dissertation on Linguistic, Humboldt distinguishes poetry and prose, treating the two concepts philosophically, not by the empirical distinction between free and measured or periodic and metric language. "Poetry gives us reality in its sensible appearance, as it is felt internally and externally; but is indifferent to the character which makes it real, and even deliberately ignores that character. It presents the sensuous appearance to fancy and, by this means, leads towards the contemplation of an artistically ideal whole. Prose, on the contrary, looks in reality for the roots which attach it to existence, the cords which bind her to it: hence it fastens fact to fact and concept to concept according to the methods of the intellect, and strives towards the objective union of them all in an idea."1 Poetry precedes prose: before producing prose, the spirit necessarily forms itself in poetry. But, beside these views, some of which are profoundly true, Humboldt looks on poets as perfecters of language, and on poetry as belonging only to certain exceptional moments, and makes us suspect that after all he never recognized clearly or maintained firmly that language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a distinction not of æsthetic form but of content, that is, of logical form.

Humboldt's contradictions about the concept of H. Steinthal. language lost him his principal follower, Steinthal. The linguistic function indeWith the help of his master, Steinthal restated the pendent of the position that language belongs not to Logic but to Psy- logical. chology, and in 1855 waged a gallant war against the Hegelian Becker, author of The Organisms of Language, one of the last logical grammarians, who pledged himself to deduce the entire body of the Sanskrit languages from twelve cardinal concepts. Steinthal declares it is not true that one cannot think without words: the deaf-mute thinks in signs; the mathematician in formulæ. In

1 Verschiedenheit, etc., pp. 326-328.

2 Op. cit. pp. 239-240.

3 Op. cit. pp. 205-206, 547, etc.

4 Grammatik, Logik und Psychologie, ihre Principien u. ihr Verhältn.

z. einand., Berlin, 1855.

Identity of the problems of the

nature of language.

some languages, as in Chinese, the visual element is as necessary to thought as the phonetic, if not more so.1 In this he may have overshot the mark, and failed to establish the autonomy of expression with regard to logical thought; for his examples only confirm the fact that if we can think without words, we cannot think without expressions. But he successfully demonstrates that concept and word, logical judgement and proposition, are incommensurable. The proposition is not the judgement but the representation (Darstellung) of a judgement; and all propositions do not represent logical judgements. It is possible to express several judgements in a single proposition. The logical divisions of judgements (the relations of concepts) find no counterpart in the grammatical divisions of propositions. "A logical form of the proposition is just as much a contradiction as the angle of a circle or the circumference of a triangle." He who talks, in so far as he talks, possesses not thoughts but language.3

Having thus freed language from all dependence on origin and the Logic, having repeatedly proclaimed the principle that language produces its forms independently of Logic and in the fullest autonomy, and having purified Humboldt's theory from the taint of the logical grammar of Port Royal, Steinthal seeks the origin of language, recognizing, with his master, that the question of its origin is identical with that of nature of language, its psychological genesis or rather the position it occupies in evolution of the spirit. "In the matter of language there is no difference between its original creation (Urschöpfung) and the creation which is daily repeated." 5 "5 Language belongs to the vast class of reflex movements; but to say that is to look at it from one side only and to omit its own essential peculiarity. Animals have reflex movements 1 Gramm., Log. u. Psych. pp. 153-158.

2 See above, pp. 28-30.

3 Gramm., Log. u. Psych. pp. 183, 195.

• Einleitung i. d. Psych. u. Sprachwissenschaft (2nd ed., Berlin, 1881), P. 62.

5 Gramm., Log. u. Psych. p. 231.

are

and sensations like man; but in animals the senses
wide gates through which external nature rushes to the
assault with such impetus as to overwhelm the mind
and deprive it of all independence and freedom of move-
ment." In man, however, language can arise because
man is resistance to nature, conqueror of his own body,
freedom incarnate: "language is liberation even to-day
we feel our mind lightened and freed from a weight when
we speak." In the situation immediately preceding the
production of speech man must be conceived as ac-
companying all his sensations and all the intuitions
received by his mind with the most lively contortions of
body, attitudes of mimicry, gestures, and above all tones,
articulate tones." What element of speech did he lack?
One only, but a most important one: the conscious
conjunction of reflex bodily movements with the ex-
citations of his mind. If sensuous consciousness is
already consciousness, it lacks the consciousness of being
conscious; if it is already intuition, it is not intuition
of intuition; what it lacks is in a word the internal form
of speech. When that arises, there arises too its in-
separable accompaniment, words. Man does not select
sound it is given him, and he takes it of necessity,
instinctively, without intention or choice.1

mistaken ideas

on art his

This is not the place for detailed examination of the Steinthal's whole of Steinthal's theory and the various phases, not always progressive, through which he travelled, especially failure to after the beginning of his spiritual collaboration with unite LinguisLazarus, with whom he studied ethnopsychology (Völker- Esthetic. psychologie), of which they both took Linguistic to be a part.2 But, while giving him full credit for bringing Humboldt's ideas into coherent order, and for clearly differentiating, as had never before been done, between linguistic activity and the activity of logical thought, it must be noted that Steinthal never recognized the identity 1 Op. cit. pp. 285, 292, 295-306.

2 Steinthal, Ursprung d. Sprache (4th ed. Berlin, 1888), pp. 120-124. M. Lazarus, Das Leben der Seele, 1855 (Berlin, 1876-1878), vol. ii. Zeitschrift f. Völkerpsych. u. Sprachwiss. from 1860 onwards, edited by Steinthal and Lazarus together.

of the internal form of language (which he also called the intuition of intuition, or apperception) with the æsthetic imagination. The Herbartian psychology to which he clung afforded him no clue to such a discovery. Herbart and his followers divorced psychology from logic as a normative science and never succeeded in discerning the true connection between feeling and spiritual formation, soul and spirit; they never understood that logical thought is one of these spiritual formations: an activity, not a code of external laws. The domain allotted by them to Esthetic we already know; for them Esthetic too was only another code of beautiful formal relations. Under the influence of these doctrines Steinthal was led to regard Art as the embellishment of thoughts, Linguistic as the science of speech, and Rhetoric or Esthetic as a thing differing from Linguistic since it is science of fine or beautiful speaking.1 In one of his innumerable tracts he says," Poetics and Rhetoric both differ from Linguistic, since they are obliged to touch on many important topics before reaching language. These sciences therefore have but one section devoted to Linguistic, which is the concluding section of Syntax. Moreover Syntax has a character entirely different from Rhetoric and from Poetics; the former is occupied solely with correctness (Richtigkeit) of language; the latter two sciences study beauty or grace of expression (Schönheit oder Angemessenheit des Ausdrucks): the principles of the first are merely grammatical, the others must consider matters outside language; for example, the disposition of the orator and so forth. To speak plainly, Syntax is to Stylistic as is the grammatical measure of the quantity of vowels to the theory of metre." 2 That speaking invariably means good or beautiful speaking, since speech that is neither good nor beautiful is not really speech,3 and that the radical renewal of the concept of language inaugurated by Humboldt and himself must produce far-reaching effects on the cognate sciences of Poetics, Rhetoric and 1 Gramm., Log. u. Psych. pp. 139-140, 146. 2 Einleit. PP. 34-35.

3 See above, pp. 78-79.

Esthetic and, by transforming, unify them, never entered Steinthal's head. After all this labour and all this minute analysis, the identification of language and poetry, and of the science of language with the science of poetry, the identification of Linguistic with Esthetic, still found its least faulty expression in the prophetic aphorisms of Giambattista Vico.