Philologist

“ She rules, with such noble repose, over men and animals alike, kindly loosed by her from the yoke of daily toil; and even I feel her beneficent influence, although my habits of sixty years have so changed me that I can feel most things only through the signs which represent them. My world is wholly formed of words—so much of a philologist I have become! ”

“ Better: people have explained antiquity to themselves out of their own experiences; and from the amount of antiquity thus acquired they have assessed the value of their experiences. Experience, therefore, is certainly an essential prerequisite for a philologist—that is, the philologist must first of all be a man; for then only can he be productive as a philologist. It follows from this that old men are well suited to be philologists if they were not such during that portion of their life which was richest in experiences. ”

“ Ah, my dear friend, in such cases the wisest course cannot be discovered by cunning; it is only afterward that one realizes whether one has seized upon the right thing or not. For the case is exceptional, and I do not know by what analogy to decide it. For my part I lay very great stress upon the fact that the philologists will receive a wholesome surprise when you suddenly stand up for me as a philologist. What Wagner in his love for me has written I do not know. In view of the coarse rudeness of our fellow philologist, it will in any case have a different effect from what he expects. ”

“ Shall the philologist who toils on words and syllables be less honoured than the student of chemistry labouring in his laboratory? It is impossible to guess beforehand what may result from philological researches, any more than one can know, in [372] digging a mine, the wealth it may contain. We may be on our way to the discovery of a new world. Science always presents itself to man as an unknown country. ”

“ The significations, therefore, with which the comparative philologist has to concern himself, are those unconsciously agreed upon by a body of men, or rather the common group of ideas suggested by a word to all of them alike. Here, again, some general causes must be at work which may yet be revealed by a careful analysis. The comparative philologist has not to trouble himself, like the classical philologist, with discovering the exact ideas connected with a word by some individual author ”

“ It is a great advantage for the true philologist that a great deal of preliminary work has been done in his science, so that he may take possession of this inheritance if he is strong enough for it—I refer to the valuation of the entire Hellenic mode of thinking. So long as philologists worked simply at details, a misunderstanding of the Greeks was the consequence. The stages of this undervaluation are · the sophists of the second century, the philologist-poets of the Renaissance, and the philologist as the teacher of the higher classes of society (Goethe, Schiller) . ”

“ When we examine the history of philology it is borne in upon us how few really talented men have taken part in it. Among the most celebrated philologists are a few who ruined their intellect by acquiring a smattering of many subjects, and among the most enlightened of them were several who could use their intellect only for childish tasks. It is a sad story · no science, I think, has ever been so poor in talented followers. Those whom we might call the intellectually crippled found a suitable hobby in all this hair-splitting. ”

“ The task which he has set himself is a very delicate one—it demands an equal knowledge of philology, literature, and popular usage, and a keen faculty for discerning things that under apparent resemblances really differ, and things that under various and unlike forms, have common root ideas. The philologist has to deal with only one root word. The compiler of a book of synonyms must be, so to speak, a compound philologist, and must have in hand, for comparative purposes, several root words. Nor, again, is philology a sufficient guide, for the significance of words changes in popular usage ”

“ The erudite philologist may harken back to the Chaldaic or another dead language of Asia or Africa and make ponderous tomes upon his research, but the amateur can dig as he plays only by being actually with a simple, semi-savage people, as I was, and finding among them, still active, the base and slight growth of human thought and emotion in speech. ”

“ Later he applied the reasoning of the philologist, classified and tabulated his results, and thus was able, when drawn into fields unexplored by science, to do original work and to produce results of great value to other students. But he was not the man to make a display of his power ”

“ If it were the task of the philologist to impart formal education, it would be necessary for him to teach walking, dancing, speaking, singing, acting, or arguing · and the so-called formal teachers did impart their instruction this way in the second and third centuries. But only the training of a scientific man is taken into account, which results in "formal" thinking and writing, and hardly any speaking at all. ”

“ The most favorable state of mind for progress in this stage is that of a philologist; and if a man has literary tastes in great strength, and philological tastes in a minor degree, he will do well, in this stage, to encourage the philologist in himself and keep his love of literature in abeyance. ”

“ In connection with the training of the modern philologist the influence of the science of linguistics should be mentioned and judged; a philologist should rather turn aside from it . the question of the early beginnings of the Greeks and Romans should be nothing to him . ”

“ This holds as good with the lower animals as with men, and is explained by the fact that perfection of proficiency is only partly dependent upon natural capacity, but is in great measure due to practice and cultivation of the original faculty. A philologist, for example, is unskilled in questions of jurisprudence; a natural philosopher or mathematician, in philology; an abstract philosopher, in poetical criticism. ”

“ The actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist ”

“ It cannot fail to affect in time even the manual-mongers and the examiners who expect the innocent school to reproduce the fictions of the cram-books. A philologist, who sees with his own eyes and sees straight, is a rare combination.”—Journal of Education. ”

“ The transformations of words—which are often astounding enough—depend upon a few well-established physiological principles of utterance; and since philology has learned to rely upon these principles, it has become nearly as sure in its methods and results as one of the so-called "exact sciences." Folly enough is doubtless committed within its precincts by writers who venture there without the laborious preparation which this science, more than almost any other, demands. But the proceedings of the trained philologist are no more arbitrary than those of the trained astronomer. ”

“ According as one object or another predominates, so will the method of teaching change; if one object is sought to the exclusion of all others, the method of teaching will, of course, vary with the object in view. The philologist will subordinate everything to the study of philology; the historian will fasten all his attention on the evidences of date, the local references, the flavour of contemporary philosophy, politics, religion, or whatever it may be; the technician will be entirely occupied with form, metre, structure. ”

“ In the region of history, as he shews, the best philologists contradict each other and themselves, as to the metals possessed by the early Aryans. Yet philology is the science which claims possession of "the only method that can lead to scientific results," results which differ with the views of each individual scholar. ”

“ We think that the philologist may engage to make out, on the strictest principles of induction, from the tenacity with which all communities cling to their language, and the slow observed rate of change by which they alter ”

“ It is to be hoped that there are a few people who look upon it as a problem why philologists should be the teachers of our noblest youths. Perhaps the case will not be always so—It would be much more natural per se if our children were instructed in the elements of geography, natural science, political economy, and sociology, if they were gradually led to a consideration of life itself, and if finally, but much later, the most noteworthy events of the past were brought to their knowledge. A knowledge of antiquity should be among the last subjects which a student would take up ”

“ But just let us consider how a scientific man bungles his life: [Pg 115] what has the teaching of Greek particles to do with the sense of life?—Thus we can also observe how innumerable men merely live, as it were, a preparation for a man, the philologist, for example, as a preparation for the philosopher, who in his turn knows how to utilise his ant-like work to pronounce some opinion upon the value of life. ”

“ That much may be accomplished by specialists following a single line of approach has been demonstrated by the philologists, who have burrowed tirelessly to present new materials to a world which seldom rewards their happiest elucidations with so much as a 'Well said, old mole!' The student of literature (in the narrower modern sense of the word) brings a new range of interests. ”

“ When we observe how few philologists there actually are, except those that have taken up philology as a means of livelihood, we can easily decide for ourselves what is the matter with this impulse for antiquity: it hardly exists at all, for there are no disinterested philologists. ”

“ If it were only possible to muster all the philologists of ten years together and drill them army fashion into the service of science, at the end of ten years the science of philology would no longer be necessary, because all the principal work would have been done. ”

“ A philologist who undertakes to explain English place-names by the rigid rules of modern philology, without taking into account the human element connected with the subject, the tendency of people to modify names into more familiar forms, or to modify their sound for the sake of change and variety alone, will find himself in difficulties with a considerable number of them. ”

“ It is for this reason that in the recensions of philologists we always hear the same song in praise of the learned man who has made a 'sober' use of documents, of blame for him who has followed a different method and included what is vain and superfluous in his volumes of annals, of selections from archives, or of collections of documents. All learned men and philologists, in fact, select, and all are advised to select. And what is the logical criterion of this selection? ”

“ A Word for Philologists.—It is thought that there are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed when through their efforts these books are kept genuine and intelligible,—to confirm this belief again and again is the purpose of philology. ”

“ In the fact that what properly belongs to his study has been relegated to the subjects out of which he has only the option of choosing one, we have a lamentable illustration of the effects of the compromise forced on the philologists. If, for the literary portion of the curriculum, a candidate could substitute the first four of the special subjects, he would have completed a thoroughly satisfactory course of Philology, so far at least as relates to the Teutonic and Romance languages.
But to pass from what concerns Philology to what concerns Literature. ”

“ The thoroughly unfitted majority draw up the rules of the science in accordance with their own capacities and inclinations; and in this way they tyrannise over the hundredth, the only capable one among them. If they have the training of others in their hands they will train them consciously or unconsciously after their own image . what then becomes of the classicism of the Greeks and Romans?
The points to be proved are—
(a) The disparity between philologists and the ancients. ”

“ If a man approves of the investigation of the past he will also approve and even praise the fact—and will above all easily understand it—that there are scholars who are exclusively occupied with the investigation of Greek and Roman antiquity: but that these scholars are at the same time the teachers of the children of the nobility and gentry is not equally easy of comprehension—here lies a problem.
Why philologists precisely? ”

“ The philologists are quarrelling about their ‘equations,’ and about the application of their phonetic laws to mythical proper names. On the basis of this shaking soil, they propose to build another science, Mythology! Then, pleased with the scientific exactitude of their evidence, they object to the laxity of ours. ”

“ They, however, who possess the greatest knowledge of antiquity should likewise possess the greatest amount of culture, viz., our philologists; but what is classical about them?
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Classical philology is the basis of the most shallow rationalism always having been dishonestly applied, it has gradually become quite ineffective. Its effect is one more illusion of the modern man. Philologists are nothing but a guild of sky-pilots who are [Pg 146] not known as such · this is why the State takes an interest in them. ”