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≤ Friedrich Max Müller The Annunciation of a New Science In 1845 and 1846, F. D. Maurice preached a series of sermons entitled ‘‘The Religions of the World and Their Relations to Christianity,’’ the aim of which, as he said, was not to ‘‘search’’ for the ‘‘absurdities’’ of non-Christian faiths but to discover the ‘‘living wants’’ and the permanent ‘‘necessities of man’s being’’ that all religions were called upon to satisfy.∞ The project had been an extremely difficult one, he admitted, because the availability of information, even on the great historical religions of Asia and the Middle East, was very limited for anyone unfamiliar with Oriental languages. For ‘‘Mahometanism’’ there was, of course, Carlyle’s essay on the Prophet, as well as some passages from Gibbon and Ranke. Turning to Indian religion, Maurice found the ‘‘chief helps’’ to be Colebrooke ’s essay on the Vedas and Rosen’s Latin translation of the Rig Veda. But Maurice had reason to hope that this dire situation was about to be remedied: ‘‘I understand that a young German, now in London, whose knowledge of Sanscrit is profound, and his industry plus quam Germanicum, has it in contemplation to publish and translate all the Vedas. English money it is to be hoped will not be wanting, when the other and more indispensable requisite is supplied by a foreigner.’’≤ The ‘‘young German’’ of whom Maurice spoke was Friedrich Max Müller. He had arrived in London in 1846, not with the intention of publishing ‘‘all the Vedas,’’ but with the more modest goal of compiling a complete edition of the text and commentaries of the oldest of them, the Rig Veda. Intending to remain in England only a few weeks, Müller ended by making his home first in London and later in Oxford, remaining there, except for brief trips abroad, 38 | Friedrich Max Müller until his death in 1900. His ambitions too soon outran his original intentions, and the edition of the Rig Veda became a platform from which he sought to launch a new branch of the human sciences—the ‘‘science of religion.’’ An Apprenticeship in Comparative Philology Müller was born in Dessau, the capital of a minor German principality, on December 6, 1823. The son of the poet Wilhelm Müller, he claimed to have inherited from his father a streak of ‘‘suppressed poetry’’ which surfaced in his scholarly writings and earned warm praise from his English critics.≥ But the father died when his son was only four, and the boy’s childhood was shadowed by his mother’s inability to shake off her grief. Mother and son were deeply attached to each other, and it was she who formed the boy’s religious sensibilities in the mold of a simple pietistic Lutheranism. The emotional tone of his early religious training, one which emphasized, above all, personal devotion to and trust in God, was to remain the dominant one even after his theology had broken through the boundaries of the most liberal forms of Victorian Protestantism. Educated at home as a child, Müller later attended the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, where he at first chose to pursue the most traditional route to scholarly success—Greek and Latin philology. He soon tired of this, however , and convinced that he was merely ‘‘chewing the cud’’ in his classical studies, Müller plunged into systematic philosophy, catching along with many of his fellow students the ‘‘Hegelian fever’’ which was ‘‘still very high at that time’’ (1841).∂ Yet, his initial reaction to these new interests was a feeling of helpless confusion: ‘‘I confess I . . . felt quite bewildered for a time, and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers. Why should I not be able to understand . . . what other people seemed to understand without any effort?’’∑ Only when he began to take courses in the history of philosophy did Müller regain his bearings and come to feel that his understanding of the subject was ‘‘strong and healthy.’’∏ This preference for a historical approach to philosophy combined with a growing interest in the problems of language led Müller to concentrate on the question of how meanings change. He was convinced that the investigation of concepts must begin as a historical, even an etymological enterprise, and he was later to assert that the problems of philosophy would someday be seen as problems of language. A deep historicist bias colored all of Müller’s work. Again and again he...

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