Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/166

154 I have fairly sustained my views against theirs, I am justified; and on that basis I am perfectly willing to submit to judgment.

I do not think Prof. Müller the person best qualified to judge me fairly, because, in the first place, owing to his great fertility as a writer, and his position as accepted guide and philosopher, beyond any other living man, of the English-speaking people, I have felt called upon to controvert his views oftener than those of any other authority; and yet more, in the second place, because he does not appear to have qualified himself by carefully examining what I have written. He confesses to never having looked at my volume on language until a few weeks ago, when stirred up to it by the fact that my opinions had been quoted with approval in so conspicuous a quarter as the pages of the Contemporary. And, even now, he has evidently given it the most cursory examination. He has not observed that it was printed and published in England, instead of "in America." He has not discovered that it is a "systematic" discussion of its subject. He is mainly impressed, even to amusement, with its similarity to his own work: as, indeed, resemblances at first glance are always more striking than differences: if he will continue his study, he will certainly find the likeness less and less apparent, and extending almost only to those facts and principles which are universal property among philologists, neither he nor I having a patent-right to them; while the underlying differences of view and plan will become more and more conspicuous to him. And, most of all, he picks out and sets forth certain alleged inconsistencies in a manner which only great haste can explain and excuse, since every one of them would be removed by a consideration of the place and connection of each passage quoted. He is even more than once so unlucky as to select a passage as showing me to hold a certain view right out of an argument in favor of the contrary view. For example (p. 310), in citing my expression that the facts of language "are almost as little the work of man as is the form of his skull," he overlooks the preceding clauses of the same sentence: "So far as concerns the purposes for which he [the linguistic scholar] studies them, and the results he would derive from them." The whole being a part of a statement intended to show that "the absence of reflection and conscious intent takes away from the facts of language the subjective character that would otherwise belong to them as products of voluntary action," There are several other cases quite as palpable as this: it is useless to expose them here.

I ought to be more than satisfied with the insignificant array of trifling errors (or supposed errors) of detail in my volume, drawn up by Prof. Müller on page 312; unfortunately, I could myself, if called upon, furnish a much heavier list. I only notice one, as being an important evidence of the haste and cursoriness already referred to. My critic is shocked to find "the Phœnician alphabet still spoken of as