PROGRESS DURING LAST CENTURY 27 



well as to the traditional point of view of the philosophical grammar 

 of the Greeks, the subordination of grammar to logic, the hopeless 

 etymologies and form analyses culminating in the phantasies of Hem- 

 sterhuis and Valckenaeer, the lack of any guiding clue for the explana- 

 tion of how sound or form came to be what it is, and the curse of arid 

 sterility that rested upon every effort. All the ways were blind and all 

 the toil was vain. On the hither side, however, there is everywhere 

 a new leaven working in the mass. What was that leaven? To identify 

 if possible what it was has been the purpose of this review. I think 

 we have seen it was not the influence of the natural sciences, certainly 

 not directly; wherever that influence found direct application, it led 

 astray. It was not in itself the discovery of the comparative method, 

 for that proved but an auxiliary to a greater. If a founder must be 

 proclaimed for the modern science of language, that founder was 

 clearly Jakob Grimm, not Franz Bopp. 



The leaven in question was comprised of two elements. One was 

 found in the establishment of historical grammar, for this furnished 

 the long-needed clue; the other was found in the discovery of Hindoo 

 grammar, for this disclosed the fruitful attitude for linguistic ob- 

 servation. Historical grammar furnished the missing clue, because 

 it represented the form of language as created what it is, not by the 

 thought struggling for expression, but by historical conditions ante- 

 cedent to it. Hindoo grammar furnished the method of observation 

 because by its fundamental instinct it asked the question how in a 

 given language does one say a given thing, rather than why does 

 a given form embody the thought it does. 



The germinal forces which have made this century of the science 

 of language are not without their parallels in the century of American 

 national life we are met to celebrate to-day. Jakob Grimm was of the 

 school of the Romanticists, and he gained his conception of historical 

 grammar from his ardor to derive the institutions of his people direct 

 from their sources in the national life. The acquaintance of European 

 scholars with the grammar of India arose from a counter-spirit in the 

 world of the day whereby an expansion of intercourse and rule was 

 bringing to the wine-press fruits plucked in many various fields of 

 national life. Thus did the spirit of national particularism reconcile 

 itself, in the experience of a science, with the fruits of national expan- 

 sion. After like sort has the American nation in its development for 

 the century following upon the typical event of 1803 combined the 

 widening of peaceful interchange and common standards of order 

 with strong insistence upon the right of separate communities in things 

 pertaining separately to them to determine their lives out of the 

 sources thereof. Therein has the nation given fulfillment to the 

 prophetic hope of its great democratic imperialist Thomas Jefferson, 1 

 1 Letter to Mr. Madison, 1809. 



