with which ingenious men have sometimes thought to replace them.[1] These are indeed artful devices, in which the character and bearing of each part is painfully weighed and determined in advance: compared with them, language is a real growth; and human thought will as readily exchange its natural covering for one of them as the growing crustacean will give up its shell for a casing of silver, wrought by the most skilful hands. Their symmetry is that of a mathematical figure, carefully laid out, and drawn to rule and line; in language, the human mind, tethered by its limited capacities in the midst of creation, reaches out as far as it can in every direction and makes its mark, and is surprised at the end to find the result a circle.
In whatever aspect the general facts of language are viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and intention. Phonetic change is the spontaneous working out of tendencies which the individual does not acknowledge to himself; in their effects upon organs of whose structure and workings he is almost or wholly ignorant. Outward circumstances, historical conditions, progress of knowledge and culture, are recorded in speech because its practical uses require that they should be so, not because any one has attempted to depict them. Language shows ethnic descent, not as men have chosen to preserve such evidence of their kindred with other communities and races, but as it cannot be effaced without special effort directed to that end. The operations of the mind, the development of association, the laws of subjective relation, are exhibited there, but only as they are the agencies which govern the phenomena of speech, unrecognized in their working, but inferrible from their effects.
Now it is this absence of reflection and conscious intent which takes away from the facts of language the subjective character that would otherwise belong to them as products of voluntary action. The linguistic student feels that he is not dealing with the artful creations of individuals. So far
- ↑ For an account of some of these attempts at an artificial language, of theoretically perfect structure, and designed for universal use, see Professor Max Müller's Lectures on Language, second series, second lecture.
