ARE LANGUAGES INSTITUTIONS? 151 



opposed to what it implies ; I shall be ready to abandon it when its 

 impropriety is proved by fact and argument. 



The great obstacle, as it seems to me, to the prevalence of consist- 

 ent and correct views concerning language, is the ambiguity of the 

 word language itself. It means two entirely different things : a 

 capacity, and a product of the exercise of that capacity. Language 

 in the former sense that is, a power to express thought by means of 

 signs, and to develop this instrumentality into a great and intricate 

 and wonderful institution, having the most important bearings on the 

 progress of the individual and of the race is a gift, a quality, a part 

 of human nature, and all that; but this power does not give a single 

 human being his language : it does not issue in any thing except 

 through an historical development, by a gradual accumulation of the 

 results of its exercise. It makes eveiy human being capable of learn- 

 ing and using any language. It implies also that every human being 

 is capable of producing a language only let circumstances be suffi- 

 ciently favorable, and give him time enough : say a few hundreds or 

 thousands of ordinary lives. But the English language, for instance, 

 or any other, is not such a capacity : it is the concrete accumulated 

 product of the efforts at expression of the English-speaking or other 

 community and its ancestors, continued through thousands of years. 

 Each such product has its history : that is to say, it has been wrought 

 only in time, and under the infinitely varied modifying influence of 

 historical circumstances ; each is difterent, therefore, from all the rest : 

 a thousand different products, of every degree of diversity, but each 

 one answering the same general purpose, and capable of being ac- 

 quired and wielded by every normally constituted human being, of 

 whatever race. 



An additional obstacle, of another character, is the (of course, un- 

 conscious) craving of many people after lofty and poetic general views, 

 views of which the very conception shall seem to exalt them. The 

 doctrines set forth above are in many respects iconoclastic, and there- 

 fore repellent to them. They want to regard man's acquisitions as 

 direct gifts to him from his Maker, or as spontaneous outbursts of his 

 noble nature. M. Renan says (" Origine du Langage," chap, iii.), 

 "Languages have come forth completely formed from the very mould 

 of the hiiman spirit, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter." Precisely 

 so, we might answer ; the comparison has a more complete applica- 

 bility than even the eloquent aiithor imagined ; the one thing has the 

 same kind of truth as the other ; each is a beautiful myth, and it is 

 hard to see why he who seriously accepted the former should not ac- 

 cept the latter also. For one man, we have taken all the poetry out 

 of life when we have made him see that it is not his God, rolling on 

 mighty chariots through the sky, and hurling thunder-bolts at the 

 demons, but mere prosaic meteorological forces, that cause the thun- 

 der-storm ; we have perhaps robbed another of both religion and self- 



