“(5) If Müller had brought before him some wholly new animal he would find that he could shut his eyes, and call up the image of it readily enough without any accompanying name.”
All this is far, far away from the real field of battle. No doubt, if I look at the sun and shut my eyes, the image remains for a time. By imagination I can also recall other sensuous impressions, and, in an attack of fever, I have had sensuous impressions resuscitated without my will. But how does that touch conceptual knowledge? As soon as I want to know what animal it is which I conjure up or imagine to myself, I must either have, for shortness’ sake, its scientific name, or I must conceive and realize its ears, or its legs, or its tail, or something else, but always something for which there is a name.
I have thus, in spite of the old warning, Ne Hercules contra duos, gone through the whole string of charges brought against me by Mr. Darwin and Professor Whitney; and while trying to show them that I was not entirely unprepared for their combined attack, I hope I have not been wanting in that respect which is due even to a somewhat rancorous assailant. I have not returned evil for evil, nor have I noticed objections which I could not refute without seeming to be offensive. Is it not mere skirmishing with blank cartridge, when Professor Whitney assures me that I have never fathomed “the theory of the antecedency of the idea to the word in the minds of those who hold that theory?” Surely, that is the theory which everybody holds who forms his idea of the origin of language from the manner in which we acquire a traditional language ready made, or, later in life, learn foreign languages. It has been my object to show that our problem is not, how languages are learnt, but how language is developed. We might as well form our ideas of the origin of the alphabet from the manner in which we learn to write, and then smile when we are told that, in writing “F” we still draw in the two upper strokes, the two horns of the cerastes, and that the connecting line in the “H” is the last remnant of the lines dividing the sieve, both hieroglyphics occurring in the name of Chufu or Cheops.
Philosophy is a study as much as philology, and though common sense is, no doubt, very valuable within its proper limits, I do not hesitate to say, though I hear already the distant grumbling of Jupiter tonans, that it is generally the very opposite of philosophy. One of the most eminent and most learned of living German philosophers—Professor Carriere, of Munchen—says in a very friendly review of Professor Whitney’s “Lectures on Language”—
“Philosophical depth and precision in psychological analysis are not his strong points, and in that respect the reader will hardly find anything new in his Lectures.”
He goes on to say that—
“The American scholar did not see that language is meant first for forming, afterwards for communicating thought.” “Wordmaking,” he says with great truth, “is the first philosophy—the first poetry of mankind. We can have sensations, desires, intentions, but we cannot think, in the proper sense of the word, without language. Every word expresses the general. Mr. Whitney has not understood this, and his calling language a human institution is very shallow.”
Against Professor Whitney’s view that language is arbitrary and conventional, and against the opposite view that language is instinctive, Professor Carriere quotes the happy expression of M. Renan, “La liaison du sens et du mot n’est jamais nécessaire, jamais arbitraire, toujours elle est motivée.” Here the nail is hit on the head. Professor Carriero highly commends Professor Whitney’s lectures, and he does by no means adopt all my own views; but he felt obliged to enter a protest against certain journalistic proceedings which in Germany have attracted general attention.
In conclusion, if I may judge from Professor Whitney’s lectures, unless he has changed very much of late, I doubt whether he would prove a real ally of Mr. Darwin in his views on the origin of language. Towards the end of his article, even Mr. Darwin, Jr., becomes suspicious. Professor Whitney, he says, makes a dangerous assertion when he says that we shall never know anything of the transitional forms through which language has passed, and he advises his friend to read a book lately published by Count G. A. de Goddesand Liancourt and F. Pincott, called “Primitive and Universal Laws of Language,” in which he would find much information and enlightenment on the real origin of roots. There is an unintentional irony in that advice which Professor Whitney will not fail to appreciate. How any one who cares for truth can speak of a dangerous assertion, I do not understand. The Pope may say so, or a barrister; a true friend of truth knows of no danger.
In his “Lectures on Language,” Professor Whitney protests strongly against Darwinian materialism. But, as he confesses himself half a convert to the Bow-wow and Pooh-pooh theories, thus showing how wrong I was in supposing that those theories had no advocates among comparative philologists in the nineteenth century; nay, as now, after he has discovered at last that I am no believer in Ding-dongism, he seems inclined to say a kind word for the advocates of that theory—Heyse and Steinthal—who knows whether, after my Lectures on Darwin’s “Philosophy of Language,” he may not be converted by Bleek and Haeckel, the mad Darwinian, as he calls him?