Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/449

XI.] beginnings of speech. This is styled the interjectional theory. A recent writer of great popularity, Professor Max Müller, entirely rejects both these, stigmatizing them as "the bow-wow theory" and "the pooh-pooh theory" respectively, and adopts from a German authority (Professor Heyse, of Berlin) a third, which is, abridged from his own statement, as follows: "There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring.... It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works"—and so on. Man possessed an instinctive "faculty for giving articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind." But "this creative faculty, which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled," etc. This, in its turn, has been very appositely termed "the ding-dong theory."

What value we have to attribute to these various theories is readily to be inferred from the principles already laid down and established. The third may be very summarily dismissed, as wholly unfounded and worthless. It is, indeed, not a little surprising to see a man of the acknowledged ability and great learning of Professor Müller, after depreciating and casting ridicule upon the views of others respecting so important a point, put forward one of his own as a mere authoritative dictum, resting it upon nothing better than a fanciful comparison which lacks every element of a true analogy, not venturing to attempt its support by a single argument, instance, or illustration, drawn from either the nature or the history of language. He tells us, virtually, that man was at the outset a kind of bell; and that, when an idea struck him, he naturally rang. We wonder it was not added that, like other bells, he naturally rang by the tongue: this would have been quite in keeping with the rest, and would merely have set more plainly before our minds the real character of the whole theory. It fully implies the doctrine, which we have shown above to be erroneous, that