156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to be too utterly condemnecl. And, as I have said above, I am ready 

 to be strictly judged by the truth or error of my criticisms. 



The plainest of plain speaking is far less really injurious than mis- 

 representation and detraction under the mask of extreme courtesy. 

 Surely, so much wholesale depreciation and imputation of unworthy 

 motives can hardly be found in all my writings as Mr. Miiller raises 

 against me in this one article. I should not venture to accuse any one 

 of being actuated in his literary work only by personal vanity and a 

 lust for notoriety, except after the summing up of a long array of par- 

 ticulars and deductions I think not, even then. If I declared any one 

 to be noisy about a subject in inverse proportion to his examination 

 of it, I should at least want to refer to examples that illustrated the 

 peculiarity. Does my critic put these accusations forward as his ex- 

 ample of how a controversy should be conducted in a gentlemanly 

 manner ? If I stated that any one " bitterly complained " that he was 

 not answered by those he criticised, I should feel called upon to give 

 chapter and verse for it ; and neither Mr. Miiller, nor any one else, 

 can point out any such complaints on my part. I regard this as one 

 more evidence of Mr. Miiller's careless and insufficient examination of 

 my writings. He got his wrong impression, I imagine, from an impu- 

 tation which Steinthal brings against me. I did blame Steinthal for 

 undertaking, in his chapter on the origin of language, to report and 

 refute the opposing views only of the last-century theorists, as if there 

 were no more recent opinions on the subject which had a claim to be 

 considered; and he was pleased to interpret it as a reproach to him 

 for not mentioning myself ! I should think far worse of him and of 

 Mr. Miiller than I do, if I supposed them incapable, in their cooler mo- 

 ments, of understanding that a man may, without any improperly 

 selfish feeling, be astonished, and even indignant, to see the views, 

 which he holds in company with a great many others, quietly ignored ; 

 or that he may hold them so heartily that he shall feel called upon 

 to stand forth in their defense whenever they are unjustifiably passed 

 over, or are assailed with what seem to him unsound arguments. 



My article upon Steinthal was so difierent from what Mr. Muller 

 appears to assume it to be, when speaking of that scholar as having 

 "retaliated with the same missiles with w^hich he had been assailed," 

 that I can only infer that it, too, is unknown to him except by false 

 report. In a chapter of his recent work, "Abriss der Sprachwissen- 

 schaft," Prof. Steinthal seemed to me to have piled together about as 

 many paradoxes as could well be gotten into so small a space, push- 

 ing the psychological method to an extreme which was almost its own 

 refutation. To pick out a few points: for a definition of language, he 

 gives us " it is what it is becoming " he declares the divine origin 

 of language inadmissible, because no science, save the philosophy of 

 religion, has any right to take account of God ; he holds primeval 

 man in distinction from the philosophers of the last century, who 



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