"Breal too was set on marking out a new course for linguistics, but he was not disposed to dismiss the the achievements of his predecessors. Nor did he accept uncritically the tenets of the dominant linguistic schools. Though he was responsible for introducing comparative Indo-European grammar in France, he was opposed to its one-sided concern with phonetic change, to its tendency to treat language as an organism that is born, grows and declines, and to neglect of the basic, semantic and social functions of language. The idea that language was a phenomenon of nature struck him as perverse... Instead, he called for a science that would examine the meanings of words and grammatical categories, that would study the development of individual languages, and that would formulate the general laws of linguistic change."