Lord Monboddo, Stewart’s fellow-countryman, showed himself a sounder critic and a more unprejudiced inquirer.[26] His friend, Wilkins, the translator of the “Bhagavadgîta” and “Hitopadeśa,” and author of a Sanskrit grammar, proved to his satisfaction that Sanskrit was “a richer and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer,” and that the likeness between Sanskrit on the one side, and Greek and Latin on the other, demonstrated the descent of all three from some common primæval tongue. The Scotch judge accordingly found a niche for the new discovery in his theory which derived mankind from two tailless apes, and the languages of the world from the Osirian language of Egypt. Sanskrit, it was plain, had been introduced into India by Osiris, just as Greek had been brought into the Peloponnesus by the Pelasgians. Not only the numerals, “the use of which must have been coeval with civil society,” or the words of common life, but even the grammatical forms of a verb like asmi, “I am,” are produced in evidence of the relationship of the classical languages of Europe and of India. As early as 1795 Lord Monboddo was not far from the discovery of that Indo-European family of speech which has been the starting-point and foundation of the science of language.

Both Sir William Jones and Lord Monboddo, however, did no more than draw aside the curtain for a moment and reveal the new world that lay behind. It was reserved for Germany to accomplish what England had begun. The genius of Leibniz had already prepared the way by overthrowing the belief that Hebrew was the original language from which all others are to be traced, and by setting missionaries and others to work in compiling vocabularies, grammars, and phrase-books of the manifold dialects of the world. Thus, in thanking Witsen, the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, for a translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Hottentot, he writes: “Remember, I implore you, and remind your Muscovite friends, to make researches in order to procure specimens of the Scythian languages, the Samoyedes, Siberians, Bashkirs, Kalmuks, Tungusians, and others;” and his sound scientific instinct makes him ask (in his “Dissertation on the Origin of Nations,” 1710): “Why begin with the unknown instead of the known? It stands to reason that we ought to begin with studying the modern languages which are within our reach, in order to compare them with one another, to discover their differences and affinities, and then to proceed to those which have preceded them in former ages, in order to show their filiation and their origin, and then to ascend, step by step, to the most ancient tongues.”[27] He found an illustrious convert in Catherine of Russia, who once shut herself up for nearly a year in order to work at her “Comparative Dictionary of Languages,” and the “Catalogo delle Lingue conosciute e notizia della loro affinitá e diversitá” (1784) of the Spanish Jesuit missionary, Don Lorenzo Hervas and the “Mithridates” of Adelung and Vater are, as Professor Max Müller has observed, plainly due to his influence. The efforts of Leibniz were seconded in another direction by those of Herder, to whom we may trace the conception of a comparative treatment of literature and a recognition of the merits of literary remains beyond those of Greece and Rome. Herder, as has already been remarked, made the rise of an historical science possible by substituting the idea of development for that of uniform sequence in history, and his treatise on the “Origin of Speech,” crowned by the Berlin Academy in 1772, dissipated for ever the theory that language was a miraculous gift and not the slowly evolved creation of the human mind. The German mind was already prepared to seize and unfold the consequences which resulted from the discovery of Sanskrit. It was a poet, Friedrich Schlegel, however, and not a philologist, who first laid down the great fact that the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany, and Slavonia form but one family, daughters of the same mother, and heirs of the same wealth of words and flections. Schlegel learnt Sanskrit while in England during the peace of Amiens (1801-1802), and to his work on “The Language and Wisdom of the Indians,” published in 1808, may be traced the foundation of the science of language. All that was now required was some master-scholar who should continue the work begun by Schlegel, and establish on a deep and firm basis the edifice that he had reared. This master-scholar was found in Francis Bopp.

Bopp, the true founder of comparative philology, made himself acquainted with Sanskrit during a visit to England and the India House library, and in 1816 appeared his famous work, “Das Conjugationssystem,” published at Frankfurt, in which a minute and scientific comparison was instituted between the grammatical systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German. It was not until 1833, however, that the first volume of his “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Slavonic, Gothic, and German” came out, though several minor productions on Comparative Philology had appeared meanwhile, and not until 1852 was the final volume of the Grammar completed. Bopp was the author of the method which must be followed by every student who pretends to a scientific treatment of language; and though there is naturally much in his work that has since needed revision, the main results at which he arrived will always remain among the fundamental truths of linguistic science. His Sanskrit grammars were published in 1827, 1832, and 1834, and his “Vergleichendes Accentuations-System,” published in 1854, not only pointed out the striking analogy between the accentuation of Greek and Sanskrit, but also laid the basis of all future inquiries into the subject. But even Homer nods at times; and as if to warn us against following too implicitly any leader, however illustrious, Bopp sought to include the Polynesian dialects in his Indo-European family, and thereby violated the very method that he had himself inaugurated.[28] His attempt to connect the language of Georgia with the same family was not more fortunate;[29] and though Georgian is undoubtedly inflectional in character, its flections are now known not to be those of the Aryan group, nor its structure and roots those which distinguish an Aryan tongue. Even the errors of a great mind are instructive, and serve to illustrate the soundness of the method which they violate.

Bopp’s work was confined to the more strictly scientific and inductive side of comparative philology, to the comparison of words and forms, and the conclusions we may infer therefrom: the metaphysical side of the science of language found an able expositor in Wilhelm von Humboldt. Starting with the new method of Bopp, Humboldt revised the old endeavours to found a philosophy of speech, and extended the results obtained by Bopp to all the manifold languages of the world. In a number of publications, more especially the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java, which came out after his death in 1836,[30] he dealt with the various problems raised by the science and philosophy of language, and not only sketched the general outlines of a true philosophy of speech, but also threw out suggestions which have since borne abundant fruit in the hands of other scholars. Humboldt’s work was followed up by Steinthal, whose journal, the “Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft,”[31] conducted with the help of Lazarus, has proved a treasury of suggestive thought to a whole generation of linguistic scholars. Bopp, on the other hand, was followed by Pott, whose vast knowledge and genial insight are probably unequalled among the students of language. His “Etymologische Forschungen,” in spite of its size and want of an adequate index, is a mine of philological wealth, and his works on the “Language of the Gipsies” (1846), on “Proper Names” (1856), and on the “Quinary and Vigesimal Systems of Numeration” (1847), have largely helped the progress of linguistic science. In the “Anti-Kaulen,” or “Mythical Representations of the Origin of Peoples and Languages” (1865), and “The Inequality of the Races of Men” (1856), where a great display of anthropological knowledge is made, Pott did good service in checking the unifying haste of a young science.

While Humboldt and Pott were laying broad and deep the foundations of the new science of language, Jacob Grimm was applying the method of Bopp in another and more special direction. Instead of endeavouring to grasp the whole vast range of languages, or even those of the Aryan group alone, he devoted himself to the minute and scientific study of one branch of them only, and his “Deutsche Grammatik” (1819-1837) ushered in a new epoch in the history of comparative philology. Benfey, indeed, still carried on with a master’s power the labours begun by Bopp and Pott, but he too had by degrees to adapt himself to the spirit of the time, and the fame he has acquired as a Sanskrit scholar far outshines that acquired by his brilliant but ineffectual attempt to reduce the Aryan and Semitic families of speech to a single stem, or by his “History of the study of Language and of Oriental Philology in Germany, since the beginning of the sixteenth century” (1869). The time was come for a microscopic rather than a telescopic view of language and languages; the broad outlines of linguistic science had been sketched by its first founders, and what was now wanted was to fill up the details, to apply the general principles of the science to special cases, and, by a close and accurate study of particular languages and dialects, either to confirm or to overthrow the conclusions at which they had arrived. No single man can know thoroughly more than a few languages at the most; for the rest he must be content to trust to the report of others; and however great may be his genius, however wide-reaching his vision, unless the materials he uses have already been sifted and arranged in the light of the comparative method, his most important inferences are likely to be vitiated. Hence the value of the work begun by Grimm, and of the direction in which he turned the course of scientific philology. Erasmus Rask, the Dane, followed up the example thus set with an investigation of the northern languages of Europe, and his researches into the language of the Zend-Avesta, the first ever undertaken by an European scholar, formed the scaffold upon which Eugène Burnouf erected the colossal structure of Zend philology. Burnouf did for Zend and Achæmenian Persian what Grimm had done for the Teutonic languages; his work has been continued by Lassen, Haug, Spiegel, Justi, and others. Meanwhile the Romance languages were taken in hand by Diez, whose “Comparative Grammar” (1836), and “Comparative Dictionary” (1853),[32] are masterpieces of method and insight. Indeed, they may be said to have created Romance philology altogether. The philology of the Keltic dialects was set on a scientific footing by our own countryman, Prichard, and above all by Zeuss and Stokes, while Miklosich and Schleicher did the same for the Slavonic tongues. Along with his special labours in Slavonic, Schleicher carried on the tradition of a wider and more general treatment of the whole Indo-European family itself, and his “Compendium of Comparative Grammar” (1861-2), in which he endeavoured to restore the grammar of the parent Aryan speech, will ever remain a monument of learning and genius. Schleicher also came forward as the representative of the view which includes the science of language among the physical sciences, and his works, whatever may be thought of the theory that underlies them, have done much to further the progress of linguistic study.

Grimm and his school acted wisely and scientifically in beginning with the modern languages whose phonology and pronunciation, the skeleton of all real linguistic science, can be fully known, and whose idioms, the life-blood, as it were, of language, are still living and familiar. But language, like all things else connected with man and his mind, is a self-developing organism, and as such must be studied historically. Consequently, though the student of language must start with the modern and living languages of the world, the older languages which lie behind them are of infinite importance, and to neglect them would be as fatal as for the geologist to neglect the older strata of the earth. The relics of ancient speech, preserved in the monuments of Egypt or Assyria, or in the records of Greece and Rome, are as precious as the fossils which enable the palæontologist to trace the history of life upon the globe, and the geologist to explain the origin and structure of the existing rocks. The same method and minute investigation, accordingly, which had effected so much for the Romance and Teutonic dialects, were applied to the study of the classical languages, and, in the hands of G. Curtius and his school, Greek and Latin philology has been revivified and illuminated, and made to yield stores of precious facts to the comparative philologist. The old-fashioned scholarship has become a thing of the past; the various dialects of Italy and Greece have been restored to their true place, and the death-blow given to the system which derived Latin from Greek, or attempted to explain the grammars of the two classical languages by confounding the laws and phænomena peculiar to each. The labours of Lobeck, of Gottfried Hermann, of Passow, of Döderlein, and above all of Philipp Buttmann, whose intuition frequently made him anticipate the conclusions of later discovery, had furnished Curtius with the basis on which the new superstructure might be built, while Corssen, his fellow-labourer in the field of Latin research, found that here also his predecessors had gathered in an almost equal harvest of materials. Comparative philology has made it possible for the scientific method to be learnt as well from the study of the classical tongues as from the study of chemistry or geology.

The results acquired in the realm of the Aryan or Indo-European languages served as a starting-point for the investigation of other families of speech. For a long time comparative philology remained practically synonymous with the comparative treatment of the Aryan languages only. But its method was equally applicable to the examination of all other languages throughout the world, and the general laws of language discovered by men like Bopp and Grimm might be expected to hold good of all languages and dialects whatsoever. Furnished with the new scientific method and the principles upon which it was based, scholars next attacked those Semitic languages whose inflectional structure seemed to bring them into such close contact with the languages of the Aryan group. A new era was inaugurated in their study by the labours of Gesenius, Ewald, and Olshausen; and Renan even attempted a “Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques.” But Renan’s work remains a splendid fragment; the first part, the “Histoire Générale,” has passed through several editions; but the “Système comparé” has never appeared. It was soon found that the comparative study of the Aryan languages would not give the key to all the problems of speech; that in fact the Aryan group was an exceptional one, and the laws determined from it, so far from being of universal validity, did not apply even to the dialects of the Semitic family. The endeavour to reduce the Semitic radicals to monosyllabic biliterals, under the belief that Aryan philology necessitated the existence of monosyllabic roots in all languages, introduced nothing but confusion into the study of the Semitic tongues; and the theory of pronominal suffixes, which seemed to be supported by the phænomena of Aryan speech, has been equally a loss rather than a gain for them. It is at last becoming recognized, however, that each group of languages, as well as each language in the several groups, has its own linguistic laws peculiar to itself, and to apply these to other groups and languages in which they have not been proved to exist, is to do violence to the comparative method itself. The Aryan languages are the languages of a civilized race; the parent-speech to which we may inductively trace them back was spoken by men who stood on a relatively high level of culture, and was as fully developed, as inflectional, in short, as Sanskrit or Latin themselves. Such a speech can tell us far less of the early condition of language than the Bushman dialects of our own day, and to make the conclusions derived from the examination of it of universal validity, or so many revelations of the primitive state of speech, would be a serious error.

The exceptional character of the Aryan group of languages has been made apparent by the application of the method learnt from its investigation to other groups of tongues. The four most important groups which have yet been examined, are the Malay-Polynesian, as explored by W. von Humboldt, Buschmann, Von der Gabelentz, and Friedrich Müller; the Bâ-ntu of Southern Africa, the scientific investigation of which is due to Bleek; the Athapasian and Sonorian of North America, of which Buschmann has been the Bopp; and, above all, the Ural-Altaic, otherwise called the Ugro-Altaic, or Turanian, which is now, owing to a variety of circumstances, receiving a special attention. The work begun by Castrèn, Schott, Böhtlingk, and Max Müller, has been continued by Boller, Budenz, Donner, Hunfálvy, Ahlqvist, Thomsen, Ujfalvy, Schiefner, and others; and so far, at all events, as the Finnic group is concerned, “Turanian” philology is almost as far advanced as Aryan philology itself. But the limits of the Ural-Altaic family as a whole are still not quite settled; while Dr. Edkins would connect Chinese with Mongol roots, others question the affinity of Mongol itself to the Tatar-Finnic languages, and Weske has even gone so far as to class the Finnic dialects among the inflectional tongues, and to hint at their connection with the languages of the Aryan family. But this is to follow in Bopp’s footsteps only when he endeavoured to trace the dialects of Polynesia and Europe to a common source.

The creation of a science of language has brought with it the creation of a science of comparative mythology and a science of comparative religion. Language is at once the expression and the creator of thought, and the history of language is consequently the history of human thought. Now mythology is a record of the way in which primitive man endeavoured to explain the phænomena of nature and his relation to the world, just as religion—that is, religion as crystallized in dogmas and systems—is a record of man’s attempt to represent his feelings and belief in relation to a higher power. The record can only be interpreted by the science of language; it is only when we come to understand the meaning of the language of mythology that we understand the meaning of mythology itself. Just as it was Sanskrit which laid the foundation of comparative philology, so, too, it was the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the oldest monument of Sanskrit literature, which laid the foundation of comparative mythology. The familiar forms and names of Greek myth met the scholar again in the Vedic poems; but their faces were no longer concealed by the veil of forgetfulness. The poets of the Rig-Veda were still conscious of the true nature and origin of Zeus (Dyaus) the “bright” sky, or Erinnys (Saraṇyu) “the dawn,” and the old stories of the sun-god and the powers of day are lighted up with renewed life and significancy when we track them back to their ancient home in the East. Not less important for the comparative study of religion have been the inquiries into the development of Brahmanism and its struggles with the teaching of Buddha, necessitated by the examination of the classical language and literature of India—inquiries which could be carried on in the dispassionate spirit of the scholar and without reference to the religious convictions of the Western world. The settlement of the exact meaning of a single word like nirvâna opens a fresh chapter in the comparative history of religion. It is not the least of Professor Max Müller’s services that he has made both these new sciences household words and invested them with a charm which has secured to them the attention they deserve.

In England the scientific study of language has taken a special direction in accordance with the practical character of the nation. Men like A. J. Ellis, Bell, and Sweet, have followed up the path first indicated by Grimm and Lepsius, and devoted themselves to an exhaustive investigation and analysis of articulate sounds. Aided by Helmholz in Germany, and Prince Lucien Bonaparte in London, they have determined the physical laws of utterance, have classified the most minute varieties of sounds, and pointed out the supreme importance, for phonological purposes, of living dialects. Etymology has to a great extent become a purely physical science: the connection and derivation of words must be traced out in obedience to the physiological laws of speech, and were it not that a sound or group of sounds cannot become a word until a meaning has been put into it, etymology might be described as merely a branch of physiology. But phonology, the science of sounds, is not synonymous with the science of language; it is but a department, a subdivision, of the master science, and deals only with the external, the mechanical, the physical side of speech. The relations of grammar and the inner signification of words and sentences are what constitute the real essence of language, and in so far as these belong to thought and not to the mere vocal organs of the body, the science of language, like the other sciences which have to do with the mind, must be described as a historical and not as a physical science. There has been a tendency among some philologists to push phonology beyond its proper sphere and make it co-extensive with comparative philology: it is this inclination which has lain at the root of the attempt to include the science of language among the physical sciences; but phonology is concerned only with the outward framework of speech, not with its inward essence. This framework, however, it is, by means of which we are able to investigate language, and the very fact of its being subject to physical laws which admit of no contravention, gives the modern science of language its scientific certainty, and constitutes the difference between it and the old punning etymology in which, as Voltaire said, the consonants counted for nothing and the vowels for very little. Before a single derivation can be admitted it must be shown to be in accordance with the ascertained phonological laws of the languages we are studying; before it can be justified it must satisfy the requirements of sense and history. The outward form is the key to the inward fact which it embodies; we can get at the original force and meaning of grammatical relations and derivative words only by interrogating the phonetic utterances by which they are expressed. The science of phonology is the entrance to the science of language, but we must not forget that it is but the outer vestibule, not the inner shrine itself.

It has been necessary to state thus in detail the distinction between phonology and the science of language as a whole, because a good many of the theories that have been propounded in the name of the science rest upon an unconscious confusion of the two. The outward and the inward have not always been kept apart, and nothing has been commoner than to argue that a change in the pronunciation of a word or suffix has been the cause of a change in its meaning. It has even been thought that the phænomena of inflection might all be accounted for by the action of phonetic decay in stripping off the final parts of compound words, and so disguising their primitive form (but not sense), and that when the comparative philologist has traced a word back to its source in accordance with phonological laws he has done all that is required of him. Even Plato and Aristotle had a higher conception of the study of language than this. No doubt the fact that a scientific treatment of language rests primarily upon phonology has had much to do with this one-sided view of speech, but the resemblance of the method of comparative philology to the method employed by the physical sciences has also been a cause of it. Comparative philology has been regarded as a physical science, language held to be a concrete organism, independent of human volition and with a growth analogous to that of the plant or the animal, and the laws of language explained without reference to the facts of psychology. The two Schlegels are the first who may be accounted responsible for this mode of dealing with language. Friedrich Schlegel divided languages into the flectionless, the agglutinative, and the inflectional, and treated the roots of languages as so many seeds, which grew up and developed like the acorn into the oak. A. W. Schlegel[33] calls the flectional languages “organic, because they contain a living principle of growth and development, and alone have, if I may so express myself, an abundant and luxurious vegetation.” In fact, speech was regarded by them as something that exists separately and independently, and the flections of the verb and noun believed to have sprouted out of the root like so many leaves and branches.

Schlegel’s mysticism, as Steinthal terms it, was exposed by Bopp, who threw the languages of the world into three groups: (1) those which, like the Chinese, are “without a grammar;” (2) those which, like the agglutinative and Aryan tongues, start with monosyllabic roots, and, by the help of composition, end with a grammar; and (3), lastly, the Semitic group, which expresses the relations of grammar by internal change. Bopp here commits at least three errors: (1) Chinese is as fully organized, as much possesses a grammar, as English or Latin; (2) the roots neither of the Aryan nor of the agglutinative languages can be proved to be monosyllabic, while the Aryan languages, at all events, sometimes use internal vowel-change to denote grammatical differences; and (3) to imply that the relations of grammar have been called into existence in the Aryan family by the passage of composition (or agglutination) into flection is to ascribe the origin of the relations conceived to exist between the several parts of our thought to the outward accidents of phonetic decay. Bopp naturally looked upon the laws of Aryan philology as holding good for all other branches of human speech; for him the parent Aryan language was the primitive language of mankind, and the verbal and pronominal roots discovered by the Sanskrit grammarians were assumed to have constituted a language, and, in fact, to have been the original language of the human race. Agglutination was but an earlier stage of inflection, and, in fact, was merely the form in which the unorganized primitive speech came to possess a grammar by compounding its roots together. No wonder, therefore, that roots were confounded with words; that Chinese should be described as consisting of “bare roots;” and that the possibility should be admitted of deriving all languages from a single source. Hence the endeavour to find a place for the Polynesian and Caucasian dialects in the Aryan family, and the stress laid upon the external rather than the internal side of speech. Structure, morphology, comparative syntax—these are ideas which have been left to Bopp’s successors to work out. With him language is still an organism, flowing from one source and passing through a series of necessary changes; it is, therefore, not so much a social product as a subject of physical inquiry. This view of language was assailed by Pott. He justly urges that we can only speak of language as an organism metaphorically, and that there is no inner necessity in language to develop like the seed into the tree, or the chrysalis into the butterfly, than there is in thought itself. The roots of language have no existence apart from the mind; before they can become words they must be clothed, now with this form, now with that, according to their relation with other words. Language, in fact, is the expression of thought; it cannot be examined except in connection with thought and the history of the human mind. The science of language, accordingly, is one of the historical or social sciences, and phonology is but the key whereby we read the enigmas of the thought within. Languages will differ according to the different ways in which men have conceived the world and their relation to it. Pott, therefore, is an advocate of the original diversity of languages, and, as might be expected, endeavours to found a science of sematology, or of the signification of words, by the side of the science of phonology.

Pott had been preceded in his general conception of speech by Wilhelm von Humboldt; indeed, his advance upon Bopp was due in some measure to Humboldt’s previous labours. For Pott, it must be remembered, was pre-eminently a phonologist, and to him we owe the extension of the results obtained by Grimm in the Teutonic languages to the whole body of Indo-European tongues. Humboldt, like all other great masters, rather suggested than worked out; and recent researches have shown that the facts to which he attached his philosophical system, such as the nature of the Kawi language of Java, are not always to be trusted. He laid down that each single language is the individual expression of the character of a nation, though language, taken generally, “is an organic whole,” from which the individual languages of the world radiate as from a centre. The nearer each language approaches the ideal of language, the more, that is to say, it is free from peculiarities of thought and expression, the less is it imperfect and, in the bad sense of the term, individual. And since a language is the outward expression of the mind and history of a nation, the nation whose language is the most perfect has approached the most nearly to a perfect culture and civilization. Language is at once the most exquisite work of art and the most marvellous creation of science that the spirit and intellect of a people can produce, and its character, as tested by the standard which linguistic science has to establish, is a sure and certain clue to the stage of art and science attained by its speakers. At the same time, Humboldt emphatically declares that language is not a product (ἔργον), but an activity (ἐνέργεια); in other words, that language and speaking are the same. But while maintaining that language is the creative organ of thought, Humboldt also maintained that it constitutes an independent world of thought, thus confusing the two senses of the word language—the one in which language is made identical with the act of speaking, the other in which it represents the whole body of significant sounds we utter. Humboldt had been educated under the influences of the Kantian philosophy, and in his theory of language we may discover a reflection of Kant’s dualism in the opposition he finds in speech between the general and the individual, between language as an organic whole, and individual languages which refuse to answer to the ideal definition of speech.

Steinthal[34] has subjected Humboldt’s statements to a very thorough-going criticism, and has exposed their manifold inconsistencies as well as the dualism which underlies them all. Humboldt’s philosophy of language erred by following the à priori rather than the à posteriori method; the facts discovered by comparative philology were used by him as illustrations of his conclusions rather than as the premisses upon which those conclusions were built. Nevertheless, in spite of his à priori metaphysical method—in spite of his laying down what language ought to be instead of what it is, Humboldt’s genius scattered ideas and suggestions through his work which have proved abundantly fruitful in the hands of later scholars. But the value of these ideas was due to the far-sightedness of his genius, not to his collection of facts, and he was accordingly unable to harmonize and classify them, or to erect upon them a sound theory of speech. Humboldt’s great work consisted in teaching that language is the expression of national thought, that it must be treated as an organic whole; that, in short, its science is a historical and not a physical one.

The work thus begun by Humboldt was taken up by Heyse in his “System der Sprachwissenschaft.”[35] Heyse approached language from the point of view of the Hegelian philosophy, but he strives to prevent the à priori method from overriding the à posteriori. His view of language professes to base itself on the results of comparative philology, although the endeavour to force them into an Hegelian mould is clearly traceable. It really rests, however, upon an à priori conception of the origin of speech, which is neither borne out by linguistic facts nor easily realizable. Language, he holds, is spiritualized sound: the world is a great vibratory organ, in which all objects when touched emit a note, and so, too, the human spirit, when affected by feeling or reason, emitted certain sounds peculiar to itself, which we call roots. Speech was as much a necessity to man as ringing is to a piece of brass when struck. It is, in fact, the music of the soul, and its development gauges the spiritual development of its speakers. This development of speech is, therefore, a wholly internal one, dependent not upon the outward phonology, but upon the common spirit of man that has created it. The outward sound is but the garment created by thought wherein to clothe itself, but the garment is always suitable to the thought it clothes. Since thought “must” develop, language also “must” do the same, and language, like thought, can develop only in a particular way. This evolution necessarily depends upon the existence of minds in which thought has become self-conscious, reflective: “the speaking of children and of the great mass of mankind is a lifelong, unconscious activity—a mere natural activity of conscious thought.” Such a theory of language is plainly mystical. On the one hand, the natural sounds uttered by a man under strong excitement do not constitute language, but rather a barren list of interjections; on the other hand, to speak of the soul, or mind, being affected like ordinary objects of the sense, and accordingly emitting sounds, is sheer mythology. Moreover, the evolution of speech, of which Heyse speaks, is not a necessary one: there is no necessity “in the very essence of human speech” that the various forms of language—isolating, agglutinative, inflectional—should have come into existence. Language originated in the very prosaic and unphilosophical need of intercommunication, without which no community was possible, and so long as this need could be supplied, the nature and perfecting of the means was not even considered. The linguistic garment of thought, it is true, generally (though by no means always) fits the thought it clothes fairly well, but only because the garment itself is to a great extent identical with the thought which it envelopes. To deny that language properly so called exists for children and uneducated persons, as Heyse finds himself forced to do, is to deny that it was framed by primitive man, which is, indeed, a reductio ad absurdum. Heyse’s chief merit lies in emphasizing the fact that language is not the work of the individual, but of the whole community, and of a community, too, which consists of reasonable, thinking beings.

Steinthal is the modern representative of the school of W. von Humboldt. Language, he holds, is an activity, an ἐνέργεια, everlastingly “becoming.” It has “broken forth” necessarily from the human mind when the conditions for its production were present, and in order, therefore, to discover the origin and nature of language, we must know the mental condition which preceded its creation. It originated through the unconscious action of psychological laws, without being willed into existence. The same instinctive laws still operate when a child is learning to speak: the learning is not a conscious effort, and in the very act of learning speech is being created anew. But these laws will only operate in a community, the first condition for the “birth” of language being that men should be united together in a common society. Hence the need of a psychological ethnology which should deal with the psychological phænomena, not of the individual, but of the race. This alone will enable us to penetrate to that “inner form of language” which Humboldt failed to recognize, but which constitutes language in a far more real sense than phonology can ever do. This inner form of language is neither more nor less than “apperception,” or a perception of the relations between allied apprehensions, and is also described by Lazarus as a “condensation of thought.”

Steinthal’s writings have proved as suggestive to other scholars as those of Humboldt, but their effect is marred by a want of clearness, as well as by an exaggerated use of the à priori method. In opposing the tendency to make phonology synonymous with the science of language, Steinthal goes much too far on the opposite side. Instead of using psychology to control the conclusions of comparative philology, he deduces philological conclusions from assumed psychological facts. Not psychology, but comparative philology, can lead us to the first beginnings of language, and raise the veil that covers its origin. The error, however, which lies at the bottom of Steinthal’s reasonings is, as in the case of Heyse, the ambiguous use of the term language. Speaking, but not language, may be described as an activity. So, too, the faculty of speech may be said to be instinctive, which language certainly cannot be. To assert that a child learns to speak without conscious effort depends again upon an ambiguous use of the word conscious: as a matter of fact the child learns to speak in much the same way as the adult learns a foreign language. Nor is it more than a questionable metaphor to speak of language as “breaking forth” or being “born.” Primitive man framed his earliest speech with labour and difficulty; no doubt certain mental and physical conditions were pre-supposed by the process, but no amount of psychological, even when conjoined with physiological, study will tell us what these were: in order to discover them we must question the records of speech itself. Steinthal has been misled, like his predecessors, by a false conception of the roots of language: he has pictured them to himself as so many mental germs thrown off spontaneously by the mind, and forthwith forming a language; and since these germs have a verbal signification in the Aryan family of speech, he has further identified them with the concepts of the mind. But roots are not words, and words are not concepts.

Opposed to Steinthal is the school which groups the science of language with the physical sciences, and of which Schleicher, with his modern follower, Hovelacque, may be considered the representative. It may be traced back to Bopp and Grimm, the one with his microscopic analysis of the suffixes and belief in the mechanical origin of inflection out of a previous composition of independent words, and the other with his engrossing regard for phonology and adherence to Bopp’s theory of a primitive language of roots. Jacob Grimm’s views may be best gathered from his treatise “Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache” (1851).[36] In this he begins by comparing the science of language with the investigation of natural history, the attempt to discover the origin of speech being analogous to that of discovering the laws of the production of animals or the growth of plants. Like Goethe, Grimm inclines to believe that mankind started from several separate pairs: at all events, the distinction of gender in the noun implies the influence of the female sex. Language has passed through three different stages, the last being the analytic, the middle the inflectional, and the earliest that of the determination and composition of monosyllabic roots. It is a purely human work, “emanating immediately from human thought,” and, as such, the key to all human history. The first words, which are identified with Aryan roots, were invented by a sort of “wonderful instinct.” The several vowels and consonants have each a particular force and significancy, l, for instance, expressing softness, r roughness, and in settling what vowel or consonant should be taken to denote some special verbal idea, the “inventor” of speech had for the most part to consult his own “arbitrary choice.” Language, in short, is a human invention, determined by the natural significance of different articulate sounds; its growth means the composition and decay of these various sounds. In order to discover what it is, we have only to investigate the history of this composition and decay—that is, the nature and history of phonology. It is no wonder, therefore, that Grimm started by comparing the comparative philologist to the student of natural history, and imagined that the phænomena of all human speech could be learned from the examination of the Aryan family. It is needless to point out the unverified assumption which underlies the notion that each articulate sound has a particular significancy, or the inconsistency of this view with the admission of human volition in the first invention of verbs. Grimm’s attempt to discover the origin of language was a failure; it amounted to stating that roots have a particular meaning because that meaning is “natural” to them, and where this tautological explanation seemed insufficient, to introducing human caprice. But human caprice in the case of the origin of language stands on the same footing as the old theory of a social contract. It was all very well for one primæval man to determine that a particular sound should represent a particular verbal notion, but how was he to communicate the fact to his neighbours?

Grimm, however, merely prepared the way for Schleicher. In the three works in which he most clearly sets forth his views on the nature and origin of language,[37] Schleicher affirms that language is a natural organism possessed of a separate existence, and as little subject to the will of the individual as the power of changing its song to the will of the nightingale. The growth and decay of language is in accordance with fixed immutable laws. Its existence as an organism is due to its being the audible manifestation or symptom of certain material relations in the constitution of the brain and vocal organs, and is consequently determined solely by those external conditions of climate, food, inherited instincts, and the like, which influence our nervous and muscular system. History and the science of language have nothing to do with one another. Like the phænomena of chemistry or physiology, the phænomena of language must be regarded as so many material facts which can only be the subject-matter of a physical science. The science of language, in short, is neither more nor less than phonology; the signification of words is either incapable of scientific treatment, or else, like their pronunciation, a mere result of determinable nervous action. The language we speak is conditioned by our bodily organization and antecedents. An European can only become a real master of Chinese by ceasing to be an European and becoming, mentally and physically, a Chinaman. Language, being in no way subject to human volition, follows its own necessary laws of growth and development. The inflectional tongues have grown out of the agglutinative, the agglutinative out of the isolating, and the isolating are to be identified with that primæval language of roots which is reached by analysis in the Aryan group. The acquisition of this root-language created man; the primates, who were less favoured by circumstances than their brethren, and consequently did not develop speech, fell back into the condition of anthropoid apes. Hence the importance of the science of language for the Darwinian theory. Not only do we see language developing by slow degrees from the simple to the complex by the aid of natural selection, but it is through language alone that man is separated from the brute; so that before the beginning of language—a beginning which linguistic science can demonstrate with certainty—man was in no way distinguishable from the other primates. Language thus becomes the most important, it may be said the sole, test of race and lineage. The Ethiopian can change his skin sooner than his mother-tongue. The languages of the world cannot be carried back to a single source. There are at least as many original languages as existing families of speech. The resemblances detected between them are due to geographical position; the nearer they were to one another at the outset, the more the speakers were subjected to the same external influences, the greater will be their similarity. A time comes when the creation of languages ceases, and is replaced by the entrance of a race into history. It is before this period, therefore, that the external influences, the geographical conditions, will have to act.

Schleicher’s views, it will be seen, are based on the false assumption that language is an actual entity existing apart from the minds and the mouths of its speakers. In the course of his argument he found himself forced to adopt a position somewhat inconsistent with this assumption. If language is a symptom of the brain and vocal organs, it can hardly be described as an independent organism. In so far as phonology is concerned,—that part of language, namely, which depends on the vocal organs,—the physiological laws which determine it can be ascertained in the same way and with the same certainty as the other laws of physiology; but mere phonetic sounds do not become language until they embody a signification; and though it may be quite true that every act of thought is preceded by a change in the molecules of the brain, yet this change is altogether unknown to us, and our only way of discovering the laws and principles of language is by questioning language itself, not by investigating the alterations undergone by the material of the brain. The morphologic facts of language must be studied in the same way as the facts of sociology, of psychology, or of any other science that has to do with the mind. The science of language, taken as a whole, cannot be counted among the physical sciences. To identify it with phonology is to identify the whole with its part. Unless we treat language historically, its study becomes little more than a dry enumeration of the several languages of the globe and their distinctive peculiarities. Not being an independent entity, it cannot follow necessary laws of its own. The laws of its life and growth are really the laws which govern the action of society in a particular direction. To speak of the impossibility of thoroughly mastering a foreign language is absurd. The same difficulty a member of one community finds in transforming himself into a member of another community recurs in the case of language, but the fact that an English child born in India will speak Hindustani as his native tongue, is sufficient to show that the power of speaking a special language does not depend on a special organization and ancestry. Language is the creation of society. An individual speaks a certain language because he belongs to a certain society. As we shall see hereafter, language is no test of race; only of social contact. As for the primæval root-language, we have no proof that it ever existed, and to confound it with a modern isolating language is simply erroneous. Equally unproved is the belief that isolating dialects develop into agglutinative, and agglutinative into inflectional. At all events, the continued existence of isolating tongues like the Chinese, or of agglutinative tongues like the Magyár and Turkish, shows that the development is not a necessary one. Not less difficult to prove is the fancy that there are two periods in the life of speech—one in which men are giving themselves up to the production of language, the other when they are creating history. There is merely an analogy between the action of natural selection in language and natural selection in the organic world. The science of language can tell us nothing of the descent of man. Man, it is true, is man in virtue of language; but, on the other hand, he must have been man to create language.

Bréal, the leading French philologist, gave at one time a qualified approval to the essential part of Schleicher’s theories, and their chief advocate at present is another French scholar, Abel Hovelacque. He has availed himself of Broca’s investigations, according to which the organ of language must be placed in the left (more rarely the right) cerebral hemisphere in the posterior half of the third frontal convolution. Hovelacque’s work on the science of language[38] exhibits the defects of Schleicher’s theory of language, as it contains little more than a catalogue of the various families of speech with their distinguishing characteristics. The physical theory of language allows for little more than what may be called a natural history treatment of it; the action of emphasis and analogy, of phonetic decay and dialectic growth, and all the other questions involved in a morphologic and historical treatment of speech are necessarily ignored. Faidherbe, another French follower of Schleicher, endeavours to bridge over the gulf between man and the ape by pointing on the one side to the inarticulate clicks of the Bushman, and on the other to the six different sounds uttered by the cebus azaræ of Paraguay when excited, which arouse corresponding emotions in other members of the same species.[39] Bleek[40] with Häckel’s help had already traced the utterances of speech to the cries of the anthropoid apes, and laid down that articulate language is distinguished from inarticulate by being broken up and mobilized. The germ of the suggestion was given by Steinthal, who first pointed out that language approaches its ideal the more analytic it is; sounds, like ideas, become articulate when they cease to be indefinite and indistinct. Bleek holds that the imitation of instinctive sounds made by others to express certain emotions first reminded the earliest men of the same feelings in themselves which had prompted them to the same kinds of utterance, and so led them to compare and distinguish the feeling and its vocal sign, the outward utterance and the inward signification. Language is thus of interjectional origin, helped by the imitative instinct, and language in the course of its development created and moulded thought.

Like Bréal, Max Müller inclines to regard the science of language as a physical rather than as a historical one, and would compare it with geology so far as its method is concerned. He, too, holds that language is the creator of conceptual thought; without the word, without the bond or memorandum which is to keep our individual impressions together, a general idea, and consequently reasoned thought, would have been impossible. Apart from inherited instincts, the deaf-mute, like the infant, has only the capability for thought so long as he is unprovided with a language of some sort. No theory, whether onomatopœic or interjectional or otherwise, which has attempted to explain the origin of language has succeeded in its task; for language is environed on all sides by the barrier of roots, and in roots alone we must seek its origin. How these roots may themselves have originated we do not know; probably onomatopœia and the reflex action of sounds excited by a common action had much to do with it; but the science of human speech is concerned only with the question of the origin of language, not with that of the origin of roots. The roots, however, once constituted a real language which may be compared with the Chinese of to-day, and which in certain instances passed through an agglutinative into an inflectional stage of development. The roots were, for the most part, not monosyllabic; whether there was one common stock of roots at the beginning, or an indefinite number of stocks, we have no means of determining. What we know is that dialects precede languages, that out of the many comes the one, and that in the drifting desert of human speech, only three or four families, like the Aryan, the Semitic, or the Ugro-Altaic, have been able to establish themselves. At the bottom of Max Müller’s theory of language seems to lie the philosophic postulate that the universal precedes the particular; the roots of language are so many “phonetic types,” so many universals, out of which the manifold forms and words of living speech have been developed. They constitute the background of those concepts whereon the structure of thought has been reared. With the mythopœic epoch of speech all was changed. Then the particular came to precede and create the universal, and out of individual words which had lost their original meaning were built up the myths of Greece and Rome. In each case the process was an unconscious one; the will of the single man can no more change the tendencies and growth of language than it can change the force of the winds. Max Müller thus stands midway between Schleicher and Steinthal.

Side by side with the school of Schleicher there has sprung from the doctrines of Bopp what may be termed the common-sense school of philologists. As perhaps is natural, it is mainly in practical America and England that the school has found its adherents, among whom Whitney may be considered its most prominent representative. He states the theories (as opposed to the method and philological facts) of Bopp in their clearest and most extreme form, and does not shrink from carrying them out to their logical conclusions. Thus it is affirmed that the first men spoke in monosyllabic roots, which by means of composition passed into an agglutinative form of speech, and that again, in a similar way, into inflection. All flection may be analyzed into a preceding agglutination, and all agglutination into a preceding juxtaposition of roots, the latter being both predicative and pronominal. Whitney holds that language is an institution like government, and that it is absolutely dependent on the human will, determined only by the necessities of society. The phonetic forms and meanings of words are assigned to them by the conscious or unconscious action of a community. Language is, in all strictness, a human invention, in which onomatopœia probably played a large part. Its science consequently will be a historical one. Thought is prior to language; language therefore did not create thought, nor can it be treated as a separate organism existing apart from its speakers. The origin of language is explained very simply by the need of intercommunication between those who first used it, and since it is always the expression and sign of thought, we may call them, with perfect accuracy, its inventors. Just as thought which is universal precedes language, so a single parent-speech precedes dialects.

Whitney’s views, however, require too many still unproved assumptions to be received as ascertained truths; the existence of a parent-speech, for instance, being as hypothetical as the transition of one form of speech into another. Too little regard also is paid to the physiological side of language, that side which connects it with the physical sciences; while too much influence is assigned to the human will in its formation. It cannot with any real strictness be termed an institution, because an institution has often been founded or changed by an individual, and over language the individual has no such power. Whitney attributes too much design, too much volition, to the formation of speech; the need of intercommunication alone will not explain its origin, since we may ask, How did this need arise, and how were the means of supplying it communicated? However much language may now be defined as the expression of thought, it was not so at first, when conceptual thought was made possible only by the help of language; and even now language is rather the embodiment, however imperfect, than the sign of thought. The stress, moreover, laid upon the element of volition in the production of speech is inconsistent with the idea that mere juxtaposition and phonetic decay could have effected that change in the way of viewing things and their relations which is involved in the transition from one form of speech to the other.

The problem of the origin of language was taken up from a wholly different point of view by Lazarus Geiger.[41] He traced it to the instinct of imitation so deeply implanted in the nature of man. The expression of feeling, of pain and pleasure, of anger and love was indicated partly by corresponding cries, partly by the muscular movements of the face, which might or might not accompany them. The imitation of these movements on the part of a second person caused a particular gesture and the cry that accompanied it to be associated with the idea of passion, pleasure, or pain that had given rise to it. Gradually the gesture was merged in the cry, and the cry was changed into a root or word. Each root was, therefore, at the outset, an embodiment and symbol of an action. Hence it is that the roots to which language can be traced back are all verbal, all expressive of movement and action. Since the publication of Geiger’s book, the whole subject of the “Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals” has been elaborately worked out by Mr. Darwin in a special work, while Benfey has independently pointed out how large an influence the physical accessories of speech must have originally had in putting sense and significancy into the sounds associated with them.[42] Looks, gestures, and the modulation of the voice are common to man and the lower animals, but whereas the import of looks and the modulation of the voice agrees all over the world, that of gestures does so only in part. How, then, could gestures have the same unambiguous meaning for others which Geiger’s theory would demand? The answer is given by Ludwig Noiré, who takes up and completes the theory of his master. The weak point in the latter is that it makes language, which is essentially a social product, the creation of the individual. Noiré, in a volume at once singularly lucid and suggestive,[43] successfully meets the difficulty. He recalls the rhythmical cries or sounds which a body of men will make when engaged in a common work, and which seem the product of a common impulse. We are all familiar with the cries of sailors when hauling a rope or pulling the oar; with the shout of the Eastern vintagers as they beat time in the wine-press; or with the yell of savages when they attack a foe. In such cries and shouts as these Noiré would discover the beginnings of speech. They seemed called forth by the work in which men were engaged for a common purpose, and so became to them the expression and symbol of it. Once established as intelligible symbols, they constituted those roots which are at once the earliest form of language and the germs out of which all future language has grown. Hence it is that roots denote actions and not objects; hence, too, the fact that the sense of sight must be regarded as the first stepping-stone to speech. Like Geiger, Noiré is a philosopher rather than a philologist, and his explanation of Aryan roots and their connection with one another frequently contravenes the laws of scientific etymology. Nor can his identification of roots and words be admitted, or the actual existence at any time of the hypothetical roots of the Aryan tongues. But his theory doubtless explains the origin of much that is in speech, though it does not explain everything. Onomatopœia is not excluded from sharing in the creation of language, nor can we refuse to recognize the interjectional source of certain roots and words. But even if it will not solve the whole problem, Noiré’s theory clears up the origin of that part of speech which has hitherto appeared hardest to explain. Like the song of the birds, the language of man, too, is instinctive and necessary, called forth by a sense of life and energy, by a common participation in a common work.

Outside the school of Bopp stands a group of scholars of whom the best known are Scherer, Westphal, and Ludwig. They agree in rejecting Bopp’s analysis of Aryan grammar and his derivation of flection from a previous agglutination. Grammatical analysis has doubtless been pushed much too far both by Bopp and by his pupils, and the protest raised against it, although needlessly indiscriminating, has done considerable good. Westphal has recourse to the old trappings of pre-scientific philology, pleonastic letters, apocope, and so forth, and lays down common “logical categories” of flection for both the Aryan and the Semitic families.[44] He defines language as “the embodiment of the content of the human consciousness,” and holds that its object is to reduce the individualism of nature to a unity of conception. What is given as separate and individual is unified by thought and language, and the development of language is in accordance with this process of unification. The process, or “movement,” of consciousness finds its expression in the corresponding movement of speech; just as thought sums up the individual parts of any perception under a single concept, so language sums up the individual parts of phonetic utterance under the sentence. The result of this movement is the evolution of the verb and the completion of organized speech. Sound and concept are brought together by the common element of “movement,” a curious return to the κίνησις of Aristotle. It is evident, however, that Westphal rather restates the phænomena of language in metaphysical language than really explains them, while his entire rejection of Bopp’s method and results makes criticism difficult.

Ludwig, like Westphal, rejects the current theory of flection, but substitutes for it another which can not only be supported by facts, but is also not inconsistent with the method founded by Bopp. Flection, he believes, is the result not of agglutination, but of adaptation, certain unmeaning terminations of existing words being selected to express new grammatical relations when they first dawned upon the mind.[45] Ludwig’s view seems to have met with partial acceptation among some of the younger French philologists, and it is supported by Bergaigne’s researches into the nature of the case-suffixes.[46] The analysis of the latter has always been a stumbling-block in the way of the current theory; Bergaigne has made it clear that they were either the terminations of abstract nouns or else suffixes which have been adapted in different words to the expression of very different meanings. On the other hand, Ludwig’s theory fails when applied to the verb, and we still need an explanation of the manner in which the same select number of meaningless terminations came to be attached to so large a variety of words. But the advocates of the agglutination hypothesis have the same difficulty to contend against when they deal with the stem-suffixes.

In pursuance of Bopp’s method, but independently of the distinctive theories of his school, Waitz, the anthropologist, has propounded a new theory of language.[47] As we do not think in words, but in sentences, and as language is the expression and embodiment of thought, it is clear that the unit of language must be the sentence and not the word. The words which compose a sentence are related to one another in the same way as the several elements of an idea, or of an action as reproduced in thought, and can only be decomposed and separated by conscious analysis. Consequently the incorporating languages of America, in which an individual action is represented by a single sentence pronounced as one word, are a survival of the primitive condition of language everywhere. It is only gradually that the different parts of speech are distinguished in the sentence, and words formed by breaking up its co-ordinated elements into separate and independent wholes. Originally words could as little be used alone and without relation as our own suffixes ly or ness. The agglutinative tongues in which the subordinate parts of a sentence are brought into duly dependent relation to the principal concept are more highly advanced than the inflectional, the “fundamental idea of which is that the principal and the subordinate elements of thought (Vorstellung) remain independent and separate, and never coalesce into a single word.” This principle of flection, however, can never be logically carried out, since the relations of the central idea expressed by the suffixes are themselves a kind of subordinate conception; if amatis is right where the personal pronoun is treated as a suffix, then amator bonus, where the attribute bonus is regarded as a subordinate, and therefore separate, conception, must be wrong. An isolating language like the Chinese stands on the highest level of development, since here the sentence has been thoroughly analyzed and each member of it rendered clear and distinct, their relations to one another being determined by position alone. Chinese therefore has given concrete expression in language to the philosophic analysis of ideas. Waitz’s view would harmonize with the antiquity and civilization of Chinese much better than the ordinary one, as well as with its resemblance to English and other modern analytical languages; and it is to be noticed that Steinthal, when speaking of Chinese, describes it as a language in which the real words are the sentences or groups of subordinated vocables. Waitz’s theory of speech is the theory of an anthropologist who, as the student of the master-science, is better able to decide upon the origin of language than the comparative philologist with whom the existence of language has to be assumed. No science can of itself discover the genesis of its subject-matter. Friedrich Müller attaches himself to Waitz when he says:[48] “We disagree with Schleicher and his school in this one point, that the individual independent word is not the unity for us that it is for him, but rather the sentence—the shortest expression of thought.” As he goes on to observe, only the context—that is, the whole sentence—can determine whether musas, for example, is to be taken as the accusative plural of a noun or, like amas, the second person singular of a verb.

Philological opinion is therefore seen to be still divided upon certain points. But such division of opinion is a healthy sign of life and progress in the new science. It is only by the conflict and discussion of theories that truth can finally be reached, and the many controversies excited by the science of language show how broadly and deeply the foundations of the science are being laid. On the phonological side the progress has been greatest and most certain; morphology and the investigation of roots still lag behind; comparative syntax is but beginning to be handled; and sematology, the science of meanings, has hardly been touched. But the method inaugurated by Bopp remains unshaken, the main conclusions he arrived at hold their ground, and the existence of the Aryan family of speech, with all its consequences, is one of the facts permanently acquired for science. True, there are many questions still to be settled. It is still disputed whether the science of language is a historical or a physical one; whether language is an independent organism obeying fixed and necessary laws of its own or an “institution” controllable by the will of man; whether phonology is to exclude all other departments of the science when the nature of the latter is discussed; whether roots ever constituted a real language or are merely the ultimate elements into which words may be decomposed; whether the flectional stage of language springs from the agglutinative, and this again from the isolating; whether the languages of the world are the selected residuum of infinite attempts at speech or have flowed from one or two common sources; whether dialects precede languages or languages dialects; whether conceptual thought has created language or language has created conceptual thought; whether, finally, the word or the sentence is the true unit of speech. But with all this diversity of opinion there is a yet greater unanimity. There is no scientific philologist who doubts the indispensable value of phonology and the absolute strictness of its laws; who questions the axiom that roots are the ultimate elements of articulate speech, the barrier between man and brute, and that no etymology is worth anything which does not repose upon them; who would compare the words of one family of speech with the words of another in the easy-going fashion of a præ-scientific age; or who would shut his eyes to the light already shed on the history of the human mind and the riddle of mythology by the study of the records of speech. Language is the reflexion of the thoughts and beliefs of communities from their earliest days; and by tracing its changes and its fortunes, by discovering the origin and history of words and their meanings, we can read those thoughts and beliefs with greater certainty and minuteness than had they been traced by the pen of the historian, or even if