Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/29

I.] and the growth of knowledge, and the history of mind and of knowledge as reflected in it.

The exceeding interest of this whole class of inquiries is at first sight manifest, but it grows to our sense in measure as we reflect upon it. We are apt to take language, like so many other things of familiar daily use, as a thing of course, without appreciating the mystery and deep significance which belong to it. We clothe our thoughts without effort or reflection in words and phrases, having regard only to the practical ends of expression and communication, and the power conferred by them: we do not think of the long history, of changes of form and changes of signification, through which each individual vocable employed by us has passed, of the labour which its origination and gradual elaboration has cost to successive generations of thinkers and speakers. We do not meditate upon the importance to us of this capacity of expression, nor consider how entirely the history of man would have been changed had he possessed no such faculty; how little of that enlightenment which we boast would have been ours, if our ancestors had left no spoken memorial of their mental and spiritual acquisitions; how, in short, without speech, the noble endowments of our nature would have remained almost wholly undeveloped and useless. It is, indeed, neither to be expected nor desired that our minds should be continually penetrated with a realizing sense of the marvellous character of language; but we should be inexcusable if we neglected altogether to submit it to such an examination as should make us understand its nature and history, and should prepare our minds to grasp by reflection its whole significance.

These and such as these are the objects most directly aimed at by the scientific student of language. But there are others, of a different character, to which his investigations conduct him hardly less immediately, and which constitute an essential part of the interest which invests them. It is a truth now almost as familiar as, fifty years ago, it would have been deemed new and startling, that language furnishes the principal means of fruitful inquiry into the