Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/163

Rh opposed to what it implies; I shall be ready to abandon it when its impropriety is proved by fact and argument.

The great obstacle, as it seems to me, to the prevalence of consistent and correct views concerning language, is the ambiguity of the word language itself. It means two entirely different things: a capacity, and a product of the exercise of that capacity. Language in the former sense—that is, a power to express thought by means of signs, and to develop this instrumentality into a great and intricate and wonderful institution, having the most important bearings on the progress of the individual and of the race—is a gift, a quality, a part of human nature, and all that; but this power does not give a single human being his language: it does not issue in any thing except through an historical development, by a gradual accumulation of the results of its exercise. It makes every human being capable of learning and using any language. It implies also that every human being is capable of producing a language—only let circumstances be sufficiently favorable, and give him time enough: say a few hundreds or thousands of ordinary lives. But the English language, for instance, or any other, is not such a capacity: it is the concrete accumulated product of the efforts at expression of the English-speaking or other community and its ancestors, continued through thousands of years. Each such product has its history: that is to say, it has been wrought only in time, and under the infinitely varied modifying influence of historical circumstances; each is different, therefore, from all the rest: a thousand different products, of every degree of diversity, but each one answering the same general purpose, and capable of being acquired and wielded by every normally constituted human being, of whatever race.

An additional obstacle, of another character, is the (of course, unconscious) craving of many people after lofty and poetic general views, views of which the very conception shall seem to exalt them. The doctrines set forth above are in many respects iconoclastic, and therefore repellent to them. They want to regard man's acquisitions as direct gifts to him from his Maker, or as spontaneous outbursts of his noble nature. M. Renan says ("Origine du Langage," chap, iii.), "Languages have come forth completely formed from the very mould of the human spirit, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter." Precisely so, we might answer; the comparison has a more complete applicability than even the eloquent author imagined; the one thing has the same kind of truth as the other; each is a beautiful myth, and it is hard to see why he who seriously accepted the former should not accept the latter also. For one man, we have taken all the poetry out of life when we have made him see that it is not his God, rolling on mighty chariots through the sky, and hurling thunder-bolts at the demons, but mere prosaic meteorological forces, that cause the thunder-storm; we have perhaps robbed another of both religion and