CHAPTER III.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.

41 Etymology and Syntax-how they ought to be discriminated. 42 Original unity of language, which is necessarily co-ordinate with human reason. 43 The Book of Genesis is in accordance with the results of philosophy in this respect; for it teaches: 44 (1) that language is an endowment, and not an invention; 45 (2) that differences of language are the effect and not the cause of dispersion. 46 Monumental writing connected with idolatry. 47 Spiritual abstraction favoured by alphabetic writing; this was manifested in the highest degree by the invention of printing. 48 Effects of literature on the structure of language; syntax and prose. 49 Passage of language from a primary to a secondary, and from this to a tertiary state. The latter presumes ethnical admixture as well as literary cultivation. 50 Degraded languages; these also capable of literary cultivation. The Chinese an example. 51 Outline of linguistic psychology. 52 Two elements of speech, (a) the organizing, (b) the material. 53 Abstraction and association. 54 Space and time. 55 Algebra. 56 Realism and nominalism. 57 Plato a nominalist. 58 Outlines of Plato's dialectics. 59 He was opposed to ultra-nominalism. 60 Design of his Cratylus. 61 Horne Tooke the modern representative of the school controverted in Plato's Cratylus. 62 Philosophical design of the present work.

41 HOSE who have hitherto written on the philosophy of

Tlanguage have generally fallen into one of two error,

they have either omitted altogether the consideration of that department which relates to the formation of sentences, or, what is worse, they have failed to discriminate the two divisions of the subject, and conducting their etymological analysis on strictly logical principles, have necessarily taken a perverted view of the nature and object of their inquiries. In the present work we have endeavoured to remedy this defect, by showing that the resolution of a sentence into its elements is a totally different process from the analysis of those elements themselves—that in a scientific investigation of the general speech of man our principal concern is with the word, its structure and developement; that the same causes which create syntax, or logical sentences, tend to corrupt and destroy the original forms of speech, so that the attempt to derive the elements of the word from the elements of the sentence is absurd, as seeking the whole in its part, and must lead to conclusions utterly false and contradictory.

A formal discussion of the philosophy of language attempts the solution of two problems;-it purposes to ascertain, first, the origin of language; and secondly, the connexion of our words with our thoughts. But, although this may be adopted as a methodical division and for form's sake, the two questions, according to our view of the former of them, are in fact one and the same; for, if language is, as we have no doubt it is, a necessary result of the constitution of man as a rational being, if the gifts of reason and speech are necessarily coordinate, then there can be no discussion, but simply an explanatory statement, with regard to the connexion between language and mind.

42 The primitive state of mankind has been a favourite subject of inquiry both in this country and on the continent, and some theory of the origin of language generally forms a part of such disquisitions. Till the introduction of the comparative study of languages these theorists wanted their facts, and therefore met with the fate of those who advance unsupported hypotheses they did not arrive at any convincing results. The researches of the present century, however, have given an entirely new turn to this subject; the right method has been adopted, and it is this, that the only safe conclusions, with regard to the primitive condition of language, are to be derived from a rigorous scrutiny of all the various forms which it exhibits in its existing state; and though philologers have not yet examined all the dialects of the world in a complete and scientific manner, they have advanced so far as to be able to divide them all into a few great families, and have moreover examined the different members of the class to which our own language belongs, with a minute accuracy which leaves little to be desired: the facts with regard to this class have not only been carefully collected, but also scientifically arranged, so that the utmost reliance may be placed upon any conclusions logically deduced from them: and from a comparison of this family (considered in its unity, which is thus established), with the other great classes of the general language of mankind, a comparison guided and illustrated by sound psychological views, the most profound and highlygifted of those philosophers who have devoted themselves to this study have inferred, that language is the necessary and spontaneous result of man's constitution, that human speech and human

nature are inseparable, and consequently that language was originally one*: physiology has made some important approxima

William von Humboldt, the most eminent of those who have made the philosophy of the word their study, has stated his opinion to this effect in the most explicit terms. The reader will not perhaps be displeased if we subjoin a few extracts from his great posthumous work, the introduction to his treatise on the Kawi language. The title of this introduction is, über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (on the varieties in the structure of human languages, and their influence upon the intellectual developement of the human race). "The true solution of the contrast of stability and fluctuation, which we find in language, lies in the unity of human nature. Whatever is derived from that which is properly one with me, in this the conceptions of subject and object, of dependance and independance, are interchanged.-What is strange to me in language is so for my (for the time being) individual, not for my originally true, nature" (p. 63).—“The reciprocal working of the individual upon language becomes clearer when we remember that the individuality of a language, according to the ordinary acceptation, is such only by comparison, whereas the real individuality lies in the speaker for the time being. Speech acquires its last definiteness only from the individual. No one assigns precisely the same meaning to a word that another does, and a shade of meaning, be it ever so slight, ripples on, like a circle in the water, through the entirety of language.—The power of speech may be regarded as a physiological effect; that proceeding from the individual as a purely dynamical one. The regularity of speech and its forms consists in the influence exerted upon the individual; but there is a principle of freedom in that reciprocal working which proceeds from him; for something may rise up in a man, the ground of which no understanding in preceding circumstances could discover" (pp. 64, 5). 'Language is the outward appearance of the intellect of nations: their language is their intellect, and their intellect their language: we cannot sufficiently identify the two" (p. 37). "We must regard speech not so much as a dead begotten, but rather as a begetting; we must abstract from what it is as a designation of objects, and a help to the understanding; on the contrary, we must go back more carefully to a consideration of its origin, so nearly connected with the subjective mental activity, and to its reciprocal influence thereupon " (p. 39). "Understanding and speaking are only different effects of the same power of speech" (p. 54). "Speech, considered in its real nature, is something constantly passing away. Even its preservation by means of writing keeps it only in an incomplete, mummy-like fashion, in which it can get vitality only by lively recitation. In itself it is not an epyov, but an évépyeta. Accordingly its true definition can be genetic only. It is, in fact, the ever-recurring labour of the mind to make articulate sound appli

66

tions to a similar result with respect to the bodily structure of mankind*; and thus external probability leads us to the conclusion, that the varieties which we distinguish as well in the form as in the language of man must have been produced by the dispersion of the human race from some one home over the whole surface of the earth, and by the subsequent operation of the multifarious causes to which the different parts of the separated family would be exposed.

The result of investigations of this nature is generally more satisfactory to our inquisitive spirit than any written testimony, however authenticated, with regard to the creation and early state of man for the facts to which such a testimony relates occurred long before the invention of writing; they are traditions handed down by word of mouth from father to son, beginning with the first man, and so going on to the man who wrote them down, and of which even the earliest narrator could have known little without a direct and immediate revelation. Yet all nations have traditions, in a great measure consistent, which describe minutely and definitely their primitive state: and when we find that the oldest of these traditions agrees exactly and entirely with the result of our anthropological studies so far as we have been able to prosecute them with safety, the most obstinate sceptic cannot refuse the homage of veneration to a narrative, of which, if true, there could be but one origin. It matters little

cable to the expression of thought" (p. 41). The same author in a paper in the Berlin Transactions for 1820-1 (p. 247) expresses himself as follows: "According to my fullest conviction speech must be regarded as immediately inherent in man; for it is altogether inexplicable as the work of his understanding in its simple consciousness. We are none the better for allowing thousands and thousands of years for its invention. There could be no invention of language unless its type already existed in the human understanding. In order that man should understand a single word truly, not as a mere perceivable utterance, but as articulate sound denoting a conception, he must have already in his head the whole connexion of speech. There is nothing individual in speech; every one of its elements announces itself as part of a whole. Natural as the belief in a gradual formation of speech may appear, the invention of it could only happen at once. Man is man only by means of speech; but in order to invent speech he must be already man."

See Dr Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, and Dr Wiseman's Third and Fourth Lectures.

to us that the divine truths of the Book of Genesis are sometimes couched in figurative or allegorical language, that the history of our first parents is veiled under the common oriental symbols, that it teaches no lessons of chronology or natural philosophy, or even that some harmless interpolations may have been introduced into the text by priests and prophets, when, with the fear of a Chaldean invasion before their eyes, they sought to rouse the drooping patriotism of their countrymen by a republication of the sacred books which told of God's great deeds in behalf of their ancestors and of his greater promises to their descendants; still less are we disturbed by our knowledge of the fact, that this, as well as the other books of the Jewish canon, was revised, modernized, and probably abridged, by the learned Ezra and his Masorethic conclave, after the return from captivity; it is clear that the essential parts of this document remained unaltered, and we have enough of internal evidence and extrinsic confirmation to justify our belief, that this book contains the residuary substratum of those ancient and venerable traditions of the Aramæan race, which descended by an unbroken chain from the first and highly-favoured men who heard the voice of Jehovah Elohim as it floated to and fro on the evening breeze*.

43 It is not our design in this place to enter upon a detailed exposition of the coincidences of science and revelation; and we think we might fairly assume, as the basis of our view with regard to the origin of language, the account given in the Book of Genesis, so far as that account is confirmed by the researches of modern philosophy. Now the results of our philosophy are as follows. We find in the internal mechanism of language the exact counterpart of the mental phenomena which writers on psychology have so carefully collected and classified. We find that the structure of human speech is the perfect reflex or image of what we know of the organization of the mind: the same description, the same arrangement of particulars, the same nomenclature would apply to both, and we might turn a treatise on the philosophy of mind into one on the philosophy of language,

Genesis iii. 8. See Kennicott, Two Dissertations, Oxford, 1747,

p. 47, note k.