The Future Of Philology [pp. 698-714]

THE FUTURE OF PHILOLOGY.
quiet followers of the current philosophy of their time. Horne
Tooke was guided by the philosophy of Loc'ike. He wanted to
reduce all words and pairts of words to signs of sensations. The
German followers of Kant are for treating words under their
categories of thought, the relations of space, time, cause, and
the like. The Hegelians are for setting all forth as polar pairs;
roots are notional or pronominal, pronouns subjective and objective, adverbs ani prepositions develop in polar pairs in each
direction of space and time. And now we have DIrwinism and
the struggle for life in language.
But as the facts of language accumulate, and special students
work upon them, they are found to have unmistakable laws of
their own, which would not have been anticipated by the reasonings of the current philosophy. Then these facts and laws of
language are seen to be facts and laws of mind and of the
history of man, and they overthrow all theories which conflict
with them.
Psychology is thus compelled to recognize history and growth,
and it changes fromn an abstract discussion of supposed constant faculties, to the ordering of the facts in successive generations, and finding the laws of their succession and development.
The intuition of right as applied to the order of the world is
trained and developed by the same studies. The ignorant man's
cosmos is little like the real one, and the scientific study of the
real one by the aid of language brings out the truth in the
clearest light. Such studies as these are the honor of the race,
and enlarge the vision and wisdom of man, and they dilate the
imagination more than all other uses of his powers. The exaltation of the faculties of man through the development of
his intuition of space by the study of the astral systems is indeed wonderful, and no less wonderful is that produced by the
use of the intuition of time in the study of geologic periods.
But they are matched and overmatched by the growth and training of the intuition of right by the study of man in history.
Vigorous as is the appeal of the starry heavens to oalr highest
faculties, the idea o4 right seen as a controlling force and law in
the development and organization of the human race is still
more imposing and insp'ing.
Mlind is the highest object we know. Diseoveries about it are
the most important and most fascinating discoveries. In truth,
space fascinates us because it is the sensoriumn of the universal
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