Linguists' chance to establish their own niche in the scientific division of labor hinged on their capacity to narrow down the content of general linguistics and disentangle it from the labors of the more philosophically minded—either those interested in exploring the connection between cat- egories of thought and language, or those searching for a perfect, universal language.13
Working within these parameters, the idea of a Weltsprache, or universal language, as Schleyer called it, was alien to mainstream linguists. It reminded them of the dreams of the old grammarians in search of the Ursprache, all the more so when Schleyer hinted that his Volapuk came about as a sort of di- vine revelation in the dead of night and when he presented himself as the "discoverer" (Erfinder) of the Universal language, as if there were such a thing waiting to be unveiled.
But the endeavors of late nineteenth-century linguists, however scientific, were not free of mystical postulates. If self-governing systems were endowed with laws waiting to be discovered, then languages were also carriers of national characters, much in line with the Romantic tradition of Fichte, Herder, and Humboldt. This scientifically clothed Romanticism was particularly prev- alent among German linguists, since, contrary to older nation-states such as the United Kingdom or France, the new German Reich needed language as a coagulant of the German spirit. The conjunction of language and national character also allowed German linguists to frame their research in one of the most popular scientific approaches ofthe age: evolutionary theory. In the same way that Darwin had liberated our understanding of man and other species from religious prejudices, German linguists claimed that their conception of "nation and language" as one and the same reality allowed for the transposi- tion of positivist, evolutionary theory to the field of linguistics. This break- through would finally release the discipline from the unsubstantiated philosophical and religious approaches of the past. As August Schleicher ex- plained, such a breakthrough meant conceiving of languages as "organisms of nature; they have never been directed by the will of man; they rose and develop themselves according to definite laws; they grew old and die out. They, too, are subject to that series of phenomena which we embrace under the name of 'life.' The science of language is consequently a natural science . . . [and] the Origin of Species . . . [does not] lie so very far beyond my own department."14
If as a living organism a language has its own genius or "inner spirit" that embodies the nation that speaks it, there is no room for artificial languages. A universal language cannot be anything but an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Being the language of everybody, a universal language would be the language of nobody. Without a Geist, an international language would be a body with no blood in its veins, a Homunkulus, to use the contemporary buzzword.15
The fact that an unnatural alliance of German linguists and Parisian ve- dettes ridiculed Volapuk could not be overlooked. Fortunately for the Volapukists, there were some linguists who risked their reputations vis-a-vis their German colleagues to champion the possibility of an artificial language. Among them was the German-born Max Muller (1823-1900), professor of Sanskrit and modern languages at Oxford. Also a supporter of the English spelling reform movement, Muller thought it worthwhile to let the Volapukists carry out their experiment. More encouraging was French linguist, sociolo- gist, and legal scholar Raoul de la Grasserie (1839-1914), who saw no reason to rule out the possibility of an artificial language, and ended up creating a new one: Apolema. As one of the fathers of sociolinguistics, de la Grasserie disagreed with mainstream German linguistics. Rather than studying how languages use people—apparently to survive just like any other living or- ganism—he preferred to study how people use languages.16
German-born Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), a professor of Romance lan- guages in Graz (Austria), was more adamant against the German linguists' Romantic mood. By the time Schuchardt stood up for the Volapukists and, more precisely, for the possibility of an artificial language, he had already con- ducted substantial research on language contact and Creole languages, pre- cisely the linguistic phenomena that deviate the most from the Mystizismus implied by the language-as-living-organism metaphor.17 Also, living in the multilingual Austro-Hungarian empire, Schuchardt was a firsthand witness to a paradox. The most eager defenders of the view of languages as autono- mous (selbstandige), living organisms were working hand in hand with those trying their best to prevent their autonomous development by purifying them from foreign influences or establishing linguistic authorities that would dic- tate usage. Languages, according to Schuchardt, were not self-contained, self- developing organisms. Although they can convey a national identity and elicit a comforting sense of belonging, they are also instruments of communica- tion, and, as such, are usually subject to purposeful human intervention. For Schuchardt, in sum, there was nothing in the domain of language that for- bade the invention of a new tongue. Whether Volapuk or any other artificial language was the best candidate was another question. In any case, Schu- chardt claimed, the obstacles that a language, artificial or not, would have to surmount to become a world language were not linguistic but political.18
All in all, even when most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century linguists believed that the link between language and nation had to be ex- plored, not all of them were willing to camouflage the old Romantic philos- ophy of language in the positivist, but ultimately mystical, metaphoric garb of language as a living organism. Volapuk was the first occasion, as Schuchardt put it, to discuss different notions of language. When some years later Espe- ranto took the lead, the same debate, with very much the same arguments, continued. To the recurrent argument that without history and a fatherland an artificial language would, like a Homunkulus, be unable to grow organi- cally, the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay offered the same reply that Schuchardt had advanced some years earlier: A language is neither a self- contained organism, nor a sacrosanct divinity (unantastbarer Abgott), but a tool and a function. And man has not only the right but also the social duty to improve his tools and make them more practical, when not to substitute them by better ones."19
Underlying these differences about the nature of language and the scien- tific approach to its study were important political issues. For de Courtenay, the "naive Romantismus" and the associated Volksgeist rhetoric that he saw prevalent among his German colleagues was scientifically misguided and po- litically dangerous.20 The French linguist Michel Breal expressed these con- cerns most clearly. As he confided in a letter to his friend Schuchardt on the language wars (Sprachkampfe) in Austria: "I would not be surprised if in that corner [the Austro-Hungarian empire] opens the fissure which will eventu- ally cause the breaking apart of the old Europe. The philologists who have been involved in those quarrels could never exaggerate their responsibility! They have provided the arguments and the pretexts."21