Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/24

2 creation, has in all ages strongly impressed the reflecting and philosophical, and impelled them to speculate respecting its nature, its history, and its origin. Researches into the genealogies and affinities of words have exercised the ingenuity of numberless generations of acute and inquiring minds. Moreover, the historical results attainable by such researches, the light cast by them upon the derivation and connection of races, have never wholly escaped recognition. The general objects and methods of linguistic study are far too obviously suggested, and of far too engaging interest, not to have won a certain share of regard, from the time when men first began to inquire into things and their causes.

Nothing, however, that deserved the name of a science was the result of these older investigations in the domain of language, any more than in those of chemistry and astronomy. Hasty generalizations, baseless hypotheses, inconclusive deductions, were as rife in the former department of study as they were in the two latter while yet passing through the preliminary stages of alchemy and astrology. The difficulty was in all the cases nearly the same; it lay in the paucity of observed facts, and in the faulty position which the inquirer assumed toward them. There had been no sufficient collection and classification of phenomena, to serve as the basis of inductive reasoning, for the establishment of sound methods and the elaboration of true results; and along with this, and partly in consequence of it, prejudice and assumption had usurped the place of induction. National self-sufficiency and inherited prepossession long helped to narrow the limits imposed by unfavourable circumstances upon the extent of linguistic knowledge, restraining that liberality of inquiry which is indispensable to the growth of a science. Ancient peoples were accustomed to think each its own dialect the only true language; other tongues were to them mere barbarous jargons, unworthy of study. Modern nations, in virtue of their history, their higher culture, and their Christianity, have been much less uncharitably exclusive; and their reverence for the two classical idioms, the Greek and Latin, and for the language of the Old Testament, the