MAX MÜLLER, WHITNEY’S ARCH-ENEMY AND A FRIEND OF BRÉAL

Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), who became Deputy-Professor at the University of Oxford in 1851, and was later appointed Professor of Comparative Philology, was Whitney’s worst foe. Whitney used to attack him with his sharp pen starting in 1865, when he reviewed Müller’s second series of Lectures on the Science of Language (1864), until 1892, two years before his death, when he devoted a whole book to a criticism of Müller’s popular theories (the first and second series of lectures had been reprinted in 1891 in a supposedly revised form; cf. Müller 1891). But Müller was unrepentant. Until his death in 1900 he continued to work within the framework established in his first series of lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1861. His lecture ‘On thought and language’, given at the Philosophical Society of Glasgow in 1891 (cf. Müller 1901:85– 109), reiterated what he had first said thirty years earlier. Until the very end Müller held to his idiosyncratic theory of language, its origin, and its relation to thought, and he did not flinch under Whitney’s continuous attacks (on Müller’s life and work, cf. Jankowsky 1979).

This raises the question who won the popularity battle; who ultimately convinced the scientific community—the Yale professor or the Oxford professor? In America it was certainly Whitney. B. E. Smith, who wrote Whitney’s biography for the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11) notes that Whitney’s ‘popular works’ ‘were particularly important in that they counteracted the popular and interestingly written works of Max Müller: for instance, Müller, like Renan and Wilhelm von Humboldt, regarded language as an innate faculty and Whitney considered it the product of experience and outward circumstance’ (1910–11:612, note 1). In Germany, Whitney triumphed too, as Brugmann testifies in his very critical review of the German translation of the new edition of Müller’s lectures (1891) by Fick and Wischmann (Müller 18923). He writes that the book does not represent the state of the art in modern linguistic science, but that it is rather a caricature of it. He recommends those wanting to be informed about linguistics should read Whitney’s works (cf. Brugmann 1893:890). It is not necessary to enumerate in detail Brugmann’s criticism of Müller, as it repeats what Whitney had written before. Brugmann’s last word on the matter is a quote from Whitney (1892:74): ‘this work is unsound in every part, most of all in its fundamental doctrines’ (Brugmann 1893:891).

Was there any value at all in Müller’s work then, or was it simply the idle thoughts of

a dilettante, as so many reviewers claimed? By some irony of scientific sort it had at least one merit: without it Whitney would perhaps never have produced anything on the subject of general linguistics. He says himself in one of the closing paragraphs of his book on Müller, it ‘is questionable whether I should myself ever have written a work on the general subject of language if I had not been driven to it by what seemed to me the necessity of counteraction, as far as possible, to the influence of snch (sic) erroneous views’ (1892:77–8). But is that all there is to Müller?

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French linguists and philosophers of language would certainly not accept Müller’s being reduced to a mere ‘stimulus’. Another factor too has to be borne in mind. Was Whitney so violently opposed to Müller because he was so illogical, irrational, and muddled, or was it that Müller constituted a real threat to Whitney? Did he sometimes come too close to the truth? Let us first see what happened to Müller in France.

From The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, edited by his wife (cf. Müller 1902:2 vols), one can make a reasonably accurate reconstruction of Müller’s circle of enemies and friends. Whitney was undoubtedly his main enemy (cf. also Müller, ‘In self-defence’ (1875), reprinted in Chips, IV, 1875:473–549). Müller once tried to make peace with him, but Whitney rejected the offer (cf. Müller 1902: II, 20–1). His friends, or at least acquaintances in a neutral sense, included Noiré in Germany (cf. Noiré 1879), Darmesteter (cf. II, 25), Bréal (cf. II, 24–5), and Renan in France. As Bréal wrote: ‘It is perhaps in France that he had the readers that really understood him and the most sincere friends’ (1900: cxcv). Bréal seems to have been instrumental in getting Müller a place in the French Institute. Müller refers to it in a letter written in 1869, where

he also mentions the reception of Bréal’s Idées latentes (1868, ID). Müller also received Bréal’s essay on ‘Les racines indo-européennes’ ([1876a] 1877:375–412), an essay that gives a rather critical account of Müller’s theories. Bréal vehemently rejected the belief that Indo-European roots represent the beginning of speech (cf. 1877:403f.). But Müller replied candidly: ‘I never believed in any Ursprache; it is a deus ex machina, an impossibility’ (II, 25)—a rather hypocritical pronouncement, as we shall soon see. Müller himself liked to produce a deus ex machina from time to time. However, on the whole, Bréal can be regarded as a supporter of Müller.

In 1900 he wrote an obituary of Max Müller which was first published in the Journal des débats (7 November 1900), and then re-

Cf. Schmidt (1976) for a late rehabilitation. Schmidt claims that Müller was one of the few

philosophers of language before Wittgenstein who regarded ‘language as an outstanding philosophical topic’ (1976:659). Based on an analysis of Müller’s The Science of Thought (1887), he comes to the conclusion that for Müller philosophy was mainly language criticism.

published in the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 1149 (1900), although Müller had not been a member of the Society. The fact that Müller never became a member is in itself symbolic of a certain contradiction in Bréal’s life and work. Initially influenced by Müller’s work on comparative mythology, he later abandoned Müller’s theories to establish himself as a hardnosed and thorough comparative linguist who rejected all speculations about the origin of language. And it was as such that he worked in the Société de Linguistique de Paris, especially when he became its Secretary in 1868. It was this Society that included in its rules that no contributions on the origin of language would be accepted (cf. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 1, 1868:111). But he must have continued covertly admiring Müller who had so strongly influenced him in his youth. In the obituary he goes so far as to imagine, or rather to fantasize about, the life Müller might have led in France:

One can well imagine, from 1845 to 1870, a Fr. Max Müller, beautiful, witty, worldly, extrovert, having all sorts of successes, soon member of the Institute and successor of Burnouf [under whom Müller had studied]…. Soon he would have been able to handle our language like his

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compatriot Grimm in former times. He would have poured out over this French public, so open to all that is new and so ill informed about the latest developments, German science, embellishing it by his imagination and seasoning it by his wit. Nothing prevents us from seeing him after 10 or 15 years at the head of the Collège de France, having his chair in the French Academy and attracting here in France, as he has done in England, all the distinctions and favours. However, it is true that the events of 1870 would have profoundly disturbed this beautiful dream.

(Bréal 1900: cxcii–cxciii)

What Bréal regarded as a beautiful dream would have been a dreadful nightmare for Whitney. If he could have read the obituary, he would have shuddered not only at this evocation of a glorious Max Müller, but at some other passages as well. What Bréal calls

The only quarrel Bréal had with Müller was a political one, related to Müller’s affiliation during

and after the Franco-Prussian war of 18701. Müller openly sided with Germany against France, and he even gave a lecture at the inauguration of the University of Strasbourg in 1872, which had become a ‘Kaiserliche Universität’, after the annexation of the Alsace by Germany.

a ‘grain of paradox’ (1900: cxciv) in Müller’s work, was a profound absurdity to Whitney. And where Bréal expresses his delight at the fact that ‘The artist was so much part of his nature that this tinged a bit his scientific work’ (1900: cxcv), Whitney writes: ‘This book is not science, but literature. Taken as literature, it is of high rank.’ (1892:75). Contrary to Whitney, it was Müller’s literary and aesthetic qualities that attracted Bréal, compared to which Whitney must have appeared to be a hard positivist:

One has seen him rejecting a priori certain solutions because they offended his aesthetic sense. He basically continued the tradition of Herder, whom he quoted often. His polemical controversy with the American scholar Whitney, a convinced positivist, brings out well this side of his personality. When his enemies sometimes accused him of voluntarily closing his eyes to the evidence they did not take enough into account this instinct for beauty which dominated his whole nature.

(1900: cxcv)

Müller’s sense of beauty was certainly not appreciated by Whitney, and Whitney’s rejection of Müller on the grounds that beauty has nothing to do with science was certainly sincere. But on the level of the actual scientific groundwork they both invested in linguistics, that is on the level of content, not form, one can detect some important similarities, and here Whitney’s rejection of Müller was much less sincere, but at the same time far harsher, and in part unjustified.

One doctrine they shared was a certain kind of uniformitarianism, to which Whitney stuck throughout his life, and which structured his work on general linguistics. Some of Müller’s claims also have a uniformitarianist ring but unfortunately these are not always systematically integrated into his conceptual framework; they are just one piece in Müller’s medley of theories—theories that mostly contradict each other. Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that he had some important insights into this issue. In his article on uniformitarianism Wells recounts the following anecdote. Lyell, the promoter of

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uniformitarianism in geology, had written in 1863 The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. This included a chapter on language. He starts his chapter 23 with a quotation from Müller, a fact that must have infuriated Whitney, an admirer of Lyell. But one has to admit that in 1863 there was little else available as a handbook of linguistics from which Lyell could have quoted. The following year, when Müller gave his second series of lectures on the science of language, ‘Müller returned the compliment by quoting Lyell’ (Müller 1864: ch. 5, 223–7). Müller might have done so out of mere courtesy or timeliness. But beyond this obvious acknowledgment, in the same work Müller took account of Lyell’s ideas in a much profounder way, for in chapter 2 he all but incorporated uniformitarianism into linguistics by formulating two ‘principles on which the science of language rests, namely, that what is real in modern formations must be admitted as possible in more ancient formations, and that what has been found to be true on a small scale may be true on a large scale’ (Müller 1864:14). The eminent American, W.D.Whitney, in his review of this book (1865:567), commented disdainfully, ‘We should have called these, not fundamental principles, but obvious considerations, which hardly required any illustration.’ But this disparagement was unfair if, as seems to be the case, Müller was the first in linguistics to formulate them. It should be noted, moreover, that Whitney did not question the truth of Müller’s principles. Again, in 1885, Whitney admitted their truth and questioned the importance of stating them (cf. Wells 1973:424– 5).

Even more astonishingly, Müller and Whitney also shared a critical view of the Schleicherian doctrine, namely that language is an organism. Both Schleicher and Müller believed that the science of language is one of the natural sciences, but for different reasons. Müller’s naturalism is much more comparable to Darmesteter’s than to Schleicher’s—and much more similar to Whitney’s own version of the life and growth of language than Whitney would like to believe. He rejects Schleicher’s organismic metaphors of the birth, life and death of languages, of languages as mothers and daughters. These ‘evolutionary’ processes, taken from embryology, cannot explain, even metaphorically, the life of language, whereas truly Darwinian processes, such as the struggle for life among words, can (cf. Müller 1861:368). According to Müller the evolution of language can neither be called history nor growth. The course of history is determined by the free acts of men; the evolution of language is not. Natural growth is independent of the acts of men; the evolution of language is not. In short, the best metaphor for the evolution of language is a geological one: sedimentation:

The various influences and conditions under which language grows and changes, are like the waves and winds which carry deposits to the bottom of the sea, where they accumulate, and rise, and grow, and at last appear on the surface of the earth as a stratum, perfectly intelligible in all its component parts, not produced by any inward principle of growth, nor regulated by invariable laws of nature; yet, on the other hand, by no means the result of mere accident, or the production of lawless or uncontrolled agencies. We cannot be careful enough in the use of our words. Strictly speaking, neither history nor growth is applicable to the changes of the shifting surface of the earth. History applies to the actions of free agents; growth to the natural unfolding of organic beings.

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(Müller 1861:5, see also Keller 1983:35)

One can see that Müller’s conception of the evolution of language was sometimes not as absurd as Whitney would have his readers believe. I agree with Christy (1983:49) that Müller expressed some sound views of language development and change, based on two processes: phonetic decay and dialectical regeneration or growth; that is, the process by which dialect words or grammatical forms enter the standard language (cf. 1861:40). But Müller does not make it easy for the reader to grasp these positive points. In this he is comparable to Steinthal.

I have to confess that, when reading Müller, I cannot detect what Bréal calls the poetic beauty of his style. Instead, I get rather impatient, because he never comes to the point, or if he does, contradicts it in the next sentence. I am rather amused by what Keller calls so appropriately Müller’s ‘argumentational contortions’ (Keller 1985:215), but I do not derive any aesthetic pleasure from them. All in all, I can fully understand Whitney’s anger. The main objections Whitney raises against Müller are:

(1) his definition of linguistics as a natural science, related to the denial that language

has a history and the proposal that it only undergoes growth; (2) his affirmation that thought and language are identical; (3) his special theory of the origin of language; and (4) his rejection of one of Whitney’s main scientific credos: the conventionality of signs.

Müller opens his lectures by introducing the following basic theses: ‘There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which according to their subject-matter, may be called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man’ (1861:22). The attribution of language to the realm of God and therefore the realm of nature, attenuated as it may be by some rather contradictory statements, flaws his whole work, and is severely criticized by Brugmann, for example, who writes: ‘Those who let language “grow” can also let religion [etc.] grow, and those who attribute “history” to the latter may also attribute it to the former’ (1893:891).

Keller, from whom we borrowed the term ‘argumentational contortions’, shows very convincingly, how these contortions arise from the theses quoted above. First, Müller, contradicts his initial statement and writes that language cannot be counted as one of the works of God after all, being subject to historical change. He admits that the first impulse to a new formation is given by an individual. But nevertheless he assigns language to the realm of physical things, given that language change in general is not influenced by the individual. As in natural growth, the individual is powerless (cf. 1861:35f.; cf. Keller 1985:215). The only way out of this theoretical labyrinth seems to be the one suggested by Keller, that is, to treat language as a phenomenon of the third kind, neither object of our intentions nor product of nature, but only explicable by reference to the invisible hand process, a way out that Müller himself had half-guessed. But this way of explaining language and language-change was not available to Whitney. In order to criticize Müller,

he used his new definition of language as an institution, an instrument of communication among others, and his definition of signs as conventional.

One of the surprising contradictions in Müller’s thought is that he plainly foresaw these objections, and he spelled them out quite clearly, even before Whitney. In 1861, some years before Whitney started to write about Müller, Müller raised the following

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objections against himself—objections that Whitney in later years had only to elaborate further to turn them into effective weapons. The speculative objections are the following:

Language is the work of man; it was invented by man as a means of communicating his thoughts, when mere looks and gestures proved insufficient; and it was gradually, by the combined efforts of succeeding generations, brought to that perfection which we admire.

(Müller 1861:28)

This is Whitney’s theory of language in a nutshell! However, Müller does not really refute these objections, but goes on to criticize another, perhaps related point concerning the origin of language. He argues against Locke, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart who had said that human beings invented artificial signs when gestures, etc. were no longer sufficient, and that they fixed the meaning of the signs by ‘mutual agreement’. Müller refutes this philosophy of the origin of language:

While fully admitting that if this theory were true, the science of language would not come within the pale of the physical sciences, I must content myself for the present with pointing out that no one has yet explained how, without language, a discussion on the merits of each word, such as must necessarily have preceded a mutual agreement, could have been carried on.

(ibid.: 31)

In short, signs are not ‘conventional’. It was easy for Whitney to reject this refutation and support the claims made by Müller’s original hypothetical critics (cf. 1861:28, quoted above, p. 43), that is, that language is the work of man—and this in a very special sense. Whitney (1892) shows that Müller confounds ‘conventionalism’ with ‘nomenclaturism’ (like Adam in Paradise) and that Müller’s concept of convention is therefore a caricature (cf. 1892:10). ‘Conventional’ in the the right sense of the term signifies neither more nor less than ‘resting on a mutual understanding or a community habit’. As applied to any word constituting a part of language, it means that that word, instead of being bound to its sense by an internal and necessary tie, is so only by an external one, a tie of mutual understanding and common usage, formed by acquired habit on the part of every user (1892:11).

Directly related to the fact that signs are conventional is the claim that language is a social institution, an instrument of communication. These claims tie in again with Whitney’s rejection of Müller’s main contribution to linguistic science, namely his description of the growth of language and his attribution of linguistics to the physical sciences. Why did Müller cling so obstinately to these patently absurd postulates? To understand this, one has to go to the heart of Müller’s philosophy of language: his fundamental axiom that there is no thought without language and no language without thought (cf. Müller 1887), and that language is the main barrier between man and beast (cf. Müller 1873). Whitney’s opposition to Müller rested on his wish to destroy these very theorems. But let us first have a closer look at one passage where Müller defends

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these theorems. This microscopic view will demonstrate again how difficult it must have been for Müller to think systematically through an argument.

In his chapter on ‘The theoretical stage in the science of language—Origin of language’ (1861: lecture IX), Müller makes some measured statements concerning the origin of language. He writes, for example, that there must have existed a ‘superabundancy of synonyms in ancient dialects’ (1861:368). As an example he gives the various names for the sun—‘the bright, the warm, the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf’, etc. (ibid.). It seems to be a semantic law (cf. Darmesteter 1887; Bréal ES) that synonyms are either spread over different registers of speech, acquire a different social or aesthetic value, or else, just as Müller says, there is a

struggle for survival carried on among these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the less fertile word, and ended in the triumph of one, as the recognised and proper name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this process of natural selection, or, as it would better be called elimination, may still be watched even in modern languages so old and full of years as English and French.

Whitney and Bréal could not have expressed it better, and their evolutionist views of language coincide here with Lyell’s, Darwin’s, and Müller’s. But Müller did not leave it at that. Unlike Darwin, who refrained from speculating on the origin of variations (which then undergo selection), Müller speculated about the origin of what he calls the ‘roots’ of language. But before he sets out on this rather perilous journey, he ends his description of the struggle for life among words by claiming that ‘Language and thought are

This passage was quoted by Darwin [1871] 1894:91.

inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing’ (ibid.: 369). To this Whitney has only the following to say (he refers to the same chapter in the new edition of the lectures; cf. Müller 1891): ‘this passage…is inane (what German would call albern)’ (1892:8). And he is right. One only has to ask oneself: Did we originally have a superabundance of thoughts, relating, for example, to the sun, and are now left with just one? And more importantly: how do we disentangle this chicken and egg problem—do the thoughts or thought about the sun come first, or do the words come first? If they appear simultaneously, does the struggle for life affect only the words or also the thoughts? If both, then we are back to the first question. The only way out seems to be Whitney’s proposition that we should regard language as an instrument of thought, among others. In any case, after having stated the identity of thought and language, Müller then asks: ‘How can sound express thought?’ (ibid.: 369). Indeed, how can it, if language and thought are identical? He rejects the theories that the ‘400 or 500 roots which remain [i.e. after philological analysis and reconstruction] as the constituent elements in different families of language’ (ibid.), would have been interjections or imitations (but cf. 370 where he rehabilitates them for the expression of sensations). Rather, they are phonetic types. Schmidt writes: ‘Müller establishes the “roots” as “phonic types”, as the final elements of language, whereby further reduction to a more basic element is no longer possible. He further states that the entire vocabulary of the

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indogermanic languages can be reduced to 121 Sanscrit roots’ (1976:665). These calculations seem to be the ingenious result of German ‘Gründlichkeit’!

What follows is his later, so-called ‘ding-dong’ theory of the origin of language, as opposed to the interjectional—pooh-pooh—and the onomatopoeic—bow-wow theories, the first attributed to Condillac, the second to Herder (cf. Stam 1976:243). The emergence of phonetic types is based on a creative faculty (371) or rather ‘instinct’ (1861:370) that human beings possessed at the origin of language, and that now that language is created, has fallen into disuse and, one might say, undergone atrophy (but cf. 1861:370, note: ‘its effects continue to exist’). It is a natural instinct, based on the fact that ‘everything which is struck rings’. He give as examples the different ‘rings’ of gold, tin, and stone. This faculty of resonance was especially capable of emitting sounds representing the ‘rational conceptions’ of our mind (ibid.: 370)—onomatopoeia and interjections are just good enough for the expression of sensations! The funny thing is that this bell, when struck by a thought, did not emit one unambiguous sound, but rather a whole ‘Glockenspiel’—and there we are back to the struggle for life and natural selection, because ‘the number of these phonetic types must have been almost infinite in the beginning’ (ibid.: 371)—before being reduced to 121…. Anybody who tries to follow Müller through this argument must admit that Whitney was right in saying that this was ‘humbug’. It is not surprising, then, that Müller distanced himself in later editions of the Lectures from the ‘ding-dong’ theory he had at first espoused.

Some people, among them Darwin himself, whom Müller met in 1874 (cf. Müller 1902, I: 468), expressed their criticism more politely. In June 1873, Müller had sent Darwin a copy of his 1873 lectures on Darwin’s philosophy of language, and Darwin had replied in July:

As far as language is concerned, I am not worthy to be your adversary, as

I know extremely little about it, and that little learnt from very few books…. He who is fully convinced, as I am that man is descended from some lower animal, is almost forced to believe a priori that articulate language has been developed from inarticulate cries; and he is therefore hardly a fair judge of the arguments opposed to this belief.

(Müller 1902: I, 452)

Whitney had read more than a few books on linguistic matters and thus regarded himself

a worthy adversary and a fair judge of Müller’s arguments.

In his 1873 lectures Müller had claimed that there are no words without thoughts, just as there are no oranges without peel (cf. the quote in Whitney 1874, DL: 77). In his article on ‘Darwinism and language’ Whitney provides a cogent counter-argument to this hypothesis.

Orange-peel, in the first place, is of the self-same substance, and produced by the self-same forces, as the rest of the orange; it is a part of the orange itself; while, on the other hand, a conception, a judgment, a volition, a fancy, is an act of the mind, while a word is an act of the body, just as much as is a gesture, or a grimace…. Again, every orange has its own particular skin, and of one unchanging form and size and thickness and

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color; while the thought and the word are so independent of one another, that either may be altered to any extent without modifying the other; the word may be reduced to the driest vestige of its old self, and the contained idea be as rich and juicy as ever; and the substance of the idea may shrivel away to the emptiness of a mere sign of formal relation, while the word continues to make a fair show. Moreover, as many languages as there are, so many different words for the same thought, words as different as orange-peel and lemon-peel, and apple-skin and potato-skin, and ox-hide and fish-scales. When the Normans came into England, a long time ago, they brought with them a store of skins of a different growth, in which English oranges finally came to be to no small extent enclosed.

(DL: 78)

It seems to be a much better idea to compare words, or even languages, not to naturally growing oranges, but to cultural products, such as clothing and shelter, both ‘results of men’s needs and men’s capacities’ (LSL: 401).

Man was not created, like the inferior races, with a frame able to bear all the vicissitudes of climate to which he should be subjected; nor yet with a natural protective covering of hair or wool, capable of adapting itself to the variety of the seasons: every human being is born into the world naked and cringing, needing protection against exposure and defence from shame. Gifted is man, accordingly, with all the ingenuity which he requires in order to provide for this need, and placed in the midst of objects for his ingenuity to work upon ready to hand. And hence, it is hardly less distinctively characteristic of man to be clad than to speak; nor is any other animal so universally housed as he. Clothing began with the simplest natural productions…. So was it also with language…. His first beginnings were rude and insufficient, but the consenting labour of generations has perfected them, till human thought has been clothed in garments measurably worthy of it, and an edifice of speech has been erected, grander, more beautiful, and more important to our race than any other work whatever of its producing.

(LSL: 401–3)

In accordance with Bréal, Whitney claims that thought always exceeds language, and sometimes language thought—that thought, so to speak, always grows out of its clothes. On the basis of this doctrine both Whitney and Bréal will be able to assert that the understanding of language cannot solely be based on looking at the apparel, but must always rely on a collaboration of thought between hearer and speaker. The mutual understanding that lies at the origin of language also keeps it alive in every act of speech.

Finally, what about Müller’s claim that language is the definite barrier between human beings and the brutes (cf. Müller 1873), and that, according to Humboldt, ‘man could not become man except by language; but in order to possess language, he needed already to

be man’ (cf. Humboldt 1903–36, IV:16)? In the Life and Growth of Language Whitney writes that this

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is one of those Orphic sayings which, if taken for what they are meant to

be, poetic expressions whose apparently paradoxical character shall compel attention and suggest thought and inquiry, are admirable enough. To make them the foundation or test of scientific views is simply ridiculous; it is as if one were to say: ‘A pig is not a pig without being fattened; but in order to be fattened he must first be a pig.’ The trick of the aphorism in question lies in its play upon the double sense of the word man; properly interpreted, it becomes an acceptable expression of our own view: ‘Man could not rise from what he was by nature to what he was able and intended to become, and ought to become, except by the aid of speech; but he could never have produced speech had he not been at the outset gifted with just those powers of which we still see him in possession, and which make him man’

(LGL: 306–7)

—namely, the adaptation of means to ends!

Some years before Müller gave his Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language (1873), an admirer of Schleicher, W.H.J.Bleek, had written a treatise On the Origin of Language (1867; English transl. 1869; reprinted in Koerner (ed.) 1983), in which he expressed a similar view to Müller’s about the relationship between thought and language. This treatise was reviewed by Whitney (OLS: 292–7; reprinted in Koerner (ed.) 1983:73–8), and Whitney made it clear that those who hold that there is no thought without language are saying something to the effect that ‘the human hand cannot act without a tool’ (OLS: 297). Just like tools, those ingenious inventions of men that allow them to adapt means to ends, language has been created as an instrument of thought, as an instrument of purposeful action.

BRÉAL AND WHITNEY, THEIR PERCEPTION OF EACH OTHER The state of linguistics in the nineteenth century, as seen through the eyes of Bréal and

Whitney, makes it quite clear that the late 1860s was a crucial period for both men, and for linguistics in general. Schleicher’s Compendium (1861) gradually lost its popularity under the joint attack of Bréal (FF) and Whitney (LSL). Bopp had died in 1867 and comparative philology slid into a methodological crisis (cf. Bréal 1868a) (although this does not mean that most comparative philologists did not carry on their work just as before).

The year 1868 saw a number of events that established a bridge between the old world and the new, between Bréal and Whitney, and which took comparative linguistics in something like a critical grip. In 1868 Whitney wrote an obituary of Bopp in which he announced Bréal’s French translation of Bopp’s comparative grammar (cf. Whitney 1868a:49). In 1868 Whitney also wrote a review of the first volume of the Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de. Paris in which an article by Bréal, ‘Les progrès de la grammaire comparée’, had appeared, (derived from a lecture given at the Collège de France, 9 December 1867; 1868a, reprinted in Bréal 1877:267–94) (Whitney 1868b). In it Whitney described Bréal as ‘one of the soundest and most esteemed of the younger

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philologists of France’ (quoted by Aarsleff 1979:80). In 1868 Schleicher died and his two treatises on Darwinian linguistics appeared in French, prefaced by Bréal. Whitney’s somewhat insensitive obituary of Schleicher appeared a year later in The Nation 8 (1869:70).

In 1872 Whitney wrote a first long article on Schleicher (reprinted in OLS) in which

he refers to the French translation of Schleicher’s controversial treatises. In a note he signals that ‘M.Bréal’s preface is of but a page or two, and in it he indicates—though, in my opinion in a manner much less distinct and decided than the case demands—his at least partial non-acceptance of Schleicher’s view’ (OLS: 330).

Bréal, on the other hand, was more courteous than his American colleague. In his review of the Oriental and Linguistic Studies, which contained reviews of Steinthal and Müller’s works, he even comments in moderate tones on what Aarsleff has called Whitney’s ‘sledgehammer method of criticism’. Bréal writes: ‘The only thing for which one could blame Mr Whitney is that his language, when he points out an error, becomes caustic, as if these errors were always made intentionally’ (1873a:8). So much for the form, but what about the content, Whitney’s theory of language? Bréal had obviously read LSL with pleasure and recommended it for a translation into French (ibid.). However, only LGL was translated into French and appeared in 1875 under the title La Vie du langage. Some believe it was translated by Bréal (cf. Collin 1914); others that Whitney translated it himself (cf. Hombert 1978:112), a fact, that, though unsatisfactory in itself, makes it particularly clear how similar Whitney’s and Bréal’s thoughts on language actually were. Bréal agreed with Whitney in his attempt to discard ‘the clouds of scientific mysticism and to reduce to their real value the hypotheses put forward by a hasty materialism’ (1873a:8). But knowing Bréal’s opinion of Max Müller, one can imagine that in some respects Bréal objected to Whitney’s inductive and pragmatic approach to language. This is why he called him a ‘convinced positivist’ in his obituary of Max Müller (1900: cxcv).

This judgement should not be interpreted too negatively, however. In some respects Bréal was all for ‘positivism’—one has only to think of his admiration of Bopp. Bréal’s real enemies—who were also Whitney’s—were those who shrouded linguistics in a veil of mysticism or materialism, and built theories on imaginary facts, as, for example, the primitive language or the Indo-European ‘roots’. These two tendencies had come about by the ill-judged importation of one biological theory or another in order to give linguistics an air of scientificity. Seduced by the achievements of ‘comparative anatomy’ (cf. Cuvier 1800), Schlegel and others had believed that a reconstruction of the Indo- European proto-language was possible. Linnaeus’ classifications of biological species and Darwin’s redefinition of the origin of species had led Schleicher to regard language as an organism and language families as species.

In his Introduction to Vol. IV of his translation of Bopp, Bréal refers to Whitney’s LSL (2nd

edn 1868) as ‘a work too unknown in France’ (quoted by Aarsleff 1979; 82, n. 31).

Before presenting Bréal’s and Whitney’s own theories of language and language-change, it is useful to look at the debate surrounding the introduction of biological ideas into linguistic thought during the nineteenth century.

Evolution, transformation, or 'the life and Growth of language'? 37

MAX MÜLLER, WHITNEY’S ARCH-ENEMY AND A FRIEND OF BRÉAL