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Linguistics 455
n’est ni l’agrkgat ni la somme; c’est pourquoi il faut considkrer l’ktude des
systkmes possibles et de leur forme comme &ant de la plus grande importance.’
It is significant that Brondal’s essay developing this thesis ends with a reference
to ‘Husserl’s penetrating meditations on phenomenology’ as an inspiring source.
Hendrik Pos, the Dutch disciple of Husserl (1898-1955), has taken a prom-
inent part in advancing the phenomenology of language and the theory of
structural linguistics.
Hegelian phenomenology and dialectics, too, left a manifest imprint on the for-
mation of structural linguistics. One can again refer to thementioned groups and
individual searchers. Emile Benveniste’s preface to Origines de la formation des
nonis en indo-europgeen begins with a reminder: ‘De fait, on ne va gubre au dela
de la constatation. L‘effort consid6rable et mkritoire, qui a Ct6 employ6 a la
description des formes, n’a Btk suivi d’aucune tentative s6rieuse pour les inter-
pr6ter.’ This foreword ended with an appeal to Hegel’s beneficial principle :
‘Das Wahre ist das Ganze.’
It must be added that perhaps the most prescient forerunner of modern lin-
guistics among scholars of the late nineteenth century, Mikolaj Kruszewski,
wrote in 1882 to Jan Baudouin de Courtenay that in addition to the extant
science of language it is necessary to establish ‘a new one, more general’, which
he defined as ‘a certain kind of phenomenology of language’. According to the
proponent, ‘the permanent foundations of such a science are to be found in
language itself’. The concept of phenomenology was obviously detected by the
young linguist in Eduard von Hartmann’s Phanomenologie des Unbewussten
(1875), characterized in H. Spiegelberg’s history of the phenomenological move-
ment as ‘an isolated landmark on the way from Hegel to Husserl’. Kruszewski’s
earlier statements disclose that it was the ‘unconscious character’ of linguistic
processes which evoked his ‘magnetic attraction’ to the logic of language and
to the problem OP general linguistic laws. Although Hartmann’s book was
disapproved of by Kruszewski as ‘tedious, boring‘ and unfit in its conception of
unconscious processes, certain items in Hartmann’s chapter on language are
akin both to Kruszewski’s search and to the lines of modern linguistic theory,
in particular, the philosopher’s insistence on the universality of the nuclear
grammatical categories (Grundformen) as an ‘unbewusste Schopfung des
Genius der Menschheit’, and his commendation of Humboldt’s teaching on
language and mind. Kruszewski, in turn (1883), pointed to the ‘eternal creativity
of language’ with an enforcing reference to Humboldt. In his address to the
Second International Congress of Linguists (1931), Mathesius presented the
Humboldtian doctrine of language as a substantial constituent of ‘functional and
structural linguistics’; and one of the first French representatives of this move-
ment, Lucien Tesnibre, extolling Humboldt as ‘un esprit universe1 hautement
cultiv6 et arm6 en particulier d‘une culture scientifique approfondie’, blamed
the neogrammarian tradition which underrated this great spirit and which gave
preference to ‘un simple technicien de la grammaire compar6e comme Bopp’.
Thus, the recent Humboldtian restitution (G. RamiSvili, N. Chomsky) has
merely strengthened a tendency which was already inherent in structural lin-
guistics.