Nothing exists
outside _Aesthetic_, which gives knowledge of the nature of language,
and _empirical Grammar_, which is a pedagogic expedient, save the
_History of languages_ in their living reality, that is, the history of
concrete literary productions, which is substantially identical with the
_History of literature_.
[Sidenote] _Elementary linguistic facts or roots._
The same mistake of confusing the physical with the aesthetic, from
which the elementary forms of the beautiful originate, is made by those
who seek for elementary aesthetic facts, decorating with that name the
divisions of the longer series of physical sounds into shorter series.
Syllables, vowels, and consonants, and the series of syllables called
words which give no definite sense when taken alone, are not facts of
language, but simple physical concepts of sounds.
Another mistake of the same sort is that of roots, to which the most
able philologists now accord but a very limited value. Having confused
physical with linguistic or expressive facts, and observing that, in the
order of ideas, the simple precedes the complex, they necessarily ended
by thinking that _the smaller_ physical facts were _the more simple_.
Hence the imaginary necessity that the most antique, primitive
languages, had been monosyllabic, and that the progress of historical
research must lead to the discovery of monosyllabic roots.
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