellect above a brute: and that he, who will not reason, may thank himself for being the author of his own ignorance. Again, a knowledge of the principles of reasoning, will guard you through life, from an innumerable multitude of impositions. You will not take the bare assertion of an other as truth, without some evidence of the fact. Neither will you have that implicit faith in the writings and works of others which characterizes the vulgar, and is the peculiar province of the ignorant: for the human mind always fixes, or settles in truth, as the needle does to the north: but never can rest in error. TRUTH, is the actual and absolute existence and action of beings and things. Every particle of matter in a state of existence, forms a truth; consequently, language to be true, must describe such existence and action as it is. In writing this work, I have endeavored to follow nature. Nature exists and acts uniformly. "The seasons change the earth unfolds its fruits-the ocean rolls in its magnificence-the heavens display their constellated canopy." The lightnings flash, and thunders roll in an uniform manner. The existence or actions of these things are matters of fact in themselves, which impress and stamp the truth equally upon the minds of all men, in all ages, nations, and languages. Now, although God and nature exist and act, uniformly true in themselves, it is wonderful to see how their existence and 1* actions are perverted in language; men forming a theory of their own, before whose shrine all beings must bend, and upon whose altar, existence, and action, or truth, must be sacrificed. This method of parsing and reasoning is founded in truth, and when once the truth, or existence or non-existence of a thing is established and demonstrated, it is not necessary to examine any thing on the other side of the question, as all attempts to prove the non-existence of truth, must be fallacious and absurd; hence it has long been an established rule of law, in all courts of justice throughout the civilized world, that a "negative, or nonexistence of truth, cannot be proved," because an affirmative sentence or proposition is one which affirms that some BEING EXISTS or ACTS, and a negative proposition is one which asserts that some being or thing does not exist. Now as no person, place, or thing, can be in a state of existence and non-existence at the same time, therefore two propositions, or sentences, when one absolutely denies what the other affirms, never can be both true. Affirmative-Barrett wrote this book. Negative-Barrett did not write this book. Negative-There are beings which have no existence. Now is it not plain that if these affirmatives assert the truth, that the negatives must be false, and vice versa. From these remarks you will readily discover that whenever you parse a word or sentence, and by a course of logical reasoning demonstrate its truth, it will not be in the power of any Philologist to falsify your conclusions. All errors originate by forming conclusions, without comparisons. |