LIKE AND UNLIKE.
I am accused by Professor Whitney of having read his lectures carelessly, because I had only been struck by what seemed to me repetitions from my own writings, without observing the deeper difference between his lectures and my own. He therefore advises me to read his lectures again. I am afraid I cannot do that, nor do I see any necessity for it, because though I was certainly staggered by a number of coincidences between his lectures and my own, I was perfectly aware that they differed from each other more than I cared to say. I imagined I had conveyed this as clearly as I could, without saying anything offensive, by observing that in many places his arguments seemed to me like an inverted fugue on a motive taken from my lectures. But if I was not sufficiently outspoken on that point, I am quite willing to make amends for it now.
AN INVERTED FUGUE.
I must give one instance at least of what I mean by an inverted fugue.
I had laid great stress on the fact that, though we are accustomed to speak of language as a thing by itself, language after all is not something independent and substantial, but, in the first instance, an act, and to be studied as such. Thus I said (p. 51):—
“To speak of language as a thing by itself, as living a life of its own, as growing to maturity, producing offspring, and dying away, is sheer mythology.”
Again (p. 58):—
“Language exists in man, it lives in being spoken, it dies with each word that is pronounced, and is no longer heard.”
When I came to Professor Whitney’s Second Lecture, and read (p. 35):—
“Language has, in fact, no existence save in the minds and mouths of those who use it,”