On the Approaches to the English Language [pp. 434-456]

1874,] ON THE APPROACHES TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
The question might as well be raised, what is the good of
botany? To the eye of the botanist, the spatter-dock and the
pond lily, the mushroom and the apple-tree, are equally valuable
objects of study, because each constitutes a link in the chain of
vegetable life. Philology, like every other science, has its own
field of inquiry and its own right of being, irrespective of any
immediate practical results to which it may be put. The philologist is not of necessity a brilliant writer, any more than the
botanist is of necessity a successful grower of potatoes. Science
is to be judged solely by the truths which it discovers; it is not
productive, creative, but rather declarative. Its office is to discover and correlate fundamental principles which the artist may,
and commonly must, take into account in his processes of creation. In point of time, art may precede science, or vice versa,
but, in any case, the two occupy different fields, follow different
methods, achieve different results, and generally presuppose
different qualities of mind in those who would pursue them. It
is one of the rarest of phenomena to find the artist and the
scientist united in the same person. That philology is a science,
in the strict sense of the term will be apparent from a consideration of its method and its results. It works according to law,
to rule; it is not, as we are too apt to suppose, a sort of brilliant
guessing at analogies. One hundred years ago, Voltaire was
perhaps justified in his sneer at philology as a system of study
where all the consonants are interchangeable and the vowels go
for nothing. At the present day philology teaches that there are
certain groups of languages derived from a common s,tock and
having certain definite relations one to the other; that the various
languages of the same group have certain features in common
and certain differences; that when we pass from one language to
another, we must expect to encounter certain points of likeness
and other points of disagreement; that words apparently
identical in form have really no connection, while other words,
that have not one letter in common, are still offshoots from the
same root. Nothing is more widely spread than the belief that
human speech is as free as air; we imagine that we can speak
as we choose. Yet the fact is that we are fettered in a thousand
ways, our utterances are not our own, but what birth, early
education, climate, provincial surroundings have made them.
Errors of grammar contracted in youth are ineradicable in old
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