Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/405

X.] creation was distant but six or seven thousand years from our day, and we have hoped to be able to read the record of so brief a career, even back to its beginning; but science is accumulating at present so rapidly, and from so many quarters, proofs that the time must be greatly lengthened out, and even perhaps many times multiplied, that this new modification of a prevailing view seems likely soon to win as general an acceptance as the other has already done. And the different historical sciences are seeing more and more clearly their weakness in the presence of so obscure a problem, and confessing their inability to give categorical answers to many of the questions it involves.

Such a confession on the part of linguistic science, with reference to one point of the most fundamental interest and importance in human history, it next devolves upon us to make.

A second question, namely, which cannot but press itself upon our attention, in connection with the survey we have taken of the grand divisions of human speech, is this: What is the scope and bearing of the division into families? Does it separate the human race into so many different branches, which must have been independent from the very beginning? Does linguistic science both fail to find any bond of connection between the families and see that no such bond exists? Or, in short, what has the study of language to say respecting the unity of the human race?

This is an inquiry to which, as I believe, the truths we have established respecting the character and history of language will enable us readily to find a reply. But that reply will be only a negative one. Linguistic science is not now, and cannot hope ever to be, in condition to give an authoritative opinion respecting the unity or variety of our species. This is not an acknowledgment which any student of language likes to make; it may seem to savour, too, of precipitation on the part of him who makes it; of a lack of faith in the future of his science—a science which, although it has already accomplished so much, has yet confessedly only begun its career. That those linguistic scholars—for such there are—are over-hasty and over-credulous who