Identity of the problems of the origin and the nature of language.
Having thus freed language from all dependence on Logic, having repeatedly proclaimed the principle that language produces its forms independently of Logic and in the fullest autonomy,[17] and having purified Humboldt's theory from the taint of the logical grammar of Port Royal, Steinthal seeks the origin of language, recognizing, with his master, that the question of its origin is identical with that of nature of language, its psychological genesis or rather the position it occupies in evolution of the spirit. "In the matter of language there is no difference between its original creation (Urschöpfung) and the creation which is daily repeated."[18] Language belongs to the vast class of reflex movements; but to say that is to look at it from one side only and to omit its own essential peculiarity. Animals have reflex movements and sensations like man; but in animals the senses "are wide gates through which external nature rushes to the assault with such impetus as to overwhelm the mind and deprive it of all independence and freedom of movement." In man, however, language can arise because man is resistance to nature, conqueror of his own body, freedom incarnate: "language is liberation: even to-day we feel our mind lightened and freed from a weight when we speak." In the situation immediately preceding the production of speech man must be conceived as "accompanying all his sensations and all the intuitions received by his mind with the most lively contortions of body, attitudes of mimicry, gestures, and above all tones, articulate tones." What element of speech did he lack? One only, but a most important one: the conscious conjunction of reflex bodily movements with the excitations of his mind. If sensuous consciousness is already consciousness, it lacks the consciousness of being conscious; if it is already intuition, it is not intuition of intuition; what it lacks is in a word the internal form of speech. When that arises, there arises too its inseparable accompaniment, words. Man does not select sound: it is given him, and he takes it of necessity, instinctively, without intention or choice.[19]
Steinthal's mistaken ideas on art: his failure to unite Linguistic and Æsthetic.
This is not the place for detailed examination of the whole of Steinthal's theory and the various phases, not always progressive, through which he travelled, especially after the beginning of his spiritual collaboration with Lazarus, with whom he studied ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie), of which they both took Linguistic to be a part.[20] But, while giving him full credit for bringing Humboldt's ideas into coherent order, and for clearly differentiating, as had never before been done, between linguistic activity and the activity of logical thought, it must be noted that Steintha! never recognized the identity of the internal form of language (which he also called the intuition of intuition, or apperception) with the æsthetic imagination. The Herbartian psychology to which he clung afforded him no clue to such a discovery. Herbart and his followers divorced psychology from logic as a normative science and never succeeded in discerning the true connection between feeling and spiritual formation, soul and spirit; they never understood that logical thought is one of these spiritual formations: an activity, not a code of external laws. The domain allotted by them to Æsthetic we already know; for them Æsthetic too was only another code of beautiful formal relations. Under the influence of these doctrines Steinthal was led to regard Art as the embellishment of thoughts, Linguistic as the science of speech, and Rhetoric or Æsthetic as a thing differing from Linguistic since it is science of fine or beautiful speaking.[21] In one of his innumerable tracts he says, "Poetics and Rhetoric both differ from Linguistic, since they are obliged to touch on many important topics before reaching language. These sciences therefore have but one section devoted to Linguistic, which is the concluding section of Syntax. Moreover Syntax has a character entirely different from Rhetoric and from Poetics; the former is occupied solely with correctness (Richtigkeit) of language; the latter two sciences study beauty or grace of expression (Schönheit oder Angemessenheit des Ausdrucks): the principles of the first are merely grammatical, the others must consider matters outside language; for example, the disposition of the orator and so forth. To speak plainly, Syntax is to Stylistic as is the grammatical measure of the quantity of vowels to the theory of metre."[22] That speaking invariably means good or beautiful speaking, since speech that is neither good nor beautiful is not really speech,[23] and that the radical renewal of the concept of language inaugurated by Humboldt and himself must produce far-reaching effects on the cognate sciences of Poetics, Rhetoric and Æsthetic and, by transforming, unify them, never entered Steinthal's head. After all this labour and all this minute analysis, the identification of language and poetry, and of the science of language with the science of poetry, the identification of Linguistic with Æsthetic, still found its least faulty expression in the prophetic aphorisms of Giambattista Vico.
[1] Antihermes oder philosophische Untersuchung üb. d. reine Begriff d. menschl. Sprache und die allgemeine Sprachlehre, Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1795.
[2] For these writers, see accounts and quotations in Loewe, Hist, crit. gramm. univ., passim, and Pott, introd. to Humboldt, pp. clxxi.-ccxii.; cf. also Benfey, Gesch. d. Sprachwiss., introd.
[3] In Philos, der Mythologie: cf. Steinthal, Urspr. pp. 81-89.
[4] Üb. d. Verschiedenheit d. menschl. Sprachbaues, posthumous work (2nd ed. by A. F. Pott, Berlin, 1880).
[5] Verschiedenheit, etc. pp. 308-310.