=34. The Science of Language.= A comparison of our investigations--which we cannot present in detail but only indicate--with the science of language or philology as taught in the universities and in a great number of books, reveals a great difference between them. This academic philology makes a most exhaustive study of relations, which from the point of view of the purpose of language are of no consequence whatever, such as most of the rules and usages of grammar. A study of this sort must naturally confine itself to a mere determination of whether certain individuals or groups of individuals have or have not conformed to these rules. Even the chief subject of modern comparative philology, the study of the relations of the word forms to one another and their changes in the course of history, both within the language communities and when transferred to other localities, appear to be quite useless from the point of view of the theory of co-ordination. For it is indeed of little moment to us to learn by what process of change, as a rule utterly superficial, a certain word has come to be co-ordinated with a concept entirely different from the one with which it had been previously co-ordinated. Of incomparably greater importance would be investigations concerning the gradual change of the concepts themselves, although by no means as important as the real study of concepts. To be sure, such investigations are much more difficult than the study of word forms set down in writing. Nevertheless, on account of a historical process, which it would lead us too far afield to discuss, an idea of such word investigations has been formed which is wholly disproportionate to their importance. And if we ask ourselves what part such labors have taken in the progress of human civilization, we are at a loss for an answer. Students of the _science_ of language make a sharp distinction between it and the _knowledge_ of language, which is regarded as incomparably lower. But while a knowledge of language is important in at least one respect, in that it presents to us the cultural material set down in other languages, or makes them accessible in translation to those who do not know foreign languages, philology is of no service in this respect at all, and the pursuit of it will seem as inconceivably futile to future science as the scholasticism of the middle ages seems to us now.