Grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics and logic and every kind of preceptive teaching, may be assumed as a form separated from its contents, as something empty and abstract. The child is taught for instance that the letter _m_ in _mamma_ does not belong to that word (we call it a "word," and forget that to him at least it is not a word but his own mother). That letter _m_, we tell him, is found in other words, _mat_, _meat_, etc. We show him that it is in all of them, and yet in none of them. We therefore can and must abstract it from all concrete connections, isolate and fix it as that something which it is in itself--the letter _m_. In the same manner we abstract the rule of grammar from a number of individual examples. We exalt it over them, and give it an existence which is higher, and independent of theirs. And so for rhetoric, and so for logic. But in this process of progressive abstraction, in this practice of considering the abstract as something substantial, and of reducing the concrete and the particular to the subordinate position of the accessory, life recedes and ebbs away. The differences between this and that word, between two images, two thoughts, two modes of thinking, of expressing, of behaving, at first become slight, then negligible, then quite inexistent, and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic, to the empty, to the indifferent. It knows no longer how to fix the peculiarities of things, how to notice the different traits of men's characters, their interests, their diverse values, until finally it becomes indifferent and sceptical. Words lose their meaning; they no longer smack of what they used to; their value is gone. Things lose their individuality, and men their physiognomies. This scepticism robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. The fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education is no education at all. It is not even instruction. For it does not teach the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new materialised and detached abstraction. The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means but an end; it is not mere form but also content. It is not a weapon which man may wield indifferently either for good purposes or for evil motives. It is man himself. It is the human soul, which should already flash in the very first word that is spelled, if it is read intelligently. And it ought to be a good word, worthy of the child and of the future man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already to be able to discover himself,--not himself in general, but that better self which the school gradually and progressively will teach him to find within himself. So considered, the alphabet is a powerful instrument of human formation and of moral shaping. It is education.