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The most highly educated man in the most highly educated society cannot sneer them out of being. But it is time to pass to the more strictly scientific aspect of the subject. The doctrine of race, in its popular form, is the direct offspring of the study of scientific philology; and yet it is just now, in its popular form at least, somewhat under the ban of scientific philologers.
Although since the days of Nimrod war has been the constant occupation of men, the fingers of one hand suffice to number the great commanders. The "unlearned" hardly think of usurping Tyndall's place in the lecture room, or of taking his cuneiform bricks from Rawlinson; yet the world has been much more prolific of learned scientists and philologers than of able generals.
N.B.: There is now in the Press, my Appeal to the Learned; Or my general Invitation to all Astrologers, Divines, Physicians, Lawyers, Mathematicians, Philologers, and to the Literati of the whole World, to come and take their Places in the Common Court of Knowledge, and receive the Charge given in by me, against ISAAC BICKERSTAFF, Esq., that most notorious Impostor in Science and illiterate Pretender to the Stars; where I shall openly convict him of ignorance in his profession, impudence and falsehood in every assertion, to the great detriment and scandal of Astrology.
In High German, there is a third name for yeast, "hefe," which is not represented in English, so far as I know. All these words are said by philologers to be derived from roots expressive of the intestine motion of a fermenting substance.
But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science.
The book by which Wilkins will always be remembered among curious students and philologers is his 'Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. It is a quarto of 600 pages, including an alphabetical dictionary of English words, with their equivalents in what may be called, without irreverence, Wilkinese.
In our present case scientific philologers are beginning to complain, with perfect truth and perfect justice from their own point of view, that the popular doctrine of race confounds race and language. They tell us, and they do right to tell us, that language is no certain test of race, that men who speak the same tongue are not therefore necessarily men of the same blood.
Little light has been thrown on their first ante-historical attempts. Until the late labors of German philologers, little had been done to clear up the confusion resting on this period of literary history. As yet the field has scarcely been explored beyond the regions not immediately connected with the literature of Germany.
On the contrary, it seems to me obvious that, though, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, unity of languages may afford a certain presumption in favour of the unity of stock of the peoples speaking those languages, it cannot be held to prove that unity of stock, unless philologers are prepared to demonstrate, that no nation can lose its language and acquire that of a distinct nation, without a change of blood corresponding with the change of language.
Bruges, in the eighteenth century, produces two writers of merit, Smidts and Labare. In French Flanders, De Swaen adapts from Corneille, and publishes original dramas. Many songs are composed both in the northern and southern provinces, mostly of a religious character. Philologers seek to revive the neglected idiom with little success. But the century is blank of great names.
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