Page:On the Stratification of Language - Muller - 1868.djvu/10

5 is brought home to us when we see how the Société de Linguistique lately founded at Paris, and including the names of the most distinguished scholars of France, declares in one of the first paragraphs of its statutes that "it will receive no communication concerning the origin of language or the formation of a universal language," the very subjects which, in the time of Herakleitos and Plato rendered linguistic studies worthy of the consideration of a philosopher.

It may be that the world was too young in the days of Plato, and that the means of communication were wanting to enable the ancient philosopher to see very far beyond the narrow horizon of Greece. With us it is different. The world has grown older, and has left to us in the annals of its various literatures the monuments of growing and decaying speech. The world has grown larger, and we have before us, not only the relics of ancient civilisation in Asia, Africa, and America, but living languages in such number and variety that we draw back almost aghast at the mere list of their names. The world has grown wiser too, and where Plato could only see imperfections, the failures of the founders of human speech, we see, as everywhere else in human life, a natural progress from the imperfect towards the perfect, unceasing attempts at realising the ideal, and the frequent triumphs of the human mind over the inevitable difficulties of this earthly condition,—difficulties, not of his own making, but prepared for him, and not without a purpose, as toils and tasks, by a higher Power and by the highest Wisdom.

Let us look then abroad and behold the materials which the student of language has now to face. Beginning with the language of these Western Isles,