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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Lectures on the Science of Language," F. Max Müller presents a profound exploration of linguistic philosophy and the evolution of language, weaving an intricate narrative that spans across various languages and cultures. Müller's literary style is characterized by clarity and precision, making complex ideas accessible to both scholars and lay readers. The lectures, originally delivered in the 19th century, delve into the interrelationship between language, thought, and culture, situating them within the broader context of historical linguistics and philology. His insights highlight the dynamic nature of language as a living entity shaped by human experience and societal evolution. Friedrich Max Müller was a pioneering philologist and orientalist who devoted his life to the study of languages, particularly Sanskrit. His academic background, influenced by his profound interest in the intersection of language and human expression, led him to scrutinize the role of language in shaping human civilization. Müller's work reflects the intellectual fervor of the Victorian era, where the rise of comparative linguistics sought to uncover the roots and connections between languages across the globe. "Lectures on the Science of Language" is indispensable for anyone interested in linguistics, anthropology, or the history of ideas. This text not only enriches the understanding of language but also challenges readers to contemplate the intricate relationship between language and culture. Engaging with Müller's profound arguments will undoubtedly inspire further exploration into the nature of human communication and thought. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Lectures on the Science of Language
Table of Contents
Introduction
Uniting the restless variety of human speech with the search for orderly principles, this book proposes that the history and structure of languages illuminate the history and structure of human thought itself, and that by tracing patterns across words, sounds, and meanings, we begin to recognize how communities remember, reason, and create through language even as they change, diverge, and recombine; it treats language as both a living process and a record, a dynamic system that shapes experience while preserving the traces of earlier worlds, inviting readers to consider how comparative inquiry transforms scattered particulars into a coherent science.
Lectures on the Science of Language, by F. Max Müller, belongs to nineteenth-century nonfiction and emerges from a culture of public scholarship in Victorian Britain. Composed as a series of talks and subsequently published in two series during the 1860s, it helped popularize philology for a wide audience beyond universities. The author, a prominent philologist and Sanskrit scholar, draws on classical and comparative studies to frame an ambitious program: a systematic, evidence-based investigation of linguistic form and change. The result is a book that sits at the intersection of learned treatise and public lecture, shaped by the intellectual energy of its time.
As a reading experience, the work blends exposition, argument, and illustrative examples to guide non-specialists into the comparative study of language while still rewarding readers already familiar with classical and linguistic traditions. Müller’s voice is at once didactic and inviting, unfolding complex ideas through carefully staged explanations and contrasts. The mood is exploratory and polemical in the constructive sense: it tests claims, weighs methods, and encourages skepticism toward convenient but unexamined assumptions. Rather than offering a single narrow thesis, the lectures map a terrain, inviting readers to appreciate both the rigor required for scientific inquiry and the imaginative reach needed to grasp long historical processes.
Central themes include the classification of languages into families, the mechanisms by which languages change over time, and the relationship between linguistic form and human cognition. The book presents comparative analysis as a disciplined method for uncovering regularities across diverse tongues, while also attending to the limits of analogy and the risks of superficial resemblance. It addresses how words accrue meanings, how sounds shift, and how grammatical structures may evolve, all to show that language is neither chaotic nor fixed but governed by patterns discernible through careful study. Across its pages, readers encounter language as evidence for history and as a tool for inquiry.
The lectures situate linguistic questions within broader nineteenth-century debates about the origin, development, and classification of languages. Without pretending to solve every problem, Müller surveys prevailing ideas and stresses the need for verifiable comparisons grounded in textual sources and living speech. He draws on examples from well-documented literary traditions alongside observations from contemporary languages to illustrate methodological points. The emphasis falls on building arguments from data, resisting fanciful etymologies, and acknowledging uncertainty where evidence is lacking. In doing so, the book advocates standards for what a science of language should be: cumulative, comparative, self-correcting, and alert to the seductions of easy explanations.
For today’s reader, the book is valuable both as a landmark in the history of linguistic thought and as a case study in how a discipline defines its tools and aims. Some classifications and terms reflect the scholarly conventions of its time and do not align with current linguistic consensus, yet the underlying aspiration—to understand language through systematic comparison and principled reasoning—retains its force. The lectures invite critical engagement with inherited categories, urging readers to ask how evidence is gathered, how hypotheses are tested, and how scholarly language shapes the questions we consider answerable.
Approached with curiosity and a historically informed eye, Lectures on the Science of Language offers a rigorous, accessible introduction to the comparative study of human speech and a window onto the intellectual atmosphere of the nineteenth century. It provides the pleasure of a guided tour conducted by a learned and persuasive teacher, one who insists that method matters and that language is worthy of sustained, patient analysis. Readers will find not a closed system but a framework for thinking, a set of tools for discerning pattern in diversity, and an invitation to pursue the long conversation about how language makes us intelligible to one another and to ourselves.
Synopsis
The book gathers a series of public lectures in which F. Max Müller sets out to define the science of language: its scope, methods, and limits. He argues that language, like other natural phenomena, can be studied by observation, comparison, and the discovery of recurring laws. The lectures distinguish between the historical study of particular tongues and a comparative inquiry that treats languages as evolving organisms. Müller situates philology alongside history, ethnology, and mythology, claiming that language preserves the oldest accessible record of human thought. He proposes that a rigorous, inductive approach can transform scattered facts about speech into a coherent scientific discipline.
Müller begins by recounting the rise of comparative philology, especially after the recovery of Sanskrit and the recognition of systematic similarities among European and Indian languages. He credits pioneers such as William Jones, Franz Bopp, and Jacob Grimm with replacing casual resemblance by methodical comparison. The result is a genealogical view: languages descend from common ancestors and can be grouped into families. This shift requires evidence drawn from shared fundamental words, parallel grammatical forms, and regular sound correspondences. Through this method the science distinguishes true relationships from chance analogies, replacing speculation with demonstrable kinship grounded in recurring phonetic and morphological patterns.
He then presents the Indo-European, or Aryan, family as the most fully documented example of linguistic descent. Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic branches display systematic correspondences that point back to a common source. Grimm’s law exemplifies the predictable shifts that link consonants across Germanic and its relatives, illustrating how apparent diversity arises from ordered change. By aligning shared roots and inflectional endings, the lectures sketch features of the ancestral language and trace the divergence of daughter branches. This genealogical framework underpins the broader claim that language history follows discoverable regularities rather than random mutation.
Turning to other traditions, Müller outlines the Semitic family, characterized by consonantal roots and patterned derivation, and introduces what he calls the Turanian group to cover several non-Semitic, non-Aryan languages known at the time. He differentiates genealogical families from morphological types. Isolating languages, such as Chinese, convey relations by position and independent words; agglutinative languages, like Turkish and Finnic, build words by transparent affixation; inflectional languages, including Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, fuse elements into single forms. The classification by structure aids comparison but does not by itself prove descent. The lectures urge care in distinguishing typological similarity from true historical relationship.
The growth of language is described through the formation of words from a limited stock of roots and the gradual development of grammar. Compounding and derivation extend meaning, while agglutinated elements become welded and opaque through phonetic wear. Pronominal and demonstrative particles, once independent, contribute case endings, verbal terminations, and other formatives. Over time, phonetic decay and analogical leveling reshape paradigms, even as speakers maintain intelligibility. Müller emphasizes that loss of sound does not imply loss of thought; rather, it accompanies the consolidation of complex forms. The lectures portray inflection as a late, historical outcome of processes visible in earlier, simpler stages.
Phonetics provides the physiological basis for sound change. Müller surveys how articulatory habits and accentual patterns govern shifts in consonants and vowels, producing regular correspondence among related languages. Laws such as Grimm’s articulate a network of predictable substitutions, while phenomena like assimilation, dissimilation, and syncope account for surface irregularities. Euphonic tendencies influence alternations without violating underlying regularity. By insisting that sound change operates unconsciously and consistently, the science guards against arbitrary etymology. The lectures illustrate how careful phonetic analysis can date divergences, chart dialectal splits, and disentangle borrowed forms from inherited vocabulary, strengthening the genealogical model with empirical constraints.
A central set of lectures addresses the problem of the origin of language. Müller reviews and labels prevailing hypotheses, from onomatopoetic explanations to interjectional accounts and other proposals, finding each insufficient on its own. He argues that language presupposes the capacity for conceptual thought and that the earliest ascertainable stage consists of meaningful roots rather than mere cries. While allowing that imitative and emotional elements contributed, he limits scientific claims to what comparative evidence can reach. The ultimate beginning, he contends, lies beyond observation; the science may describe growth from simple roots to complex grammar, but it cannot witness the first utterance.
From language he turns to mythology, proposing that many myths originate in the history of words. Metaphorical names for natural phenomena harden into personal narratives when the original sense is forgotten, producing stories that comparative philology can clarify. By aligning names across the Indo-European world, and studying their literal meanings, Müller outlines a method for resolving divine figures and heroic tales into earlier linguistic strata. This approach does not seek to reduce religion to etymology, but to show how verbal shifts fostered imaginative transformations. Language thus becomes a guide for interpreting ancient belief, linking philology with the comparative study of myth.
In conclusion, the lectures present language as humanity’s oldest documentary record and as a disciplined field of inquiry with clear methods and limits. Classification by descent illuminates the movements of peoples, but Müller warns that language and race are not identical and should not be confused. Sound laws, structural typology, and cautious etymology together provide tools for reconstructing past stages and understanding present diversity. The overarching message is that language changes according to discoverable principles, and that the comparative method can retrieve a coherent history from dispersed materials, advancing our knowledge of human thought, tradition, and the pathways of cultural development.
Historical Context
In 1861 and 1863, Friedrich Max Müller delivered two widely attended series at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on Albemarle Street, London, later published as Lectures on the Science of Language. The setting was Victorian Britain at the height of imperial expansion and confidence in public science. London’s institutions, from the British Museum to the Bodleian’s manuscript traffic via Oxford, were conduits for Asian texts and comparative inquiry. The city’s lecture culture, nourished by the Royal Institution since 1799, framed philology as a public science alongside chemistry and physics. Print capitalism and an expanding educated middle class created a receptive audience for linguistic history and classification.
The emergence of comparative philology in Europe shaped the lectures decisively. In 1786, William Jones in Calcutta posited affinities among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, inaugurating Indo-European studies. Franz Bopp’s 1816 treatise formalized comparative grammar; Rasmus Rask (1818) and Jacob Grimm (Deutsche Grammatik, 1819–1837; Grimm’s Law, 1822) supplied method and sound correspondences. August Schleicher’s Compendium (1861–1862) and Stammbaum model systematized language families. Centers in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris professionalized the field. Müller’s book consolidates these gains for an English audience, popularizing sound laws, reconstruction, and family classification, while critically engaging Schleicher’s tree and affirming the scientific status of language history grounded in Sanskrit and Indo-European comparison.
The British Empire’s governance of South Asia furnished both materials and motives for linguistic science. The East India Company, dominant until 1858, funded Müller’s critical edition of the Rigveda at Oxford (volumes issued 1849–1874), enabling direct engagement with Vedic Sanskrit. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act (1858) ended Company rule and intensified administrative demands for language classification. Thomas Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835) had already pivoted policy toward English, sharpening debates between Anglicists and Orientalists. Within this milieu, Müller’s lectures draw authority from Sanskrit philology and colonial manuscript networks, while speaking to contemporaneous British needs to map, classify, and govern languages across the Raj.
Victorian disputes over science and religion formed a second crucible. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the Huxley–Wilberforce exchange at Oxford in 1860, and the theological turmoil of Essays and Reviews (1860) placed origins and historical method at center stage. Decipherments in Egyptology (Champollion, 1822) and cuneiform (Rawlinson’s Behistun, ratified 1857) expanded deep time and comparative history. Against Bishop Ussher’s 4004 BCE chronology, philologists were extending linguistic timelines. Müller’s lectures claim language as a historical science, critique naive onomatopoetic or interjectional origin theories, and navigate between evolutionary analogies and theological sensitivities, using comparative evidence to argue for lawful linguistic change and great antiquity.
The culture of public science in London provided infrastructure and audiences. The Royal Institution, founded in 1799 and associated with Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, cultivated popular yet rigorous lectures for the metropolitan public. The Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased global artifacts and heightened curiosity about the languages and cultures behind them. The Philological Society of London (founded 1842) promoted methodological standards, and in 1857 proposed the project that became the Oxford English Dictionary, reflecting a broader movement to catalog linguistic facts. Müller's lectures harnessed this setting, translating specialist continental philology into accessible discourse aligned with Britain’s encyclopedic and statistical impulses.
European political upheavals and nationalism also influenced the work’s framing. The revolutions of 1848 and the subsequent unification of Germany in 1871 elevated language as a marker of nationhood. Müller, born in Dessau in 1823 and trained in Leipzig and Berlin, moved to London in 1846, bringing German scholarly methods into British institutions. He engaged with Oxford’s academic politics, notably the 1860 election to the Boden Chair of Sanskrit, which he lost to Monier Monier-Williams amid debates over missionary utility versus philological scholarship. In the lectures, Müller repeatedly cautions that linguistic families—Indo-European, Semitic, proposed Turanian—denote languages, not “races,” implicitly critiquing nationalist reductions.
Nineteenth-century classification enterprises, including racial science and administrative ethnography, formed a contentious backdrop. The Ethnological Society of London (1843) and Anthropological Society (1863) debated monogenism versus polygenism; in France, Paul Broca’s Société d’Anthropologie (1859) advanced cranial metrics; and Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai (1853–1855) propagated racial hierarchies. Colonial enumerations and early language surveys in India prepared the ground for the 1871 census. Müller’s lectures participate in classification by typologizing isolating, agglutinative, and inflectional structures and proposing a broad “Turanian” grouping, reflecting administrative and scholarly impulses to order diversity. He simultaneously insists on separating linguistic genealogy from biological race, pushing back against deterministic ethnology.
As social and political critique, the book destabilizes hierarchies that underwrote empire and class. By demonstrating systematic complexity in so-called “savage” or non-European tongues, Müller undermines assumptions that civilization or intellect is indexed by English or Latin. He rejects conflations of language, nation, and blood, countering racialized nationalism and administrative essentialism. His invocation of lawful historical change challenges biblical literalism used to police social order, while advocating evidence-based inquiry accessible to the public lecture hall rather than clerical authority. Within a stratified Victorian society, the elevation of vernaculars and global philologies functions as a critique of Eurocentric prestige and an argument for the equal rationality of all speech communities.
Lectures on the Science of Language
Dedication
Dedicated
To
The Members Of The University Of Oxford,
Both Resident And Non-Resident,
To Whom I Am Indebted
For Numerous Proofs Of Sympathy And Kindness
During The Last Twelve Years,
In Grateful Acknowledgment Of Their Generous Support
On The
7th Of December, 1860.
Preface.
My Lectures on the Science of Language are here printed as I had prepared them in manuscript for the Royal Institution[1]. When I came to deliver them, a considerable portion of what I had written had to be omitted; and, in now placing them before the public in a more complete form, I have gladly complied with a wish expressed by many of my hearers. As they are, they only form a short abstract of several Courses delivered from time to time in Oxford, and they do not pretend to be more than an introduction to a science far too comprehensive to be treated successfully in so small a compass.
My object, however, will have been attained, if I should succeed in attracting the attention, not only of the scholar, but of the philosopher, the historian, and the theologian, to a science which concerns them all, and which, though it professes to treat of words only, teaches us that there is more in words than is dreamt of in our philosophy. I quote from Bacon: “Men believe that their reason is lord over their [pg viii] words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and reactionary power over our intellect. Words, as a Tartar's bow, shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”
MAX MÜLLER.
Oxford, June 11, 1861.
Lecture I. The Science Of Language One Of The Physical Sciences.
When I was asked some time ago to deliver a course of lectures on Comparative Philology[2] in this Institution, I at once expressed my readiness to do so. I had lived long enough in England to know that the peculiar difficulties arising from my imperfect knowledge of the language would be more than balanced by the forbearance of an English audience, and I had such perfect faith in my subject that I thought it might be trusted even in the hands of a less skilful expositor. I felt convinced that the researches into the history of languages and into the nature of human speech which have been carried on for the last fifty years in England, France, and Germany, deserved a larger share of public sympathy than they had hitherto received; and it seemed to me, as far as I could judge, that the discoveries in this newly-opened mine of scientific inquiry were not inferior, whether in novelty or importance, to the most brilliant discoveries of our age.
[pg 012]It was not till I began to write my lectures that I became aware of the difficulties of the task I had undertaken. The dimensions of the science of language are so vast that it is impossible in a course of nine lectures to give more than a very general survey of it; and as one of the greatest charms of this science consists in the minuteness of the analysis by which each language, each dialect, each word, each grammatical form is tested, I felt that it was almost impossible to do full justice to my subject, or to place the achievements of those who founded and fostered the science of language in their true light. Another difficulty arises from the dryness of many of the problems which I shall have to discuss. Declensions and conjugations cannot be made amusing, nor can I avail myself of the advantages possessed by most lecturers, who enliven their discussions by experiments and diagrams. If, with all these difficulties and drawbacks, I do not shrink from opening to-day this course of lectures on mere words, on nouns and verbs and particles,—if I venture to address an audience accustomed to listen, in this place, to the wonderful tales of the natural historian, the chemist, and geologist, and wont to see the novel results of inductive reasoning invested by native eloquence, with all the charms of poetry and romance,—it is because, though mistrusting myself, I cannot mistrust my subject. The study of words may be tedious to the school-boy, as breaking of stones is to the wayside laborer; but to the thoughtful eye of the geologist these stones are full of interest;—he sees miracles on the high-road, and reads chronicles in every ditch. Language, too, has marvels of her own, which she unveils to the inquiring glance of the patient [pg 013] student. There are chronicles below her surface; there are sermons in every word. Language has been called sacred ground, because it is the deposit of thought. We cannot tell as yet what language is. It may be a production of nature, a work of human art, or a divine gift. But to whatever sphere it belongs, it would seem to stand unsurpassed—nay, unequalled in it—by anything else. If it be a production of nature, it is her last and crowning production which she reserved for man alone. If it be a work of human art, it would seem to lift the human artist almost to the level of a divine creator. If it be the gift of God, it is God's greatest gift; for through it God spake to man and man speaks to God in worship, prayer, and meditation.
Although the way which is before us may be long and tedious, the point to which it tends would seem to be full of interest; and I believe I may promise that the view opened before our eyes from the summit of our science, will fully repay the patient travellers, and perhaps secure a free pardon to their venturous guide.
The Science of Language is a science of very modern date. We cannot trace its lineage much beyond the beginning of our century, and it is scarcely received as yet on a footing of equality by the elder branches of learning. Its very name is still unsettled, and the various titles that have been given to it in England, France, and Germany are so vague and varying that they have led to the most confused ideas among the public at large as to the real objects of this new science. We hear it spoken of as Comparative Philology, Scientific Etymology, Phonology, and Glossology. [pg 014] In France it has received the convenient, but somewhat barbarous, name of Linguistique. If we must have a Greek title for our science, we might derive it either from mythos, word, or from logos, speech. But the title of Mythology[3] is already occupied, and Logology would jar too much on classical ears. We need not waste our time in criticising these names, as none of them has as yet received that universal sanction which belongs to the titles of other modern sciences, such as Geology or Comparative Anatomy; nor will there be much difficulty in christening our young science after we have once ascertained its birth, its parentage, and its character. I myself prefer the simple designation of the Science of Language, though in these days of high-sounding titles, this plain name will hardly meet with general acceptance.
From the name we now turn to the meaning of our science. But before we enter upon a definition of its subject-matter, and determine the method which ought to be followed in our researches, it will be useful to cast a glance at the history of the other sciences, among which the science of language now, for the first time, claims her place; and examine their origin, their gradual progress, and definite settlement. The history of a science is, as it were, its biography, and as we buy experience cheapest in studying the lives of others, we may, perhaps, guard our young science from some of the follies and extravagances inherent in youth by learning a lesson for which other branches of human knowledge have had to pay more dearly.
There is a certain uniformity in the history of most [pg 015] sciences. If we read such works as Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences or Humboldt's Cosmos, we find that the origin, the progress, the causes of failure and success have been the same for almost every branch of human knowledge. There are three marked periods or stages in the history of every one of them, which we may call the Empirical, the Classificatory, and the Theoretical. However humiliating it may sound, every one of our sciences, however grand their present titles, can be traced back to the most humble and homely occupations of half-savage tribes. It was not the true, the good, and the beautiful which spurred the early philosophers to deep researches and bold discoveries. The foundation-stone of the most glorious structures of human ingenuity in ages to come was supplied by the pressing wants of a patriarchal and semi-barbarous society. The names of some of the most ancient departments of human knowledge tell their own tale. Geometry, which at present declares itself free from all sensuous impressions, and treats of its points and lines and planes as purely ideal conceptions, not to be confounded with those coarse and imperfect representations as they appear on paper to the human eye; geometry, as its very name declares, began with measuring a garden or a field. It is derived from the Greek gē, land, ground, earth, and metron, measure. Botany, the science of plants, was originally the science of botanē, which in Greek does not mean a plant in general, but fodder, from boskein, to feed. The science of plants would have been called Phytology, from the Greek phyton, a plant.1 The founders [pg 016] of Astronomy were not the poet or the philosopher, but the sailor and the farmer. The early poet may have admired “the mazy dance of planets,” and the philosopher may have speculated on the heavenly harmonies; but it was to the sailor alone that a knowledge of the glittering guides of heaven became a question of life and death. It was he who calculated their risings and settings with the accuracy of a merchant and the shrewdness of an adventurer; and the names that were given to single stars or constellations clearly show that they were invented by the ploughers of the sea and of the land. The moon, for instance, the golden hand on the dark dial of heaven, was called by them the Measurer,—the measurer of time; for time was measured by nights, and moons, and winters, long before it was reckoned by days, and suns, and years. Moon2 is a very old word. It was môna in Anglo-Saxon, and was used there, not as a feminine, but as a masculine; for the moon was a masculine in all Teutonic languages, and it is only through the influence of classical models that in English moon has been changed into a feminine, and sun into a masculine. It was a most unlucky assertion which Mr. Harris made in his Hermes, that all nations ascribe to the sun a masculine, and to the moon a feminine gender.3 In Gothic moon is mena, which is a masculine. For month we have in A.-S. mónâdh, in Gothic menoth, both masculine. In Greek we find mēn, a masculine, for month, and mēnē, a feminine, for moon. In Latin we have the derivative mensis, month, and in Sanskrit we find mâs for moon, and mâsa for month, both [pg 017] masculine.4 Now this mâs in Sanskrit is clearly derived from a root mâ, to measure, to mete. In Sanskrit, I measure is mâ-mi; thou measurest, mâ-si; he measures, mâ-ti (or mimî-te). An instrument of measuring is called in Sanskrit mâ-tram, the Greek metron, our metre. Now if the moon was originally called by the farmer the measurer, the ruler of days, and weeks, and seasons, the regulator of the tides, the lord of their festivals, and the herald of their public assemblies, it is but natural that he should have been conceived as a man, and not as the love-sick maiden which our modern sentimental poetry has put in his place.
It was the sailor who, before intrusting his life and goods to the winds and the waves of the ocean, watched for the rising of those stars which he called the Sailing-stars or Pleiades, from plein, to sail. Navigation in the Greek waters was considered safe after the return of the Pleiades; and it closed when they disappeared. The Latin name for the Pleiades is Vergiliæ, from virga, a sprout or twig. This name was given to them by the Italian husbandman, because in Italy, where they became visible about May, they marked the return of summer.5 Another constellation, the seven stars in the head of Taurus, received the name of Hyades or Pluviæ in Latin, because at the time when they rose with the sun they were supposed to announce rain. The astronomer retains these and many other names; he still speaks of the pole of heaven, of wandering and fixed stars,6 but he is apt [pg 018] to forget that these terms were not the result of scientific observation and classification, but were borrowed from the language of those who themselves were wanderers on the sea or in the desert, and to whom the fixed stars were in full reality what their name implies, stars driven in and fixed, by which they might hold fast on the deep, as by heavenly anchors.
But although historically we are justified in saying that the first geometrician was a ploughman, the first botanist a gardener, the first mineralogist a miner, it may reasonably be objected that in this early stage a science is hardly a science yet: that measuring a field is not geometry, that growing cabbages is very far from botany, and that a butcher has no claim to the title of comparative anatomist. This is perfectly true, yet it is but right that each science should be reminded of these its more humble beginnings, and of the practical requirements which it was originally intended to answer. A science, as Bacon says, should be a rich storehouse for the glory of God, and the relief of man's estate. Now, although it may seem as if in the present high state of our society students were enabled to devote their time to the investigation of the facts and laws of nature, or to the contemplation of the mysteries of the world of thought, without any side-glance at the practical result of their labors, no science and no art have long prospered and flourished among us, unless they were in some way subservient to the practical interests of society. It is true that a [pg 019] Lyell collects and arranges, a Faraday weighs and analyzes, an Owen dissects and compares, a Herschel observes and calculates, without any thought of the immediate marketable results of their labors. But there is a general interest which supports and enlivens their researches, and that interest depends on the practical advantages which society at large derives from their scientific studies. Let it be known that the successive strata of the geologist are a deception to the miner, that the astronomical tables are useless to the navigator, that chemistry is nothing but an expensive amusement, of no use to the manufacturer and the farmer—and astronomy, chemistry, and geology would soon share the fate of alchemy and astrology. As long as the Egyptian science excited the hopes of the invalid by mysterious prescriptions (I may observe by the way that the hieroglyphic signs of our modern prescriptions have been traced back by Champollion to the real hieroglyphics of Egypt7)—and as long as it instigated the avarice of its patrons by the promise of the discovery of gold, it enjoyed a liberal support at the courts of princes, and under the roofs of monasteries. Though alchemy did not lead to the discovery of gold, it prepared the way to discoveries more valuable. The same with astrology. Astrology was not such mere imposition as it is generally supposed to have been. It is counted as a science by so sound and sober a scholar as Melancthon, and even Bacon allows it a place among the sciences, though admitting that “it had better intelligence and confederacy with the imagination of man than with his reason.” In spite of the strong condemnation which Luther pronounced against astrology, [pg 020] astrology continued to sway the destinies of Europe; and a hundred years after Luther, the astrologer was the counsellor of princes and generals, while the founder of modern astronomy died in poverty and despair. In our time the very rudiments of astrology are lost and forgotten.8 Even real and useful arts, as soon as they cease to be useful, die away, and their secrets are sometimes lost beyond the hope of recovery. When after the Reformation our churches and chapels were divested of their artistic ornaments, in order to restore, in outward appearance also, the simplicity and purity of the Christian church, the colors of the painted windows began to fade away, and have never regained their former depth and harmony. The invention of printing gave the death-blow to the art of ornamental writing and of miniature-painting employed in the illumination of manuscripts; and the best artists of the present day despair of rivalling the minuteness, softness, and brilliancy combined by the humble manufacturer of the mediæval missal.
I speak somewhat feelingly on the necessity that every science should answer some practical purpose, because I am aware that the science of language has but little to offer to the utilitarian spirit of our age. It does not profess to help us in learning languages more expeditiously, nor does it hold out any hope of ever realizing the dream of one universal language. [pg 021] It simply professes to teach what language is, and this would hardly seem sufficient to secure for a new science the sympathy and support of the public at large. There are problems, however, which, though apparently of an abstruse and merely speculative character, have exercised a powerful influence for good or evil in the history of mankind. Men before now have fought for an idea, and have laid down their lives for a word; and many of these problems which have agitated the world from the earliest to our own times, belong properly to the science of language.
Mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language. A myth means a word, but a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence. Most of the Greek, the Roman, the Indian, and other heathen gods are nothing but poetical names, which were gradually allowed to assume a divine personality never contemplated by their original inventors. Eos was a name of the dawn before she became a goddess, the wife of Tithonos, or the dying day. Fatum, or fate, meant originally what had been spoken; and before Fate became a power, even greater than Jupiter, it meant that which had once been spoken by Jupiter, and could never be changed,—not even by Jupiter himself. Zeus originally meant the bright heaven, in Sanskrit Dyaus; and many of the stories told of him as the supreme god, had a meaning only as told originally of the bright heaven, whose rays, like golden rain, descend on the lap of the earth, the Danae of old, kept by her father in the dark prison of winter. No one doubts that Luna was simply a name of the moon; but so was likewise Lucina, both derived [pg 022] from lucere, to shine. Hecate, too, was an old name of the moon, the feminine of Hekatos and Hekatebolos, the far-darting sun; and Pyrrha, the Eve of the Greeks, was nothing but a name of the red earth, and in particular of Thessaly. This mythological disease, though less virulent in modern languages, is by no means extinct.
During the Middle Ages the controversy between Nominalism and Realism[4], which agitated the church for centuries, and finally prepared the way for the Reformation, was again, as its very name shows, a controversy on names, on the nature of language, and on the relation of words to our conceptions on one side, and to the realities of the outer world on the other. Men were called heretics for believing that words such as justice or truth expressed only conceptions of our mind, not real things walking about in broad daylight.
In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing political and social questions. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe; and in America comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the unhallowed theory of slavery. Never do I remember to have seen science more degraded than on the title-page of an American publication in which, among the profiles of the different races of man, the profile of the ape was made to look more human than that of the negro.
Lastly, the problem of the position of man on the [pg 023] threshold between the worlds of matter and spirit has of late assumed a very marked prominence among the problems of the physical and mental sciences. It has absorbed the thoughts of men who, after a long life spent in collecting, observing, and analyzing, have brought to its solution qualifications unrivalled in any previous age; and if we may judge from the greater warmth displayed in discussions ordinarily conducted with the calmness of judges and not with the passion of pleaders, it might seem, after all, as if the great problems of our being, of the true nobility of our blood, of our descent from heaven or earth, though unconnected with anything that is commonly called practical, have still retained a charm of their own—a charm that will never lose its power on the mind, and on the heart of man. Now, however much the frontiers of the animal kingdom have been pushed forward, so that at one time the line of demarcation between animal and man seemed to depend on a mere fold in the brain, there is one barrier which no one has yet ventured to touch—the barrier of language. Even those philosophers with whom penser c'est sentir,9 who reduce all thought to feeling, and maintain that we share the faculties which are the productive causes of thought in common with beasts, are bound to confess that as yet no race of animals has produced a language. Lord Monboddo, for instance, admits that as yet no [pg 024] animal has been discovered in the possession of language, “not even the beaver, who of all the animals we know, that are not, like the orang-outangs, of our own species, comes nearest to us in sagacity.”
Locke, who is generally classed together with these materialistic philosophers, and who certainly vindicated a large share of what had been claimed for the intellect as the property of the senses, recognized most fully the barrier which language, as such, placed between man and brutes. “This I may be positive in,” he writes, “that the power of abstracting is not at all in brutes, and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes. For it is evident we observe no footsteps in these of making use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general signs.”
If, therefore, the science of language gives us an insight into that which, by common consent, distinguishes man from all other living beings; if it establishes a frontier between man and the brute, which can never be removed, it would seem to possess at the present moment peculiar claims on the attention of all who, while watching with sincere admiration the progress of comparative physiology, yet consider it their duty to enter their manly protest against a revival of the shallow theories of Lord Monboddo.
But to return to our survey of the history of the physical sciences. We had examined the empirical stage through which every science has to pass. We saw that, for instance, in botany, a man who has [pg 025] travelled through distant countries, who has collected a vast number of plants, who knows their names, their peculiarities, and their medicinal qualities, is not yet a botanist, but only a herbalist, a lover of plants, or what the Italians call a dilettante, from dilettare, to delight. The real science of plants, like every other science, begins with the work of classification. An empirical acquaintance with facts rises to a scientific knowledge of facts as soon as the mind discovers beneath the multiplicity of single productions the unity of an organic system. This discovery is made by means of comparison and classification. We cease to study each flower for its own sake; and by continually enlarging the sphere of our observation, we try to discover what is common to many and offers those essential points on which groups or natural classes may be established. These classes again, in their more general features, are mutually compared; new points of difference, or of similarity of a more general and higher character, spring to view, and enable us to discover classes of classes, or families. And when the whole kingdom of plants has thus been surveyed, and a simple tissue of names been thrown over the garden of nature; when we can lift it up, as it were, and view it in our mind as a whole, as a system well defined and complete, we then speak of the science of plants, or botany. We have entered into altogether a new sphere of knowledge where the individual is subject to the general, fact to law; we discover thought, order, and purpose pervading the whole realm of nature, and we perceive the dark chaos of matter lighted up by the reflection of a divine mind. Such views may be right or wrong. [pg 026] Too hasty comparisons, or too narrow distinctions, may have prevented the eye of the observer from discovering the broad outlines of nature's plan. Yet every system, however insufficient it may prove hereafter, is a step in advance. If the mind of man is once impressed with the conviction that there must be order and law everywhere, it never rests again until all that seems irregular has been eliminated, until the full beauty and harmony of nature has been perceived, and the eye of man has caught the eye of God beaming out from the midst of all His works. The failures of the past prepare the triumphs of the future.
Thus, to recur to our former illustration, the systematic arrangement of plants which bears the name of Linnæus, and which is founded on the number and character of the reproductive organs, failed to bring out the natural order which pervades all that grows and blossoms. Broad lines of demarcation which unite or divide large tribes and families of plants were invisible from his point of view. But in spite of this, his work was not in vain. The fact that plants in every part of the world belonged to one great system was established once for all; and even in later systems most of his classes and divisions have been preserved, because the conformation of the reproductive organs of plants happened to run parallel with other more characteristic marks of true affinity.10 It is the same in the history of astronomy. Although the Ptolemæan system was a wrong one, yet even from its eccentric [pg 027] point of view, laws were discovered determining the true movements of the heavenly bodies. The conviction that there remains something unexplained is sure to lead to the discovery of our error. There can be no error in nature; the error must be with us. This conviction lived in the heart of Aristotle when, in spite of his imperfect knowledge of nature, he declared “that there is in nature nothing interpolated or without connection, as in a bad tragedy;” and from his time forward every new fact and every new system have confirmed his faith.
The object of classification is clear. We understand things if we can comprehend them; that is to say, if we can grasp and hold together single facts, connect isolated impressions, distinguish between what is essential and what is merely accidental, and thus predicate the general of the individual, and class the individual under the general. This is the secret of all scientific knowledge. Many sciences, while passing through this second or classificatory stage, assume the title of comparative. When the anatomist has finished the dissection of numerous bodies, when he has given names to each organ, and discovered the distinctive functions of each, he is led to perceive similarity where at first he saw dissimilarity only. He discovers in the lower animals rudimentary indications of the more perfect organization of the higher; and he becomes impressed with the conviction that there is in the animal kingdom the same order and purpose which pervades the endless variety of plants or any other realm of nature. He learns, if he did not know it before, that things were not created at random or in a lump, but that there is a scale which leads, by imperceptible degrees, from the [pg 028] lowest infusoria to the crowning work of nature,—man; that all is the manifestation of one and the same unbroken chain of creative thought, the work of one and the same all-wise Creator.
In this way the second or classificatory leads us naturally to the third or final stage—the theoretical, or metaphysical. If the work of classification is properly carried out, it teaches us that nothing exists in nature by accident; that each individual belongs to a species, each species to a genus; and that there are laws which underlie the apparent freedom and variety of all created things. These laws indicate to us the presence of a purpose in the mind of the Creator; and whereas the material world was looked upon by ancient philosophers as a mere illusion, as an agglomerate of atoms, or as the work of an evil principle, we now read and interpret its pages as the revelation of a divine power, and wisdom, and love. This has given to the study of nature a new character. After the observer has collected his facts, and after the classifier has placed them in order, the student asks what is the origin and what is the meaning of all this? and he tries to soar, by means of induction, or sometimes even of divination, into regions not accessible to the mere collector. In this attempt the mind of man no doubt has frequently met with the fate of Phaeton; but, undismayed by failure, he asks again and again for his father's steeds. It has been said that this so-called philosophy of nature has never achieved anything; that it has done nothing but prove that things must be exactly as they had been found to be by the observer and collector. Physical science, however, would never have been what it is without the impulses which [pg 029] it received from the philosopher, nay even from the poet. “At the limits of exact knowledge” (I quote the words of Humboldt), “as from a lofty island-shore, the eye loves to glance towards distant regions. The images which it sees may be illusive; but, like the illusive images which people imagined they had seen from the Canaries or the Azores, long before the time of Columbus, they may lead to the discovery of a new world.”
Copernicus, in the dedication of his work to Pope Paul III. (it was commenced in 1517, finished 1530, published 1543), confesses that he was brought to the discovery of the sun's central position, and of the diurnal motion of the earth, not by observation or analysis, but by what he calls the feeling of a want of symmetry in the Ptolemaic system. But who had told him that there must be symmetry in all the movements of the celestial bodies, or that complication was not more sublime than simplicity? Symmetry and simplicity, before they were discovered by the observer, were postulated by the philosopher. The first idea of revolutionizing the heavens was suggested to Copernicus, as he tells us himself, by an ancient Greek philosopher, by Philolaus, the Pythagorean. No doubt with Philolaus the motion of the earth was only a guess, or, if you like, a happy intuition. Nevertheless, if we may trust the words of Copernicus, it is quite possible that without that guess we should never have heard of the Copernican system. Truth is not found by addition and multiplication only. When speaking of Kepler, whose method of reasoning has been considered as unsafe and fantastic by his contemporaries as well as by later astronomers, Sir David Brewster remarks very [pg 030] truly, “that, as an instrument of research, the influence of imagination has been much overlooked by those who have ventured to give laws to philosophy.” The torch of imagination is as necessary to him who looks for truth, as the lamp of study. Kepler held both, and more than that, he had the star of faith to guide him in all things from darkness to light.
In the history of the physical sciences, the three stages which we have just described as the empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, appear generally in chronological order. I say, generally, for there have been instances, as in the case just quoted of Philolaus, where the results properly belonging to the third have been anticipated in the first stage. To the quick eye of genius one case may be like a thousand, and one experiment, well chosen, may lead to the discovery of an absolute law. Besides, there are great chasms in the history of science. The tradition of generations is broken by political or ethnic earthquakes, and the work that was nearly finished has frequently had to be done again from the beginning, when a new surface had been formed for the growth of a new civilization. The succession, however, of these three stages is no doubt the natural one, and it is very properly observed in the study of every science. The student of botany begins as a collector of plants. Taking each plant by itself, he observes its peculiar character, its habitat, its proper season, its popular or unscientific name. He learns to distinguish between the roots, the stem, the leaves, the flower, the calyx, the stamina, and pistils. He learns, so to say, the practical grammar of the plant before he can begin to compare, to arrange, and classify.
[pg 031]Again, no one can enter with advantage on the third stage of any physical science without having passed through the second. No one can study the plant, no one can understand the bearing of such a work as, for instance, Professor Schleiden's “Life of the Plant,”11 who has not studied the life of plants in the wonderful variety, and in the still more wonderful order, of nature. These last and highest achievements of inductive philosophy are possible only after the way has been cleared by previous classification. The philosopher must command his classes like regiments which obey the order of their general. Thus alone can the battle be fought and truth be conquered.
After this rapid glance at the history of the other physical sciences, we now return to our own, the science of language, in order to see whether it really is a science, and whether it can be brought back to the standard of the inductive sciences. We want to know whether it has passed, or is still passing, through the three phases of physical research; whether its progress has been systematic or desultory, whether its method has been appropriate or not. But before we do this, we shall, I think, have to do something else. You may have observed that I always took it for granted that the science of language, which is best known in this country by the name of comparative philology, is one of the physical sciences, and that therefore its method ought to be the same as that which has been followed with so much success in botany, geology, anatomy, and other branches of the study of nature. In the history of the physical sciences, however, we look in vain for a place assigned to comparative philology, and [pg 032] its very name would seem to show that it belongs to quite a different sphere of human knowledge. There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which, according to their subject-matter, are called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man. Now if we were to judge by its name, comparative philology, like classical philology, would seem to take rank, not as a physical, but as an historical science, and the proper method to be applied to it would be that which is followed in the history of art, of law, of politics, and religion. However, the title of comparative philology must not be allowed to mislead us. It is difficult to say by whom that title was invented; but all that can be said in defence of it is, that the founders of the science of language were chiefly scholars or philologists, and that they based their inquiries into the nature and laws of language on a comparison of as many facts as they could collect within their own special spheres of study. Neither in Germany, which may well be called the birthplace of this science, nor in France, where it has been cultivated with brilliant success, has that title been adopted. It will not be difficult to show that, although the science of language owes much to the classical scholar, and though in return it has proved of great use to him, yet comparative philology has really nothing whatever in common with philology in the usual meaning of the word. Philology, whether classical or oriental, whether treating of ancient or modern, of cultivated or barbarous languages, is an historical science. Language is here treated simply as a means. The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, [pg 033] or any other language, as a key to an understanding of the literary monuments which by-gone ages have bequeathed to us, as a spell to raise from the tomb of time the thoughts of great men in different ages and different countries, and as a means ultimately to trace the social, moral, intellectual, and religious progress of the human race. In the same manner, if we study living languages, it is not for their own sake that we acquire grammars and vocabularies. We do so on account of their practical usefulness. We use them as letters of introduction to the best society or to the best literature of the leading nations of Europe. In comparative philology the case is totally different. In the science of language, languages are not treated as a means; language itself becomes the sole object of scientific inquiry. Dialects which have never produced any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese are as important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important, than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know languages, we want to know language; what language is, how it can form a vehicle or an organ of thought; we want to know its origin, its nature, its laws; and it is only in order to arrive at that knowledge that we collect, arrange, and classify all the facts of language that are within our reach.
And here I must protest, at the very outset of these lectures, against the supposition that the student of language must necessarily be a great linguist. I shall have to speak to you in the course of these lectures of hundreds of languages, some of which, perhaps, you may never have heard mentioned even by name. Do [pg 034] not suppose that I know these languages as you know Greek or Latin, French or German. In that sense I know indeed very few languages, and I never aspired to the fame of a Mithridates or a Mezzofanti. It is impossible for a student of language to acquire a practical knowledge of all tongues with which he has to deal. He does not wish to speak the Kachikal language, of which a professorship was lately founded in the University of Guatemala,12 or to acquire the elegancies of the idiom of the Tcheremissians; nor is it his ambition to explore the literature of the Samoyedes, or the New-Zealanders. It is the grammar and the dictionary which form the subject of his inquiries. These he consults and subjects to a careful analysis, but he does not encumber his memory with paradigms of nouns and verbs, or with long lists of words which have never been used in any work of literature. It is true, no doubt, that no language will unveil the whole of its wonderful structure except to the scholar who has studied it thoroughly and critically in a number of literary works representing the various periods of its growth. Nevertheless, short lists of vocables, and imperfect sketches of a grammar, are in many instances all that the student can expect to obtain, or can hope to master and to use for the purposes he has in view. He must learn to make the best of this fragmentary information, like the comparative anatomist, who frequently learns his lessons from the smallest fragments of fossil bones, or the vague pictures of animals brought home by unscientific travellers. If it were necessary for the comparative philologist to acquire a critical or practical acquaintance with all the [pg 035] languages which form the subject of his inquiries, the science of language would simply be an impossibility. But we do not expect the botanist to be an experienced gardener, or the geologist a miner, or the ichthyologist a practical fisherman. Nor would it be reasonable to object in the science of language to the same division of labor which is necessary for the successful cultivation of subjects much less comprehensive. Though much of what we might call the realm of language is lost to us forever, though whole periods in the history of language are by necessity withdrawn from our observation, yet the mass of human speech that lies before us, whether in the petrified strata of ancient literature or in the countless variety of living languages and dialects, offers a field as large, if not larger, than any other branch of physical research. It is impossible to fix the exact number of known languages, but their number can hardly be less than nine hundred. That this vast field should never have excited the curiosity of the natural philosopher before the beginning of our century may seem surprising, more surprising even than the indifference with which former generations treated the lessons which even the stones seemed to teach of the life still throbbing in the veins and on the very surface of the earth. The saying that "familiarity breeds contempt" would seem applicable to the subjects of both these sciences. The gravel of our walks hardly seemed to deserve a scientific treatment, and the language which every plough-boy can speak could not be raised without an effort to the dignity of a scientific problem. Man had studied every part of nature, the mineral treasures in the bowels of the earth, the flowers of each season, the [pg 036] animals of every continent, the laws of storms, and the movements of the heavenly bodies; he had analyzed every substance, dissected every organism, he knew every bone and muscle, every nerve and fibre of his own body to the ultimate elements which compose his flesh and blood; he had meditated on the nature of his soul, on the laws of his mind, and tried to penetrate into the last causes of all being—and yet language, without the aid of which not even the first step in this glorious career could have been made, remained unnoticed. Like a veil that hung too close over the eye of the human mind, it was hardly perceived. In an age when the study of antiquity attracted the most energetic minds, when the ashes of Pompeii were sifted for the playthings of Roman life; when parchments were made to disclose, by chemical means, the erased thoughts of Grecian thinkers; when the tombs of Egypt were ransacked for their sacred contents, and the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh forced to surrender the clay diaries of Nebuchadnezzar; when everything, in fact, that seemed to contain a vestige of the early life of man was anxiously searched for and carefully preserved in our libraries and museums,—language, which in itself carries us back far beyond the cuneiform literature of Assyria and Babylonia, and the hieroglyphic documents of Egypt; which connects ourselves, through an unbroken chain of speech, with the very ancestors of our race, and still draws its life from the first utterances of the human mind,—language, the living and speaking witness of the whole history of our race, was never cross-examined by the student of history, was never made to disclose its secrets until questioned and, so to say, brought back to itself within [pg 037] the last fifty years, by the genius of a Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, Bunsen, and others. If you consider that, whatever view we take of the origin and dispersion of language, nothing new has ever been added to the substance of language, that all its changes have been changes of form, that no new root or radical has ever been invented by later generations, as little as one single element has ever been added to the material world in which we live; if you bear in mind that in one sense, and in a very just sense, we may be said to handle the very words which issued from the mouth of the son of God, when he gave names to “all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field,” you will see, I believe, that the science of language has claims on your attention, such as few sciences can rival or excel.
Having thus explained the manner in which I intend to treat the science of language, I hope in my next lecture to examine the objections of those philosophers who see in language nothing but a contrivance devised by human skill for the more expeditious communication of our thoughts, and who would wish to see it treated, not as a production of nature, but as a work of human art.
Lecture II. The Growth Of Language In Contradistinction To The History Of Language.
In claiming for the science of language a place among the physical sciences[5], I was prepared to meet with many objections. The circle of the physical sciences seemed closed, and it was not likely that a new claimant should at once be welcomed among the established branches and scions of the ancient aristocracy of learning.13
[pg 039]The first objection which was sure to be raised on the part of such sciences as botany, geology, or physiology is this:—Language is the work of man;[1q]
