Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/164

152 when we show him the earth gradually cooling and condensing, clothing itself with vegetable and animal life; and man himself creeping up through the ages from a condition of savagery, gradually finding out his powers by their exercise, laying up and shaping institutions—language among the rest—for traditional transmission, the knowledge and wisdom which are one day to raise him to the headship of Nature. We are all loath to put a truth regarded as humble in place of a brilliant error; and slow to realize that, when the false coloring is taken off, what remains is worth more to us than what we thought we had before.

There is, it is believed, a wide-spread impression that views of language of the kind advocated in this paper are "superficial;" and that only those treat the subject profoundly who lift it up either into the sphere of psychology, or on to the platform of the physical sciences, making linguistic study a department of the study of mind, or else of that of human organs and their functions. But that is a matter to be settled along with the truth or error of the views in question. If they are true, then those are superficial who, in a mistaken endeavor after profundity, abandon the true basis and method of their science. There are infinite mysteries involved in every act of language-making and language-using, with which the linguistic scholar, as such, has to do only secondarily, or not at all. To recur to our former example: the psychological processes whereby the rude conception of a book is formed, partly under instruction, and gradually developed into fullness and accuracy, are one subject of study; the physiological processes whereby one hears the word book, and then is able to reproduce it, by an imitative effort of his own organs, is another; the history of the civilization which has given birth to such product, and of the arts by which it is manufactured, is yet another; and there are more, clustering about the same word: with the great problems of existence and human destiny looming up in the background, as they do behind every thing that we attempt to investigate. But no one of these is the standing-point of the linguist; to him, the central fact is that there exists one audible sign book, representing in a certain community a certain conception, for all purposes of communication; used by hosts of people who know nothing about the history of books, nor about the operations of the organs of speech, nor about the analysis of mental processes—and answering their purposes as well as if they knew it all. The sign had a certain definite time, locality, and occasion of origin; it was applied to its purpose for reasons which lay neither in men's mental nor in their physical nature, but in their historical conditions; it has passed through certain changes of form and office on its way to our use. Here, now, is where the linguist takes his stand; from this point of view every thing falls into its true position of relative prominence. Language is a body, not of thoughts, nor of physical acts, but of physically apprehensible signs for thought; and the student of