ow, breath the bull, and
their young is said to be the mind of man.(56) Brahman, the highest being,
is said to be known through speech, nay, speech herself is called the
Supreme Brahman. At a very early period, however, the Brahmans recovered
from their raptures about language, and set to work with wonderful skill
dissecting her sacred body. Their achievements in grammatical analysis,
which date from the sixth century, B. C., are still unsurpassed in the
grammatical literature of any nation. The idea of reducing a whole
language to a small number of roots, which in Europe was not attempted
before the sixteenth century by Henry Estienne,(57) was perfectly familiar
to the Brahmans, at least 500 B. C.

The Greeks, though they did not raise language to the rank of a deity,
paid her, nevertheless, the greatest honors in their ancient schools of
philosophy. There is hardly one of their representative philosophers who
has not left some saying on the nature of language. The world without, or
nature, and the world within, or mind, did not excite more wonder and
elicit deeper oracles of wisdom from the ancient sages of Greece than
language, the image of both, of nature and of mind. "What is language?"
was a question asked quite as early as "What am I?" and, "What is all this
world around me?" The problem of language was in fact a recognized
battle-field for the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy, and we
shall have to glance at their early guesses on the nature of human speech,
when we come to consider the third or theoretical stage in the science of
language.

At present, we have to look for the early traces of the first or empirical
stage. And here it might seem doubtful what was the real work to be
assigned to this stage. What can be meant by the empirical treatment of
language? Who were the men that did for language what the sailor did for
his stars, the miner for his minerals, the gardener for his flowers? Who
was the first to give any thought to language?--to distinguish between its
component parts, between nouns and verbs, between articles and pronouns,
between the nominative and accusative, the active and passive? Who
invented these terms, and for what purpose were they invented?

We must be careful in answering these questions, for, as I said before,
the merely empirical analysis of language was preceded in Greece by more
general inquiries into the nature of thought and language; and the result
has been that