Abstract
AS I found that you had already admitted no less than thirteen letters on my recent work “The Science of Thought,” I hesitated for some time whether I ought to ask you to admit another communication on a subject which can be of interest to a very limited number of the readers of NATURE only. I have, indeed, from the very beginning of my philological labours, claimed for the science of language a place among the physical sciences, and, in one sense, I do the same for the science of thought. Nature that does not include human nature in all its various manifestations would seem to me like St. Peter's without its cupola. But this plea of mine has not as yet been generally admitted. The visible material frame of man, his sense-organs and their functions, his nerves and his brain, all this has been recognized as the rightful domain of physical science. But beyond this physical science was not to go. There was the old line of separation, a line drawn by mediæval students between man, on one side, and his works, on the other; between the sense-organs and their perceptions; between the brain and its outcome, or, as it has sometimes been called, its secretion—namely, thought. To attempt to obliterate that line between physical science, on one side, and moral science, as it used to be called, on the other, was represented as mere confusion of thought. Still, here as elsewhere, a perception of higher unity does not necessarily imply an ignoring of useful distinctions. To me it has always seemed that man's nature can never be fully understood except as one and indivisible. His highest and most abstract thoughts appear to me inseparable from the lowest material impacts made upon his bodily frame. And “if nothing was ever in the intellect except what was first in the senses,” barring, of course, the intellect itself, it follows that we shall never understand the working of the intellect, unless we first try to understand the senses, their organs, their functions, and, in the end, their products. For practical purposes, no doubt, we may, nay we ought, to separate the two. Thus, in my own special subject, it is well to separate the treatment of phonetics and acoustics from higher linguistic researches. We may call phonetics and acoustics the ground floor, linguistics the first story. But as every building is one—the ground floor purposeless without the first story, the first story a mere castle in the air without the ground floor—the science of man also is one, and would, according to my opinion, be imperfect unless it included psychology, in the widest meaning of that term, as well as physiology; unless it claimed the science of language and of thought, no less than the science of the voice, the ear, the nerves, and the brain, as its obedient vassals. It was, therefore, a real satisfaction to me that it should have been NATURE where the questions raised in my “Science of Thought” excited the first interest, provoking strong opposition, and eliciting distinct approval, and I venture to crave your permission, on that ground, if on no other, for replying once more to the various arguments which some of your most eminent contributors have brought forward against the fundamental tenet of my work, the inseparableness of language and reason.
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MÜLLER, F. No Language without Reason—No Reason without Language . Nature 36, 249–251 (1887). https://doi.org/10.1038/036249a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/036249a0