Friedrich Max Müller's Rubicon: Historicism and empiricism in the Victorian sciences of language and mind

This paper reevaluates Friedrich Max Müller's interactions with his British detractors from the early 1860s to the early 1890s. By offering a re-examination of their disputes concerning language and mind, it first and foremost illuminates a transformation in the research methods, standards of evidence, and forms of explanation that were seen as scientifically legitimate in the human sciences in late Victorian Britain. To use Müller's language, this entailed a shift in the balance of power between "historical" and "theoretical" schools of thought, which came to privilege the latter over the former. No less importantly, this paper also demonstrates how the history of philology can contribute to the history of science by revealing the extent to which Müller and his opponents were ultimately searching for the same thing - knowledge about human origins and development. Additionally, by taking seriously Müller's arguments as a philologist, this paper refutes the pernicious view that his objections to Darwin's account of languages were motivated by his religious beliefs.