Educational Theory of Auxiliary Verbs

Walter Shandy’s Educational Theory of Auxiliary Verbs is a theory of education built around a grammatical engine: auxiliary verbs can turn even a sparse idea into a branching series of questions, propositions, and conclusions. Walter calls this a shorter passage to intellectual knowledge than ordinary instruction provides. Its promise is expansive, but its comic demonstration also exposes a tension in the theory: a method intended to open a child’s mind might, as Uncle Toby warns, burst it into splinters.

The proposed passage to knowledge

In conversation with Yorick, Walter argues that there is a North-West Passage to the intellectual world: the soul can find shorter routes to knowledge and instruction than people generally take. Such a route is not equally available to every child, he acknowledges, since not every field has a river or spring running beside it, and not every child has a parent to point the way. The image makes education a matter of discovering and showing a path, not merely delivering a stock of finished information.

Walter then reduces his proposal to a grammatical foundation, telling Yorick in a low voice that the whole matter depends on auxiliary verbs. His concern is not grammar as an end in itself. He believes educators have neglected these verbs in their duty to open children’s minds and furnish them early with ideas, leaving the imagination insufficiently equipped to work upon its materials. Yorick listens attentively; the theory arrives in Walter’s familiar mixture of eccentricity and occasional illumination, and the narrator cautions against dismissing its reasoning simply because of its odd presentation.

How the auxiliaries work

Walter distinguishes the limited development of a single word from the continuing activity of the mind. A word, he says, can reach the high metaphorical stretch of its development, after which the mind and idea come to rest until another idea enters. Auxiliary verbs interrupt that rest: they set the soul going by itself upon the materials supplied to it, and, as a versatile engine around which those materials are twisted, open new paths of inquiry. In Walter’s account, each idea can thereby engender millions more.

He makes the method concrete by listing the verbs children should learn to vary: “am; was; have; had; do; did; make; made; suffer; shall; should; will; would; can; could; owe; ought; used; or is wont.” These forms are to be exercised across present, past, and future tenses, joined to a verb such as “see,” and expanded into questions, negative statements, affirmative statements, chronological inquiries, and hypothetical conditions. The examples range from asking whether something is, was, or will be, to asking how long it has been so, what follows if it was not, or what would happen if the French should defeat the English or the Sun should leave the Zodiac. Grammatical variation becomes a way of investigating time, truth, possibility, and consequence.

The method therefore does not require a child to possess direct experience of every subject before being able to reason about it. Walter turns to Trim and asks whether he has ever seen a White Bear. Trim says he has not. Walter nevertheless maintains that Trim could discourse about one in case of need: the fact he wants is not a report of sighting, but proof of what auxiliary verbs can make possible. The White Bear becomes a test case for thinking about something absent from experience.

The White Bear as demonstration

Walter puts the White Bear through a succession of questions: whether he has ever seen one, might ever have seen one, is ever to see one, ought to have seen one, or can ever see one. He adds the wish that he had seen it, then asks what he should say if he were to see one and what would follow if he never did. Each form alters the relation between the speaker and the imagined animal: past experience gives way to possibility, expectation, obligation, capacity, desire, and conditional reasoning.

The demonstration extends through half a dozen pages, with Walter dancing the White Bear backwards and forwards before finally closing the book and handing it back to Trim with a nod to return it to the escritoire. The physical comedy gives form to the conceptual procedure: the animal does not advance through an observed encounter, but moves back and forth through the grammatical alternatives Walter generates. The example is at once an exercise in reasoning beyond direct experience and a deliberately extravagant display of how far a single premise can be made to travel.

A curriculum of endless propositions

After the demonstration, Walter announces that Tristram shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary backwards and forwards in the same way. By this means, he argues, every word becomes a thesis or hypothesis; each thesis and hypothesis produces propositions; and every proposition has consequences and conclusions that lead the mind into fresh tracks of inquiry and doubt. Education, in this conception, is not the accumulation of settled answers. It is the multiplication of paths from an initial idea.

Walter calls the force of this engine incredible in opening a child’s head. Uncle Toby immediately supplies the counterimage: such a procedure, he objects, is enough to burst the head into a thousand splinters. The contrast marks the theory’s comic limit without cancelling its central insight. The same profusion that promises intellectual expansion can look like overwhelming proliferation, and Walter offers no clear boundary at which productive questioning should stop. His plan makes Tristram’s education an imagined exercise in unending verbal inquiry, while leaving the reader to hold its promise of mental freedom beside the danger of excess.