to be too utterly condemned. And, as I have said above, I am ready to be strictly judged by the truth or error of my criticisms.
The plainest of plain speaking is far less really injurious than misrepresentation and detraction under the mask of extreme courtesy. Surely, so much wholesale depreciation and imputation of unworthy motives can hardly be found in all my writings as Mr. Müller raises against me in this one article. I should not venture to accuse any one of being actuated in his literary work only by personal vanity and a lust for notoriety, except after the summing up of a long array of particulars and deductions—I think not, even then. If I declared any one to be noisy about a subject in inverse proportion to his examination of it, I should at least want to refer to examples that illustrated the peculiarity. Does my critic put these accusations forward as his example of how a controversy should be conducted in a gentlemanly manner? If I stated that any one "bitterly complained" that he was not answered by those he criticised, I should feel called upon to give chapter and verse for it; and neither Mr. Müller, nor any one else, can point out any such complaints on my part. I regard this as one more evidence of Mr. Müller's careless and insufficient examination of my writings. He got his wrong impression, I imagine, from an imputation which Steinthal brings against me. I did blame Steinthal for undertaking, in his chapter on the origin of language, to report and refute the opposing views only of the last-century theorists, as if there were no more recent opinions on the subject which had a claim to be considered; and he was pleased to interpret it as a reproach to him for not mentioning myself! I should think far worse of him and of Mr. Müller than I do, if I supposed them incapable, in their cooler moments, of understanding that a man may, without any improperly selfish feeling, be astonished, and even indignant, to see the views, which he holds in company with a great many others, quietly ignored; or that he may hold them so heartily that he shall feel called upon to stand forth in their defense whenever they are unjustifiably passed over, or are assailed with what seem to him unsound arguments.
My article upon Steinthal was so different from what Mr. Müller appears to assume it to be, when speaking of that scholar as having "retaliated with the same missiles with which he had been assailed," that I can only infer that it, too, is unknown to him except by false report. In a chapter of his recent work, "Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft," Prof. Steinthal seemed to me to have piled together about as many paradoxes as could well be gotten into so small a space, pushing the psychological method to an extreme which was almost its own refutation. To pick out a few points: for a definition of language, he gives us "it is what it is becoming"—he declares the divine origin of language inadmissible, because no science, save the philosophy of religion, has any right to take account of God; he holds primeval man—in distinction from the philosophers of the last century, who
