Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/71

II.] or in his capacities, that they can affect speech: the immediate agent is the will of men, working under the joint direction of impelling wants, governing circumstances, and established habits. What makes a physical science is that it deals with material substances, acted on by material forces. In the formation of geological strata, the ultimate cognizable agencies are the laws of matter; the substance affected is tangible matter; the product is inert, insensible matter. In zoölogy, again, as in anatomy and physiology, the investigator has to do with material structures, whose formation is dependent on laws implanted in matter itself, and beyond the reach of voluntary action. In language, on the other hand, the ultimate agencies are intelligent beings, the material is—not articulated sound alone, which might, in a certain sense, be regarded as a physical product, but—sound made significant of thought; and the product is of the same kind, a system of sounds with intelligible content, expressive of the slowly accumulated wealth of the human race in wisdom, experience, comprehension of itself and of the rest of creation. What but an analogical resemblance can there possibly be between the studies of things so essentially dissimilar?

There is a school of modern philosophers who are trying to materialize all science, to eliminate the distinction between the physical and the intellectual and moral, to declare for naught the free action of the human will, and to resolve the whole story of the fates of mankind into a series of purely material effects, produced by assignable physical causes, and explainable in the past, or determinable for the future, by an intimate knowledge of those causes, by a recognition of the action of compulsory motives upon the passively obedient nature of man. With such, language will naturally pass, along with the rest, for a physical product, and its study for a physical science; and, however we may dissent from their general classification, we cannot quarrel with its application in this particular instance. But by those who still hold to the grand distinction of moral and physical sciences, who think the action of intelligent beings, weighing motives and selecting courses of conduct, seeing ends and seeking means