Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 5: Miscellaneous Later EssaysMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 5: Miscellaneous Later Essays
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Comparative linguistics; Folklore; Literature -- History and criticism; Mythology; Religions
Secondly, though if we speak of language, we mean chiefly phonetic
articulate language, we do not exclude the less perfect symbols of
thought, such as gestures, signs, or pictures. They, too, are language in
a certain sense, and they must be included in language before we are
justified in saying that discursive thought can be realized in language
only. One instance will make this clear. We hold that we cannot think
without language. But can we not count without language? We certainly can.
We can form the conception of _three_ without any spoken word, by simply
holding up three fingers. In the same manner, the hand might stand for
five, both hands for ten, hands and feet for twenty.(25) This is how
people who possessed no organs of speech would speak; this is how the deaf
and dumb _do_ speak. Three fingers are as good as three strokes, three
strokes are as good as three clicks of the tongue, three clicks of the
tongue are as good as the sound _three_, or _trois_, or _drei_, or
_shalosh_ in Hebrew, or _san_ in Chinese. All these are signs, more or
less perfect, but being signs, they fall under the category of language;
and all we maintain is, that without some kind of sign, discursive thought
is impossible, and that in that sense, language, or λόγος, is the only
possible realization of human thought.
Another very common misunderstanding is this: people imagine that, if it
be impossible to think, except in language, language and thought must be
one and the same thing. But a true philosophy of language leads to the
very opposite result. Every philosopher would say that matter cannot exist
without form, nor form without matter, but no philosopher would say that
therefore it is impossible to distinguish between form and matter. In the
same way, though we maintain that thought cannot exist without language
nor language without thought, we do distinguish between thought and
language, between the inward and the outward λόγος, between the substance
and the form. Nay, we go a step beyond. We admit that language necessarily
reacts on thought, and we see in this reaction, in this refraction of the
rays of language, the real solution of the old riddle of mythology.
You will now see why these somewhat abstruse disquisitions were necessary
for our immediate purpose, and I can promise those who have hitherto
followed me on this rather barren and rugged track, that they will now be
able to rest, and command, from the point of view which we have reached,
the whole panorama of the mythology of the human mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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