As the previous essay took its bearings from some comparative etymological research, and also drew upon a lecture by Max Müller in order to round out a description of the environs of literary life during the nineteenth century, a brief presentation may be in order of the linguist’s views concerning the endeavour of etymology. When his treatment of the subject, at one crucial moment during another lecture in the same series, did not remain simply analytical but became diagnostic and even prescriptive, the effects could have passed the bounds of his own discipline and touched the power of imagination broadly, indirectly thus impinging upon the inward creativity specific to the composition of music, as an activity a near neighbour of literature: so, in view of that possible consequence, it is fitting briefly to discuss his position, as conveyed by a few passages in two of the lectures in the series.
Here time permits nothing beyond brevity, though, for curious readers, I should state that much may be elicited from between the lines of these two texts.
“On the Principles of Etymology” was the title of the first, a choice Müller illuminated implicitly with some remarks in one of those passages. Words, he suggested, are the beginnings of which language is made (as such they themselves are amongst the “principles of etymology”). What is more, the first origin of the words is evidently coeval or even perhaps identical altogether with the origin of the world (in at least one sense of the term). Once the commencement did occur, the space was opened for their circuits and cycles to take place (here setting aside the question whether or how often all of these are ever or eventually completed). Many a word has – he said – gone the round of the world, and it may go the same round again and again. These basic units of language change in sound and meaning to such an extent that not a single letter remains the same, and that their meaning becomes the very opposite of what it originally was, and yet the sum total of them is fixed at the outset, such that in absolute number neither an increase nor a decrease is conceivable: since the beginning of the world no new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements of nature. Given these fixed limits within which any creativity can unfold, at least on the part of human beings considered simply as such, no man can ever invent an entirely new word.
Novelty within that which he called the “world,” or, speaking more precisely, world as coeval and coterminous with that invention or adaptation of the human species, language (hence not with any language in particular), is inherently comparative, and therefore it comes into greater prominence as an extensive fund of data with which to compare accrues, in the train of literate history. Thus the later ages of language almost necessarily avail to the keen observer possibilities of knowledge never accorded to the earlier. Modern dialects may be said to let out the secrets of language. The secrets . . . for them keen ears and eyes are requisite. (By the term “dialect” broadly applied it seems a language is meant.) Thus the modern languages often surprise us by the wonderful simplicity of the means by which the whole structure of language is erected, and they frequently repeat in their new formations the exact process which had given rise to more ancient forms. As the frequency of this repetition increased, during a period such as the nineteenth century when the rate of change both in language and in the world accelerated more and more, the seeming privilege granted to the assiduous linguists of later days, was augmented accordingly. The processes which they aimed to study had themselves been abbreviated, and so where else, he asked rhetorically, except in the modern languages, can we watch – as though ours were set behind glass, in one very large terrarium, or at some safe distance, in a habitat – the secret growth of new forms, and so understand the resources which are given for the formation of the grammatical articulation of language?
Those inward resources were given at the outset, and hence language was likened to an organism (in the specific sense Wilhelm von Humboldt had favoured) or to a species (as the Darwin whom Müller praised would have said). To it a life-span can be attributed only if one speaks very loosely, and any senescence or death an observer might discern in it, instead suggests inattentiveness on the part of the latter. Language, though it changes continually, does by no means continually decay – this point was fundamental, and accordingly what we are wont to call decay and corruption in the history of language is in truth nothing but the necessary condition of its life. Furthermore, this necessary condition became ever more evident, to percipient eyes and ears, in a period when continual change was itself sped up, whereas the inattentive bystander who noticed in modern languages nothing but corruption or anomaly would be able to grasp hardly anything that pertained to the true nature of language.*
* Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, Lecture vi
This clean bill of health and certification of the longest possible life issued to language, however, is not the end of the story. For he himself, in the lecture of which the previous essay cited some remarks, alerted to the eventuality of a stagnation both in intellectual life and in language, whereby the creativity in both would cease to flow, while in another text of his, a few years prior, he compressed an alternative and quite gloomy notion of the entire history of language into one single aperçu: We begin by playing with words, but in the end the words will play with us.* If a reader pauses and places this “end” under a magnifying glass, what may come into focus is the prospect of an ultimate state not of language as such but of a language and therewith of its world, wherein the denizens would be abused by words and their caretakers, a literary-bureaucratic caste (that is, by a byzantine clerisy or a mandarinate) arrogating to itself their administration. Then the sovereignty of this formation with all its labyrinthine word-procedures would be ensured and extended in duration not least by an adroit manipulation of the fear that whatever arrangements might in turn follow it, could prove themselves to be even worse.
* “Semitic Monotheism” (The Times (April 14, 1860))
Against either that conceivable stagnation, and/or the other further eventuality of a general subjection to maleficent sovereigns of language (whose reign might itself emerge as a consequence of the former), Müller’s approach turned around and became diagnostic and prescriptive. These were fates which, it seems, he dearly did wish to avert and to avoid.
In the second of the two lectures which are of interest in the present connection, entitled “Metaphor,” this turn on his part is quite evident. Bearing in mind how the insights gleaned from the study of modern languages were considered to be applicable when it came time to examine the ancient, and vice versa, linguistic science as he now envisioned it, in contradistinction to its earlier indiscipline, had before it a serious task: to devise better ways in which language in its present state might be rendered more fit to survive, in the Darwinesque sense of the phrase. Thus, he said, the study of the antiquity of man, the Palæontology of the human mind, can never again be allowed to become the playground of mere theorizers, however bold and brilliant, but must henceforth be cultivated in accordance with those principles that have produced rich harvests in other fields of inductive research. Here Darwin’s hypothesis furnished the paradigm, while the eventuality that in the end the words will play with us represented the danger to be carefully bypassed.
As an example in the present of that coming wordplay, as it were, an adumbration of that fateful linguistic mischief in times that might conceivably arrive, Müller’s attention was drawn to one word in particular. Not surprisingly, he cited “nothing” in this regard, and his treatment of it was by turns analytical and admonitory, diagnostic and prescriptive.
How, in Roman antiquity, he asked, did language express what, if it were a rational conception at all, would seem to be the most immaterial of all conceptions – namely, nothing? The forthright answer: by the negation of, or the comparison with, something real and tangible. That is, by the word nihil, i. e. nihilum, which stands for nifilum, i. e. ne-filum, and means ‘not a thread or shred.’ The recourse in the term “nihil” to a thread (filum) may lead one to think of the Fates, but to pursue this connection would be to digress – and in any case the peroration that Müller delivered is of greater interest.
His audience was then addressed as follows.
[O]bserve for a moment how fables will grow up under the charm of language. It was perfectly correct to say, ‘I give you nothing,’ i. e. ‘I give you not even a shred.’ Here we are speaking of a relative nothing; in fact, we only deny something, or decline to give something. It is likewise perfectly correct to say, on stepping into an empty room, ‘There is nothing here,’ meaning not that there is absolutely nothing, but only that things which we expect to find in a room are not there. But by dint of using such phrases over and over again, a vague idea is gradually formed in the mind of a Nothing, and Nihil becomes the name of something positive and real. People at a very early time began to talk of the Nothing as if it were something; they talked and trembled at the idea of annihilation – an idea utterly inconceivable, except in the brain of a madman. Annihilation, if it meant anything, could etymologically – and in this case, we may add, logically too – mean nothing but to be reduced to a something which is not a shred – surely no very fearful state, considering that in strict logic it would comprehend the whole realm of existence, exclusive only of what is meant by shred. Yet what speculations, what fears, what ravings, have sprung from this word Nihil – a mere word, and nothing else! We see things grow and decay, we witness the birth and death of living things, but we never see anything lost or annihilated. Now, what does not fall within the cognizance of our senses, and what contradicts every principle of our reasoning faculties, has no right to be expressed in language.
Thenceforth “Nothing” could never be permitted to reside in language, nor perhaps even to pay it a visit.
Yet to deal with this verbum non gratum, along with others fallen into disfavour, a simple ban did not appear to suffice. For they did not themselves pose so much of a problem, when taken together; rather each was an expression of the problem, namely, manifestations of a particular condition afflicting language itself.
Here Müller’s foremost concern was to bring his audience and his readers to begin to appreciate the power of language over thought in order to circumvent it as needful. So, in view of the ways in which people talk about the Nothing, how poets make it the subject of the most harrowing strains, and, perhaps most worrisomely, how it has been, and still is, one of the principal ingredients in most systems of philosophy, the care aroused in him by the prospect of an eventual future in which such a word would, as he said, trifle with human beings, impelled his thoughts to consider the possibility of a radical linguistic cure. The idea of this treatment he then broached publicly, offering a hint which, were it then to result in the adoption of quasi-medicinal and/or prophylactic counter-measures, would represent a further application of the principle of selection that already had become so active by the middle of the nineteenth century throughout the literary sphere.
His comparative illustration of the power of language over thought, in modern times and ancient alike, was intended to lessen the contemporary public’s surprise at the nations of antiquity when they offered worship and sacrifice to such abstract names as Fate, Justice, or Victory. That surprise was marked not least by the usage of a new coinage which had begun to circulate widely, fetishism, and though it did draw attention to the mental procedures correlate to the reverence for a deity or a devil of one’s own making, its over-use also tended to discourage further inquiry into them. That may be why Müller did not opt for it, though evidently it would have fit well: for his aim was a more stringent one. He wanted to caution the public against a condition of language by which “Nothing” would be erected into just such a divinity as those personified notions of antiquity. There is as much mythology in our use of the word Nothing as in the most absurd portions of the mythological phraseology of India, Greece, and Rome – he insisted – and if we ascribe the former to a disease of language, the causes of which we are able to explain, we shall have to admit that in the latter, language has reached to an almost delirious state, and has ceased to be what it was meant to be, the expression of the impressions received through the senses, or of the conceptions of a rational mind. Such almost delirious states, one may gather from his comparison (was it put half-hypothetically for rhetorical effect?), did not represent a danger limited solely to antiquity, but were that which present-day diseases of language could develop into, if not appropriately treated, and indeed preventatively.
Either the stagnation of intellectual life, or the subjection to words which will play with us, or both in epochal succession, would be abetted by an inordinate growth of metaphor within a language, and of metaphorical habits of thought within its world. Therefore the principle of selection would need to be applied to control their spread, this action being taken under the conscientious oversight of the study of language in general and etymology in particular, precisely in order also to avoid the other pitfall, spurious research and charlatanry. Whenever any word, that was at first used metaphorically, is used without a clear conception of the steps that led from its original to its metaphorical meaning, there is danger of mythology – the prescriptive cast of this statement is obvious. Even worse, accordingly, and more needful to elude, is the aggravation of that possible danger into a condition in the present: whenever those steps are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places, we have mythology, or, if I may say so, we have diseased language, whether that language refers to religious or secular interests.*
* Lecture viii
The very broad scope of diagnoses and prescriptions along the lines here set out, should be noted. What piece of linguistic life would not fall under this assessment of its degree of health (if not also of its fitness in the Darwinesque sense)? Granted, fakery whereby the sequential changes in meaning which etymology has attested are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places is pernicious in its consequences, to one degree or another, and such illicit substitutions ought to be reproved; yet were they to be treated as he more than intimates they should, what would remain of language beyond scraps of cloth threadbare and in tatters? – That his plan to handle the conditions which gave rise to “Nothing” and other like notions so that language would be freed of them, might itself leave voids where words had been, is not the least of its peculiarities. – Liberating oneself from every fateful attraction to the nothing is perhaps easier said than done.
At a minimum, any such proposal to cure some linguistic ill, would have to be carried out with great care. The treatment, as often occurs when thoughts turn to therapy, or thinking turns into therapy, may well prove worse than the disease.
And moreover, surely one does need to ask, in whose case are they actually ills? Must it not be admitted, in all honesty, for those individuals whose temperaments diverge from the scholar’s, whose hearts burn at a different temperature than his, or beat at a different tempo, a programme such as this may be contra-indicated.
A Further Remark About Care
Curative projects were plentiful during the nineteenth century, with a checkered history. Three decades before Müller gave his lectures, the éminence grise of Socialism in England, Robert Owen, propounded a vision of society whereby it would be re-made into something like a piece of industrial machinery. To realise this goal, great discipline would necessarily have to be observed, while for those who showed an incapacity, a supplementary institution had to be established, of which the nature and function may be imagined without much difficulty. Nor did he prevaricate when he outlined these arrangements. All individuals trained, educated, and placed in conformity to the laws of their nature, must, of necessity, at all times, think and act rationally, except they shall become physically, intellectually, or morally diseased; in which case, the council shall remove them into the Hospital for bodily, mental, or moral invalids, where they shall remain until they shall be recovered by the mildest treatment that can effect their cure.* The size to which this other institution would have to grow, were the new model of society, a composite of “parallelograms” in the Owenite terminology, to be implemented, was noticed at the time and afterwards. The year before Müller’s lectures, one opponent of that programme, not then exactly an ancient memory, John Hill Burton, did not mince his words: when we reflect that the laws of the parallelogram were very stringent and minute, and required to be absolutely enforced to the letter, otherwise the whole machinery of society would come to pieces, like a watch with a broken spring, – it is clear that these hospitals would have contained a very large proportion of the unrationalised population.** – Today we still contend with the spectre of Owen’s “Hospital,” though the agenda which now would necessitate a contemporary iteration of it has been swaddled deliberately in layer upon layer of dissimulation and double-speak. The differences in structure and operation aside, what is the social-credit system rulers around the globe seek to impose upon a refractory humanity, if not a coercive, supposedly curative instrument of much the same kind?
* “Outline of the Rational System of Society,”
“A General Constitution of Government, and Universal Code of Laws,”
“On the Government of the Population: And Duties of the Council,” xxvi
** The Book-Hunter, pt. i, Introductory