I04 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



more apparent. Obscured as the truth may have be- 

 come for a time through the fogs of Realism [!], dis- 



thought. Delbriick's essays on comparative syntax show what can 

 be done in this direction. For practical purposes, for teaching the 

 art of reasoning, formal logic will always retain its separate exist- 

 ence ; but the best study of the real laws of thought will be here- 

 after the study of the real laws of language. If it was really so 

 audacious to make the identity of language and reason the founda- 

 tion of a new system of philosophy, may I make the modest request 

 that some philosopher by profession should give us a definition of 

 what language is without reason, or reason without language? 



" F. M. M." 



{Nature^ February i6, 1888.] 



Reason and Language. 



*' Prof. Max Muller has been so kind as to favour the readers 

 of Nature with his views on language and reason, concisely ex- 

 pressed in a letter to an American friend. As one grateful reader, 

 1 must desire both to, express my thanks, and also to beg for yet a 

 little further information with respect to matters of such extreme 

 interest. 



" The Professor says, ' Because we reason — that is, because we 

 reckon, because we add and subtract— therefore we say that we 

 have reason.' Now, in the first place, I should be glad to be told 

 why ' reason ' is to be regarded as identical with such ' reckon- 

 ing ' ? I have been taught to distinguish two forms of intellectual 

 activity : (i) Acts of intuition, by which we directly apprehend 

 certain truths, such as, e.g.^ our own activity, or that A is A ; and 

 (2) Acts of inference, by which we indirectly apprehend others, 

 with the aid of the idea ' therefore ' — evolving into explicit recog- 

 nition a truth previously implicit and latent in premisses. The 

 processes of addition and subtraction alone, seem to me to consti- 

 tute a very incomplete representation of our mental processes. 



" The Professor also identifies language and reason, denying to 

 either a separate existence. As to ' reason,' he says, ^ We have 

 only to look into the workshop of language in order to see that 

 there is nothing substantial corresponding to this substantive, and 

 that neither the heart nor the brain, neither the breath nor the 

 spirit, of man discloses its original whereabouts.' The expression 

 ' whereabouts ' would seem to attribute to those who assert the ex- 

 istence of 'reason,' the idea that it possesses the attribute of 



