I felt pleasantly reminded of what I knew I had said somewhere. But what was my surprise, when a few lines further on I read:—
“This truth is sometimes explicitly denied, and the opposite doctrine is set up, that language has a life and growth independent of its speakers, with which men cannot interfere. A recent popular writer (Professor Max Müller) asserts that, ‘although there is a continuous change in language, it is not in the power of man either to produce or to prevent it. We might think as well of changing the laws which control the circulation of our blood, or of adding an inch to our height, as of altering the laws of speech, or inventing new words according to our own pleasure.’”
How is one to fight against such attacks? The very words which Professor Whitney had paraphrased before, only substituting “skull” for “height,” and by which I had tried to prove “that languages are not the artful creations of individuals,” are turned against me to show that, because I denied to any single individual the power of changing language ad libitum, I had set up the opposite doctrine, viz. that language has a life and growth independent of its speakers.
Does Professor Whitney believe that any attentive reader can be taken in by such artifices? Suppose I had said that in a well-organized republic no individual can change the laws according to his pleasure, would it follow that I held the opposite doctrine, that laws have a life and growth independent of the lawgiver? The simile is weak, because an individual may, under very peculiar circumstances, change a law according to his pleasure: but weak as it is, I hope it will convince Professor Whitney that Formal Logic is not altogether a useless study to a Professor of Linguistics. I only wonder what Professor Whitney would have said if he had been able to find in my Lectures a definition of language (p. 46), worthy of Friedrich Schlegel, viz.:—
“Language, like an organic body, is no mere aggregate of similar particles; it is a complex of related and mutually helpful parts.”
And again:—
“The rise, development, decline, and extinction of language are like the birth, increase, decay, and death of a living creature.”
In these poetical utterances of Professor Whitney’s we have an outbreak of philological mythology of a very serious nature, and this many years after I had uttered my warning that “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” (I. p. 51).
REPETITIONS AND VARIATIONS.
It is, no doubt, quite natural that in reading Professor Whitney’s lectures I should have been struck more forcibly than others by coincidences, which have reference not only to general arguments, but even to modes of expression and illustrations. I had pointed out some of these verbal or slightly disguised coincidences in my first article, but I could add many more. As we open the book, it begins by stating that the Science of Language is a modern science, that its growth was analogous to that of other sciences, that from a mere collection of facts it advanced to classification, and from thence to inductive reasoning on language. We are told that ancient nations considered the languages of their neighbors as merely barbarous, that Christianity changed that view, that a study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew widened the horizon of scholars, and that at present no dialect, however rude, is without importance to the students of the Science of Language. Next comes the importance of the discovery of Sanskrit, and a challenge for a place among the recognized sciences in favor of our new science.