152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



respect when we sliow him the earth gradually cooling and condens- 

 ing, clothing itself with vegetable and animal life ; and man himself 

 creeping np through the ages from a condition of savagery, gradually 

 finding out his powers by their exercise, laying up and shaping insti- 

 tutions language among the rest for traditional transmission, the 

 knowledge and wisdom which are one day to raise him to the head- 

 ship of Nature. We are all loath to put a truth regarded as humble 

 in place of a brilliant error ; and slow to realize that, when the false 

 coloring is taken oflf, what remains is worth more to us than what we 

 thought we had before. 



There is, it is believed, a wide-spread impression that views of lan- 

 guage of the kind advocated in this paper are " superficial ; " and that 

 only those treat the subject ijrofouudly who lift it up either into the 

 sphere of psychology, or on to the platform of the physical sciences, 

 making linguistic study a department of the study of mind, or else of 

 that of human organs and their functions. But that is a matter to be 

 settled along with the truth or error of the views in question. If they 

 are true, then those are superficial Avho, in a mistaken endeavor after 

 profundity, abandon the true basis and method of their science. There 

 are infinite mysteries involved in every act of language-making and 

 language-using, with which the linguistic scholar, as such, has to do 

 only secondarily, or not at all. To recur to our former example : the 

 psychological processes whereby the rude conception of a hooh is 

 formed, partly under instruction, and gradually developed into full- 

 ness and accuracy, are one subject of study ; the physiological pro- 

 cesses whereby one hears the word hook^ and then is able to reproduce 

 it, by an imitative eftbrt of his own organs, is another ; the history of 

 the civilization which has given birth to such product, and of the arts 

 by which it is manufactured, is yet another ; and there are more, clus- 

 tering about the same word : with the great problems of existence and 

 human destiny looming up in the backgi-ound, as they do behind every 

 thing that we attempt to investigate. But no one of these is the stand- 

 ing-point of the linguist ; to him, the central fact is that there exists 

 one audible sign hooh^ representing in a certain community a certain 

 conception, for all purposes of communication ; used by hosts of people 

 who know nothing about the history of books, nor about the operations 

 of the organs of speech, nor about the analysis of mental processes 

 and answering their purposes as well as if they knew it all. The sign 

 had a certain definite time, locality, and occasion of origin ; it was 

 applied to its purpose for reasons which lay neither in men's mental 

 nor in their physical nature, but in their historical conditions ; it has 

 passed through certain changes of form and office on its way to our 

 use. Here, now, is where the linguist takes his stand ; from this 

 point of view every thing falls into its true position of relative promi- 

 nence. Language is a body, not of thoughts, nor of physical acts, but 

 of physically apprehensible signs for thought ; and the student of Ian- 



