language and the faculty of thought, the philosophical propriety of the identification has become more and single conceptual word, we have to pass through at least five stages : "(1) Consciousness of our own repeated acts. '(2) Clamor concomitans of these acts. "(3) Consciousness of that clamor as concomitant of the act. '(4) Repetition of that clamor to recall the act. "(5) Clamor (root) defined by prefixes, suffixes, etc., to recall the act as localized in its results, its instruments, its agents, etc. "You can see from my preface to the 'Science of Thought' that I was quite prepared for fierce attacks, whether they came from theologians, from philosophers, or from a certain class of scholars. So far from being discouraged, I am really delighted by the opposition which my book has roused, though you would be surprised to hear what strong support also I have received from quarters where I least expected it. I have never felt called upon to write a book to which everybody should say Amen. When I write a book, I expect the world to say tamen, as I have always said tamen to the world in writing my books. I have been called very audacious for daring to interfere with philosophy, as if the study of language, to which I have devoted the whole of my life, could be separated from a study of philosophy. I have listened very patiently for many years to the old story that grammar is one thing and logic another; that the former deals with such laws of thought as are observed, the latter with such as ought to be observed. No, no. True philosophy teaches us another lesson— namely, that in the long-run nothing is except what ought to be, and that in the evolution of the mind, as well as in that of Nature, natural selection is rational selection; or, in reality, the triumph of reason, the triumph of what is reasonable and right; or, as people now say, of what is fittest. We must learn to recognize in language the true evolution of reason. In that evolution nothing is real or remains real except what is right; nay, in it even the apparently irrational and anomalous has its reason and justification. Towards the end of the last century, what used to be called Grammaire Générale formed a very favourite subject for academic discussions; it has now been replaced by what may be called Grammaire Historique. In the same manner, Formal Logic, or the study of the general laws of thought, will have to make room for Historical Logic, or a study of the historical growth of more apparent. Obscured as the truth may have become for a time through the fogs of Realism [!], dis thought. Delbrück's essays on comparative syntax show what can be done in this direction. For practical purposes, for teaching the art of reasoning, formal logic will always retain its separate existence; but the best study of the real laws of thought will be hereafter the study of the real laws of language. If it was really so audacious to make the identity of language and reason the foundation of a new system of philosophy, may I make the modest request that some philosopher by profession should give us a definition of what language is without reason, or reason without language? [Nature, February 16, 1888.] REASON AND LANGUAGE. "F. M. M." "PROF. MAX MULLER has been so kind as to favour the readers of Nature with his views on language and reason, concisely expressed in a letter to an American friend. As one grateful reader, I must desire both to express my thanks, and also to beg for yet a little further information with respect to matters of such extreme interest. "The Professor says, 'Because we reason-that is, because we reckon, because we add and subtract-therefore we say that we have reason.' Now, in the first place, I should be glad to be told why reason' is to be regarded as identical with such 'reckoning'? I have been taught to distinguish two forms of intellectual activity (1) Acts of intuition, by which we directly apprehend certain truths, such as, e.g., our own activity, or that A is A; and (2) Acts of inference, by which we indirectly apprehend others, with the aid of the idea therefore'-evolving into explicit recognition a truth previously implicit and latent in premisses. The processes of addition and subtraction alone, seem to me to constitute a very incomplete representation of our mental processes. "The Professor also identifies language and reason, denying to either a separate existence. As to 'reason,' he says, 'We have only to look into the workshop of language in order to see that there is nothing substantial corresponding to this substantive, and that neither the heart nor the brain, neither the breath nor the spirit, of man discloses its original whereabouts.' The expression 'whereabouts' would seem to attribute to those who assert the existence of 'reason,' the idea that it possesses the attribute of cussion of centuries has fully cleared the philosophical atmosphere so far as this matter is concerned"! extension? In order to understand clearly the passage quoted, we should learn what Prof. Max Müller really means by the term 'spirit,' which here figures as one species of a genus also comprising the breath, the brain, and the heart. Reason, however, is not represented as being simply language as we now hear it and use it,' but as it has been slowly elaborated by man through all the ages of his existence upon earth.' Thus understood, the Professor 'cannot doubt''the identity of reason and language.' Nevertheless he immediately proceeds to point out a striking want of identity between them. He says, quite truly,' We have two words, and therefore it requires with us a strong effort to perceive that behind these two words there is but one essence'-namely, that denoted by the Greek word, logos-'the undivided essence of language and thought.' Now, the intimate connection of language (whether of speech or gesture) with thought, is unquestionable; but intimate connection is not 'identity.' If thought and language are identical, how came two words not to have two meanings, or two thoughts to be expressed by one word? The plain fact that we have different words with one meaning, and different meanings with one word, seems to demonstrate that thought and language cannot be 'identical.' "No reason without language—no language without reason,' is a statement true in a certain sense, but a statement which cannot be affirmed absolutely. Language (meaning by that term only intellectual expression by voice or gesture) cannot manifestly exist without reason; but no person who thinks it even possible that an intelligence may exist of which ours is but a feeble copy, can venture dogmatically to affirm that there is no reason without language, unless he means by reason mere 'reasoning,' which is evidently the makeshift of an inferior order of intellect unable to attain certain truths save by the roundabout process of inference. "But I demur to the assertion that truly intellectual processes cannot take place in us apart from language. In such matters our ultimate appeal must be to our own reflective consciousness. Mine plainly tells me that I have every now and then apprehensions which flash into my mind far too rapidly to clothe themselves even in mental words, which latter require to be sought in order to express such apprehensions. I also find myself sometimes expressing a voluminous perception by a sudden gesture far too rapid even Mr. Romanes tells us, further on in his book,* that "within the four corners of human experience a self for thought-words, and I believe that other persons do the same. A slight movement of a finger, or the incipient closure of an eyelid, may give expression to a meaning which could only be thought in words by a much slower process. "It is the more remarkable that Prof. Max Müller should deny the existence of reason, since he unequivocally affirms, in rather lofty language, the existence of truth. Yet surely the existence of truth, in and by itself, is inconceivable. What can truth be, save a conformity between thought and things? I affirm, indeed, the certain existence of truth, but I also affirm that of reason, as existing anteriorly to language-whether of voice or gesture. What is the teaching of experience? Do men invent new concepts to suit previously coined words, or new words to give expression to freshly thought-out concepts? The often referred to jabber of Hottentots is not to the point. No sounds or gestures which do not express concepts would be admitted by either Prof. Max Müller or myself to be 'language.' "The Professor speaks of the 'alarmingly small' number of primitive concepts; but who is to be thereby alarmed? Not men who occupy a similar standpoint to mine. I fully agree with Prof. Max Müller in saying, 'After the genesis of the first concept, everything else becomes intelligible.' "We come now to the supreme question of the origin of language. As to this the Professor observes, 'No one who has not himself grappled with that problem can appreciate the complete change that has come over it by the recognition of the fact that roots are the phonetic expressions of the consciousness of our own acts. Nothing but this, our consciousness of our own repeated acts, could possibly have given us our first concepts. Nothing else answers the necessary requirements of a concept, that it should be the consciousness of something manifold, yet necessarily realized as one. ... The results of our acts become the first objects of our conceptual thought.' The truth of these statements I venture to question, and after noting the dogmatic nature of the assertion, 'Nothing but this could, etc., I must object to the statement of fact as regards human beings now. I do not believe that the infant's first object of thought is the results of its own acts.' In the first place, p. 397. conscious personality cannot be led up to in any other way than through the medium of language." But ex no object of our early thoughts is merely 'the results of our own acts,' but a combined result of our own activity and of the action on us of our environment. Secondly, my observations lead me to believe that the infant's first thoughts relate to things external, and certainly not to the results of its own activity as such, which is a highly complex and developed thought. It may be that the Professor, when he says, 'The results of our acts become the first object of our conceptual thought,' means that such acts in remote antiquity became the objects of man's first thought. This is probably the case, since, with respect to the origin of thought and language, Prof. Max Müller has adopted Noiré's crude notion that they sprang from sounds emitted by men at work, conscious of what they were doing, in the presence of others who beheld their actions and heard the sounds; the result being the formation of a conceptual word, to attain which five stages had to be gone through as follows: 666 "(1) Consciousness of our own repeated acts. "(2) Clamor concomitans of these acts. "(3) Consciousness of our clamor as concomitant to the act. "(4) Repetition of that clamor to recall the act. 666 (5) Clamor (root) defined by prefixes, suffixes, etc., to recall the act as localized in its results, its instruments, its agents, etc.' "But if language and reason are identical, reason could not exist before a single conceptual word existed. Nevertheless, to attain to this first single word, we see, from the above quotation, that man must have had the notion of his own acts as such; the notion of their repetition; the notions of clamour, action, and the simultaneity of clamour and action; the will to recall the act (yet nihil volitum quin præcognitum); and, finally, the notions of consequence, instrumentality, agency, or whatever further notions the Professor may intend by his 'etc.' "Thus he who first developed language must be admitted to have already had a mind well stored with intellectual notions! But can it for one instant be seriously maintained, close as is the connection of language with reason, that their genesis (miracle apart, of which there is no question) was absolutely simultaneous? He must be a bold, not to say a rash, man who would dogmatically affirm this. But if they were not absolutely simultaneous, one must have existed, for however brief a space, before the other. That |