Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)

On Language


Source: Humboldt. On Language, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Edited by Michael Losonsky, CUP 1999, pp. 25-64 reproduced here.


§3. The Course of Man’s Development

In every survey of world-history there is a progress, also alluded to here. But it is by no means my intention to set up a system of purposes, or process of perfection extending ad infinitum; on the contrary, I am to be found here on an entirely different path. Peoples and individuals proliferate vegetatively, as it were, like plants, spreading across the earth, and enjoy their existence in happiness and activity. This life that dies away in every individual goes on undisturbedly, without regard to effects for the centuries that follow; nature’s determination that everything which breathes shall complete its course to the last gasp, the purpose of beneficent ordering goodness, that every creature shall attain to enjoyment of its life, is carried out, and each new generation runs through the same circuit of joyous or painful existence, of successful or frustrated activity, but where man appears, he acts in a human way, combines gregariously, creates organizations, gives himself laws; and where this has occurred in a more imperfect fashion, supervening individuals or dynasties transplant thither what has succeeded better in other places. With the rise of man, therefore, the seed of civilization is also planted, and grows as his existence evolves. This humanization we can perceive in advancing stages, indeed it lies partly in its own nature, partly in the extent to which it has already prospered, that its further perfecting can hardly, in essence, be disturbed.

In the two points here specified there lies an unmistakeable purposiveness; it will also be present in others, where we do not encounter it in this fashion. But it should not be presupposed, lest the search for it should lead us astray in unravelling the facts. What we are here in fact discussing can least of all be subjected to it. The appearance of human mental power in its various forms is not connected with the progress of time and the accumulation of data. Its origin can no more be explained than its effect can be calculated, and the highest in this kind is not just the latest to appear. If we wish, therefore, to peer here into the products of creative nature, we must not foist ideas upon her, but take her as she presents herself. In all her creations she brings forth a certain number of forms expressing what has been brought to reality by each species, and suffices to complete its idea. We cannot ask why there are not more or different forms; there are just no others about – would be the only appropriate answer. But from this viewpoint we can regard that which lives in spiritual and corporeal nature as the effect of an underlying force, developing according to conditions unknown to us. If we are not to forego all discovery of a connection between phenomena in the human race, we still have to come back to some independent and original cause, not itself in turn conditioned and transitory in appearance. But we are thereby most naturally led to an inner life-principle, freely developing in its fullness, whose particular manifestations are not intrinsically unlinked because their outer appearances are presented in isolation. This viewpoint is totally different from that of the purposive theory, since it does not proceed towards a set goal, but from an admittedly unfathomable cause. Now it is this which, to me, seems solely applicable to the diverse shapings of human mental power, since – if it is allowable to divide in this fashion – the customary requirements of mankind are satisfactorily fulfilled through the powers of nature and the quasi-mechanical advancement of human activity, whereas the emergence of major individualty in persons and populations, which no really adequate derivation is able to explain, then makes a sudden and unforeseen intrusion into this obviously cause-and-effect-governed path.

Now the same view, of course, is equally applicable to the major manifestations of human mental power, and in particular to language, on which we here intend to dwell. Its diversity can be regarded as the striving with which the power of speech that man is universally endowed with, favoured or hampered by the mental power inherent in peoples, breaks forth with greater or lesser success.

For if we look at languages genetically, as a work of the mind directed to a specific purpose, it is automatically evident that this purpose can be attained in a lower or higher degree; we can even perceive the various major points in which this inequality of goal-attainment will consist. For the better success may lie in the strength and abundance of the mental power as such that operates upon language, and beyond that again in the special aptitude of this to language-making, and thus, for example, in the particular clarity and perspicuity of ideas, in the depth of penetration into the nature of a concept, so as to wrest from it at once the most characteristic feature, in the activity and creative strength of imagination, in the justly-felt delight in the harmony and rhythm of sounds, with which, therefore, agility and suppleness of the vocal organs and acuteness and fineness of ear are also associated. But we must additionally take note of the quality of the transmitted material and the historical milieu in which a nation finds itself at the time of a significant reshaping of language, between a prehistory that works upon it, and the seeds of further development that lie within itself. There are also elements in languages that can actually be judged only by the effort directed to them, and not equally well by its success. For languages do not always contrive to carry through completely an endeavour that may yet be all-too-clearly evinced in them. To this belongs, for example, the whole question of flexion and agglutination, on which a great deal of misunderstanding has prevailed, and still continues to do so. Now, that nations of happier gifts, and under more favourable circumstances, possess languages superior to others, lies in the very nature of the case. But we are also led to the more deep-lying cause just referred to. The bringing-forth of language is an inner need of human beings, not merely an external necessity for maintaining communal intercourse, but a thing lying in their own nature, indispensable for the development of their mental powers and the attainment of a worldview, to which man can attain only by bringing his thinking to clarity and precision through communal thinking with others. Now if, as we can hardly help doing, we regard every language as an attempt, and, taking the range of all languages together, as a contribution to the fulfilment of this need, it may well be assumed that the languagemaking power in man does not rest until, either in individuals or as a whole, it has brought forth that which answers the most and most completely to the demands to be made. In the light of this assumption, therefore, we may be able to discover, even among languages and linguistic families that betray no historical connection, an advancement in varying degrees of the principle of their formation. But if such be the case, this connection of outwardly unlinked phenomena must lie in a common inner cause, which can only be the evolution of the force at work. Language is one of the fields whence the general mental power of human beings emerges in constantly active operation. To put it otherwise, we see in it the endeavour to secure being in reality for the idea of linguistic completeness. To follow and depict this endeavour is the task of the linguist in its final, yet simplest, analysis. Linguistics, to be sure, has no need at all of this possibly too hypothetical-seeming viewpoint as a foundation. But it can and must employ it as an incentive to testing whether such a gradually progressing approach may be discovered in languages, towards the completion of their formation. For there could be a series of languages of a simpler and more composite structure which, on comparison with each other, betrayed in the principles of their formation a progressive approach to the attainment of the most successful language-structure. The organism of these languages would then, even in involved forms, have to bear within it the nature of their striving for linguistic completion more readily recognizable in its consistency and simplicity than is the case elsewhere. Progress on this line would primarily be found in such languages, first in the separation and completed articulation of their sounds, and hence in the formation of syllables that depends on this, the pure severance of the latter into their elements, and in the structure of the simplest words; next in the treatment of words, as vocal wholes, so as to obtain thereby real word-unity, corresponding to the unity of the concept; lastly, in the appropriate division of what should appear in language independently, and what should merely appear, as form, from the independent, for which a procedure is naturally required to distinguish mere mutual attachment in language from the symbolically fused. But in this consideration of languages I separate entirely the changes that can develop from one another in each, according to their destinies, and what is for us their first original form. The circle of these primordial forms seems to be closed, and in the state in which we now find the development of human powers, to be unable to return. For however internal language may altogether be, it yet has at the same time an independent outer existence that exerts dominion against man himself. The emergence of such primordial forms would thus presuppose a differentiation of peoples which now, and especially combined with more animated mental power, can no longer be thought of; unless, what is still more probable, a specific epoch in mankind, as in individual men, was dependent on the breaking forth of new languages as such.

§4. Civilisation, Culture and Education

The mental power that intrudes, from its inner depth and fullness, into the course of world events, is the truly creative principle in the hidden and, as it were, secret evolution of mankind, of which I have spoken above, in contrast to the overt sequence obviously linked by cause and effect. It is the outstanding peculiarity of the spirit, enlarging the concept of human intellectuality, and emerging in a manner unexpected, and, in the ultimate depths of its appearance, inexplicable. It is especially marked out by the fact that its products are not mere foundations on which further construction can be effected, but carry within them at the same time the rekindling breath that engenders them. They propagate life, because it is from full life that they proceed. For the power that produces them works with the tension of its whole endeavour and in its full unity, yet at the same time truly creatively, regarding its own procreation as something inexplicable even to itself; it has not just seized upon novelty by chance, or merely latched on to the already known. Thus arose the plastic art of Egypt, which was able to build up the human form from out of the organic centre of its circumstances, and which thereby first impressed upon its works the stamp of true art. In this way, though otherwise more closely related, Indian poetry and philosophy and classical antiquity possess a character inherently distinct, and in the latter case also a Greek and Roman manner and cast of thought. So, later, from Romance poetry and the mental life which suddenly developed, with the downfall of Latin, in the now independent European West, there came the major part of modern culture. Where such phenomena have not occurred, or have been stifled by adverse circumstances, even the finest talent, once obstructed in its natural course, could no longer shape anything of great novelty, as we see from the Greek language, and so many relics of Greek art , during the centuries when Greece, through no fault of its own, Was kept in barbarism. The old form of the language then becomes fragmented and mixed with the alien one, its true organism collapses, and the forces that press upon it are unable to reshape it for the start of a new path, or to breathe into it a newly inspiriting principle of life. In explanation of all such phenomena we can point to favourable and restrictive, preparing and retarding, circumstances. Human beings always cling to what is there. Of every idea whose discovery or implementation lends a new impetus to human endeavour, it can be shown by acute and careful research how it was already there previously and gradually growing in the minds of human beings. But if the kindling breath of genius is lacking in individuals or peoples, the dimness of this glimmering coal never bursts into glowing flames. However little the nature of these creative forces may allow them to be properly understood, at least this much is evident, that there always prevails in them a capacity to master the given material from within outwards, to transform or subject it to ideas. Even in his earlier circumstances, man transcends the present moment, and does not remain sunk in mere sensuous enjoyment. Among the roughest tribes we find a love of adornment, dancing, music and song, and beyond that forebodings of a world to come, the hopes and anxieties founded on this, and traditions and tales which commonly go back to the origin of man and of his abode. The more strongly and brightly does the spiritual power, working independently by its own laws and forms of intuition, pour out its light into this world of the past and future, with which man surrounds his existence of the moment, the more purely and variously does the mass, simultaneously, take shape. Thus do science and art arise, and the goal, therefore, of mankind’s developing progress is always the fusion of what is produced independently from within with what is given from without, each grasped in its purity and completeness, and bound into the subjection which the current endeavour by its nature demands.

But though we have depicted spiritual individuality as something primary and exceptional, we can and must equally regard it, even where it has reached the highest level, as in turn a limitation of nature in general, a path that the individual has been forced on to, since everything individual can be so only through a predominating and therefore exclusive principle. But precisely through confinement, power is enhanced and tautened, and exclusion can still be so guided by a principle of totally, that many such individualities are again joined into a whole. This is at bottom the foundation for that higher combination of men in friendship, love or grand collective endeavour devoted to the welfare of fatherland or mankind. Without pursuing further the consideration of how it is just the limitation of individuality which opens to man the only way of approaching ever nearer to unattainable totality, it is enough for me here to point out, merely, that the power which truly makes man into man, and is thus the simple definition of his nature, is disclosed in its contact with the world, in what we may call the vegetative life of mankind, proceeding somewhat mechanically on a given path, in particular phenomena revealing itself and its diversified endeavours in new shapes that enlarge its concept. Thus the discovery of algebra for example, was a new shaping of this sort in the mathematical bent of the human mind and thus similar examples can be given in every science and art. We shall seek them out more fully in language later on.

Yet they are not confined merely to modes of thought and representation, but are also found quite especially in the formation of character. For what proceeds from the whole of man’s power cannot rest until it again reverts into the whole; and the totality of inner appearance, feeling and disposition, coupled with the externality it suffuses, must let it be perceived that, permeated by the influences of these enlarged individual efforts, it also reveals the whole of human nature in an extended form. From this, indeed, arises the most general effect, and that which elevates mankind to its greatest worth. But it is language, the intermediary, uniting the most diverse individualities through communication of outer exertion and inner perceptions, which stands in the closest and most active interplay with character. The most energetic and readily susceptible temperaments, the most penetrating and fruitfully alive within, pour into it their strength and tenderness, their depth and inwardness, and it sends forth from their bosoms the kindred sounds to propagate the same sentiments. Character, the more it is enobled and refined, levels and unites the individual aspects of temperament and gives them, like plastic art, a shape to be grasped in its unity, yet one which bodies forth even more purely from within the outline at any moment. But language it is that is fitted to present and promote this shaping, through the delicate harmony, often invisible in detail, but woven together in its whole wonderful symbolic web. The effects of character-formation are simply far harder to calculate than those of merely intellectual advances, since they largely depend on the mysterious influences whereby one generation is connected with the rest.

In the evolution of mankind there are thus advances, achieved only because an uncommon power has unexpectedly taken its flight thither; cases where, in place of ordinary explanation of the effect produced, we must postulate the assumption of an emission of force corresponding to it. All spiritual progress can only proceed from an internal emission of force, and to that extent has always a hidden, and because it is autonomous, an inexplicable basis. But if this inner force suddenly creates so mightily of its own accord, that it could not in any way have been led to do so by what went before, then by that very fact, all possibility of explanation automatically ceases. I trust I have made these statements clear to the point of conviction, since in application they are important. For it now follows at once that where enhanced appearances of the same endeavour are perceivable, we cannot, unless the facts imperatively demand it, presuppose a gradual progress, since every significant enhancement appertains, rather, to a peculiar creative force. An example may be drawn from the structure of the Chinese and Sanscrit languages. One might certainly suppose here a gradual progression from the one to the other. But if we truly feel the nature of language as such, and of these two in particular, if we reach the point of fusion between thought and sound in both, we discover there the outgoing creative principle of their differing organization. At that stage, abandoning the possibility of a gradual development of one from the other, we shall accord to each its own basis in the spirit of the race, and only within the general trend of linguistic evolution, and thus ideally only, will regard them as stages in a successful construction of language. By neglecting the careful separation here proposed of the calculable stepwise progress and the unpredictable, immediately creative advance of human mental power, we banish outright from world-history the effects of genius, which is no less displayed at particular moments in peoples than it is in individuals.

But we also run the risk of wrongly evaluating the different states of human society. Thus civilization and culture are often credited with what cannot in any way proceed from them, but is effected by a power to which their own existence is due.

As to languages, it is a very common idea to attribute all their features and every enlargement of their territory to these factors, as if it were merely a question of the difference between cultivated and uncultivated tongues. If we call upon history to witness, such a power of civilization and culture over language is in no way confirmed. Java manifestly received higher civilization and culture from India, and both in a significant degree, but the indigenous language did not for that reason alter a form that was more imperfect and less adapted to the needs of thought; on the contrary, it robbed the incomparably nobler Sanscrit of its own form, to force it into the local one. And India itself, however early it was civilized, and not through foreign mediation, did not obtain its language from this; the principle thereof, profoundly created from the truest linguistic sense, flowed rather, like that civilization itself, from the gifted mentality of the people. Thus even language and civilization by no means always stand in a like relation to each other. Whatever branch of its arrangements may be considered, Peru under the Incas was easily the most civilized country in America; but assuredly no linguist will equally give preference over the other New World languages to the common Peruvian tongue, which was attemptedly spread by war and conquests. In my conviction, anyway, it is notably inferior to the Mexican. Moreover, admittedly crude and uncultivated languages may possess striking felicities of structure, and possess them genuinely, nor would it be impossible for them to surpass more cultured ones in this respect. Even a comparison of Burman, to which Pali has undeniably imparted a measure of Indian culture, with the Delaware language, let alone the Mexican, should leave judgement of the latter’s superiority in little doubt,

But the matter is too important for us not to discuss it more fully, and to consider the inner reasons for it. So far as civilization and culture convey to the nations ideas from abroad that were previously unknown to them, or develop such ideas from within, this view is in one aspect undeniably correct. The need for a concept, and its resultant clarification, must always precede the word, which is merely the expression of its completed clarity. But if we one-sidedly remain at this standpoint, and think that in this way alone we shall discover the differences in the merits of languages, we fall into an error that is damaging to a true assessment of language. It is already in itself most precarious to seek to assess from its dictionary the range of concepts possessed by a people at a given time. Without touching here on the obvious pointlessness of attempting this from the incomplete and casually-assembled word-lists that we have for so many non-European nations, it must already strike us automatically that a large number, especially of non-sensuous concepts, on which these claims are predominantly founded, may be expressed through metaphors, to us unfamiliar and hence unknown, or else by circumlocutions. There resides, however, and this is by far the more crucial here, no less in the concepts than in the language of every people, however uncultivated, a totally corresponding to the range of the untrammelled human capacity for cultivation, from which everything particular that humanity encompasses can be created, without alien assistance; and we cannot call alien to language what attention directed to this point unfailingly encounters in its bosom. A factual proof of this is provided by the languages of uncultured nations which, like those of the Philippines and America, for example, have long been studied by missionaries. We find even highly abstract concepts designated in them, without any supervenience of alien terms. It would indeed be interesting to know how the natives understand these words. But since such words are formed from elements of their language, they must necessarily couple some analogous meaning with them.

But that in which the above-mentioned view leads us chiefly astray is, that it considers language far too much as a spatial territory, to be extended, as it were, by captures from without, and thereby misapprehends its true nature in its most essential individuality. It is not just a matter of how many concepts a language designates with its own words. This occurs automatically if it otherwise follows the true path marked out for it by nature, and is not the aspect from which it must first be judged. Its authentic and essential efficacy in man rests upon his thinking and thinkingly creative power itself, and is immanent and constitutive in a far deeper sense. Whether and to what extent it promotes clarity and correct order among concepts, or puts difficulties in the way of this? Whether it retains the inherent sensuous perspicuity of the ideas conveyed into the language from the world-view? Whether, though the euphony of its tones, it works harmoniously and soothingly, or again energetically and upliftingly, upon feeling and sentiment? In these and in many other such determinations of the whole mode of thought and way of feeling lies that which constitutes its true character and determines its influence on spiritual evolution. But this rests upon the totality of its original design, upon its organic structure, its individual form. Nor do civilization and culture, which themselves enter only at a later date, pass over it in vain. The clarity and precision of language gain through the habit of expressing enlarged and refined ideas, perspicuity is enhanced in a heightened level of imagination, and euphony profits from the judgement and superior requirements of a more practised ear. But this whole progress of improved language-making can only go on within the limits prescribed to it by the original design of the language. A nation can make a more imperfect language into a tool for the production of ideas to which it would not have given the original incentive, but cannot remove the inner restrictions which have once been deeply embedded therein. To that extent even the highest elaboration remains ineffective. Even what later ages have added from without is appropriated by the original language, and modified according to its laws.

From the standpoint of inner spiritual evaluation, it is also impossible to regard civilization and culture as the summit to which the human spirit is capable of raising itself. Both have in recent times flourished to the highest degree and in the greatest generality. But whether, on that account, the inner aspect of man’s nature, as we see it, for example, in some periods of antiquity, has also simultaneously returned as abundantly and powerfully, or even in higher degree, we can hardly wish to affirm with equal assurance; and still less whether this has been the case in the nations to which the dissemination of civilization and a certain culture has been chiefly due.

Civilization is the humanization of peoples in their outward institutions and customs, and the inner attitude pertaining thereto. Culture adds science and art to this refinement of the social order. But when we speak in our language of cultivation [Bildung], we mean by this something at the same time higher and more inward, namely the disposition that, from the knowledge and feeling of the entire mental and moral endeavour, pours out harmoniously upon temperament and character.

Civilization can come forth from within a people, and testifies, in that case, to that uplifting of the spirit which cannot always be explained. If, on the other hand, it is implanted in a nation from without, it spreads more quickly, and also, perhaps, penetrates more into every branch of the social order, but does not react so energetically upon mind and character. It is a splendid privilege of our own day, to carry civilization into the remotest corners of the earth, to couple this endeavour with every undertaking, and to utilize power and means for the purpose, even apart from other ends. The operative principle here, of universal humanity, is an advance to which only our own age has truly ascended; and all the great discoveries of recent centuries are working together to bring it to reality. The colonies of the Greeks and Romans were far less effective in this respect. The reason, to be sure, lay in the want of so many outer means of linking countries, and of civilizing as such. But they also lacked the inner principle, from which alone this endeavour can take a true life. They had a clear concept, deeply rooted in their disposition and temperament, of a higher and nobler human individuality; but the notion of respecting a man simply because he is human had never gained influence among them, and still less the sense of rights and obligations arising from this. This important aspect of the general civilizing process had remained foreign to their course of national development. Even in their colonies they probably did less to mingle with the natives than simply to push the latter back from their frontiers; but their colonists themselves developed differently in the altered surroundings, and hence, as we see in Southern Italy, Sicily and Spain, there arose in distant countries new orientations of the people in character, political attitude and scientific development. The Indians were quite exceptionally good at kindling and making fruitful the native powers of the peoples they settled among. The Indian archipelago and Java itself give us notable evidence of this. For there, on encountering Indian elements, we also commonly see how the local population mastered and built upon them. Along with their more perfect outward institutions, their greater wealth of means for a heightened enjoyment of life, their art and science, the Indian immigrants also carried abroad the living breath, by whose power of inspiration these things had first been fashioned among themselves. All particular social endeavours among the ancients were not yet so fragmented as they are with us; they were far less able to convey what they possessed, without the spirit that had created it. Since things are quite different with us nowadays, and a power residing in our own civilization is driving us ever more definitely in this direction, the peoples are acquiring under our influence a far more uniform shape, and even where it may possibly have occurred, development of the original individuality of a people is often nipped in the bud.

5. Conjoint Actions of Individuals and Nations

In surveying the mental evolution of mankind, we have hitherto viewed it in its sequence through the different generations, and have outlined four factors which chiefly determine it; the peaceable life of peoples, according to the natural circumstances of their existence on earth; their activity in migration, wars etc., sometimes guided by intention, or arising from passion and inner urges, sometimes forcibly necessitated of them; the series of mental advances mutually linked with each other as causes and effects; and finally the mental phenomena which find their explanation only in the power that is disclosed in them. We now have to consider a second aspect, namely how there is effected in each particular generation the development which contains the ground of its progress at any time.

The efficacy of the individual is always a truncated affair, but one which, to all appearance, and up to a certain point in truth as well, proceeds in the same direction alongside that of the whole species, since as conditioned and also conditioning it stands in unbroken connection with time past and time to come. In another respect, however, and on examining its nature more deeply, the direction of the individual, as against that of the whole species, is nevertheless a divergent one, so that the web of world history, so far as it concerns the inner side of man, consists of these two criss-crossing, yet at the same time closely-linked tendencies. The divergence is directly evident from the fact that the destinies of the species proceed unbroken independently of the vanishing of the generations, although tending on the whole, so far as we can tell, towards enhanced perfection; the individual, however, is not only severed from all participation in those destinies, and often unexpectedly in the midst of his most important work, but does not even think, in his inner consciousness, in his foresight and convictions, that he stands for that reason at the end of his career. He therefore sees the latter as separate from the course of those destinies, and there arises in him, even while living, an opposition between self-cultivation and that shaping of the world which everyone grapples with, in reality, within his own sphere. That this opposition becomes ruinous neither to the development of the species nor to individual cultivation, assures the ordering of human nature. Self-cultivation can only further the world’s shaping, and throughout life man is attached to the destinies he forsakes by emotional needs and imaginative pictures, by family ties, the struggle for fame, and the happy prospect that seeds he has planted will develop in time to come. But by means of this opposition, and even originally underlying it, there is formed an inwardness of mind on which the mightiest and holiest feelings depend. It works the more comprehensively when man regards not only himself, but all his kind, as equally determined to a lone and life-long self-development, and when all the ties that bind one mind to another acquire by this a new and higher significance. From the varying degrees attained by this inwardness, which severs the self from reality, even in the coupling therewith, and from its more or less exclusive dominance, nuances arise that are important for all human development. India itself provides a notable example of the purity to which it can be refined, but also of the abrupt contrasts into which it may lapse, and Indian antiquity can be largely explained from this standpoint. Upon language this determining of the soul exerts a special influence. It takes a different form in a people that gladly pursues the solitary paths of withdrawn contemplation, and in nations which chiefly have need of the mediating understanding for external concerns. The symbolic is quite differently apprehended by the former, and whole tracts of linguistic territory remain by the latter untilled. For language must first be introduced, by a still obscure and undeveloped feeling, into the spheres upon which it is to pour forth its light. How this broken-off existence here of the individual is united with the advancing development of the species, into a region perhaps unknown to us, remains an impenetrable mystery. But the operation of the sense of this impenetrability is pre-eminently an important factor in the inner cultivation of the individual, in that it awakens the reverential awe towards a thing unknown, which still remains behind after everything knowable has vanished. It is comparable to the impression of night, in which everything normally visible is likewise replaced by merely the single scattered sparkles of bodies beyond our ken.

The advance of the destinies of the species, and the cutting-off of individual generations, also has a very significant effect through the differing weight that the future thereby acquires for each of the latter. Those who come later find themselves set, as it were – and primarily through the perfecting of means for preserving information about the past – before a stage on which a richer and more brightly-lit drama unfolds. The hurrying stream of events also throws generations, seemingly by chance, into darker and more fateful, or brighter and more easily liveable periods. To the actual, living, individual view, this difference is less great than it appears to the eye of history. Many points of comparison are lacking, we experience at each moment only a part of the development, we engage in it, with enjoyment and activity, and the virtues of the present carry us over its vicissitudes. Like clouds emerging from the mist, an age only takes on a circumscribed outline when seen from a distance. Only in the influence that each exerts on its successor do we clearly see what its own experience was of the time ahead. Our modern culture, for example, rests largely on the opposition in which we stand confronted by classical antiquity. It would be difficult and depressing to say what might remain of it, if we were to cut ourselves off from everything pertaining to this antiquity. If we examine the state of the peoples comprising it, in all their historical details, they do not really correspond, either, to the picture that we carry of them in our minds. What exerts a powerful impression on us is the conception we have, which proceeds from the centre of their greatest and purest endeavours, which emphasizes more the spirit than the reality of their institutions, which leaves the points of contrast unregarded, and which makes no demand of them that does not agree with the received idea of what they were. It is, however, no arbitrary choice that leads to such a conception of their individuality. The ancients entitle us to it; of no other age would it be possible. The deep sense of their nature first lends to us the very capacity to uplift ourselves towards it. Since in their case reality always passed over with happy agility into idea and fantasy, and they reacted to it with both, we legitimately transplant them exclusively into this domain. For by the spirit that resides in their writings, their works of art and their fruitful practical endeavours, they describe in complete purity, totality and harmony – though reality among them did not everywhere correspond to it – the sphere assigned to man in his freest developments, and in this way left behind them a picture that works ideally upon us, as a higher form of human nature. As between a sunny and a cloudy sky, their superiority to ourselves lies not so much in the patterns of life itself, as in the wonderful light that in their case streamed over them. The Greeks themselves, however much of an influence we assume upon them from earlier peoples, were obviously quite lacking in such a phenomenon, which might have enlightened them from afar. In itself they had something of the kind in the Homeric ballads and those that succeeded them. As to us they seem beyond explanation, by nature and in the roots of their shaping, and become for us a pattern to emulate, the source of a great mass of spiritual enrichments, so even for the Greeks was that age, obscure and yet radiating towards them in such unique exemplars. For the Romans, the Greeks were not so much a kindred people as they are to us. Their effect on the Romans was merely that of a contemporary nation, of higher cultivation, possessing a literature beginning from an earlier period. India, for us, recedes into too dark a distance for us to be capable of passing a judgement on its prehistory. In the earliest times at least, its effect upon the West, since such influence would not have been so utterly erasable, was not through the characteristic form of its literary productions, but at most through particular opinions, discoveries and myths that have come down to us. The importance, however, of this difference in the mental influence of peoples on one another, is something I shall have occasion to deal with in more detail later on (Bk 1, §§ 1.2). Their own antiquity will have appeared to the Indians in a form resembling that of Greek antiquity to the Greeks. But this is very much clearer in China, through the influence and contrast of works in the old style and the philosophical teaching contained in them.

Since languages, or at least their elements (a distinction not to be neglected) are transmitted from one age to another, and we can only speak of newly beginning languages by completely overstepping the bounds of our experience, the relation of the past to the present enters into the utmost depths of their formation. But the difference of state that an age is put into, through the place it occupies in the series of those that are known to us, is immensely powerful even in languages already quite fully formed, since the language is simultaneously a mode of apprehending the whole way of thought and feeling, and this, presenting itself from a remote epoch to a people, cannot operate upon the latter without also becoming influential for their own tongue. Thus our languages today would on many points have taken on a different shape if Indian rather than classical antiquity had worked so persistently and penetratingly upon us.

§6. Individuals and Nations (continued)

The individual man is always connected with a whole, with that of his nation , of the race to which the latter belongs, and of the entire species. From whatever aspect one may look at it, his life is necessarily tied to sociality, and here, too, as we have already seen earlier in a similar case, the outer subordinate viewpoint and the inner superior one lead to the same point. In the merely vegetative existence, as it were, of man on the soil, the individual’s need for assistance drives him to combine with others, and calls for understanding through language, so that common undertakings may be possible. But mental cultivation, even in the loneliest seclusion of temperament, is equally possible only through language, and the latter requires to be directed to an external being that understands it. The articulate sound is torn from the breast, to awaken in another individual an echo returning to the ear. Man thereby at once discovers that around him there are beings having the same inner needs, and thus capable of meeting the manifold longing that resides in his feelings. For the intimation of a totality, and the endeavour towards it, are given immediately with the sense of individuality, and gather strength in the same degree as the latter is sharpened, since every individual bears within him the collective essence of man, though only on a single line of development. Nor do we even have the remotest inkling of another as an individual consciousness. But this endeavour, and the seed of indelible longing implanted in us by the concept of humanity itself, will not let the conviction perish, that separate individuality as such is merely an appearance of the conditioned existence of a spiritual being.

The connection of the individual with a whole that enhances power and initiative is too important a point in the spiritual economy of mankind (if I may be allowed that expression), to have no need of being specifically referred to here. The unity of nations and races, which invariably evokes a simultaneous separation, depends, in any case, primarily upon historical events, themselves largely due to the nature of the places men live in and travel to. But even if we wish to separate from this all influence of inner agreement or repulsion, even of a merely instinctive kind – not that I would care to justify this view forthwith -still, every nation, quite apart from its external situation, can and must be regarded as a human individuality, which pursues an inner spiritual path of its own. The more we realize that the efficacy of individuals, at whatever level they may have placed even their genius, is still only incisive and enduring to the degree in which they have been simultaneously carried up by the spirit residing in their nation, and are able in turn to impart new impetus to it from their own point of view, the more evident is the necessity of seeking the explanatory ground of our present stage of cultivation in these national spiritual individualities. History also presents them to us in distinct outlines, wherever it provides us with the data for judging the inner cultivation of peoples. Civilization and culture gradually remove the glaring contrasts of peoples, and still more successful is the striving for the more universal moral form of a more deeply penetrating and nobler cultivation. In agreement with this also are the advances of science and art, which always strive towards more universal ideals, unshackled by national outlook. But if the equal is sought, it can be achieved only in the varieties of the spirit, and the manifold ways in which human individuality can assert itself, without erroneous one-sidedness, extends into the infinite. But upon this very diversity the achievement of what is universally striven for unconditionally depends. For this demands the whole undivided unity of that force which can never be explained in its completeness, but is necessarily operative in its sharpest individuality. To penetrate fruitfully and powerfully, therefore, into the general course of cultivation, the issue for a nation is not merely one of success in particular scientific endeavours, but primarily of the total exertion in that which constitutes the centre of man’s nature, which finds its clearest and completest expression in philosophy, poetry and art, and which streams out from thence over the entire mode of thought and disposition of the people.

In virtue of the connection here in view, between the individual and the mass surrounding him, every significant activity of the former belongs, albeit mediately only, and in some degree, to the latter as well. But the existence of languages proves that there are also mental creations which in no way whatever pass out from a single individual to the remainder, but can only emanate from the simultaneous self-activity of all. In languages, therefore, since they always have a national form, nations, as such, are truly and immediately creative.

Yet we must certainly beware of framing this view without the restriction proper to it. Since languages have grown up in inseparable association with man’s inmost nature, and emanate automatically therefrom, far more than they are deliberately produced by it, we might equally well call the intellectual individuality of peoples their effect. The truth is that both proceed simultaneously and in mutual agreement from inaccessible depths of the mind. We have no empirical acquaintance with such a creation of language, nor are we anywhere presented with an analogy to judge it by. If we speak of original languages, they are so merely for our lack of knowledge of their earlier components. A connected chain of languages has run on for centuries before reaching the point which our inadequate information designates as the oldest. But not only the primitive formation of the truly original language, but also the secondary formations of later ones, which we know quite well how to resolve into their components, are to us inexplicable, precisely in respect of their actual gestation. All becoming in nature, but especially of the organic and living, escapes our observation. However minutely we may examine the preparatory stages, between the latter and the phenomenon there is always the cleavage that divides the something from the nothing; and this is equally so with the moment of cessation. All comprehension of man lies only between the two. In languages, a period of origination, from perfectly accessible historical times, affords us a striking example. We can follow out a multiple series of changes that the language of the Romans underwent during its decline and fall, and can add to them the minglings due to invading tribesmen: we get no better explanation thereby of the origin of the living seed which again germinated in various forms into the organism of newly burgeoning languages. An inner principle, newly arisen, rebuilt the collapsing structure, for each in its own fashion, and we, since we always find ourselves situated among its effects only, become aware of its transformations only by the multitude thereof. It may therefore seem that this point would better have been left wholly untouched. But this is impossible if we wish to depict the evolution of the human mind even in broadest outline, since the forming of languages, even of particular ones, in every type of derivation or composition, is a most essentially characteristic fact about the mind, and displays therein the collective action of individuals in a shape that does not otherwise occur. So while acknowledging that we stand here at a boundary which can be crossed neither by historical research nor by free speculation, the fact and its immediate consequences must still be faithfully described.

The first and most natural of these consequences is that this connection of the individual with his nation lies right at the centre from whence the total mental power determines all thinking, feeling and willing. For language is related to everything therein, to the whole as to the individual, and nothing of this ever is, or remains, alien to it. At the same time it is not merely passive, receiving impressions, but follows from the infinite multiplicity of possible intellectual tendencies in a given individual, and modifies by inner self-activity every external influence exerted upon it. It can, however, by no means be regarded, in contrast to mental individuality, as something outwardly distinct from this, and hence – though it may seem otherwise at first sight – it cannot properly be taught, but only awakened in the mind; it can only be given the threads by which it develops on its own account. So although languages are thus the work of nations, in a sense of the term’ liberated from all misunderstanding, they still remain the self-creations of individuals, in that they can be produced solely in each individual, but only in such fashion that each presupposes the understanding of all, and all fulfil this expectation. Though we may now consider language as a world-view, or as a linkage of thoughts, since both these tendencies are united within it, it still always necessarily rests upon the collective power of man; nothing can be excluded from it, since it embraces everything.

Now in nations, both generally and in different epochs, this power differs individually in degree, and in the actual path possible in the same general direction. But the diversity must become visible in the result, namely language, and becomes so, of course, primarily through the preponderance either of external influence or of inner self-activity. So here too it happens that if we pursue the sequence of languages comparatively, we make more or less easy headway in explaining the structure of one from another, though there are also languages which appear separated by a real chasm from the rest. As individuals, by the power of their particular nature, impart a new impulse to the human mind in a direction as yet unexplored, so nations can do this in language-making. But an undeniable connection exists between language-structure and the success of all other kinds of intellectual activity. It lies primarily – and we consider it here from this angle only – in the animating breath which the formative power of language instils, in the act of altering the world, into thought, so that it diffuses harmoniously through all parts of its domain. If we may think it possible for a language to arise in a nation precisely as a word evolves most meaningfully and evidently from the world-view, reflects it most purely, and itself takes form so as to enter most readily and concretely into every vicissitude of thought, then this language, if it does but retain its life principle, must evoke the same power, in the same direction, with equal success in every individual. The entry of such a language, or even one that approaches it, into world-history, must therefore establish an important epoch in man’s course of development, and this in its highest and most wonderful products. Certain paths of the spirit, and a certain impulse carrying it on to them, are not thinkable until such languages have arisen. They therefore constitute a true turning-point in the inner history of mankind; if we are to see them as the summit of language-making, they are also the starting-points for a more mentally abundant and imaginative cultivation, and it is to that extent quite correct to maintain that the work of nations must precede that of individuals; although the very observations here made are indisputable evidence of how in these creations the activity of each is simultaneously swallowed up in that of the other.

§ 7. Closer Consideration of Language

We have now reached the point at which we recognize languages as the first necessary stage in the primitive cultivation of mankind, from whence nations are first able to pursue this higher human tendency. They grew up in similarly conditioned fashion, along with mental power, and form at the same time the animating inspiring principle of the latter. But neither proceeds in succession to or apart from the other, for each is utterly and inseparably the same act of the intellectual faculty. In that a people effects, from its inner freedom, the development of its language, as the instrument of every human activity within it, it seeks and simultaneously attains to the thing itself, that is, to something different and higher; and in that it gets on to the road of poetic creation and speculative thought, it simultaneously works back, in turn, upon language. If the first even raw and uncultivated attempts of intellectual endeavour are assigned the name of literature, language always takes the same road with it, and so both are inseparately tied to one another.

The mental individuality of a people and the shape of its language are so intimately fused with one another, that if one were given, the other would have to be completely derivable from it. For intellectuality and language allow and further only forms that are mutually congenial to one another. Language is, as it were, the outer appearance of the spirit of a people; the language is their spirit and the spirit their language; we can never think of them sufficiently as identical. How they actually conjoin with each other in one and the same source, beyond reach of our conception, remains inexplicably hidden from us. But without wishing to decide as to the priority of one or the other, we must see the real principle of explanation and true determining ground in the mental power of nations, since this alone stands independently living before us, whereas language only attaches to it. For so far as even the latter is revealed to us in creative independence, it is lost beyond the realm of appearance in an ideal essentiality. Historically, our concern is always with actually speaking men, merely, but we should not on that account lose sight of the true situation. Though we may separate intellectuality and language, no such division in fact exists. If language appears to us, rightly, as too high a thing to be ranked as a human artefact, like other evidences of the spirit, the situation would be different if man’s mental power did not confront us merely in particular instances, but the very essence of it streamed in its unfathomable profundity towards us, and we were able to see into the connection of man’s individuality; for even language transcends the separateness of individuals. For practical purposes it is, however, specially important to rest content with no mere lower principle for explaining languages, but really to ascend to this last and highest one, and to see as the fixed point of the whole mental configuration the principle that the structure of languages differs among mankind, because and insofar as the mental individuality of nations is itself different.

If we enter, however, as we cannot refrain from doing, into the nature of this diversity in the particular form of language-structure, we can no longer seek to apply to the details of language an investigation of mental individuality, first undertaken separately for its own sake. In the early epochs to which the present considerations transport us, we know the nations, as such, only by their languages, nor do we ever know exactly which people, even, we are to think of, by descent and affinity, in connection with each language. Thus Zend, for us, is really the language of a nation that we can define more exactly only by way of conjecture. Among all manifestations whereby spirit and character can be recognized, language, however, is also the only one suited to exhibit both, even to their inmost windings and recesses. If we look upon languages, therefore, as a basis for explaining successive mental development, we must indeed regard them as having arisen through intellectual individuality, but must seek the nature of this individuality in every case in its structure; so that if the considerations here introduced are to be carried to completion, it is now incumbent on us to enter more closely into the nature of languages and the possibility of their retroactive differences, in order thereby to couple the comparative study of languages to its last and highest reference-point.

§8 Form of Languages

A certain line of linguistic research is called for, however, if the way above indicated is to be followed with success. We must look upon language, not as a dead product, but far more as a producing, must abstract more from what it does as a designator of objects and instrument of understanding, and revert more carefully, on the other hand, to its origin, closely entwined as it is with inner mental activity, and to its reciprocal influence on the latter. The advances that linguistic inquiry owes to the successful efforts of recent decades make it easier to survey this in its full extent. We can now approach nearer to the goal of setting forth the individual ways in which the business of producing language is brought to completion among the variously divided, isolated and conjoined populations of mankind. But in this lies the very cause of the diversity of human language-structure, and likewise the influence of this upon the mind’s evolution, and thus the whole topic of our present concern.

But the moment we embark on this course of inquiry, an important difficulty stands in our way. Language presents us with an infinity of details, in words, rules, analogies and exceptions of every kind, and we are not a little perplexed at how to bring this mass, which, apart from the order already brought into it, still seems to us a bewildering chaos, into judicious comparison with the unity of the image of man’s mental power. Even if we possess all the necessary lexical and grammatical detail of two major branches of language, e.g. Sanscrit and Semitic, we have still made but little progress thereby in the endeavour to catch the character of either in such simple outline as to permit a fruitful comparison of them, or a determination of their allotted place, by reference to the mental power of nations, in the general enterprise of language-creation. This still demands a special search for the communal sources of individual peculiarities, the drawing together of the scattered features into the image of an organic whole. Only so do we gain a purchase by which to hold on to the details. So in order to compare different languages fruitfully with one another, in regard to their characteristic structure, we must carefully investigate the form of each, and in this way ascertain how each resolves the main questions with which all language-creation is confronted. But since this term ‘form’ is used in various connections in investigations of language, I believe I must spell out more fully the sense in which I would wish it to be taken here. This appears the more necessary in that here we are talking, not of language as such, but of the various different peoples, so that it is also a matter of defining what is meant by one particular language, in contrast, on the one hand, to the linguistic family, and on the other to a dialect, and what we are to understand by one language, where it undergoes essential changes during its career.

Language, regarded in its real nature, is an enduring thing, and at every moment a transitory one. Even its maintenance by writing is always just an incomplete, mummy-like preservation, only needed again in attempting thereby to picture the living utterance. In itself it is no product (Ergon), but an activity (Energeia). Its true definition can therefore only be a genetic one. For it is the ever-repeated mental labour of making the articulated sound capable of expressing thought. In a direct and strict sense, this is the definition of speech on any occasion; in its true and essential meaning, however, we can also regard, as it were, only the totality of this speaking as the language. For in the scattered chaos of words and rules that we are, indeed, accustomed to call a language, there is present only the particular brought forth by this speaking, and this never completely, and first calling for new work, so as to detect from it the nature of the living speech and to provide a true image of the living language. It is precisely the highest and most refined aspect that cannot be discerned from these disparate elements, and can only be perceived or divined in connected discourse; which is all the more proof that language proper lies in the act of its real production. It alone must in general always be thought of as the true and primary, in all investigations which are to penetrate into the living essentiality of language. The break-up into words and rules is only a dead makeshift of scientific analysis.

To describe languages as a work of the spirit is a perfectly correct and adequate terminology, if only because the existence of spirit as such can be thought of only in and as activity. The dismemberment of their structure that is indispensable for studying them does indeed oblige us to consider them as a procedure advancing by specific means to specific goals, and to that extent really to view them as fashioned by nations. The misconception that may thus arise has already been sufficiently acknowledged above,’ and hence these terms cannot be harmful to the truth.

I have already pointed out earlier on (pp. 42-3) that in our study of language we find ourselves plunged throughout – if I may so put it – into a historical milieu, and that neither a nation nor a language, among those known to us, can be called original. Since each has already received from earlier generations material from a prehistory unknown to us, the mental activity which, as earlier explained, produces the expression of thought, is always directed at once upon something already given; it is not a purely creative, but a reshaping activity.

Now this labour operates in a constant and uniform way. For the mental power which exerts it is the same, differing only within certain modest limits. Its purpose is understanding. Thus nobody may speak differently to another from the way in which the latter, under similar circumstances, would have spoken to him. In the end the material transmitted is not only of this kind, but also closely allied throughout with the train of thought, having itself a similar origin. The constant and uniform element in this mental labour of elevating articulated sound to an expression of thought, when viewed in its fullest possible comprehension and systematically presented, constitutes the form of language.

In this definition, form appears as an abstraction fashioned by science. But it would be quite wrong to see it also in itself as a mere non-existent thought-entity of this kind. In actuality, rather, it is the quite individual urge whereby a nation gives validity to thought and feeling in language. Only because we are never allowed to view this urge in the undivided totality of its striving, but merely in its particular effects on each occasion, are we also left with no recourse but to summarize the uniformity of its action in a dead general concept. In itself this urge is single and alive.

The difficulty of precisely the most important and refined inquiries into language resides very often in this, that something emanating from the total impression of the language is perceived, indeed, by the clearest and most convincing feeling, yet we fail in the attempt to set it out with sufficient fullness, and to define it in specific concepts. We now have to struggle with this here as well. The characteristic form of languages depends on every single one of their smallest elements; however inexplicable it may be in detail, each is in some way determined by that form. It is scarcely possible, however, to find points of which it can be maintained that this form has decisively attached to them, taken individually. So if we work through a given language, we shall find much that we could also well imagine to be otherwise without harming the nature of its form, and in order to perceive the latter in pure isolation are driven back to the total impression. Now here the opposite at once occurs. The most distinct individuality plainly strikes the eye and is borne inexorably in upon our feeling. Languages, in this respect, can least inaccurately be compared with human countenances. The individuality is undeniably there, resemblances are recognized, but no measurement or description of the parts in detail and in their interconnection can subsume the particularity in a concept. It rests upon the whole, and in the equally individual apprehension; and hence, too, no doubt, each physiognomy seems different to everyone. Since language, in whatever shape we may receive it, is always the mental exhalation of a nationally individual life, both factors must also enter there as well. However much in it we may fix and embody, dismember and dissect, there always remains something unknown left over in it, and precisely this which escapes treatment is that wherein the unity and breath of a living thing resides. Given this nature of languages, depiction of the form of any one of them in the sense here stated can never thus succeed quite completely, but always up to a certain degree only, though one that is adequate to a survey of the whole. But by this concept the linguist is nonetheless apprised of the path on which he must track the secrets of language and seek to unveil its nature. In neglecting this route he unfailingly overlooks a multitude of research points, must leave unexplained a great deal that is actually explicable, and takes to be subsisting in isolation what is bound together by living ties.

From the foregoing remarks it is already self-evident that by the form of language we are by no means alluding merely to the so-called grammatical form. The distinction we are accustomed to draw between grammar and vocabulary can serve only for the practical purpose of learning a language; it can lay down neither limits nor rules for true linguistic research. The concept of the form of languages extends far beyond the rules of word-order and even beyond those of word-formation, insofar as we mean by these the application of certain general logical categories, of active and passive, substance, attribute, etc. to the roots and basic words. It is quite peculiarly applicable to the formation of the basic words themselves, and must in fact be applied to them as much as possible, if the nature of the language is to be truly recognizable.

The form is contrasted, indeed, to a matter; but to find the matter of linguistic form, we must go beyond the bounds of language. Within the latter, it is only relatively speaking that one thing can be regarded as the matter of another, e.g. the basic words in contrast to declension. But the matter here is again perceived in other connections as form. A language can also borrow words from an alien source and genuinely treat them as matter. But if so they are such again in relation to it, not in themselves. In an absolute sense there can be no formless matter within language, since everything in it is directed to a specific goal, the expression of thought, and this work already begins with its first element, the articulated sound, which of course becomes articulate precisely through being formed. The real matter of language is, on the one hand, the sound as such, and on the other the totality of sense -impressions and spontaneous mental activities which precede the creation of the concept with the aid of language.

It is therefore self-evident that, in order to obtain an idea of the form of a language, we must first of all attend to the real nature of the sounds. Investigation of the form of a language begins right away with the alphabet, and this is treated as its primary basis throughout every part of it. The concept of form does not, as such, exclude anything factual and individual; everything to be actually established on historical grounds only, together with the most individual features, is in fact comprehended and included in this concept. It is only, indeed, if we follow the path here indicated, that all the details will be safely brought under investigation, since otherwise they readily run the risk of being overlooked. This leads, admittedly, to a laborious examining of fundamentals, which often extends to minutiae; but there are also details, plainly quite paltry in themselves, on which the total effect of languages is dependent, and nothing is so inconsistent with their study as to wish to seek out in them only what is great, inspired and pre-eminent. Exact investigation of every grammatical subtlety, every division of words into their elements, is necessary throughout, if we are not to be exposed to errors in all our judgements about them. It is thus self-evident that in the concept of linguistic form no detail may ever be accepted as an isolated fact, but only insofar as a method of language-making can be discovered therein. Through exhibiting the form we must perceive the specific course which the language, and with it the nation it belongs to, has hit upon for the expression of thought. We must be able to see how it relates to other languages, not only in the particular goals prescribed to it, but also in its reverse effect upon the mental activity of the nation. In its own nature it is itself an apprehension of particular linguistic elements in mental unity – such elements to be regarded as matter in contrast to this form. For a form of this kind resides in every language, and by means of this comprehensive unity a nation makes the language bequeathed by its forebears into its own. The same unity must therefore be found again in the depiction; and only if we ascend from the scattered elements to this unity do we truly obtain a conception of the language, since without such a procedure we are manifestly in danger of not even understanding the said elements in their true individuality, and still less in their real connection.

As may be noted here in advance, both the identity and the affinity of languages must rest on the identity and affinity of their forms, since the effect can only be equal to the cause. So the form alone decides what other tongues a language is affiliated to by family ties. We shall apply this in the sequel to the Kawi language, which, however many Sanscrit words it may have incorporated, does not cease on that account to be a Malayan tongue. The forms of several languages may unite into a yet more general form, and the forms of all actually do this, in that we everywhere set out simply from the most general: from the connections and relationships of the ideas required to designate concepts and order speech, from the similarity of vocal organs, whose scope and nature permit only a certain number of articulated sounds, and finally from the relations obtaining between particular consonant and vowel sounds and certain sensory impressions, which then give rise to similarity of designation, without family relationship. For in language the individualization within a general conformity is so wonderful, that we may say with equal correctness that the whole human species has but one language, and that every man has one of his own. But among the linguistic similarities connected by closer analogies, the most outstanding is that which arises from the genetic relationship of nations. This is not the place to inquire as to the degree and nature of such similarity that is needed to justify the assumption of genetic relationship, where historical facts do not immediately establish it. We are here concerned merely with applying the above-developed concept of linguistic form to genetically related languages. Now in these it follows naturally from the foregoing, that the form of the particular related languages must reappear in that of the whole family. Nothing can be contained in them which would not be in accord with the general form; in the latter, rather, we shall normally find the peculiarities of each to be in some way indicated. And in each family there will be one language or another which contains the original form with greater purity and completeness. For we are speaking here only of languages that have arisen from one another, where a genuinely given matter (this term being understood always in a relative sense, as above explained) is conveyed and transformed, therefore, from one people to another in determinate sequence, though the latter can but seldom be exactly demonstrated. But the transformation itself may nevertheless remain a closely related one, given a similar way of thinking and trend of ideas in the mental power that effects it, a likeness in the speech-organs and traditional habits of utterance, and finally, where many historically external influences coincide.

§ 9 Nature and constitution of language

Since the diversity of languages rests on their form, and the latter is most intimately connected with the mental aptitudes of nations and the power that suffuses them at the moment of creation or new conception, it now becomes necessary to develop this notion in greater detail.

In pondering on language in general, and analysing the individual tongues that are clearly distinct from one another, two principles come to light: the sound-form and the use made of it to designate objects and connect thoughts. The latter is based on the requirements that thinking imposes on language, from which the general laws of language arise; and this part, in its original tendency, is therefore the same in all human beings, as such, until we come to the individuality of their mental endowments or subsequent developments. The sound-form, on the other hand, is the truly constitutive and guiding principle of the diversity of languages, both in itself, and in the assisting or obstructing power it presents to the inner tendency of the language. As an element of the whole human organism, closely related to the inner mental power, it is, of course, equally precisely connected with the collective outlook of the nation; but the nature and basis of this tie are veiled in a darkness that scarcely permits of any clarification. Now from these two principles, together with the inwardness of their mutual interpenetration, there proceeds the individual form of each language, and they constitute the points that linguistic analysis must examine and try to present in connection. The most indispensable thing here is for the undertaking to be based on a correct and proper view of language, the depth of its origin and the breadth of its scope; and hence we must first of all take time to examine these latter.

I take the practice of language here in its widest extent, not merely in its relation to speech and the stock of its verbal elements, which are its direct product, but also in its connection with the capacity for thought and feeling. We are to consider the whole route whereby, proceeding from the mind, it reacts back upon the mind.

Language is the formative organ of thought. Intellectual activity, entirely mental, entirely internal, and to some extent passing without trace, becomes, through sound, externalized in speech and perceptible to the senses. Thought and language are therefore one and inseparable from each other. But the former is also intrinsically bound to the necessity of entering into a union with the verbal sound; thought cannot otherwise achieve clarity, nor the representation become a concept. The inseparable bonding of thought, vocal apparatus and hearing to language is unalterably rooted in the original constitution of human nature, which cannot be further explained. The concordance of sound and thought is nevertheless plain to see. Just as thought, like a lightning-flash or concussion, collects the whole power of representation into a single point, and shuts out everything else, so sound rings out with abrupt sharpness and unity. Just as thought seizes the whole mind, so sound has predominantly a penetrating power that sets every nerve atingle. This power that distinguishes it from all other sense-impressions is evidently due to the fact (which is not always so with the other senses, or is so differently), that the car receives the impression of a movement, and in the echoing sound of the voice the impression, even, of a veritable action; and this action proceeds here from within living creature, a thinking creature if the sound is articulated, and feeling one if it is not. just as thought at its most human is a yearning from darkness into light, from confinement into the infinite, so sound streams outward from the heart’s depths, and finds a medium wonderfully suited to it in the air, the most refined and easily moveable of all elements, whose seeming incorporeality is also a sensuous counterpart to the mind. The cutting sharpness of the vocal sound is indispensable to the understanding in apprehending objects. Both things in external nature, and the activity excited within, press. in upon man all at once with a host of characteristics. But he strives to compare, separate and combine, and in his higher purposes to fashion an ever more embracing unity. So he also insists upon apprehending objects in a determinate unity, and demands the unity of sound to deputize in place of it. But sound suppresses none of the other impressions which objects are capable of producing upon outer or inner sense; instead, it becomes the bearer of them, and in its individual composition, connected with that of the object – and this precisely according to the way that the speaker’s individual sensibility grasps the latter – it appends a new designating impression. At the same time the incisiveness of sound permits an incalculable number of modifications which are yet precisely distinctive when presented, and do not mingle in combination, a thing not found to the same degree in any other sensory effect. Since intellectual effort does not just occupy the understanding, but arouses the whole man, this too is chiefly promoted by the sound of the voice. For as living sound it comes forth from the breast like breathing life itself, is the accompaniment, even without language, to pain and joy, aversion and desire, and thus breathes the life it flows from into the mind that receives it, just as language itself always reproduces, along with the object presented, the feeling evoked by it, and within itself couples, in ever-repeated acts, the world and man, or, to put it otherwise, the spontaneously active and the receptive sides of his nature. And suited, finally, to vocalization is the upright posture of man, denied to animals; man is thereby summoned, as it were, to his feet. For speech does not aim at hollow extinction in the ground, but demands to pour freely from the lips towards the person addressed, to be accompanied by facial expression and demeanour and by gestures of the hand, and thereby to surround itself at once with everything that proclaims man human.

After this preliminary view of the aptitude of sound to the operations of the mind, we can now go more accurately into the connection of thought and language. Subjective activity fashions an object in thought. For no class of ideas can be regarded as a purely receptive contemplation of a thing already present. The activity of the senses must combine synthetically with the inner action of the mind, and from this combination the idea is ejected, becomes an object vis-a-vis the subjective power, and, perceived anew as such, returns back into the latter. But language is indispensable for this. For in that the mental striving breaks out through the lips in language, the product of that striving returns back to the speaker’s car. Thus the idea becomes transformed into real objectivity, without being deprived of subjectivity on that account. Only language can do this; and without this transformation, occurring constantly with the help of language even in silence, into an objectivity that returns to the subject, the act of concept-formation, and with it all true thinking, is impossible. So quite regardless of communication between man and man, speech is a necessary condition for the thinking of the individual in solitary seclusion. In appearance, however, language develops only socially, and man understands himself only once he has tested the intelligibility of his words by trial upon others. For objectivity is heightened if the self-coined word is echoed from a stranger’s mouth. But nothing is robbed from subjectivity, for man always feels himself one with his fellow-man; indeed it is strengthened, since the representation transformed into language is no longer the exclusive possession of a single subject. In passing over to others, it joins the common stock of the entire human race, of which each individual possesses a modification containing the requirements for completion by others. The greater and more active the social collaboration on a language, the more it gains, under otherwise similar circumstances. What language makes necessary in the simple act of thought-creation is also incessantly repeated in the mental life of man; social communication through language provides him with conviction and stimulus. The power of thinking needs something that is like it and yet different from it. By the like it is kindled, and by the different it obtains a touchstone of the essentiality of its inner creations. Although the cognitive basis of truth, of the unconditionally fixed, can lie for man only within himself, the struggle of his mental effort towards it is always surrounded by the risk of deception. With a clear and immediate sense only of his mutable limitedness, he is bound to regard truth as something lying outside him; and one of the most powerful means of approaching it, of measuring his distance away from it, is social communication with others. All speaking, from the simplest kind onwards, is an attachment of what is individually felt to the common nature of mankind.

Nor is it otherwise with understanding. There can be nothing present in the soul, save by one’s own activity, and understanding and speaking are but different effects of this power of speech. Conversing together is never comparable with a transfer of material. In the understander, as in the speaker, the same thing must be evolved from the inner power of each; and what the former receives is merely the harmoniously attuning stimulus. Hence it is also very natural for man to re-utter at once what he has just understood. In this way language resides in every human being in its whole range, which means, however, nothing else but that everyone possesses an urge governed by a specifically modified, limiting and confining power, to bring forth gradually the whole of language from within himself, or when brought forth to understand it, as outer or inner occasion may determine.

But understanding could not, as we have just found, be based upon inner spontaneity, and communal speech would have to be something other than mere mutual arousal of the hearer’s speech-capacity, did not the diversity of individuals harbour the unity of human nature, fragmented only into separate individualities. The comprehension of words is a thing entirely different from the understanding of unarticulated sounds, and involves much more than the mere mutual evocation of the sound and the object indicated. The word, to be sure, can also be taken as an indivisible whole, just as even in writing we recognize the meaning of a word-group, without yet being certain of its alphabetic composition; and it may be possible that the child’s mind proceeds thus in the first beginnings of understanding. But just as not merely the animal’s sensory capacity, but the human power of speech is excited (and it is far more probable that even in the child there is no moment when this would not be the case, however feebly), so the word, too, is perceived as articulated. But now what articulation adds to the mere evocation of its meaning (which naturally also occurs more perfectly thereby), is that it presents the word directly through its form as part of an infinite whole, a language. For even in single words, it is by means of this that we are given the possibility of constructing, from the elements of the language, a really indeterminate number of other words according to specific feelings and rules, and thereby to establish among all words an affinity corresponding to the affinity of concepts. The soul, however, would get no intimation at all of this artificial mechanism, would no more apprehend articulation than the blind do colours, if it did not harbour a power of rendering this possibility actual. For language cannot indeed be regarded as a material that sits there, surveyable in its totality, or communicable little by little, but must be seen as something that eternally produces itself, where the laws of production are determined, but the scope and even to some extent the nature of the product remain totally unspecified. The speech-learning of children is not an assignment of words, to be deposited in memory and rebabbled by rote through the lips, but a growth in linguistic capacity with age and practice. What is heard does more than merely convey information to oneself; it readies the mind also to understand more easily what has not yet been heard; it makes clear what was long ago heard, but then half understood, or not at all, in that a similarity to the new perception suddenly brings light to the power that has since become sharpened; and it enhances the urge and capacity to absorb from what is heard ever more, and more swiftly, into the memory, and to let ever less of it rattle by as mere noise. The advances thus accelerate in a constantly increasing ratio, since the growth of power and the acquisition of material mutually strengthen and enlarge each other. That in children there is not a mechanical learning of language, but a development of linguistic power, is also proved by the fact that, since the major abilities of man are allotted a certain period of life for their development, all children, under the most diverse conditions, speak and understand at about the same age, varying only within a brief time-span. But how could the hearer gain mastery over the spoken word, solely through the growth of that power of his own, developing in isolation within him, if there were not in both speaker and hearer the same essence, merely segregated individually and appropriately to each, so that a signal so fine, yet created from the very deepest and most intrinsic nature of that essence, as is the articulate sound, is enough to stir both parties, by its transmission, in a matching way?

One might wish to object to the foregoing that the children of any people, when displaced to an alien community before learning to speak, develop their linguistic abilities in the latter’s tongue. This undeniable fact, we might say, is a clear proof that language is merely an echoing of what is heard, and depends entirely on social circumstances, without regard for any unity or diversity of the essence. In cases of this kind, however, it has hardly been possible to observe with sufficient accuracy how laboriously the native pattern has had to be overcome, or how perhaps in the finest nuances it has still kept its ground unvanquished. But even without paying attention to this, the phenomenon in question is sufficiently explained by the fact that man is everywhere one with man, and development of the ability to use language can therefore go on with the aid of every given individual. It occurs no less, on that account, from within one’s own self; only because it always needs an outer stimulus as well, must it prove analogous to what it actually experiences, and can do so in virtue of the congruence of all human tongues. But the power of descent upon these can be seen, nonetheless, with sufficient clarity, in their distribution by nations. It is also readily intelligible in itself, since descent has so predominantly powerful an effect on the whole individuality, and the particular language at any time is again most intimately connected with this. If language, by its origin from the depths of man’s nature, did not also enter into true and authentic combination with physical descent, why otherwise, for both cultured and uncultured alike, would the native tongue possess a strength and intimacy so much greater than any foreign one, that after long abstention it greets the ear with a sort of sudden magic, and awakens longing when far from home? This obviously does not depend upon its mental content, the thought or emotion expressed, but rather on the very thing that is least explicable and most individual, its sound; it is as if we were perceiving, in the native tongue, a portion of ourselves.

The picture of language as designating merely objects, already perceived in themselves, is also disconfirmed by examination of what language engenders as its product. By means of such a picture we would never, in fact, exhaust the deep and full content of language. just as no concept is possible without language, so also there can be no object for the mind, since it is only through the concept, of course, that anything external acquires full being for consciousness. But the whole mode of perceiving things subjectively necessarily passes over into cultivation and the use of language. For the word arises from this very perceiving; it is a copy, not of the object in itself, but of the image thereof produced in consciousness. Since all objective perception is inevitably tinged with subjectivity, we may consider every human individual, even apart from language, as a unique aspect of the world-view. But he becomes still more of one through language, since as we shall see later, by an added meaning of its own the word constitutes itself an object for the mind, and superimposes a new character. Via the latter, qua character of a speech-sound, a pervasive analogy necessarily prevails in the same language; and since a like subjectivity also affects language in the same notion, there resides in every language a characteristic world-view. As the individual sound stands between man and the object, so the entire language steps in between him and the nature that operates, both inwardly and outwardly, upon him. He surrounds himself with a world of sounds, so as to take up and process within himself the world of objects. These expressions in no way outstrip the measure of the simple truth. Man lives primarily with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on his presentations, he actually does so exclusively, as language presents them to him. By the same act whereby he spins language out of himself, he spins himself into it, and every language draws about the people that possesses it a circle whence it is possible to exit only by stepping over at once into the circle of another one. To learn a foreign language should therefore be to acquire a new standpoint in the world-view hitherto possessed, and in fact to a certain extent is so, since every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind. But because we always carry over, more or less, our own world-view, and even our own language-view, this outcome is not purely and completely experienced.

Even the beginnings of language should not be thought restricted to so meagre a stock of words as is commonly supposed when, instead of seeking its inception in the original summons to free human sociality, we attribute it primarily to the need for mutual assistance, and project mankind into an imagined state of nature. Both are among the most erroneous views that can be taken about language. Man is not so needy, and to render assistance, unarticulated sounds would have sufficed. Even in its beginnings, language is human throughout, and is extended unthinkingly to all objects of casual sense perception and inner concern. Even the languages of so-called savages, who would have, after all, to come closer to such a state of nature, exhibit, in fact, a wealth and multiplicity of expressions that everywhere exceeds what is required. Words well up freely from the breast, without necessity or intent, and there may well have been no wandering horde in any desert that did not already have its own songs. For man, as a species, is a singing creature, though the notes, in his case, are also coupled with thought.

But language does not merely implant an indefinable multitude of material elements out of nature into the soul; it also supplies the latter with that which confronts us from the totality as form. Nature unfolds before us a many-hued and, by all sensory impressions, a diverse manifold, suffused with a luminous clarity Our subsequent reflection discovers therein a regularly congenial to our mental form. Aside from the bodily existence of things, their outlines are clothed, like a magic intended for man alone, with external beauty, in which regularity and sensory material enter an alliance that still remains inexplicable to us, in that we are seized and carried away by it. All this we find again in analogous harmonies within language, and language is able to depict it. For in passing, by means of it, into a world of sounds, we do not abandon the world that really surrounds us. The regularity of language’s own structure is akin to that of nature; and in thereby arousing man in the activity of his highest and most human powers, it also brings him closer, as such, to an understanding of the formal impress of nature, since, the latter, top, can after all be regarded simply as a development of mental powers. Through the rhythmical and musical form whose linkages are peculiar to sound, language enhances the impression of beauty in nature, transposing it into another sphere, but acts, even independently of this, through the mere cadence of speech upon the temper of the soul.

What is uttered at any time differs from language, as the body of its products; and before leaving the present section, we must take time to examine this difference more closely. A language, in its whole compass, contains everything that it has transformed into sounds. But just as the matter of thinking, and the infinity of its combinations, can never be exhausted, so it is equally impossible to do this with the mass of what calls for designation and connection in language. In addition to its already formed elements, language also consists, before all else , of methods for carrying forward the work of the mind, to which it prescribes the path and the form. The elements, once firmly fashioned, constitute, indeed, a relatively dead mass, but one which bears within itself the living seed of a never-ending determinability. At every single point and period, therefore, language, like nature itself, appears to man – in contrast to all else that he has already known and thought of – as an inexhaustible storehouse, in which the mind can always discover something new to it, and feeling perceive what it has not yet felt in this way. In every treatment of language by a genuinely new and great talent, this phenomenon is evinced in reality; and in order to encourage him in the constant labour of his intellectual struggle, and progressive unfolding of his mental life, man does in fact require that, beyond the field of past achievements, a vista should remain open to him into an infinite mass that still waits to

be gradually unravelled. But language contains at the same time, in two directions, a dark unrevealed depth. For rearwards, even, it flows out from an unknown wealth that is still to a certain extent discernible, but then closes off, leaving only a sense of its unfathomability. For us, who receive light from a brief past only, language shares this infinitude, without beginning or end, with the whole existence of mankind. But in it we gain a clearer and more vivid sense of how even the distant past is still linked with the feeling of today; for language has traversed through the experience of earlier generations and preserved a breath of this; and these generations have a national and family kinship to us in these same sounds of the mother-tongue, which serve to express our own feelings as well.

This partly fixed and partly fluid content of language engenders a special relationship between it and the speaking generation. There is generated within it a stock of words and a system of rules whereby it grows, in the course of millennia, into an independent force. As we noted above, the thought once embodied in language becomes an object for the soul, and to that extent exerts thereon an effect that is alien to it. But we have primarily considered the object as having arisen from the subject, the effect as having proceeded from that upon which it reacts. We now encounter the opposite view, whereby language is truly an alien object, and its effect has in fact proceeded from something other than what it works on. For language must necessarily be a joint possession (PP. 56, 57), and is in truth the property of the whole human species. Now since, in writing, it also keeps slumbering thoughts ready for arousal to the mind, it comes to enjoy a peculiar existence, which in every case, admittedly, can only hold good in the current act of thinking, but in its totality is independent of this. The two opposing views here stated, that language belongs to or is foreign to the soul, depends or does not depend upon it, are in actuality combined there and constitute the peculiarity of its nature. Nor must this conflict be resolved by making language in part something alien and independent, and in part neither one nor the other. Language is objectively active and independent, precisely in so far as it is subjectively passive and dependent. For nowhere, not even in writing, does it have a permanent abode; its ‘dead’ part must always be regenerated in thinking, come to life in speech and understanding, and hence must pass over entirely into the subject. But this act of regeneration consists, precisely, in likewise making an object of it; it thereby undergoes on each occasion the full impact of the individual, but this impact is already in itself governed by what language is doing and has done. The true solution of this opposition lies in the unity of human nature. In what stems from that, in what is truly one with myself, the concepts of subject and object, of dependence and independence, are each merged into the other. Language belongs to me, because I bring it forth as I do; and since the ground of this lies at once in the speaking and having-spoken of every generation of men, so far as speech-communication may have prevailed unbroken among them, it is language itself which restrains me when I speak. But that in it which limits and determines me has arrived there from a human nature intimately allied to my own, and its alien element is therefore alien only for my transitory individual nature, not for my original and true one.

When we think how the current generation of a people is governed by all that their language has undergone, through all the preceding centuries, and how only the power of the single generation impinges thereon – and this not even purely, since those coming up and those departing live mingled side by side – it then becomes evident how small, in fact, is the power of the individual compared to the might of language. Only through the latter’s uncommon plasticity, the possibility of assimilating its forms in very different ways without damage to general understanding, and through the dominion exercised by every living mind over its dead heritage, is the balance somewhat restored. Yet it is always language in which every individual feels most vividly that he is nothing but an outflow of the whole of mankind. For while each reacts individually and incessantly upon it, every generation nevertheless produces a change in it, which only too often escapes notice. For the change does not always reside in the words and forms themselves, but at times only in their differently modified usage; and where writing and literature are lacking, the latter is harder to perceive. The reaction of the individual upon language becomes more apparent if we consider, as we must not omit to do if our concepts are to be sharply defined, that the individuality of a language (as the term is commonly understood) is only comparatively such, whereas true individuality resides only in the speaker at any given time. Only in the individual does language receive its ultimate determinacy. Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbour does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence. The manner in which language is modified in every individual discloses, in contrast to its previously expounded power, a dominion of man over it. Its power may be regarded (if we wish to apply the term to mental forces) as a physiological efficacy; the dominion emanating from man is a purely dynamical one. In the influence exerted on him lies the regularity of language and its forms; in his own reaction, a principle of freedom. For a thing may spring up in man, for which no understanding can discover the reason in previous circumstances; and we should misconceive the nature of language, and violate, indeed, the historical truth of its emergence and change, if we sought to exclude from it the possibility of such inexplicable phenomena. But though freedom in itself may be indeterminable and inexplicable, its bounds can perhaps be discovered, within a certain sphere reserved to it alone; and linguistic research must recognize and respect the phenomenon of freedom, but also be equally careful in tracing its limits.