Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/408

386 human family, until conscientious study should show the hope to be groundless. The question was one of fact, of what existing and accessible testimony was competent to prove; it was to be settled only by investigation. But I claim that investigation, limited as its range and penetration have hitherto confessedly been, has already put us in condition to declare the evidence incompetent, and the thesis incapable of satisfactory proof.

In order to make clear the justice of this claim, it will be necessary to recapitulate some of the results we have won in our previous discussions.

The processes of change which are constantly at work in language, altering both the form and the meaning of its constituent words, were set forth and illustrated with sufficient fulness in our early lectures. The degree of alteration which they may effect, and the variety of their results, are practically unlimited. As they can bring utter apparent diversity out of original identity, so they can impress an apparent similarity upon original diversity, Hence the difficulties which beset etymological science, its abuse by the unlearned and incautious, the occasional seeming arbitrariness and violence of its procedures, even in skilled and scientific hands. Voltaire's witty saying, that in etymologizing the vowels are of no account at all, and the consonants of very little—to which he might have added, that the meaning is equally a matter of indifference—was true enough as regarded the science of his day; but we must also confess that in a certain way it possesses an applicability to that of our own times. Even modern etymology acknowledges that two words can hardly be so different, in form or in meaning, or in both form and meaning, that there is not a possibility of their being proved descendants of the same word: any sound, any shade of idea, may pass by successive changes into any other. The difference between the old hap-hazard style of etymologizing and the modern scientific method lies in this: that the latter, while allowing everything to be theoretically possible, accepts nothing as actual which is not proved such by sufficient evidence; it brings to bear upon each individual case a wide circle of related facts; it imposes upon the student the