ARE LANGUAGES INSTITUTIONS? 143 



persion and differentiation of a unitary stock. One or two teachers 

 of the highest popular repute ask us to believe, instead, that language 

 had its besriniunof in a condition of indefinite dialectic division, and 

 has been always tending toward unity that there are, as an excep- 

 tion, two or three real families, and no more, these being the result of 

 peculiar and unexplained processes of arbitrary concentration in the 

 remote past ; and another bold doubter makes a great stir by denying 

 the ordinary family-tree theory of linguistic kinship, and putting in 

 its place a theory of wave-motion, propagated from a centre. Some 

 hold (more or less consistently) that language is a natural organism, 

 growing by its own forces and its own laws, with which men cannot 

 interfei-e: others declare it an instrumentality, produced in every 

 item by the men themselves who use it. Some write of it as a human 

 faculty or capacity, like sight or hearing, as a gift, as identical with 

 thought or reason, as the one distinguishing quality of man. Others 

 regard it as one of the outcomes of a variety of faculties and impulses, 

 by all of which man is far removed from the lower animals; as one 

 which, under normal conditions, is sure to show itself, but which 

 may, by the mere force of external and accidental circumstances, be 

 thwarted, without impeachment of man's nature, but only of his edu- 

 cation. Some maintain that the child learns his own language ; others 

 strenuously deny that there is any teaching or learning about it. 

 Some, once more, declare the study in which they are engaged a physi- 

 cal science, while to others it seems as truly an historical or moral 

 science as any other branch of the history of man and his works. 



Now, with regard to all these matters of discordant opinion, only 

 one side can possibly be in the right. We may be able to excuse 

 those who take the wrong side, seeing where they are misled by look- 

 ing at the facts from a false point of view, by misconceiving the mean- 

 ing of a term or forgetting its double application, by omitting to take 

 into account some decisive consideration, by overlooking important 

 items of evidence, and so on ; but wrong they are, nevertheless. 

 And it is truly unfortunate that, just upon points of the most funda- 

 mental importance, the linguists should be so at variance with one 

 another. Surely the study of language, so extolled on all sides for 

 the strictness of its methods and the solidity of its results, might have 

 gone so far by this time that its votaries should be able to give a 

 nearly unanimous opinion, for example, as to what a word is in rela- 

 tion to a conception, and to follow that opinion logically and con- 

 sistently out to its consequences. One grand reason for the discord- 

 ance has been, to be sure, that linguists were so busy with the infinite 

 and urgent details of their Avork : details which they have not yet 

 begun to exhaust hardly, even for the majority of human languages, 

 to look over and get well in hand. 



Germany is the home of philological and linguistic study; but the 

 Germans are rather exceptionally careless of what we may call the 



