Professor Friedrich Max Müller (December 6, 1823 – October 28, 1900), a German philologist, gave three lectures on the Science of Thought at the Royal Institution, London in March of 1878. That lecture was reprinted in the Open Court journal of Chicago in June of 1887. In it he made the following comment:
The Science of Language, therefore, was to me at all time but a means to an end — a telescope to watch the heavenly movements of our thoughts, a microscope to discover the primary cells of our concepts. I have waited for many years, hoping that some one better qualified than myself might lay hold of the materials collected by the comparative philologists, and build with them a new system of philosophy. Everything was ready — the ore was there, it had only to be coined. But whether philosophers mistrusted the ore, or whether they preferred to speculate with their time-honoured tokens rather than with the genuine metal, certain it is that, with few exceptions, no philosopher by profession has as yet utilized the new facts which the Science of Language has placed at his free disposal.
I find it an intriguing simile to compare the study of language to a telescope observing the heavens, as well as a microscope observing cells, in the same sentence. An ability to look in opposite directions at the same time with some degree of precision and focus is clearly a must when it comes to language. As to philosophy and language things have moved on. One need only look to Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaine published as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences; or Jacques Derrida's Philosophy of Language; Julia Kristeva's focus on the politics of language and semiotics; and many others.
Nonetheless, the lectures are well worth searching out. Part 1 can be found at:
http://www.archive.org/stream/opencourt11887caru#page/n5/mode/2up
Go to pages 225, 253, 281 and 309.
Without the likes of Professor Müller and his colleagues we might not have Foucault and others.
Whilst rummaging through The Open Court Journal you will find many other items of interest.
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