It has often amused me to examine grown-up persons (non-philologists) in what they could remember of the instruction they had received in school in foreign languages. It seems to be extremely common that they have not the slightest idea as to what case for instance a preposition governs, but the rigmarole in which it occurs they generally know by heart. They also know ever so many scraps like _der buchstabe_, _der friede_, _der funke_ ... or _das amt_, _das ass_, _das bad_, _das bild_, _das blatt_ ... but why they have learned these things, and what they were supposed to be good for, to these questions there is generally no answer forthcoming. So those rigmaroles are really of no practical use whatever.
Now, of course, rigmaroles could easily be so arranged--though no one seems to have put it into practice--as to contain an indication of the object in grouping together just those words, for instance by saying _durch das zimmer_, _für_, _gegen_ ... or _durch für ... um wider mich_, or _das amt_, _die ämter_, _das ass_ ... or _das amt_, _ämter_, _bäder_, _bilder_....
But even in this improved form it seems to me that grammatical rigmaroles are of little value just because they accustom the pupils to learn and say things by rote without _thinking_; they are remnants of the old-fashioned would-be pedagogy where a teacher in any subject was satisfied if the pupil only “knew his lesson,” that is, could recite the words of the book, and where no one ever thought about understanding or other such-like modern inventions.
The expressions “living” and “dead” are so often used about languages and words, but those who use them do not always take the trouble to consider in what sense these expressions really have any meaning. A language only lives, and can only live, in a person’s mind, and that it lives there means that its component parts are for him associated with certain ideas, which are recalled when he hears the words, and which in turn summon up the corresponding words when he wants to express them, or when he simply wants to make them clear for himself. But ideas do not and cannot exist except in combinations; an absolutely isolated thought is the same as nothing. It is the same with words; if they are taken out of their natural surroundings, they suffer atrophy and at last cease to perform the usual function of words, namely to produce ideas. So isolated words, such as are given in rigmaroles and paradigms, are only ghosts or corpses of words. Try to run through the words “jewel, stone, cabbage, knee, owl, toys, louse,” and see if a single complete picture has been produced in your mind--but you are no better off when you say the French rigmarole _bijou_, _caillou_, _chou_, _genou_, _hibou_, _joujou_, _pou_. That, as well as _amo_, _amas_, _amat_, _amamus_, _amatis_, _amant_ and all the others, must by virtue of the fundamental psychical law of the life of language become merely empty jingle and nothing else. Now we see the psychological reason why sensible persons can write such sentences in their books as _je mourus_ or the entirely parallel “Wir sind nicht hier.” When the mind is occupied with a word as a grammatical phenomenon, the word’s normal power of calling forth ideas is of course lessened in a considerable degree.