ABSTRACT

Research into the relations between thought and speech, between the unity of logic and the multiplicity of languages, had been promoted, like many other things, by the Critique of Pure Reason: the earliest Kantians often tried to apply the Kantian categories of intuition and of intellect to language. Even the famous philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was unable to detach himself entirely from the prejudice of the substantial identity and the purely historical, accidental diversity between logical thought and language. Having freed language from all dependence on Logic, having repeatedly proclaimed the principle that language produces its forms independently of Logic and in the fullest autonomy, and having purified Humboldt's theory from the taint of the logical grammar of Port Royal, Steinthal seeks the origin of language, recognizing, with his master, that the question of its origin is identical with that of nature of language, its psychological genesis or rather the position it occupies in evolution of the spirit.