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Rh of so many new branches of knowledge, both historical and physical, by the abandonment of shackling prejudices, the freedom of inquiry, the recognition of the dignity of all knowledge, the wide-reaching assemblage of facts and their objective comparison, and the resulting constant improvement of method. Literary philology has had its full share of advantage from this movement; but linguistic philology has been actually created by it out of the crude observations and wild deductions of earlier times, as truly as chemistry out of alchemy, or geology out of diluvianism. It is unnecessary here to follow out the details of the development; but we may well refer to the decisive influence of one discovery, the decisive action of one scholar. It was the discovery of the special relationship of the Aryan or Indo-European languages, depending in great measure upon the introduction of the Sanskrit as a term in their comparison, and demonstrated and worked out by the German scholar Bopp, that founded the science of linguistic philology. While there is abundant room for further improvement, it yet appears that the grand features of philologic study, in all its departments, are now so distinctly drawn that no revolution of its methods, but only their modification in minor respects, is henceforth probable. How and for what purposes to investigate the literature of any people (philology in the more proper sense), combining the knowledge thus obtained with that derived from other sources; how to study and set forth the material and structure and combinations of a language (grammar), or of a body of related languages (comparative grammar); how to co-ordinate and interpret the general phenomena of language, as variously illustrated in the infinitely varying facts of different tongues, so as to exhibit its nature as a factor in human history and its methods of life and growth (linguistic science)—these are what philology teaches.

The study of language is a division of the general science of anthropology (q.v.), and is akin to all the rest in respect to its objects and its methods. Man as we now see him is a twofold being: in part the child of nature, as to his capacities and desires, his endowments of mind and body; in part the creature of education, by training in the knowledge, the arts, the social conduct, of which his predecessors have gained possession. And the problem of anthropology is this: how natural man has become cultivated man; how a being thus endowed by nature should have begun and carried on the processes of acquisition which have brought him to his present state. The results of his predecessors' labours are not transmuted for his benefit into natural instincts, in language or in anything else. The child of the most civilized race, if isolated and left wholly to his own resources, aided by neither the example nor the instruction of his fellows, would no more speak the speech of his ancestors than he would build their houses, fashion their clothes, practise any of their arts, inherit their knowledge or wealth. In fact, he would possess no language, no arts, no wealth, but would have to go to work to acquire them, by the same processes which began to win them for the first human beings. One advantage he would doubtless enjoy: the descendant of a cultivated race has an enhanced aptitude for the reception of cultivation; he is more cultivable; and this is an element that has to be allowed for in comparing present conditions with past, as influencing the rate of progress, but nothing more. In all other respects it is man with the endowments which we now find him possessed of, but destitute of the gradually accumulated results of the exercise of his faculties, whose progress we have to explain. And it is, as a matter of necessity, by studying recent observable modes of acquisition, and transferring them, with due allowance for different circumstances, to the more primitive periods, that the question of first acquisition or origin is to be solved, for language as for tools, for arts, for family and social organization, and the rest. There is just as much and just as little reason for assuming miraculous interference and aid in one of these departments as in another. If men have been left to themselves to make and improve instruments, to form and perfect modes of social organization, by implanted powers directed by natural desires, and under the pressure of circumstances, then also to make and change the signs that constitute their speech. All expressions, as all instruments, are at present, and have been through the known past, made and changed by the men who use them; the same will have been the case in the unknown or prehistoric past. And we command now enough of the history of language, with the processes of its life and growth, to determine with confidence its mode of origin—within certain limits, as will appear below.

It is beyond all question, in the first place, that the desire of communication was the only force directly impelling men to the production of language. Man's sociality, his disposition to band together with his fellows, for lower and for higher purposes, for mutual help and for sympathy, is one of his most fundamental characteristics. To understand those about one and to be understood by them is now, and must have been from the very beginning, a prime necessity of human existence; we cannot conceive of man, even in his most undeveloped state, as without the recognition of it. Communication is still the universally recognized office of speech, and to the immense majority of speakers the only one; the common man knows no other, and can only with difficulty and imperfectly be brought to see that there is any other; of the added distinctness and reach of mental action which the possession of such an instrumentality gives him he is wholly unconscious: and it is obvious that what the comparatively cultivated being of to-day can hardly be made to realize can never have acted upon the first men as a motive to action. It may perhaps be made a question which of the two uses of speech, communication or the facilitation of thought is the higher; there can be no question, at any rate, that the former is the broader and the more fundamental. That the kind and degree of thinking which we do nowadays would be impossible without language-signs is true enough; but so also it would be impossible without written signs. That there was a time when men had to do what mental work they could without the help of writing, as an art not yet devised, we have no difficulty in realizing, because the art is of comparatively recent device, and there are still communities enough that are working without it; it is much harder to realize that there was a time when speaking also was an art not yet attained, and that men had to carry on their rude and rudimentary thinking without it. Writing too was devised for conscious purposes of communication only; its esoteric uses, like those of speech, were at first unsuspected, and incapable of acting as an inducement; they were not noticed until made experience of, and then only by those who look beneath the surface of things. There is no analogy closer and more instructive than this between speech and writing. But analogies are abundant elsewhere in the history of human development. Everywhere it is the lower and more obvious inducements that are first effective, and that lead gradually to the possession of what serves and stimulates higher wants. All the arts and industries have grown out of men's effort to get enough to eat and protection against cold and heat—just as language, with all its uses, out of men's effort to communicate with their fellows. As a solitary man now would never form even the beginnings of speech, as one separated from society unlearns his speech by disuse and becomes virtually dumb, so early man, with all his powers, would never have acquired speech, save as to those powers was added sociality with the needs it brought. We might conceive of a solitary man as housing and dressing himself, devising rude tools, and thus lifting himself a step from wildness toward cultivation; but we cannot conceive of him as ever learning to talk. Recognition of the impulse to communication as the efficient cause of language-making is an element of primary importance in the theory of the origin of language. No one who either leaves it out of account or denies it will, however ingenious and entertaining his speculations, cast any real light on the earliest history of speech. To inquire under what peculiar circumstances, in connexion with what mode of individual or combined action, a first outburst of oral expression may have taken place, is, on