Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/158

 146 H. STEINTHAL'S ABRISS DER SPRACHWISSENSCHAFT, i. historical development is an essential characteristic of the mental. There are tribes and times and relations which remain outside of the historical movement. Philology only embraces historical life. What lies beyond is the province of the Science of Language. Now, where language oversteps the bounds of philology, it enters the province of psychological ethnology. There is undoubtedly a mental life which is not historical. Tribes without culture and history have language and religion, and the life they lead is one ordered by mental considerations, as marriage, work, law, autho- rity, &c. They are therefore neither mere objects of natural science nor objects of philology ; hence, by the side of history we have ethnological psychology. And as the investigation of ex- ternal nature has its rational basis in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and physiology, so history (philology) and ethnology find the means for understanding the causal, regular relations of mental facts in psychology. As regards the relation of grammar to logic, it has been sup- posed, from Plato to the present time, that language is identical with intelligence, i.e., that speech-sounds are nothing more than the products of intellectuality itself, intuitions, concepts, thoughts. The investigation of the grammatical categories, begun by Plato, was continued by Aristotle and brought so far to an end by the Stoics that they at least found out all the categories. But not only were these used by the Greek philosophers in the service and to the advantage of dialectic and logic ; they were in fact to them dialectical or logical essences. Nor did the Schoolmen or even the men of Port-Eoyal get beyond this ; accordingly the gram- matical forms of language were looked upon as the embodiment of the general forms of logical thought and of general intuition. To such length has this doctrine of the unity of thought and speech been carried that, as might have been expected, K. F. Becker's view of the human logos giving itself a sensuous reality in language, just as the idea of life realises itself in the organic body, has been opposed by Schleicher and Bleek, according to the materialistic tendency of our day, with the view that the content of language, the mind or thought, is the function of the sound. But, what is the real relation of grammar to logic ? Is the position upon w 7 hich the derivation of grammar from logic rests a tenable one ? Here, again, we cannot but agree with Prof. Steinthal. With characteristic skill he argues that logic is a purely critical and formal science, which, as mathematics, makes use of abstract algebraic formulae for the statement of its propositions, whereas grammar is an historical science which deals with definite, real forms. Were the single parts of speech an embodiment of the logical categories, it would necessarily follow that we should find them equally developed in all languages. Such, however, is not the case. And if human speech were nothing more than embodied logic, and grammar