Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/57

 Whitney 469 But his induction is complete ; there are none of those confused categories or obscure arrangements that betoken failure to reach illuminating concepts. Whitney has thus left for the use of students in Indo-European linguistics an organon that is not likely to be soon discarded. Whitney's works upon the general science of language — Language and the Study of Language (1867), The Life and Growth of Language (1875), etc., might perhaps never have been written if he "had not been driven to it by . . . the necessity of counteracting as far as possible the influence" of Max MuUer's views. Against the idealism, transcendentalism, and logical fallacies of Muller, Whitney takes a distinctly common-sense and almost pragmatic view. Language is for him a human institution, an instrument made by man to meet human needs, and at no time beyond human control. It has to be acquired afresh by every speaker, for it is not a self -subsisting entity that can be transmitted through the body or the mind of race or individual. Whitney thus decisively ranges himself against all absolutist and determinist theories of the nature of language. Upon the origins of language, though he declined to commit himself, as feeling that the evidence warranted no positive assertion, he yet felt equally certain that the evidence did not warrant MuUer's assertion of a multiple origin — languages springing up here, there, and everywhere upon the surface of the earth. The trend of Whitney's opinion, though he asserts noth- ing positively, is towards a single primal language. As in Indology, so in general linguistics, Whitney left a school, represented in Germany by the so-called Jung-Gram- matiker, who include Osthoff, Brugmann, Leskien, Fick, and Paul, and in the United States by Professor Hanns Oertel and other disciples. They emphasize the importance of analogy and of phonetic economy, as chief among the psychic factors that must be added to the physical in order to account fully for linguistic change. All Whitney's modes of thinking tended away from those integrations which take the investigator back towards undifferentiated origins, and worked forward among the differentiations that account for linguistic progress towards the present and the future. Whitney is much more interested in the processes of linguistic change than in the evidences of linguistic unity.