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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
Nature leads the way. Man emerges on the scene, follows her footprints, marks and registers them in language, and makes a Science of Nature. Then he looks back and discovers that Language, while following the path of Nature, has left a trail of her own. He returns on this new trail, again marks and registers its footprints, and makes a Science of Language.
My purpose in this book is not to compare languages as in linguistic science, or to trace their concrete development as in language history; but to describe the problem which gave birth to language, to show the place of language in the general scheme of world evolution, and to point out its basic structure in relation to the two forms of sense, Space and Time. I have dealt at some length with Herder and his time because that period was the beginning of the modern movement in language investigation in which we are still engaged. For the next hundred years, from Herder’s essay in 1772 to Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871, I can only touch some of the peaks in the development of linguistic theory and science, that, in their combined results, have prepared the way for the present inquiry, and that may help to give the perspective necessary to set the fabric of language clearly in its place among the other phenomena of the world. If this mode of treatment should appear to the language specialist as in some degree wanting in the ‘hard factualness’ of language, the explanation is that the inclusion of such factual material would not contribute to the investigation in hand. If one can make clear the world-problem which called language into existence, and show the structure which language was destined to assume in order to answer this problem, then the way should be better prepared and the impulse quickened for tracing man’s first steps and subsequent windings in the actual making of language.
page 25 note 1 Works of Sir William Jones, edited by Teignmouth, Lord, 1804, vol. ii, p. 268 Google Scholar. The italics are Sir William Jones’s.
page 30 note 1 It may be interesting to notice that Mr. J. B. Watson’s most recent exposition of language (Behaviorism, revised edition, 1930, Chap. X), apart from its new behaviourist diction and phraseology, is a logical development of Max Müller’s theory here. All human behaviour of action, thought, and speech is explained by Mr. Watson as phases of the simple formula of ‘stimulus and response.’ ‘The behaviorist,’ he says, ‘advances a natural theory about thinking which makes it just as simple, and just as much a part of biological processes, as tennis playing’ (p. 238). Speech is thinking ‘aloud in words’ (p. 246), and ‘speaking overtly or to ourselves (thinking) is just as objective a type of behavior as baseball’ (p. 6). Thought and language are both explained as the materials of an objective natural science. After a careful reading, however, of Mr. Watson’s interesting exposition of thought and language by reducing them to simple phases of ‘stimulus and response,’ one has the uneasy feeling that he is being induced, to borrow an apt phrase from the late Professor J. S. Haldane, ‘to take a gigantic leap in the dark.’
page 31 note 1 Müller, Max, Collected Works, vol. i, p. 533 Google Scholar.
page 33 note 1 One may be excused for calling attention here to a characteristic difference in these two sentences. The dogmatic certainty and emphatic pointedness of Müller’s statement, and the unemphatic, careful, measured quietness of Whitney’s are like differentiating portraits of the two minds and their manner of working. One has more confidence in the writer whose ‘yea is yea, and nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil.’