Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/801

765 PHILOLOGY PART I. SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE IN GENERAL. PHILOLOGY is the generally accepted comprehensive name for the study of the word ; it designates that branch of knowledge which deals with human speech, and with all that speech discloses as to the nature and history of man. Philology has two principal divisions, corre sponding to the two uses of "word" or "speech," as signifying either what is said or the language in which it is said, as either the thought expressed which, when recorded, takes the form of literature or the instrument ality of its expression : these divisions are the literary and the linguistic. Not all study of literature, indeed, is philological : as when, for example, the records of the ancient Chinese are ransacked for notices of astronomical or meteorological phenomena, or the principles of geometry are learned from the text -book of a Greek sage ; while, on the other hand, to study Ptolemy and Euclid for the history of the sciences represented by them is philological more than scientific. Again, the study of language itself has its literary side : as when the vocabulary of a com munity (say of the ancient Indo-Europeans or Aryans) is taken as a document from which to infer the range and grade of knowledge of its speakers, their circumstances, and their institutions. The two divisions thus do not admit of absolute distinction and separation, though for some time past tending toward greater independence. The literary is the older of the two ; it even occupied until recently the whole field, since the scientific study of language itself has arisen only within the present century. Till then, literary philology included linguistic, as a merely subordinate and auxiliary part, the knowledge of a lan guage Laing the necessary key to a knowledge of the literature written in that language. When, therefore, instead of studying each language by itself for the sake of its own literature, men began to compare one language with another, in order to bring to light their relationships, their structures, their histories, the name " comparative philology " naturally enough suggested itself and came into use for the new method ; and this name, awkward and trivial though it may be, has become so firmly fixed in English usage that it can be only slowly, if at all, displaced. Continental usage (especially German) tends more strongly than English to restrict the name philology to its older office, and to employ for the recent branch of knowledge a specific term, like those that have gained more or less currency with us also : as glottic, glossology, linguistics, linguistic science, science of language, and the like. It is not a question of absolute propriety or correctness, since the word philology is in its nature wide enough to imply all language-study, of whatever kind ; it is one, rather, of the convenient distinction of methods that have grown too independent and important to be any longer well included under a common name. Philology, in all its departments, began and grew up as classical ; the history of our civilization made the study of Greek and Latin long the exclusive, still longer the pre dominant and regulating, occupation of secular scholar ship. The Hebrew and its literature were held apart, as something of a different order, as sacred. It was not imagined that any tongue to which culture and literature did not lend importance was worthy of serious attention from scholars. The first essays in comparison, likewise, were made upon the classical tongues, and were as erroneous in method and fertile in false conclusions as was to be expected, considering the narrowness of view and the con trolling prejudices of those Avho made them ; and the admission of Hebrew to the comparison only added to the confusion. The change which this century has seen has been a part of the general scientific movement of the age, which has brought about the establishment of so many new branches of knowledge, both historical and physical, by the abandonment of shackling prejudices, the freedom of inquiry, the recognition of the dignity of all knowledge, the wide-reaching assemblage of facts and their objective comparison, and the resulting constant improvement of method. Literary philology has had its full share of advantage from this movement ; but linguistic philology has been actually created by it out of the crude observa tions and wild deductions of earlier times, as truly as chemistry out of alchemy, or geology out of diluvianism. It is unnecessary here to follow out the details of the development ; but we may well refer to the decisive in fluence of one discovery, the decisive action of one scholar. It was the discovery of the special relationship of the Aryan or Indo-European languages, depending in great measure upon the introduction of the Sanskrit as a term in their comparison, and demonstrated and worked out by the German scholar Bopp, that founded the science of linguistic philology. While there is abundant room for further improvement, it yet appears that the grand features of philologic study, in all its departments, are now so distinctly drawn that no revolution of its methods, but only their modification in minor respects, is henceforth probable. How and for what purposes to investigate the literature of any people (philology in the more proper sense), combining the knowledge thus obtained with that derived from other sources ; how to study and set forth the material and structure and combinations of a language (grammar), or of a body of related languages (comparative grammar) ; how to co-ordinate and interpret the general phenomena of language, as variously illustrated in the infinitely varying facts of different tongues, so as to exhibit its nature as a factor in human history, and its methods of life and growth (linguistic science), these are what philology teaches. The first two subjects are mainly disposed of in this work in the various articles devoted to countries and races, with their literatures and dialects ; the last was briefly touched upon in the article ANTHRO POLOGY, but requires fuller treatment here, along with a general view of the classification of languages, as thus far effected. The study of language is a division of the general Relation science of anthropology, and is akin to all the rest in * ar >- respect of its objects and its methods. Man as we now | iro P- see him is a twofold being : in part the child of nature, as to his capacities and desires, his endowments of mind and body ; in part the creature of education, by training in the knowledge, the arts, the social conduct, of which his predecessors have gained possession. And the problem of anthropology is this : how natural man has become culti vated man ; how a being thus endowed by nature should have begun and carried on the processes of acquisition which have brought him to his present state. The results of his predecessors labours are not transmuted for his benefit into natural instincts, in language or in anything else. The child of the most civilized race, if isolated and left wholly to his own resources, aided by neither the example nor the instruction of his fellows, would no more speak the speech of his ancestors than he would build their houses, fashion their clothes, practise any of their arts, inherit their knowledge or wealth. In fact, he would