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The Language of Discovery: William Whewell and George Eliot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert O. Preyer
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Extract

In 1861 Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) delivered his famous Lectures On the Science Of Language at the Royal Institution in London. Published the following year, this popular and influential volume provided a classical exposition for a widely accepted and comforting account of the role played by language in the creation and subsequent preservation of new knowledge. This view, based largely on German comparative philology, was embraced by George Eliot and G.H. Lewes even though it bore stiking resemblances to the lexical ideas and practise of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Whewell (1794–1866), representative figures of an earlier generation of philosophical Idealists – Kantians, admiring commentators on Plato, and both of them powerful defenders of the Anglican Church and Tory traditionalism. There was something about Müller's “great and delightful book” (as George Eliot called it) which appealed to distinguished Victorians of every intellectual stripe. Among the auditors at the Royal Institution were “Germano-Coleridgian” clergymen (Bishop Thirlwall, Dean Stanley F.D. Maurice), poets and philosophers (Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle), and a distinguished group of scientists, headed by Michael Faraday. All were excited and enthusiastic, despite their very different intellectual positions. Linda Dowling suggests why:

Muller's lectures on language … were deeply reassuring. They managed to suggest that even though the new philology had reconstituted language in wholly new terms as a phonetic totality independent of representation and of human control, language somehow remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. (“Victorian Oxford” 161)

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 16 , Spring 1988 , pp. 123 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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