From Fraser's Magazine. to a desperate attempt to restore the old LECTURES ON MR. DARWIN'S PHILOSO- dynasty of Locke and Hume. During PHY OF LANGUAGE. BY PROFESSOR MAX MULLER. SECOND LECTURE, DELIVERED At the Royal INSTITUTION, MARCH 29, 1873. * the years immediately preceding the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1860) and his Descent of Man, the old problems which had been discussed in the days of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, IF we want to understand the history turned up again in full force. We had to of the Norman Conquest, the Reforma- read again that sensuous impressions tion, the French Revolution, or any other were the sole constituent elements of the great crisis in the political, religious, and human intellect; that general ideas were social state of the world, we know that all developed spontaneously from single we must study the history of the times impressions; that the only difference immediately preceding those momentous between sensations and ideas was the changes. Nor shall we ever understand faintness of the latter; that what we the real character of a great philosophical mean by substance is only a collection of crisis unless we have made ourselves particular ideas, united by imagination, thoroughly familiar with its antecedents. and comprehended by a particular name; Without going so far as Hegel, who saw and that what we are pleased to call our in the whole history of philosophy an un-mind, is but a delusion, though who the broken dialectic evolution, it is easy to deluder is and who the deluded, would see that there certainly is a greater conseem to be a question too indiscreet to ask. tinuity in the history of philosophic thought than in the history of politics, But the principal assault in this strugand it therefore seemed to me essential gle came from a new quarter. It was not to dwell in my first Lecture on the exact to be the old battle over again, we were stage which the philosophical struggle of told; but the fight was to be carried on our century had reached before Mr. Dar- with modern and irresistible weapons. win's publications appeared, in order to The new philosophy, priding itself, as all enable us to appreciate fully his historical philosophies have done, on its positive position, not only as an eminent physiolo- character, professed to despise the endgist, but as the restorer of that great em- less argumentations of the schools, and pire in the world of thought which claims to appeal for evidence to matter of fact as its founders the glorious names of only. Our mind, whether consisting of Locke and Hume. It might indeed be material impressions or intellectual consaid of Mr. Darwin what was once said of cepts, was now to be submitted to the the restorer of another empire, "Il n'est dissecting knife and the microscope. We pas parvenu, il est arrivé." The philo- were shown the nervous tubes, afferent sophical empire of Locke and Hume had and efferent, through which shocks from fallen under the blows of Kant's Criticism without pass on to sensitive and motive of pure Reason. But the successors of cells; the commissural tubes holding these cells together were laid bare before Kant - Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel disregarding the checks by which Kant us; the exact place in the brain was had so carefully defined the legitimate pointed out where the messages from exercise of the rights of Pure Reason, without were delivered; and it seemed indulged in such flights of transcendent as if nothing were wanting but a more fancy, that a reaction became inevitable. powerful lens to enable us to see with First came the violent protest of Scho- our own eyes how, in the workshop of penhauer, and his exhortation to return to the brain, as in a photographic apparatus, the old fundamental principles of Kant's the pictures of the senses and the ideas of the intellect were being turned out in philosophy. These, owing to their very endless variety. violence, passed unheeded. Then followed a complete disorganization of philosophic thought, and this led in the end * Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, book i. sec. i. p. 33. If it can be Nor do I think that philosophers would have allowed the reopening of the floodgates of animal anthropomorphism if it had not been for the simultaneous rise of Mr. Darwin's theories. proved that man derives his origin genealogically, and, in the widest sense of the word, historically, from some lower animal, it is useless to say another word on the mind of man being different from the mind of animals. The two are identical, and no argument would be required any longer to support Hume's opinions; they would henceforth rest on positive facts. This shows the immense importance of Mr. Darwin's speculations in solving, once for all, by evidence that admits of no demurrer, the long-pending questions. between man and animal, and, in its further consequences, between mind and matter, between spiritualism and materialism, between Berkeley and Hume; and it shows at the same time that the final verdict on his philosophy must be signed, not by zoologists and physiologists only, but by psychologists also, nay, it may be, by German metaphysicians. And this was not all. The old stories | much useless ink had been shed over the about the reasoning of animals, so pow-question of the intellect of animals, to be erfully handled in the school of Hume, for ever neutralized, ought hardly to have were brought out again. Innumerable been disturbed, least of all by those who anecdotes that had been told from the profess to trust in nothing but positive time of Aelian to the days of Reimarus, fact. were told once more, in order to show that the intellect of animals did not only match, but that in many cases it transcended the powers of the human intellect. One might have imagined oneself living again in the days of La Mettrie, who having published his work, Man, a Machine, followed it up by another work, Brutes, more than Machines. It is true there were some philosophers who protested energetically against reopening that question, which had been closed by common consent, and which certainly ought not to have been reopened by positive philosophers. For if there is a terra incognita which excludes all positive knowledge, it is the mind of animals. We may imagine anything we please about the inner life, the motives, the foresight, the feelings and aspirations of animals — we can know absolutely nothing. How little analogy can help us in interpreting their acts is best proved by the fact, that a philosopher like Descartes could bring himself to consider animals as mere machines, while Leibniz was unwilling to deny to them the possession of immortal souls. We need not wonder at such discrepan- Few men who are not zoologists and cies, considering the nature of the evi- physiologists by profession can have read dence. What can we know of the inner Mr. Darwin's books On the Origin of Spelife of a mollusc? We may imagine that cies and On the Descent of Man with it lives in total darkness, that it is hardly deeper interest than I have, and with a more than a mass of pulp; but we may more intense admiration of his originalequally well imagine that, being free ity, independence, and honesty of thought. from all the disturbances produced by I know of few books so useful to the stuthe impressions of the senses, and out of dent of the Science of Language, in teachthe reach of all those causes of error to ing him the true method for discovering which man is liable, it may possess a much similarity beneath diversity, the general truer and deeper insight into the essence behind the individual, the essential hidof the Absolute, a much fuller apprehen- den by the accidental; and helping him sion of eternal truths than the human soul. to understand the possibility of change It may be so, or it may not be so, for there by natural means. There may be gaps is no limit to an anthropomorphic inter- and flaws in the genealogical pedigree of pretation of the life of animals. But organic life, as drawn by Mr. Darwin and the tacit understanding, or rather the his followers; there may or there may clear compromise, established among the not be a possibility of resisting their arphilosophers of the last century, and de- guments when, beginning with a group of claring the old battle-field, on which so animals, boldly called "organisms with out organs," ,"such as the Bathybius wish to say that, in the presence of such high authorities, one ought to refrain from expressing an opinion, and be satisfied to wait. I am old enough to remember the equally authoritative statements of the most eminent naturalists with re This is a point to be settled by physiologists; and if Carl Vogt may be accept-gard to the races of man. When my own ed as their recognized representative and researches on language and the intellectual development of man led me to the conclusion that, if we only had sufficient time (some hundreds of thousands of years) allowed us, there would be no difficulty in giving an intelligible account of the common origin of all languages, I was met with the assurance that, even hypothetically, such a view was impossible, because the merest tyro in anatomy knew that the different races of men constituted so many species, that species were the result of independent creative acts, and that the black, brown, red, yellow, and white races could not possibly be conceived as descended from one source. Men like Prichard and Humboldt, who maintained the possibility of a common origin, were accused of being influenced by extraneous motives. I myself was charged with a superstitious belief in the Mosaic ethnology. And why? Simply because, in the Science of Language, I was a Darwinian before Darwin; simply But, however that may be, and what- because I had protested against scientific ever modification Mr. Darwin's system as strongly as against theological dogmamay receive at the hands of professed tism; simply because I wished to see the physiologists, the honour of having question of the possibility of a common cleared the Augean stable of endless spe- origin of languages treated, at least, as an cies, of having explained many things open question.* And what has happened which formerly seemed to require the in- now? All the arguments about hybridterference of direct creation, by the slow ity, infertility, local centres, permanent action of natural causes, of having made types, are swept away under the powerus see the influence exercised by the in-ful broom of development, and we are dividual on the family, and by the family told that not only the different varieties on the individual, of having given us, in of man, but monkeys, horses, cats, and fact, a few really new and fresh ideas, dogs, have all one, or at the utmost four. will always remain his own. progenitors; nay, that "no living creature, in Europe at least, dares to affirm the independent creation of species." Under these circumstances it seems but fair to follow the old Greek rule of ab In saying this, however, I do not wish to imply assent to Mr. Darwin's views on the development of all species; I only • Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 165. staining, and to wait whether in the prog "Personne, en Europe au moins, n'ose plus soutenir la création indépendante et de toutes pièces des espèces." Quoted by Darwin, in his Descent of Man, vol, i. p. I. See Durand, Origines, pp. 77, 78. * See "The Possibility of a Common Origin of Language," in my letter to Bunsen "On the Turanian Languages," published in Bunsen's Christianity and Mankind, 1854. |