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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



and, secondly, his substitution of force instead of 

 extension. 



DESCARTES, SPINOZA, LEIBNITZ, AND LOCKE, ON 

 LANGUAGES. 



But Noire not only turns away from Descartes 

 and Spinoza on these points, but he declares him- 

 self most emphatically a pupil of Leibnitz on 

 another point also, viz., the proper study of lan- 

 guage, as before all things an empirical study. 

 He had asked Descartes what place he assigned 

 to language in his system of philosophy, but he 

 received from his works no answer which would 

 show that he had ever given serious thought to 

 the relation between his Cogito and the Logos. 

 We might have expected that Descartes would 

 have treated words as material sounds, as me- 

 chanical products running parallel with the ideas 

 of the mind, but neither provoking ideas nor 

 provoked by them, and fulfilling their purpose 

 simply by means of the concursus divinus. But, 

 instead of this, he simply repeats the views then 

 current, that, " if we learn a language, we join 

 the letters or the pronunciation of certain words, 

 which are material, with their meanings, which 

 are thought ; so that whenever we hear the same 

 words again we conceive the same things, and, 

 when we conceive the same things, the same 

 words recur to our memory." ' 



Neither does Spinoza return a more satisfac- 

 tory answer as to the mutual relation between 

 language and thought, and we look in vain for 

 any passage in which he might have attempted 

 to bring the facts of language into harmony with 

 his general system of philosophy. He distin- 

 guishes in one place very clearly between ideas 

 or concepts on one side, and images or percepts 

 and words on the other. But it is again the old 

 story. Words are there to signify things, 2 but 

 how they came to be there and to perform such 

 an office, is never even asked. In another place, 

 words and images are said to consist in corpo- 

 real movements which have nothing to do with 

 thought (ideas). Once Spinoza asks himself the 

 question how, on hearing the sound of pomum, 

 a Roman thought of what had no similarity what- 



1 Epistola i., 35 : " Sic qunm linguam aliquam ad- 

 disciruus, literas sive quarundam vocum, quae mate- 

 riales sunt, pronunciationem conjungimus cum earum 

 significationibus, quae sunt cogitationes, ita ut auditis 

 iterum iisdem vocibus easdem res concipiamus, atque 

 iisdem rebus conceptis, eaedem voces in memoriam 

 recurrant." 



2 "Ethica," ii., Propoeitio xlix., schol. :" Verba 

 quibusressigniflcamus." Ibid.: " Vcrborumnamque 

 et imaginum essentia a eolis motibus corporeis consti- 

 tuta, qui cogitatioiiis conceptum minime iuvolvunt." 



ever with that sound, viz., an apple ; and the 

 answer is, by the concatenation of ideas. " The 

 body," he says, " has frequently been affected at 

 one and the same time by the sound of pomum 

 and by the sight of an apple, and hence, on per- 

 ceiving the sound of pomum, it perceives its fre- 

 quent or constant concomitant, the apple." ' The 

 question, " Whence that sound of pomum, and 

 whence its first concomitancy with an apple ? " is 

 never asked by Spinoza. One remark only shows 

 that his thoughts must have dwelt on the diffi- 

 culties of language. In one passage he com- 

 pares words with footprints, and remarks that 

 when the soldier sees the footprints of a horse, 

 he thinks of cavalry and war, while the peasant 

 who sees the same marks is carried away in his 

 thoughts to the plough and the field. This shows 

 an advance beyond the then current view of the 

 purely conventional character of language, and 

 some apprehension of the fact that words imply 

 far more than they express. 



Noire, not satisfied with Descartes and Spino- 

 za, turns to Leibnitz, not, however, because that 

 philosopher seemed to him to have solved the 

 problem as to the relation between language and 

 reason, but because he was the first to point out 

 that, as in every other part of Nature, so in lan- 

 guage, it was the inductive method only that 

 could lead to any valuable results. Before you 

 attempt to find out how language arose, he would 

 say, collect all that there is of language, classify, 

 analyze, sift, label; only when that has been 

 done, and done thoroughly, will there be a chance 

 of discovering the simple elements of human 

 speech. This was the conviction which guided 

 Leibnitz in his own linguistic labors, in his col- 

 lection of living dialects, in his bringing to light 

 the earliest documents of his own language, in 

 his encouraging emperors as well as missionaries 

 in the compilation of dictionaries of hitherto un- 

 known and barbarous tongues. It was in this 

 way that he became the founder of the science of 

 language, as an inductive science. It was in this 

 way also that he was led to conceive the possi- 

 bility of a more perfect, or so-called universal, 

 philosophical language. But the vital question 

 as to whether thought was possible without lan- 

 guage, or language without thought, remained 

 outside the horizon of his speculations. 



At the same time, while Leibnitz was laying 

 the foundation of comparative philology, Locke 

 approached nearer than any one before him to 



1 "Ethica," ii., Propositio xviii. 



2 "Lectures on the Science of Language," vol. i., p. 

 158 (tenth edition). 



