RELATIONS OF GERMAN LINGUISTICS 279 



cannot, accordingly, attribute to mere chance the circumstance that 

 the two most important principles in modern linguistics as opposed 

 to the older science were first emphatically announced by those 

 scholars who were investigating living dialects. I refer in the first 

 place to the doctrine of the regularity of sound-correspondence and 

 sound-development in that portion of language the transmission of 

 which is purely mnemonic, in other words, to what has been called 

 the choice of terms is not a particularly happy one the doctrine 

 of the absolute constancy of sound-laws. In the second place I refer 

 to the doctrine of the complete equality of those new linguistic 

 forms which are created in the absence of purely mnemonic trans- 

 mission by means of definite psychological processes of assimilation, 

 that is, what we call formation by analogy, or through association, 

 or explain as form-transferences, leveling, etc. Nor should we forget 

 that the demand for a strictly phonetic treatment of problems of 

 sound-development was first made and carried out in practice by the 

 Germanists. Comparative linguistics is indebted especially to the 

 Germanic and Slavic scholar Karl Verner for his important incor- 

 poration of the doctrine of accent in the history of sound-develop- 

 ment. And finally, comparative language-study is indebted to Ger- 

 manic linguistics for the one systematic treatise on the methodology 

 of language-investigation which is recognized as the complete expres- 

 sion of the ideas now generally accepted. I speak of the methods 

 proclaimed by Hermann Paul in his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 

 and it is these methods which, unconscious as the act may be, in 

 practice helped to regulate the research even of those language-inves- 

 tigators, who, opposed to the theoretical discussion of general prin- 

 ciples, prefer to base their methods, as it were, on the foundation of 

 individual instances. 



From all that has been said, we see that the history of comparative 

 and Germanic linguistics furnishes an excellent illustration of a 

 mutual borrowing of methods and ideas, and the more active this 

 interchange became, the more bountiful was the harvest of the joint 

 intellectual labors. 



If we next turn our attention to the relation between Germanic 

 linguistics and critical German philology, we shall find that the con- 

 ditions are very similar, except that the mutual diffusion of the two 

 sets of ideas has not been so complete and productive as in the case 

 of German linguistics and comparative linguistics. This circumstance 

 is readily explained on general as well as on historical grounds. 



The representatives of Germanic and of comparative linguistics 

 are inherently brought into more intimate contact by the common 

 tendency and the common goal of their labors: the only difference 

 lies in the breadth, the number, and the peculiar character of the 

 subjects treated. Both strive to throw light on the history of Ian- 



