NATURE 



241 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 1902. 



PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE. 

 Vol ker psychologic. By W. Wundt. Erster Band. Die 

 Sprache. 2 Parts. Pp. .\v + 627 and x + 644. (Leipzig; 

 Engelmann, 1900.) Prices 14^. net and 15^. net. 



PROF. WUNDT'S two bulky volumes form the tlrst 

 part of a long-expected treatise on race-psychology. 

 The distinguished author has not the gift of concise 

 utterance, and one almost shudders to think of the 

 thousands of pages to which the work promises to e.xtend 

 by the time the second and third parts, dealing with 

 myth and custom, have been completed. It is, perhaps, 

 unfortunate that Prof Wundt should have determined to 

 treat his two remaining topics in the order just indicated ; 

 if there is anything at all in the results and methods of 

 modern anthropology, it is from customs of the most 

 practical kind, in fact from magic, that mythology on the 

 whole derives its existence ; hence one would think that 

 custom rather than myth is entitled to the central posi- 

 tion in a systematic " Volkerpsychologie." Can it be 

 that Prof. Wundt's arrangement of his material has been 

 unconsciously influenced by the now obsolete or obso- 

 lescent view of mythology as a "disease of language"? 

 In any case, the intimate connection of the myths of 

 one age with the magic of its predecessors seems to 

 diminish the value of the author's psychological scheme 

 by which custom is made to correspond to the voli- 

 tional, myth to the emotional, aspect of racial life (vol. i. 

 P- 27)- 



No one but a specialist in comparative philology is 

 really competent to deal minutely with Prof Wundt's 

 elaborate investigations into the psychology of language. 

 In the present notice, it is impossible to do more than 

 supply a very brief summary of the topics treated of, and 

 a briefer indication of a few of the author's leading results. 

 He begins with a detailed and careful description of the 

 general characteristics of emotion and its expression, 

 which leads up to a study of the simplest and crudest 

 form of language, the expression of emotion by a code of 

 gestures. The account of gesture-language, which is 

 based upon the artificial systems of signs in use among 

 the dumb, as well as of the wide-spread gesture-language 

 of the North-American Indians and of the Neapolitan 

 populace, is full and interesting, especially in dealing 

 with the question of the existence of grammatical form 

 in gesture-speech. That gesture-language is not form- 

 less, as is often asserted, is well shown by reference to 

 the fixed order in which the gesticulator expresses the 

 constituent parts of a proposition. Prof Wundt, by the 

 way, appears not to be acquainted with the singularly 

 full and excellent study of the gesture-language of Aus- 

 tralian tribes contained in Mr. W. E. Roth's "Aborigines 

 of North-West-Central Queensland." Proceeding in his 

 third chapter to deal with articulate sounds, the author 

 has much that is useful, if little that is new, to say about 

 theditiferences between the song of birds and the song of 

 men, and between the song and the speech of men. 

 Incidentally he derives human song from vocal accom- 

 paniments of the rhythmical movements of work, and 

 therefore regards its connection with religious cultus as 

 NO. 1681, VOL. 65 J 



secondary (i.,p. 265). It might, perhaps, be objected that 

 the beginnings of both rhythmical movement and its 

 vocal accompaniments are to be found in the corroborees 

 of the Australians, among whom systematic work hardly 

 exists, and that here, at all events, the rhythmical move- 

 ments appear to arise directly out of the magical repre- 

 sentations of incipient cultus. Prof Wundt is on surer 

 ground when he goes on to deal with the origin of ono- 

 matopoeia. It.is impossible to resist the arguments by 

 which he shows that direct and intentional imitation of 

 natural sounds can have little to do with the origin of 

 names, and that the real process is one of impulsive and 

 unintentional imitation by the organs of articulation of 

 striking forms of physical movement. 



The fourth chapter deals with the psychological causes 

 of sound-change. Prof Wundt finds the principal source 

 of regular and continuous changes affecting whole classes 

 of sounds, apart from such incidental influences as those 

 of climate or racial mixture, in the growing tendency of 

 civilised men to speed of thought and utterance. To 

 this psychical source he traces those changes in articula- 

 tion which have often been ascribed to the imaginary 

 desire for ease of utterance ; a desire which, in the first 

 place, is never consciously operative, and, in the second, 

 could not exist unless advance in culture brought with it 

 tendencies which make an originally easy articulation 

 increasingly difficult. Such tendencies we have in the 

 increasing speed of civilised speech, with its effects upon 

 pitch and accent. Prof Wundt uses his theory chiefly 

 to explain the familiar changes formulated in " Grimm's 

 law." On the value of the explanation no doubt the 

 philologists will claim to be heard, but it has at any rate 

 the merit of assigning a psychological causa ziera for 

 facts which have often been either left entirely unac- 

 counted for or put down to a purely imaginary "desire 

 for ease." In the case of the sound-changes produced 

 by assimilation, a second psychological principle is in- 

 voked, viz. the tendency of thought to outrun speech. 

 The assimilation takes place because the second sound 

 is already " in consciousness " before the first has been 

 duly articulated. The same principle in combination 

 with the laws of association is in the succeeding chapter 

 employed to explain the various forms of paralalia. 

 Curiously enough, the author does not treat of the im- 

 portant vowel-changes whichoccur in the life of a language, 

 such as those by which diphthongs have been substituted 

 in modern spoken English for so many of the original 

 vowels. In the chapter on word-formation the sections 

 dealing directly with the nominal subject are rather of 

 grammatical and philological than of strictly psycho- 

 logical interest. The earlier parts of the chapter, on the 

 other hand, which treats of the cerebral speech-centres, 

 the phenomena of aphasia and the perception of short 

 words, are of great psychological interest, but so loosely 

 connected with the ostensible subject of the chapter that 

 they would be more in place in a separate work on 

 experimental and physiological psychology. 



Prof Wundt's second volume is at once far the more 

 important half of his book and the more difficult to 

 describe with justice in a brief notice. He has set him- 

 self the gigantic task of digesting the facts contained in 

 such works as F. Miiller's monumental " Grundriss der 

 Sprachwissenschaft '' into a systematic form, and eliciting 



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