Literature and Poetry

Language, next to reason, is the greatest gift of God to man. It raises him above the brute creation and makes him the prophet and king of nature. It is the inseparable companion of reason, its utterance and embodiment, the interpreter of thought and feeling, the medium of intercourse, the bond of society, and the source of all that happiness which springs from contact between heart and heart. It is the "armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests."

So close is the connection between intelligence and speech, between thought and word, that the one may be called the inward speech, or speech concealed, and the other the outward thought, or thought revealed. Hence, also, the intimate relation between grammar, which treats of the laws of language, and logic, which teaches the laws of thought; the one is the logic of speech, the other the grammar of reason. The second person of the holy Trinity is called by St. John the "Logos," or the personal Word; for in him God is revealed to himself, and through him he reveals himself to the world.

A distinguished writer on comparative philology denies this connection between reason and language. He maintains that language belongs not to man as an individual, but as a member of society, and that a solitary child would never frame a language, but remain a mute all his life. Granted, but such a child would also remain ignorant and would never become a man intellectually or morally. All his mental faculties would

lie dormant or be extinguished altogether. It is idle to reason from a sheer possibility which God never intended, and which would destroy the very nature and destiny of man. For man is essentially and constitutionally a social as he is a rational being. In the same degree in which the mind produces thoughts it also clothes them in words of some kind, although they may not be expressed or uttered. If a man thinks he knows a thing, but cannot say it, his knowledge is to the same extent defective; the idea may be begotten, but it is not born until it assumes shape and form in some word or words, or some symbolic signs, however imperfectly they may convey the meaning. And it must be admitted that language even in its most perfect state is only a partial revelation of reason which has hidden depths transcending the resources of grammar and dictionary. All human knowledge "ends in mystery."1

ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

The origin of language must be divine, like that of reason itself. In creating Adam a rational being or with the faculty of knowledge, God endowed him at the same time not, indeed, with a full-formed grammar and diction, as little as with a minute. positive knowledge of all surrounding objects, but with the power or capacity and with the organ of articulate speech, and taught him also the actual use of words as signs of ideas. This capacity grew and developed itself with the expansion of reason and observation, knowledge and experience, by an inherent law and impulse or instinct under the direction of the Creator. Adam himself named his female companion and the objects of

1 The science of language as such is of recent growth, but has made astonishing progress in connection with comparative philology. It was nurtured by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brothers Schlegel, Bopp, Grimm, Pott, in Germany; by Rask, in Denmark; Burnouf and Renan, in France; Max Müller, in England; Marsh, Brown, Dwight, Schele de Vere, White, Whitney, in America. See Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language, 8th ed. 1875, 2 vols.; and Whitney's Language and the Study of Language, 1867. For the chief authorities on the English language I refer to the long list of Skeat in his Etym. Dict., pp. xxiii.-xxviii., and to the list at the head of Goold Brown's Grammar of English Grammars, 10th ed., by Berrian (New York, 1875, pp. xi.-xx.).

« Previous Continue »

Books

Literature and Poetry: Studies on the English Language; the Poetry of the ...