Professor Müller, in stopping with root-syllables (to the number of four or five hundred), as the least or ultimate elements to which Language can be reduced, has, naturally enough, and along with all Comparative Philologists hitherto, committed the error of insufficient analysis; an error of precisely the same kind which the founders of Syllabic Alphabets have committed, as compared with the work of Cadmus, or any founder of a veritable alphabet. The true and radical analysis carries us back in both cases to the Primitive Individual Sounds, the Vowels and Consonants of which Language is composed.
It is clear enough that the analysis must be carried to the very ultimate in order to reach the true foundation for an effective and sufficient alphabetic Representation of Language. Precisely the same necessity is upon us in order that we may lay a secure and adequate foundation for a True Science of Language. This will explain more fully what was meant in a preceding paragraph, when it was stated that the labors of Mr. Andrews begin, in this department of Language, just where the labors of the whole school of Comparative Philologists have ended. He first completes the analysis of Language, by going down and back to the Phonetic Elements, the ulterior roots, the Vowels and Consonants of Language. Then by putting Nature to the crucial test, so to speak, to compel her to disclose the hidden meaning with which each of these absolute (ultimate) Elements of Speech is inherently laden, he discovers—what might readily be an à priori conception—that these Elements, and not any compound root-syllables whatsoever, are the true 'Phonetic Types,' representative in Nature of 'the Rational Conceptions of the human mind.'
The ultimate Rational Conceptions of the Human Mind are confessedly, among all Philosophers of the Mind, not four or five hundred, but like the Alphabetic Sounds of Language, a mere handful in number. Precisely how many they are and how they are best distributed has not been agreed upon. Aristotle classed them as Ten. Kant tells us there are Twelve only of the Categories of the Understanding. Spencer, while finding the Ultimate of Ultimates in the idea of Force alone, admits its immediate expansion into this handful of Primitive Conceptions, but without attempting their inventory or classification. The discoverer of Universology, first settling and establishing the fact that the Elements of Sound in Speech are the natural Phonetic Types, equal in number to the inventory of the Primitive Rational Conceptions of the Human Mind, is then enabled to work the new discovery backward, and, by the aid of the classifications which Nature herself has clearly introduced among these Sounds (into Vowels, Consonants, Liquids, etc.), to arrive at a classification of all the Primitive Rational Conceptions, which cannot fail to be completely satisfactory and final. The same discovery leads, therefore, to the reconstruction of the Science of Language, on the one hand, and of Ontology, the Science of the highest Metaphysical domain, on the other.
But, again, it is one of the demonstrations of Universology that all careers, that of the development of the Human Mind among others, pass through three Successive Stages correspondential with each other in the different domains of Being. As respects the Mind, these are: 1. Intuitional (or Instinctive); 2. Intellectual (or Reflective); and 3. Composite (or Integral). It is another of these demonstrations that the Intuitional (Unismal) development of Mind, and the Intellectual (Duismal), proceed in opposite courses or directions; so that the highest Intellectual development reaches and investigates in its own way just those questions with which the Intuitional development ('Instinct,' as Professor Müller denominates it) began; and which, in the very earliest times, it disposed of in its appropriate way as if finally.
By this means, the road having been passed over completely in both directions, the way is prepared for the inauguration of the third or Integral Stage, which consists in putting the road intelligently to all its possible uses.
To apply these statements to the instance before us, for the elucidation both of the statements themselves and of the matter to be expounded; it is the test labor of the highest Intellectual development to come back upon precisely those recondite points of knowledge which the nascent Intuition of the race felt or 'smelt' out blindly; and, by the sight of the Mind's eye, to arrive more lucidly at the understanding of the same subject. Not that the nature of the Understanding by any two senses or faculties is ever the same; but that each has its own method of cognizing the same general field of investigation. It is the re-investigation, intellectually, of the Relationship of the (true, not the pseudo) Phonetic Types with the Fundamental Rational Conceptions of the Human Mind, which is the first step taken by Mr. Andrews, in laying the basis for the new and coming stage of the development of the Science of Language.
It is the completion of this Intellectually Analytical process which offers the point of incipency for the new and immense Lingual Structure of the future, and the ultimate virtual unification of Human Speech. It may be quite true, as Professor Müller affirms, that the Instinctual Development of Language—by which we mean the whole Lingual History of the Past, with the exception of our present very imperfect Scientific nomenclatures—has never proved adequate to the introduction of a single new root, since the 'Instinct' exhausted itself, as he says, in the nascent effort. But it is a pure assumption, when he supposes, for that reason, that the informed Human Intellect of the Future will not be competent to constitute thousands of them. It is just as legitimate as would have been the assumption in the infancy of Chemistry, that because Nature never synthetized in her laboratory more than a few simple salts, the modern chemist would never be able to produce any one of the two thousand salts now known to him. This kind of assumption is the common error of the expounders of existing science, as contrasted with the bolder originality of discoverers.
But, again, though it is true that the Intuitional (or Instinctual) faculty of man has, in a manner, declined, as in the case of the sense of Smell, while the Intellect (the Analogue of the Eye) has been developed, still it is assuming too much to say that it utterly fails us even yet. It remains, like the sense of Smell, an important helper even in our present investigations. Professor Müller should not, because he may happen to have a cold, affirm that nobody smells anything any more. To explain what I mean in this respect, the following extract may serve as a text:
'It is curious to observe how apt we are to deceive ourselves when we once adopt this system of Onomatopoieia. Who does not imagine that he hears in the word 'thunder' an imitation of the rolling and rumbling noise which the old Germans ascribed to their god Thor playing at nine-pins? Yet thunder is clearly the same word as the Latin tonitru. The root is tan, to stretch. From this root tan we have in Greek tonos, our tone, tone being produced by the stretching and vibrating of cords. In Sanskrit the sound thunder is expressed by the same root tan; but in the derivatives tanyu, tanyatu, and tanayitnu, thundering, we perceive no trace of the rumbling noise which we imagined we perceived in the Latin tonitru and the English thunder. The very same root tan, to stretch, yields some derivatives which are anything but rough and noisy. The English tender, the French tendre, the Latin tener are derived from it. Like tenuis, the Sanskrit tanu, the English thin, tener meant originally what was extended over a larger surface, then thin, then delicate. The relationship betwixt tender, thin, and thunder would be hard to establish if the original conception of thunder had really been its rumbling noise.
'Who does not imagine that he hears something sweet in the French sucre, sucré? Yet sugar came from India, and it is there called 'sarkhara, which is anything but sweet sounding. This 'sarkhara is the same word as sugar; it was called in Latin saccharum, and we still speak of saccharine juice, which is sugar juice.'