■^W^^^iiSS'^'i^^.'^^-ggM^$:i\X^^^^ AMnnAGE TP ^^"^^r^- lAND Languages IBallantlpnc SPrcM BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON LANGUAGE'^ AND LANGUAGES. BEING jyV\\/ ^ /a»b, "CHAPTERS ON LANGUAGE" "FAMILIES OF SPEECH." REV. FREDERIC W.'^FARRAR, D.D. F.R.S LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; CANON OF Wif.STMIN&TER ; AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARV TO THE QUEEN. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1878. [A/l rights reserve(i.\ Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026437693 PREFACE. This book is a reprint of my Chapters on Language and Families of Speech, — of which the former was written in defence of the theory of Onomatopoeia as the only discovered or discoverable basis of language, and the latter was composed of Lectures delivered before the Royal Institution, Both works have passed through several editions, and the con- tinued demand for them shows that they have been found useful by students of the young and intensely- interesting Science of Language. Subsequent study during the eleven years which have elapsed since their first publication would have enabled me to add largely to what I have here written on the subject, but it has not rendered necessary the alteration of a single material fact ; and as both parts of the book in their original form were fortunate enough to receive the approval of very high authorities, I have felt justified in accepting the suggestion of the Publishers that they should now be republished in a single volume. '• F. W. FARRAR. Westminster, Kovember 15, 1877. Non excogitandum neque fingendum, sed inveniendum quid Natura facial aut ferat. ' Bacon. 'E7tb fikv odv irepl toOtojv (Ls edpov Kai &viyvci3v oStujs ^ypa^a' el S4 Tis (SXXms /SouX^treTa: So^d^eir irepl airQv, aver/K\Tp-bv ixiru riiv irepiryviiiiiocivqv. JoSEVHVS, An/i, a. II, 7. CHAPTERS ON LANGUAGE. TO R. B. LITCHFIELD, ESQ. IN MEMORY OF MANY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP, THESE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. When, in the year i860, I published my book on the " Origin of Language," it was, I believe, the only book distinctly devoted to that subject which had appeared in England since the end of the last century. Since that time Philology has been daily gaining ground as a study of infinite importance, and I believe that the stimulus it has received has been- mainly due to the eloquence and genius of Professor Max Miiller, whose first series of Lectures was pub- lished in 1 861. The views hdwever which it was the object of my Essay to explain and illustrate, although they were propounded by philologists of the most unquestioned eminence, have found in Professor Miiller a strong opponent, and therefore have met in England with but few converts and fewer supporters. Nevertheless after constant study, and the most candid consideration of the objections urged against them, I believe that those views, in spite of the vehement assaults directed against them, remain absolutely unshaken. Now, if they are true, they furnish to Etymologists so simple and luminous a X Preface. principle whereby to guide their researches, and they throw so strong a light on one of the most interesting problems that can be presented for our solution, that it is most desirable that they should not be dismissed unexamined and with a sneer. I have therefore devoted some portion of this book to a careful,, detailed, and respectful review of all that has been urged against them, and I have thought it due to the high authority deservedly attributed to Professor Miiller's opinion, to state those objections in his own language. The answer liiay not be con- vincing to every one, but at least it will be admitted that thfe objections have been fairly met. I hope that I have never used a single 'expression incon- sistent with the high respect which is due to the courtesy, learning, and ability of so eminent an opponent. The controversial part of the book however only occupies a few chapters, and even in these I have steadily kept in view the object of bringing the. theory into clearer and fuller relief — of placing it as far as possible on a scientific basis — of removing the misrepresentations which have clustered round it — and of supplying linguistic facts and illustrations which might be valuable to the student without any reference to his particular views. And, besides this, there are whole chapters of the book which have no controversial aspect whatever, and which may, I hope, contain suggestions not wholly unworthy of con- sideration by scholars of every shade of opinion. I should not for a moment venture to speak of my. Preface. xi work in these terms if it contained nothing beyond the results of my own thought. But besides my own reasonings and speculations it sets forth the views of those who are incomparably more entitled to a hearing. A glance at almost any page will show that the authorities quoted are neither few nor unimportant; and, as I have carefully avoided an idle parade of learned names, I can assure the reader that there are very few references in the book-^ certainly none of any iniportance — which have not been derived immediately from my own reading. And, more than this, I have often fortified my posi-- tion by the authority of others in cases where the thought was my own, and was expressed in my own language. In one or two places, which are always carefully pointed out, I closely follow the reasonings of the late Professor Heyse, whose hoo\:., {System der ■ Sprachwissenschaft) is one of the wisest and most beautiful treatises on this subject which have ever fallen into my hands. The reader too will find con- stant allusions to other profound philological writings, which I have always studied with great profit. I have placed at the end of the book a list of the works from which I have derived most advantage, and which have been most constantly in my hands. In conclusion I have only to thank those critics who bestowed such indulgent consideration on my previous labours. Their approval, and the still more valuable notice of my work by some very eminent scholars, both English and Continental, have en- couraged me to proceed. xii Preface. I cannot hope to have escaped errors, and for these I venture to ask an indulgent consideration. These pages have been written, and the proof-sheets corrected, under a pressure of other avocations which has often made me hesitate whether I ought not wholly to abandon this subject to those who can study it under greater advantages. Any mistakes into which I have fallen are due to this cause, and not either to wilfulness or carelessness. Whethef they are pointed out by friendly or by unfriendly critics, I shall always be ready to acknowledge and to correct them with cheerfulness and candour. Harrow, Au^ist 1865. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE General Table of the Aryan or Indo-European Languages To face 346 Table of the Semitic or Syro- Arabian Languages „ 372 • Table of the Chief Allophylian Languages . . 404 Philological Map of Europe ^ V . . . . end of book Asia I SYNOPSIS. CHAPTER I. LANGUAGE A HUMAN DISCOVERY. PAGE Nothing humanly discoverable has been made a subject of revelation . i Language was humanly discoverable 3 Certainty of its non-revelation 5 Scripture asserts its discovery by man 7, 8 ' God said ' 7 Adam, the Name-giver 9 Nature's teaching 9 Slavery to the letter II CHAPTER II. THE EXPERIMENT OF PSAMMETICHUS. The story probably true . . . . . . . .12 It confirms inferences from other data . . . . .13 (i.) Deserted children would probably evolve ^ language . 14 (ii.) Animal names among the earliest words . . .15 (iii.) Animal names naturally Imitative 15 Their value as suggesting the Idea of Language . . . .17 Wild-children. Their Onomatopoeias 18 CHAPTER IIL THE NAMING OF ANIMALS. Primitive nutssity for Onomatopoeia ...... 19 Classification of animal names 20 The class under which they must have originally fallen . . 21 Australian names for animals 21 Chinese Onomatopoeias 22 Animal nanles in Sanskrit ° ." . .' .' . • > ^Z XIV Synopsis. In Hebrew In Ancient Egyptian .... Names adopted by Colonists Tliey are either (i) Borrowed native names Or (2) Expressive of attributes . . Or (3) Misapplications suggested by analogy Or (4) When invented are invariably Imitative Imitative words invented in modern Argots Why new words must be Imitative Inferences PAGS 24 26 26 26 27 29 30 31 32 CHAPTER IV. THE INFANCY OF HUMANITY. Primitive inferiority of Man Man created with only the capacity of Speech Even if Language were revealed A priori objections are valueless And presumptuous . And contradictgry of existing facts Existing degradation of human races ' The 'state of nature ' not necessarily miserable Fancies vemis Facts, respecting the first men The Darwinian hypothesis Language furnishes fresh proofs of our position Bizarre complexity and cumbrousness of savage dialects Opinion of Mr. Garnett And of Mr. A. Gallatin Inference ..... 33 34 34 35 35 35 36 39 40 42 44 44 46 47 47 CHAPTER V. PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT. ' Invenisse non instituisse ' ....... 48 Admitted fewness of roots 49 Very few words necessary for the wants of life .... 49 Germs of Speech developed by the Intellect .... 50 Realisation of the Ego j2 Gradual distinctness of Sensuous Impressions .... 53 Sensations become Perceptions 54. Intuitions jj Synopsis. xv PAGE Representations re Concepts • • 55 Words correspond to Representations . . . . -56 Illustration of the Process 57 Recapitulation 58 CHAPTER VI. POSSIBLE MODES OF. EXPRESSING THOUGHT. Tactile Language .... Art, a Language addressed to the Eye Language of Gesture Its advantages and imperfections Superiority of Audible Language 60 6i 62 64 67 CHAPTER VII. SOUND AS A VEHICLE OF THOUGHT. Analogies of Light and Sound 6$ The Voice . . . 70 Its penetrative power ........ 71 Machinery by which it is produced 71 Elementary sounds 73 Material of Speech 74 CHAPTER VIIL INTERJECTIONS. Ultimate identity of Interjection and Onomatopoeia . . . JS Two classes of Interjections 76 Interjections in different Languages 76 Home Tooke's denunciation of them ..... 7^ Interjections are parts of Speech 79 The source of many words 81 Their value in Etymology 8 1 'Roots' 82 Dignity of Interjections . 84 The part they play in Literature 84 Their high linguistic importance 85 Originally more numerous ....... 86 Impressions provoke expressions. Ancient stories ... 87 The Idea of Speech .. . . . . _ . . . . • 87 xvi Synopsis. CHAPTER IX. LAUTGEBERDEN, OR VOCAL GESTURES. PAGK The term due to Heyse "^ Expressions of the will 9° Recapitulation . . . . • • • • • •9' What is Prof. Max Miiller's view ? 9' CHAPTER X. VOCAL IMITATIONS. Epicurus 94 Instinct of Imitation ......•■ 94 Onomatopoeias imitate the subjective impression • • • 9S Story of Phasdrus ' . 96 Diversity of Imitations for the same Sound .... 97 Not mere passive echoes ........ 9^ But ideally modified 9^ Names for Thunder -99 Instinctive evolution of Language 100 Myths, indicative of Onomatopoeia . . ... . . 101 CHAPTER XI. FROM IMITATIVE SOUNDS TO INTELLIGENT SPEECH. Sounds developed into words ....... 104 Connection between Sound and Sense - 105 Sounds, to become signs, must have been self-explaining . . loj The only theory of Language . . . . . . .100 CHAPTER XIL ONOMATOPCEIA. Matter-words and Form-words 107 Sounds as the signs of other sounds 108 Vocal imitation only a stepping-stone for Language . . . 109. Sounds became Words 109 Imitation the starting-point . . . . . . .111 CHAPTER XI n. OBJECTIONS TO THE THEORY ; HOW REFUTED. First objection. ' Oitomatofaias ftw in number ' . . .112 Dictionaries of them . .113 Synopsis. xvu PAGE They become greatly vW^i?!/ in form 113 Just as alphabetic letters lose their pictorial significance . . 115 The Hebrew Alphabet . . . . . . . .117 Closeness of the Analogy 118 New words, not ^elf-explicative, never succeed . . . - 119 Second objection. ' Animal names not imitative' . . , 120 A few such instances would prove nothing . . . .122 But nearly all of those adduced are Imitative . . . .123 As may be seen by their cognate forms : — The word ' Goose ' 1 23 The word 'Hen' , 124 • The word ' Dove ' 125 The word 'Hog' 126 The word 'Cat' 126 The word 'Dog' ' . . 127 CHAPTER XIV. FERTILITY OF ONOMATOPOETIC ROOTS. Third objection. ' Onomatopmias are sterile ' The root ' cuckoo ' The root ' cru ' General predicative ' roots ' inconceivable . Onomatopoeia a luminous principle of Etymology Immense fertility of Imitative roots . Fertility of the primitive sounds, ma, ta, da, &c. Onomatopoeias even among the numerals . 131 131 131 132 133 133 134 139 CHAPTER XV. DIGNITY OF ONOMATOPCEIA, Language an echo of Nature Fourth objection.. ' Onomatopceias are modem ' If true, an argument in their favour . ■ Their function in poetry .... Harmonies of Language .... 142 143 144 144 14S CHAPTER XVI. SUPPOSED ILLUSORlNESS OF THE SEARCH. The search not 'lawless,' but the reverse 14/ Errors of ' scientific ' Etymologists 148 Prof. Miiller's instances all fail .1 150 XVIll Synopsis. The interjections Fie ! &c. ' Squirrel ' 'Katze' - . . ' Thunder ' onomatopoetic in all languages Examination, and probable history of the word PAGE ISO 151 151 152 IS3 CHAPTER XVII. REFLEX IMITATIVE TENDENCY OF LANGUAGE. The charge of ' fancifulness ' iSr Falls to the ground 158 Views of St. Augustine 159 Contain a residuum of truth ....... 160 Instances 160 CHAPTER XVIII. THE PART PLAYED BY THE IMAGINATION. ' How are ideas not expressive of sound to be accounted for by Onomatopceia ? ' Illustration of the subject from the Chinese Ideography Fancy indispensable ...... Close analogy to the Progress of Language Verbal roots could not have been the earliest Feebleness of abstraction among uncivilised races ' Ideas of going ' ' Ideas of standing ' ' Ideas of tasting ' 163 164 167 168 169 170 172 173 174 CHAPTER XIX. METAPHOR. Sound, the exponent of things soundless 176 All impressions subjective . . . , . . , .177 The Sensorium Commune 178 Instinctively observed analogies of different senses . . .178 Light and Sound j»q Other senses jgj Genders jg2 Catachresis •••...... 182 'The Pathetic Fallacy' '. ! 18-' Personification . .■ jg. Human relationships attributed to things inanimate . . .185 Synopsis. xix PACK The Unseen described by analogy 185 Analogies to describe the Soul, &c 188 Localisation of the passions 190 Hieroglyphics 191 Colours in Metaphor 191 Metaphor among the Numerals igt CHAPTER XX. METAPHOR IN VARIOUS LANGUAGES. Metaphor most abundant at earliest stages .... 195 Hebrew vagueness of terms 196 Hebrew Metaphors 197 Metaphors in Greek Tragedy 198 Metaphor and National Character 199 Kafir Metaphors ......... 200 Malay Metaphors 200 Chinese Homonyms ......... 200 Metaphors in the Argot 202 Evanescence of conscious Metaphor ...... 204 Universal consequent confusion of Metaphors .... 205 Especially in Shakspeare 206 Metaphor, happily indispensable to Language . . . . 207 Their illustrative power .,,..... 208 Languages without Metaphor 208 What the results would be 208 CHAPTER XXL OTHER LINGUISTIC PROCESSES. Recapitulation 212 Struggle for existence among words 214 Different possible characteristics. 'Left' 215 Contradictory roots 216 Their explanation . . 217 Antiphrasis 217 Errors about it 218 Proclus's fifteen methods 219 Reducible to three or four 219 CHAPTER XXH. THE NATURE OF WORDS. Analogists and Anomalists 221 Confusions of the subject 221 XX Synopsis. PAGB ' . . • • 223 Herachtus .... 224 Democritus . ■ ■ 224 Weak arguments on botli sides Universality of Analogist views i 226 The Jews Analogists [227 jParonomasia 228 Mystic import of words And names. Biblical Etymologies "230 •Adam' . ; ; ! 232 Insulting name-changes Myths about Adam J'J Import of names among the Greeks J* Among the Romans ^g Among the Modems ^^^ Alterations of names ^ Euphemism ^ Its source The primitive granite of Language . . ' • • • • '^ Dangerous hypocorisms of Vice ^4 The ' fatal force ' of words ^^"^ CHAPTER XXIII. THE NATURE OF WORDS — continued. Sound and Sense . . ''^ - The Senses and the Understanding 247 The three factors of a word 247 Words express nothing of the nature of things . . . .248 They teach us nothing about things 249 Which is a knowledge impossible to us 250 And they teach us nothing about our abstract nature . . .250 A knowledge no less impossible to us . . ■ • -251 They merely express relations • 252 And even as the signs of our conceptions they are essentially imperfect ^52 Instances ^53 They are the starting-point of the fuU-growii Intelligence . . 254 But the goal of its earlier development' 254 Their immense historical, intellectual, and moral importance . 255 Conclusion ^5S ON LANGUAGE. CHAPTER I. LANGUAGE, A HUMAN DISCOVERY. Xldt^a Beta xal AvSpdnriya xdvTa. — HippokrateSi God, who, in the words of Lactantius,i was ' the artificer alike of the intelligence, of the voice, and of the tongue,' gave to man, with those three gifts, the power of constructing a language for himself. Now we are entitled to conclude from the widest possible observation of God's dealings with ' the human race, that He never bestows directly what man can obtain for himself by the patient and faithful use of ' intrusted powers. Science, for instance, by which we mean the sum total of all that has been discovered respecting the laws of nature, has furnished the human race with blessings ■ of inestimable value ; and yet the secrets of science were n.ever ^ revealed by a voice from heaven, and, although within the reach of human industry, were absolutely unknown to the ancient Hebrews. The living oracles intrusted to their charge spoke much of the nature of God, and revealed to the world that which, of himself, man could but dinily and most partially discover or understand — his relation to his 1 'Deus et mentis, etvocis, et linguae artifex.' — Lactant. Instt. vi. 21. ° ' Tlie Scriptures have never yet revealed a single scientific truth'-~ I Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, p. 265. A 2 On Language. ch. i. Creator, the scheme of the divine government, and the means appointed for the purification and deliverance of the soul. The high majesty and grandeur of this revelation, its sacred origin and unspeakable importance, must not blind us to the fact that there are other ^ revelations also, which unveil to us in all their marvellous magnificence the works of God, and which yet were never accorded to Psalmist, or Priest, or Prophet, but to those great benefactors of their race who from time to time have been inspired to devote lives of ardent and devout study to the observation of the laws which God has imposed on His created Universe. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the advantages which Science, by thus deciphering the divine records of Creation, has conferred upon mankind ; yet her lessons have never been whispered by angel or lawgiver, but, if we may borrow a poet's simile, they have been unclenched by sheer labour from the granite hand of nature. They have always been not immediate but mediate ; not revealed to the idle, but dis- covered by the patient ; not direct from God, but granted indirectly through the use of appointed means. Men have attained to them, not by gliding down the lazy stream of dogmatic inference, but by Springing from crystal step to crystal step of that bright ascent which leads to the serene heights of knowledge. ' And because all those scattered rays of beauty and loveliness which we behold spread up and down all the world over, are only the emanations of that inexhaustible light which is above, they have climbed up always by those sunbeams to the Eternal Father of Light.' God never lavishes gratuitously that which man can earn by faithful industry : this is an axiom which may be confidently claimed, a truth which may be broadly asserted, of every discovery which was possible to the intelligence of man. ^ ' Deus natuiii cognoscendus, dein doctrinsl recognoscendus. ' Ter- tullian. 'Duo sunt quse ia cognitionem Dei ducunt, Creatio it Scriptura' CH. I. Language, a Human Discovery. 3 That language is such a discovery — that it is possible for man to have arrived at speech from a condition originally mute, merely by using the faculties which God had implanted — has been proved repeatedly, and will, we hope, be further illustrated in the following pages. Even those who cling with tenacity to a belief in the revelation of language are compelled to admit ih^ possibility 1 of its invention. How, indeed, can this be denied when it has been a matter of constant observation that deaf and dumb children, before they have been taught, can and do elaborate for themselves an intelligible language of natural and conventional signs ? If, then, the invention of a voiceless language, addressed to the eye instead of the ear, — a language so much mcTre cum- brous and difficult than articulate speech, and one in which the learner can receive little or no assistance from the mul- titudinous echoes of external nature, — be thus easily within the range of human capabilities so unusually limited, can we do otherwise than conclude that a spoken language — of which man must at once have perceived the analogon among the living creatures with which he was surrounded, and which required for its ample commencement no achievement more difficult than the acceptance of sounds as the signs either of sounds or of the things which the sounds naturally recall — was one which man, by the aid of the divine instincts within him, would spontaneously and easily invent, with nature as his beneficent instructress, and all the world before him as the school wherein to learn? We may therefore assert, as Dante ^ did five centuries ago, That man speaks Is Nature's prompting ; whether thus or thus She leaves to you as ye do most affect it. ' Entia non sunt multiplicanda prseter necessitatem,' said William of Occam ; ' frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora,' It is astonishing how much spurious philosophy ^ Chastel, De la Raison, pp. 283, 295. Dug. Stewart, Phil, of the Mind, iii. i. Corap. Home Tooke, Divers, of Purley, i. 2. ' Carey's Dante, Farad, xxvi. 128. 4 On Language. ch. i. and spurious theology is cut away by this ' razor of the Nomi- nalists.' Those theologians who, by the liberal intrusion of unrecorded and purely imaginary miracles into every lacuna of their air-built theories, do their best to render science impossible, have earned thereby the merited suspicion of scientific men. .Nevertheless, all ^a/the most obstinate and the most prejudiced even of theologians ought to admit that if man could have invented language, we may safely conclude that he i did; for the wasteful prodigality of direct interposition and miraculous power which plays the chief part in the idle and anti-scriptural exegesis of many church- men, finds no place in the divine economy of God's dealings displayed to us either in nature, in history, or in the inspired Word itself. This single consideration ought to be sufficient for any mind philosophically trained; but as too many engines cannot be employed against the invincible bastions of prejudice, let us proceed to additional and yet more con- clusive arguments. I have stated elsewhere ^ the positive reasons which are adequate to disprove the revelation of language. The whole cha:racter of human speech, its indirect and imperfect methods, its distant metaphoric approxima- tions, its traceable growth and decay, the" recorded stages of historic development and decadence through which it passes, and the psychological and phonetic laws which rule these organic changes, furnish us at once with a decisive criterion of its human origin. An invention which, in spite of all its power and beauty, is essentially imperfect, could not have come direct from God. The single fact that the spiritual and abstract signification of roots is never the original one, but always arises from some incomplete and often wholly erroneous application or metaphor, is of itself adequate to confirm an d, priori probability. The vast multitude ^ of ^ Zobel, Ursfr, d. Sprache, ad f. ° Origin of Lang. pp. 23-29. ^ The number is very uncertain. Pott reckons about a thousand. Die Ungkichheit d. Menschl. Rafen, 230-244. Adrian Balbi reckons 860, Atlas Ethnogr. Dissert. PrUim. Ixxv. sqq. Crawfurd, Ethnol. Trans. L 335, 1863. CH. I. La7tguage, a Human Discovery. 5 human languages— certainly not fewer than 750 in number — differing from each other in words, in structure, and in sound, points inevitably, as we shall see hereafter, to the same conclusion. Speech, moreover, is the correlative of the understanding.^ It can express nothing which has not been developed by intelligence and thought. It can have no existence inde- pendent of, or separate from our conception of things. It may be unable to keep pace with the advancing power of abstraction, but it never can by any possibility anticipate or outstrip it. A language without corresponding conceptions would be a babble of unintelligible sounds ; ' for words,' says 2 Bacon, ' are but the image of matter ; and, except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.' If then a language were dictated, or in any other manner directly revealed to the earliest men, the comprehension' of ideas must necessarily have been inspired with the signs which expressed them ; in other words, the full-grown understand- ing must have been created together with the language, since the only difference between the imitative vocal faculty of children and some animals consists in the fact that with animals the sound in most instances remains a sound, while the understanding of man teaches him the conceptions /«/^ passu with the sounds, so that the sounds become signs. But ^ Heyse, Syst. d. Sprackvuissenschaft, p. 51- We do not deny to language a certain maieutic power which enables us to bring our con- ceptions into clearer light, by reducing them into shape, and by enabling us to reason respecting them ; but when Hamann calls speech the ^Dei- fara unserer Vernunft,' it is easy to see that the expression can with at least equal truth be reversed, ° Advancement of Learning, p. 100; compare the dictum of the Buddhist philosopher : 'Le nom et la forme ont pour cause I'intelU- gence ; et Tintelligence a pour cause le nom et la forme.' — Burnouf, Le Lotus de la bonne Foi, p. 550. ' Wie der Mensch eine Einheit von Geist und Leib, so ist das Wort die Einheit von Begriff und Laut.' — Becker, Organism, d. Sprache, § i, 2, 4. Hermann, Das Prohlem d. Sprache, p. I. ' Maine de Eiran, Orig. de Lang. CEuvres ined. 111. 239. 6 On Language. ch. i. to assert in this sense the creation of the human understand- ing, is, after the manner of certain ignorant divines, to force upon us as an article of faith, that which is nothing more than an arbitrary i and anti-philosophic hypothesis. For to suppose the creation of a full-grown understanding contra- dicts the very nature of the understanding as ' the ^ faculty of relations or comparisons.' An understanding can no more exist without having passed through the very processes which constitute its activity, than a tree can show its thou- sand layers of wood without having passed through as many seasons of growth and change. The impulse to self-develop- ment, and the capacity for it, are indeed innate in the higher races of man ; but to assert that the results ^ of this impulse were revealed, is to contradict both History and the order of nature. For nothing is more certain, even as an historical fact, than that man did not come into the world with his abstract ideas ready made ; nothing is more certain than that the growth of abstract ideas can be distinctly traced, and that, to be primitive, a word must express some material image.* For all reasoners, except that portion of the clergy who in all ages have been found among the bitterest enemies of scientific discovery,^ these considerations have been con- clusive. But, strange to say, here, as in so many other in- stances, this self-styled orthodoxy, more orthodox than the Bible itself, directly contradicts the very Scriptures which it professes to explain, and, by sheer misinterpretation, succeeds in producing a needless and deplorable collision between the statements of Scripture and those other mighty and certain ^ Maine de Biran, ubi supr. p. 233. ° Sir W. Hamilton, Discussions, p. 4, note. ' Heyse, /. c. * Benloew, Sur I' Origine des Noms de Nomhre, pp. ix, 7. » Witness the lives of Vigiiius, of Giordano Bruno, of Vanini, of Galileo, of Kepler, of Descartes, of La Peyrere, of Dr. Morton, of the early geologists, and of hundreds more. There is hardly a single nascent science against which theological dogmatism has not injuriously paraded its menacing array of misinterpreted or inapplicable texts. CH. I. Language, a Human Discovery. 7 truths which have been revealed to Science and to Humanity as their glory and reward. On the human origin of language, the voice of the Bible coincides perfectly with the voice of reason and of science. In the passage which deals directly with the origin of language, the Bible implies, as distinctly as it is possible to imply, that language resulted from the working of human faculties, and was not a direct gift from God to man.^ We shall consider the chief passage in Genesis immedii- ately : but before doing so it is necessary to clear away a preliminary misconception. We find repeatedtyj in the earlier chapters of the Bible, the expression 'God said;' and as this is used before the mention of Adam's gift of speech, it is at once inferred that language was revealed. Surely such a method of interpretation, stupidly and slavishly literal, and wholly incapable of rising above the simplest anthropo- morphism, shows that the vail which was upon the hearts of men when Moses was read in their synagogues some 1800 years ago, is by no means as yet removed ! Luther, far more advanced, and far more liberal than many modern theologians, could enforce -the explanation that ' God said' had nothing to do with the voice or articulations of human language; Bishop Patrick could write 'wherever in the his- tory of the creation these words are used, God said, it must be understood to mean ' He willed;" ^ nay, more, St. Gregory of Nyssa could vigorously and eloquently denounce the hypothesis of a revealed language as ' Jewish nonsense and folly' (tpXva^ia. xai /iaraioTtis 'lovdaiKti),^ and St. Augustine ^ Any one who wishes to support by authorities the Revelation of language has on his side Mohammed and some of the Rabbis ! See Kircher, Tar. Bab. iii. 4, p. 147- Michaeler, De Orig. Ling. Vien. 1738. Everything that can be said on the question is to be found in M. de Bonald, Ladevi- Roche, and Siissmilch, Vermch eines Beweises doss die erste Sprache ihren Ursprung vom SchSpfer erhalten habe. — Berl. 1766. ' As indeed it is rendered in the Arabic version. ' 3 Contra Eunomium Or. xii., Aug. de Ordine, ii. 12. Cf. St. Basil, Oral, ii., and Severianus, De Mundi Great. (Bibl. Patr. xii. 119.) 8 On Language. ch. t, could unhesitatingly write 'Vidit {ratio) imponenda esse rebus vocabula, id est significantes quosdam sonos : ' yet some modem writers, essentially aggressive and essentially retrogressive, — doctors of that school which learns nothing and forgets nothing, and whom eighteen centuries have only pushed back behind the earliest Fathers in tolerance and liberality, — can only see in the certainty of a language dis- covered by mankind ' a materialist and deistic hypothesis ! ' ^ Before being guilty of an inference so groundless as the sup- posed revelation of language from the obiter dictum of an ' auctoris aliud agentis ' — an inference which contradicts the express assertion of the Jehovist when he is treating directly of the subject — might they not have observed that the same expression is used by the Elohist of God's laws respecting animals'! 'And God blessed them (/.e Ling. Lat. v. 77. (Comp. ^X"> f7Xe^os). Compare Amos ix. 3, where ' snake ' is used for a sea- creature. By a very natural transference anguilla in later Latin means a thong for punishing boys — the Scotch ' tawse. ' — Du Cange, s. v. ^ It is very doubtful whether in some Aryan languages there has not been a confusion between the names for elephant and camel. See Pictet s. V. Le Chameau. * See Plin. viii. 17. Fera=peregnna. '■ Prehist. Man, i. 72. ^ Voyage of the Beagle, p. 408. ° Michaelis, De V Injluence des Opinions sur le Langage. '" Secman, Mission to Viii, pp. 45, 377. cH. III. The Naming of Animals. 29 called it ' manumanu ' (a iird), having never seen such a thing before ; and money from the same cause they called • at Lavo,' from its resemblance to the flat round seeds of the Mimosa scandens. The Dutch could find no better name than Bosjesbok, hvi'S^-goat, for the graceful African antelope ; and in the Spanish name alligator we see that they regarded that unknown river-monster as a large lizard.^ The New Zealanders called the first horses they saw ' large dogs,' as the Highlanders are said to have called the first donkey which they brought to their mountains ' a large hare.' The Kaffirs called the first parasol'^ to which they were in- troduced ' a cloud.' To this day the Malays have no better name for rat than^ 'large mouse.' This, then, is an im- portant principle to notice in all theories respecting lan- guage. 4. If, however, none of these processes furnish a convenient name for animals hitherto unfamiliar to new colonists — if the native name be too uncouth or difficult for adoption, and the animal offer neither a ready analogy, nor any very salient property, to provide itself with a new title — then a new name must be invented ; and in this case we venture to assert that there is not to be found in any country a single instance of a name so invented which is not an onomatopceia. Such names as whip-poor-will, pee-whee (Muscicapa rapax), towhee {Emberiza erythropterd), kittawake {Lams tridactylus), &c., may be profusely paralleled; and in some cases the onoma- topoetic instinct is so strong that it asserts itself side by side with the adoption of a name ; thus (as in the childish words moo-cow, bumble-bee) the North American Indian will speak of a gun as an Ut-to-tah-gun, or a Faush-ske-zi-gun. It has often been asserted that man has lost the power of inventing language, and this present inability is urged as a ground for believing that language could not have been a human inven- » El lagarto, the lizard. See Farrar, Origin of Lang. p. 119. » Charma, Or. du Lang: p. 277, who refers to Condillac, Gram. ch. v. • Crawfurd, Malay Gram. i. 58. 30 On Language. ch, hi. tion. We have elsewhere i given reasons for disputing the assertion, and even if it were true, it would be beside the mark, seeing that the absence of all necessity of exercise for a faculty is the certain cause of its all but irretrievable decay. From the fact, however, that when men do invent new words they are almost invariably onomatopoeias, we see an index pointing us back with unerring certainty to the only possible origin of articulate speech. For whatever may be true of abstract ' roots,' it is demonstrable, and will be shown here- after, that roots which by their onomatopoetic power are the only ones capable of explaining and justifying themselves, so far from being the sterile playthings which Professor M. Miiller represents them to be, have in them a fertility and a power of growth which can only be represented by the analogy of vegetable life, and which is as sufficient to account for the full-grown languages of even the Aryan family as the germinative properties of an acorn are sufficient to account for the stateliest oak that ever waved its arms over British soil. The history of colonisation, then, by reproducing some of the conditions of primitive man, enables us to see his lin- guistic instincts in actual operation, and those instincts un- deniably confirm our theory by displaying themselves in the very directions which we have been pointing out. But we can offer yet another proof of the reasonableness of our view in certain languages of modern invention, to which we shall again allude. I mean the various argots of the dangerous classes throughout Europe. These languages have to fulfil the opposite conditions of being distinct to those who use them, and unintelligible to the rest of the world. And how do they effect this? Partly ind eed by generalising the special, and specialising the general; partly by seizing on some one very distintt attribute and describing it, if nepessary, by periphrases ; but also in great measure by the obvious resource 1 Origin of Lang. p. 68 sqq. A very few instances of invented words, with some remarks upon them, may be found, Id. pp. 6o, 6l. CH. III. The Naming of Animals. 31 of direct smnd-imitation. Thus the German thief, no less than the English, calls a watch a tick, the French thief calls it tocquante ; the Italian thief speaks of a pig as grugnante, the German as grunnickel, the English ' the grunting,' the French as grondin, &lc. These languages must, from their very nature, remain uncultivated, and the consequence is that they abound in onomatopoeia. In the English slang, a pulpit is a Aum-hox ; carriages and horses are rattlers and prads. In the French argot the heart is battant; a sheep is itlant ; a. grimace is boMne; a marionette is bouis-bouis ; to die is claquer; a liar is craquelin ; to drink a health is cric- croc ; a skeleton-key is froufrou; a glutton is licheur ; a shoe \s paffe; a soldier, by an onomatopoeia which it would take too long to explain, is piou-piou ; a little chimney- sweeper is raclette ; a cab is roulant; a dog tambour ; a noisy child tarabate; and gendarmes, from the songs which soldiers like, is called tourlouru. These are but a few in- stances out of many, and it is impossible to deny that they establish the necessity of having recourse to onomatopoeia when new words have to be invented. They therefore furnish a fresh support to the views here advocated. When by strict etymological laws we have traced back a word through all its various changes, instructive and valuable as the process is sure to have been, we have done nothing to explain its origin or to account for its earliest history, unless we can point to its ultimate germ in some onomato- poetic or interjectional root ; and perhaps in the majority of cases this can be done with a fair amount of probability; for the number of roots required for the formation of a language is extremely small; and that small number is amply supplied by the imitation of natural sounds, and by the instinctive utterances which all violent impressions produce alike in animals and in men. The reason why new words, except of an imitative kind, are not invented is because every word involves a long history from its sensational origin to its final meaning, and the result without the process is felt to be a contradiction and an impossibility. This is why all attempts 32 On Language. ch. hi;' to frame an artificial language have been a failure, and the ponderous schemes of Kircher, and Becker,i and Dalgarno, and Wilkins, and Faignet, and Letellier can only move us to a smile, because they are based on a conventional theory of language which is utterly mistaken. This, too, is the reason why language is stronger than emperors, and Tiberius ^ could neither give the citizenship to a word, nor Claudius ^ procure acceptance even for a useful letter. A radically new word to have any chance of obtaining currency must of necessity be of an imitative character. It is a curious fact that some of the tribes* on the coast of New Guinea derive even the names which they give to their children from direct imitations of the first sounds or cries which they utter. We are surely entitled then to draw secure inferences from the facts hitherto observed, and those inferences may be summed up in the observation that animals were among the first objects to receive names, and that, in the absence of any previous words, they could not have been named except by onomatopoetic designations. This we have en- deavoured to render strong and secure by many proofs, drawn both d, priori from the nature of the case, and from the analogies presented by the methods in use among chil- dren and among savages; and a posteriori from the pheno- mena which have invariably recurred when, in the course of history, a condition of circumstances has been reproduced which in any way resembles that which must have existed in the case of primal man. ^ For an account of their systems see Du Ponceau, Mhn. sur le Syst. Gram, de quelques Nations Indiennes, pp. 26-31, 320. Hallam, Lit. Eur. iii. 362 ; and Letellier, £tablissemeni immidiat de la Langue Universelle. " ' Tu enim Cajsar civitatem potes dare hominibus, verbis non poles,' said Capito to Tiberius. — Sueton. De Illustr. Gram. ^ Claudius vainly tried to introduce into the Roman alphabet an antisigma )(;, with the value Ps. 'pro qua Claudius Csesar Antisigma 3C hac figuri scribi voluit, sed nuUi ausi sunt antiquam scripturam mutare.' — Priscian, i. De LUerarum Numero et Affinitate, * Salverte, Hist, of Names, i. 62, Engl. Transl. C 33 ) CHAPTER IV. THE INFANCY OF HUMANITY. 'Hv xpiStos St' ^v &TaKToi dvOpitiruv jSi'os, Kai 6ripu!iSr)s, Iffxios 6' iiritpirqi. . . . TTiviKavrA IJ.01 SoKct JlvKvds Tis fiXXos Kal ffOtis yyoiHTiv dvijp Teyorivai, &s . . . • • • • t6 Betov elaTj'Y'^traTO. Ignot. a/. Sext. Empiric. As we have here arrived at a sort of landing-place, we may devote a separate chapter to consider the full bearing of the conclusions thus formed. In so doing, we are not digressing from the main point, but rather we are removing a groundless prepossession which would lie in the road of all further advance, and we are at the same time calling attention to one of those important facts which it is the object of philology to illustrate or discover. For, obviously, if language was a human invention, and was due to a gradual development, there must have been a time in man's history when he was possessed of nothing but the merest rudiments of articulate speech; in which, there- fore, he must have occupied a lower grade than almost any existing human tribe. This is a conclusion which cuts at the root of many preconceived theories. Thus Lessing ^ re- marks that God is too good to have withheld from His poor children, perhaps for centuries, a gift like speech ; and M. de Bonald asks how can we suppose ' that a Good Being could create a social animal without remembering that he 1 Sdmmtl. Schriften, Bd. x. 34 On Language., ch. iv. ought also from the first moment of his existence to inspire him with the knowledge necessary to his individual, social, physical, and moral life." Such reasoners, therefore, reject the doctrine of the human origin of language as alike an injustice to God and an indignity to man. In answer to such ' high priori ' reasonings, it might be sufficient to say that we are content, for our part, humbly to observe and record what God has done, rather than to argue what He ought to do or ought not to do, incompetent as we are in our absolute ignorance ' to measure the arm of God with the finger of man.' Claiming for ourselves the character of observers only, and desirous to accept the results to which our enquiries directly lead, without any regard to system or prejudice, we might easily repudiate assumptions which rest on the mere sandy basis of system- atic prejudice. It is childish arrogance in us to argue what plans are consonant to, and what are derogatory of, God's Divine Power and Infinite Wisdom. Seeing that we have not the capacity for understanding that which is, it is pre- posterous in us to argue on any general principles as to what must have been. Perfect humility and perfect faith — a faith in Truth, which seems to have the least power in many of the loudest champions of a supposed orthodoxy — are the first elements of scientific success. The problems and mysteries which encumber all our enquiries — the adamantine wall against which we dash ourselves in vain whenever we seek to penetrate the secrets of the Deity — should at least prevent us from following Lessing and.M. de Bonald in laying down rules of our own, in accordance with which we fancy that God must inevitably have worked. Moreover, if language was a Eevelation and not an In- vention, at what period in man's life was it revealed ? If, indeed, man was, according to the Chaldee paraphrast, created ' a speaking intelligence ' (see p. 9), we get over this difficulty, though it is only at the expense of an absurdity, and by making the Bible contradict itself. But if not, there must have been a time, on any supposition, when man CH. IV. The Infancy of Httmanity. 35 wandered in the woods a dumb animal, till God bethought Him of inspiring language. Surely such a view is even less pious than that of Lucretius himself. 'Any one,' says Steinthal,^ ' who thinks of man without a language ' [or, he should have added, the capacity for evolving a language] ' thinks of him as one of the Brutes ; so that any one who calls down the Deity as his teacher of Language, gives Him only an animal as a scholar.' In other words, unless man was born speaking — (and it is apparent in Scripture that language was subsequent to creation) — then, even on this theory, man must have once been destitute of a language, and must, therefore, on this theory also, have emerged from a condition of mutism. Why then should a similar belief be held an insuperable objection to a theory so certain as the human discovery of language ? It is, forsooth, an insult to the dignity of man and a slur on the beneficence of God to suppose that man appeared on this earth in a low and barbarous condition 1 But w^hy is it ? Do those who use such reasonings consider that they are thereby arraigning and impugning before the bar of their own feeble criticisms 'the.arfKfl/ dealings of God? If it be indeed irreconcilable with God's goodness to suppose that He would have created man in a savage state, is it more easy to believe that He would now suffer, as He does suffer, the existence of thousands ■who are doomed throughout life to a helpless and hopeless imbecility, and that for no fault of their own ? — thousands in whom the light of reason has been utterly quenched ; thousands in whom it never existed, and who pass in help- less idiocy from the cradle to the grave, as irresponsible as the brutes who perish, without language, without religion, without knowledge, without hope ? Facts like these ought to silence us for ever when we attempt beforehand to assign limits to the possible workings of God's Providence. We know that He is infinitely good and gracious, but we cannot know how His Providence will work. 1 Urspr. d, Sprache, p. 40. 36 On Language. ch. iv. If for many ages millions of the human race have been, and still are, born into a low and barbarous condition, why may they not have been originally so created ? We know from history and from ordinary reasoning that existing savage races could not have sunk 1 into this condition, and there seems every ground for believing that they are morally, mentally, and physically incapable of rising out of it, since they melt away before the advance of civilisation like the line of snow before the sunlight. ' God,' says M. Jules Simon,2 ' who suffers millions of savages to exist in three quarters of the globe, may well be supposed to have per- mitted in the beginning that which He permits at the present day.' What shall we say, for instance, of the tallow-coloured Bosjesman,^ who lives for the most part on beetles, worms, and pismires, and is glad enough to squabble with the h}'sena for the putrid carcass of the buffalo or the antelope ? Of the leather-skinned Hottentot,* ' whose hair grows in short tufts, like a worn-down shoe brush, with spaces of bare scalp between,' and who is described as a creature ' with passions, feelings, and appetites as the only principles of his constitu- tion ' ? Of the Yamparico, ' who speaks a sort of gibberish like the growling of a dog,' ^ and who ' lives on roots, crickets, ^ Archbp. Whately (Preliminary Dissert, iii. in the Encycl. Britan- nica) argues that savages can never, of themselves, rise out of degrada- tion ; it is as easy to show that they can never sink into such a con- dition. We do not believe that the primeval savages were in any ■way direct ancestors of the two noble races — the Aryan and the Semitic. ' Rev. des Deux Mondes, 1 841, p. 536. ' Caldwell, Unity of the Human Race, p. 75. * Personal Adventures in S. Africa, by Rev. G. Brown (a missionary), p. 7. ' See some examination of the question about races with a deficient language in Mr. E. Burnet Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind (p. 77 sq.), who also has some admirable chapters on gesture language, picture writing, &c. I am glad to find in his two chapters on myths abundant confirmations of the arguments which I have used inapaperon ' Traditions real and fictitious ' in the Trans. oftheEthnoU Soc. 186;. CH. IV. The Infancy of Humanity. T^y and several bug-like insects of different species ' ? ^ Of the aborigines of Victoria,^ among whom new-born babes are killed and eaten by their parents and brothers, and who have no numerals beyond three ? Of the Puris ^ of Brazil, who have to eke out their scanty language by a large use of signs, and who have no words for even such simple con- ceptions as ' to-morrow,' and ' yesterday ' ? Of the naked, houseless, mischievous, vindictive Andamaner,* with a skull hung ornamentally round his neck? Of the Fuegians,^ * whose language is an inarticulate clucking,' and who kill and eat their old women before their dogs, because, as a Fuegian boy naively and candidly expressed it, ' Doggies catch otters, old women no ' ? Of the Banaks,^ who wear lumps of fat meat, artistically suspended in the cartilage of the nose? Of the negroes of New Guinea,^ who were seen springing from branch to branch of the trees like monkeys, gesticulating, screaming, and laughing ? Of the Alforese * of Ceram, who live in trees, ' each family in a state of per- petual hostility with all around ' ? Of the forest tribes of Malacca,^ who lisp their words, 'whose sound is like the noise of birds ' ? Of the wild people of Borneo,^" whom the Dyaks hunt as if they were monkeys ? Of the cannibal Fans ^1 of equatorial Africa, who bury their corpses before ^ Capt. Mayne Reid, Odd Races, p. 330 sqq. ' W. Stainbridge on the Aborigines of Victoria. — Trans, of Ethn. Soc. 1861, p. 289. Fern-roots, grubs, mushrooms, and frogs are their main diet ; that of some other savages is too disgustful for utterance. — Greenwood, Curiosities of Savage Life, p. 15. ' Mad. Ida Pfeiffer, Voyage Round the World. * Mouatt's Andamaners, p. 328. ' Darwin, Voyage of a Naturalist, p. 214. The boy who gave the philosophic defence of cannibalism, imitated, as a great joke, the screams of the poor old women, while being choked in the smoke. ^ Hutchinson, Ten Years' Wanderings, p. 245. ' Crawfurd, Malay Gram. i. clxi. ° Pickering, Races of Man, p. 304 sqq. ^ Id. "-"Id. " Du Chaillu's Equatorial Africa. This has been denied. 38 On Language. ch, iv. eating them ? Of the pigmy Dokos,i south of Abyssinia, 'whose nails are allowed to grow long like the talons of vultures, in order to dig up ants and tear in pieces the flesh of serpents, which they devour raw ' ? Of the wild Veddahs^ of Ceylon, who have gutturals and grimaces in- stead of language ; ' who have no God ; no idea of time and distance ; no name for hours, days, or years ; and who cannot count beyond five on their fingers ' ? Of the Miaut- see,3 or aborigines of China, whose name means ' children of the soil,' and who, like the Malagassy, the Thibetans, and many African tribes, attribute their origin not to gods and demigods, not even to lions (as do the Sahos), or to goats (as do the Dagalis), but with unblushing unanimity, to the ape ? Of the Negrilloes of Aramanga, the Battas of Sumatra, the wild people of Borneo, the hairy Ainos of Jesso, the Hyglaus of the White Nile, the Kukies and other aborigines of India, even the Cagots and other Races Maudites of France and Spain ? These beings, we presume no one will deny, are men with ordinary human souls. If then God can tolerate for unknown generations the per- petuation of such a state of existence as this — the perpet- uation of people with squalid habits, mean and deforaied heads, hideous aspect, and protuberant jaws — what possible ground is there for denying that He may also have sufiered men at the Creation to live in what is called a state of nature, which is the name given to a state of squalor and ignorance, of savagery and degradation? Considering these facts, and believing with Schlegel that savage nations are ' Pritchard, JVai. Hist. i. 306. Norris's Note. Dr. Davy, Researches, ii. 177. ' Sir J. Emerson Tennent, Ceylon. " Authorities for the facts mentioned in these two sentences will be found in Ritter, Erdkunde, Asien, ii. 273, 431 sqq. ; Hope, Ess. on the Origin of Man; Virey, Hist. Nat. du Genre Humain, ii. 12; i. 190. Pickering, Races of Man, 175-179, 302-308; Journ. Asiat. Soc. of Bengal, xxiv. 206 ; Pritchard, Nat. Hist, of Man, i. 250-274 (ed. Norris). Pouchet, Des Races, p. 59 ; Perty, Anthropol. Vortrage, p. 41 ; Michel, Hist, des Races maudites, &c. CH. IV. The Infancy of Humanity. 30 savage by nature, and must ever remain so, some (and among them Ni^uhr) have been polygenists precisely because they thought it was more consonant with God's attributes to have created men in different grades of elevation than to have suffered them to degenerate in so many regions from a con- dition originally exalted.^ The argument in this case may be as worthless as in the other ; but what is the value of a nftthod of reasoning from which two conclusions so opposite can be drawn ! It would be an error to suppose that ' the state of nature,' with its imperfect language, its animal life, its few natural wants, its utter ignorance, is necessarily a state so low as to render existence a misfortune or a curse. Nature, in all probability, provided as bountifully for her first-born as she does for many of his descendants ; and if not, she at any rate ' makes habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary.' Even the Fuegian, in his land of cold and rain — crawling from the lair in which he lies, unsheltered, coiled up like an animal on the wet ground, to gather at all hours, from morn till midnight, the mussels and berries which are his only food — does not decrease in numbers, and must, therefore, as Mr. Darwin observes,^ be supposed ' to enjoy a sufficient share of happiness (of whatever kind it may be) to render life worth having.' It is hard to say how little is ' neces- sary' for man; and it is certain,, both from Scripture and history, that not only the luxuries and ornaments of life, but even those things which we regard as indispensable, were the gradual inventions, or long-delayed discoveries, of a race which had received from God certain faculties, in order that they might at once be exercised and rewarded by a perpetual progress in dignity and self-improvement. There can be no question that the systems of those Rabbis and Fathers,* and their modem imitators, who make Adam a ' Pouchet, Plural, des Racts, p. 105. ^ Darwin, Voy. of a A^aturalist, p. 216. ' Clem. Alex. Strom, iv. 25, § 173 ; 23, § 152. Buddaeus, FhSos. Hebr. 383-388, where he gives the Rabbinic fancies about Adam 40 On Langtiage. ch. iv, being of stupendous knowledge and superhuman wisdom, are more improbable, as well as more unscriptural, than those of writers who, like Theophilus of Antioch among the Fathers, and Joseph Ben Gorion among the Jews, make his original condition a weak and inferior one. Philosophy, the arts, the sciences, the observations of the simplest natural facts, the elucidation of the simplest natural laws, required centuries to elaborate. We do not even hear of the first kingdom till some thousands of years after the first man. It is but as yesterday that man has wrung from the patient silence of Nature some of her most important, and apparently her most open secrets. It is forsooth a degradation to suppose that man origi- nated in an ignorant and barbarous condition ! People prefer the poet's fancies : — One man alone, the father of mankind, Drew not his life from woman ; never gazed With mute unconsciousness of what he saw On all around' him ; learned not by degrees : Nor owed articulation to his ear ; But, moulded by his Maker into man, At once upstood intelligent, surveyed All creatures ; with precision understood Their purport, uses, properties ; assigned To each his place significant ; and filled With love and wisdom, rendered back to Heaven In praise harmonious the first air he drew. He was excused the penalties of dull Minority. . . . History, not wanted yet. Leaned on her elbow, watching Time, whose course Eventful should supply her with a theme.^ Fascinating and poetical, no doubt; the primal man, regarded as a being beautiful of body, gracious in soul,* Kadmon. Suidas s. v. 'ASd/i. South, Siate of Man before the Fall, &c. On the other side see Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 12, § 96; Greg. Naz. Orat. xxxviii. 12 ; and even Irenseus, Adv. Heeres. iv. 38. ' Cowper, The Task. ' The Bible tells us nothing of this kind ; but it would take us too long here to examine fully the Biblical data. I believe that when fairly CH. IV. The Infancy of Humanity. 41 filled in heart with virgin purity and sweetness, and dis- covering everything with exquisite and lightning-like spon- taneity ! Nevertheless, ' Science ^ banishes amongst myths and chimeras the fancy of a primitive man, burning with youth and beauty, to show us upon icy shores I know not what abject being, more hideous than the AustraHan, more savage than the Patagonian, a fierce animal struggling against the animals with which he disputes his miserable existence.' What support is there for the poetic hypo- theses of those who love their own assumptions better than they love the truths which science reveals ? In a handful of rude and bizarre traditions, in a few skulls of the very meanest and most ^ degraded type, in here and there a gnawed fragment of human bones, in a few coarse and piti- able implements of bone and flint, what traces have we of that radiant and ideal protoplast whom men have delighted to invest with purely imaginary attributes, and to contem- plate as the common ancestor of their race ? But man, in his futile and baseless arrogance, must exalt the earliest representatives of his kind, though he cannot deny the infinite debasement of his cotemporary brethren. He refuses to- see in his far-off ancestors what he must see in his living congeners, a miserable ^ population maintaining and thoroughly considered, they sanction the view here expressed. For a picture of frightfully degraded aboriginal races, see Job xxx. 1-8 ; Ewald, Gesch. d. Volkes Israel, i. 27 ; De Gobineau, i. 486. ' Aug. Laugel, Rev. des Deux Monies, May i, 1863 ; cf. De Gobineau, De Plnigaliti des Races, i. 228 ; Link, Die Urwelt, i. 84 ; Lyell, Princ. of Geol. i. 178 ; Laugel, Science et Philosophie, p. 270. * It has even been suspected (most likely on insufficient ground), from the position of Has foramen magnum, that the head was not ver- tical on the neck. See Ethml. Trans, p. 269, 1863. * It is agreed on all hands that Gen. i. 26, has no bearing on this question, since it rpfers to the moral and intellectual nature of man — reason, liberty, immortality. ' Non secundum formam corporis factus est ad imaginem Dei, sed secundum rationalem mentem.' — Aug. de Trin. xii. 7. Obviously, if all men— even Mundrucus and Ostiaks — are created in the 'image of God,' then the first men were so, however low their grade. 42 On Language. ch. iv. an inglorious struggle with the powers of nature, wrestling with naked bodies against the forest animals, and forced to dispute their cave-dwellings with the hyaena and the wolf. Years pass before the infant can realise and express his own individuality; ages may have rolled away before those ancestors of man, who lived in the dim and misty dawn of human^ existence, could in any way understand their own position in the yet untamed chaos of the ancient world. The recognition of the long and feeble periods of animal- ism and ignorance is no more degrading to humanity than the reinembrance of the time when he was rocked, and swaddled, and dandled in a nurse's arms is a degradation to any individual man. DisbeHeving, on the scientific ground of the Fixity of Type,^ the Darwinian hypothesis, we should yet consider it disgraceful and humihating to try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or a claptrap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance* of a prejudiced assembly. We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer ; and in doing so we should be very far from the assumption ' that we were on the side of the angels ! ' Is it not indisputable that man's body — ' all but an inap- preciable fragment of its substance ' — is conjposed of the very same materials, the same protein and fats, and salines, and water, which constitute the inorganic world — which may unquestionably have served long ago as the dead ma- terial which was vivified and utilised in the bodies of extinct creatures — and which may serve in endless metensomatosis ' ' It is a remarkable fact that native legends betray a reminiscence of the Ellc, Mastodon, Megalonyx, Deinotherium, &c. Hamilton Smith, Nat. Hist, of Human Spec. pp. 104-106 ; Maury, Des Ossements humains {Mint, de la Soc. des Antiq. i. 287), &c. ' I may perhaps be allowed to refer to my paper on this subject read before the British Association in 1S65, and now in the Ethnolog. Soc's Transactions. ' If the word, which has the authority of Clemens Alexandrinus, and which is now imperiously demanded by the wants of science, may be pardoned on the score of its necessity. CH. IV. The Infancy of Htimatiity. 43 for we know not what organisms yet to come ? Was there, or was there not, a time in the embryonic daWn of individual life, when every one of us drew the breath of life by means not of lungs but of a species of gills ? Is this fact any dis- grace to us, or will any pseudo-theologian have the dogmatic hardihood to deny it? Are we, in our gross and haughty ignorance, to assume that, because by God's grace we caiTy in ourselves the destinies of so grand a future, a deep and impassable gulf of separation must therefore divide even the material particles of our frame from those of all other crea- tures which find their development in so poor a life ? What sanction have we for this assumption ? Is it to be found in the future fate of the elements of our body — destined, as we know they are, to be swept along by the magic 1 eddy of nature, to be transmuted by her potent alchemy into name- less transformations, and subjected by her pitiless economy to what we should blindly consider as nameless dishonour ? or, looking backwards as well as forwards, is it to be found in the fact that there are stages in the earlier development of the human embryo, during which the most powerful microscope, and the most delicate analysis, can neither detect nor demonstrate the slightest difference between the ^ three living germs of which one is destined to be a wolf, the second a horse, and the third a man ? If the question is to be degraded from scientific decision into a matter for tea-table aesthetics and ignorant prepossessions, is this cer- tain embryonic degradation of immaturity less oppressive than the admission of a bare possibility that, myriads of centuries ago, there may have been a near genetic connec- tion between the highest of the animals and the lowest of the human race ? ft is not yet proved that there wasj we believe that there was not; but, nevertheless, the hypothesis is neither irreverent nor absurd. Let those who love truth ^ Coleridge, Aids to Keflection ; Huxley, Lect. pp. 15-19 ; HaniUt, V. I. » Karl Snell, Die SchSffung des Menschen, p. 130. 44 On Language. ch. iv. only consider what are the certain facts about our mortal bodies, and be still ;— awaiting the gradual revelation of His own past workings which the All-wise Creator may yet vouchsafe, not assuredly to the clamorous, the idle, and the ignorantly denunciative, but to humble and studious en- quirers — to those loftier and less self-complacent souls, whom He has endowed with the desire, the wisdom, and the ability to search out the pathless mystery of His ways, through long years of noble and self sacrificing toil. It has, indeed, been asserted that the languages of some barbarous nations — for instance, the Greenlanders and the North American Indians — are of so rich, so perfect, and so artistic a structure, that they could not possibly have been achieved by them in their present condition, and furnish a proof that they have sunk into savagery from a state of higher culture. Du Ponceau ^ speaks in the most glowing terms of the genius displayed in the infinite variety and perfect regularity of those languages. Charlevoix calls attention to the beautiful union of energy and nobleness in the Huron, where, as in the Turkish, ' tout se conjugue.' Dr. James says that there are seven or eight thousand pos- sible forms of the verb in Chippeway. Appleyard ^ tells us that 'the South African languages, though spoken by tribes confessedly uncivilised and illiterate, are highly systematic and truly philosophical ; ' that in Kafir there are a hundred different forms for the pronoun ' its,' ^ and that ' the system of alliteration maintained throughout its grammatical forms is one of the most curious and ingenious ever known.' Threlkeld * tells us similar facts about the Australian dia- lects ; and Caldwell,^ in his ' Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages,' occupies many pages with the laws '^ fit. du Ponceau, Mint, sur le Syst. Gram, de quelqttes Nations i»- dknnes, passim. A most valuable and brilliant work. * Kafir Grammar, pref. ' Id. p. 66 ; p. 6, note, &c. * Threlkeld, Australian Gratn. p. 8. " Dravidian Grammar, pp. 126-138. CH. IV. The Infancy of Humanity. f 45 of euphonic permutation of consonants and harmonic se- quence of vowels, which exist both in those and in the Scythian languages. Instances of similar exuberance and complexity in savage languages might be indefinitely multi- plied : 1 and the argument that they imply an intellectual power superior to what we now find in these races, and that they therefore prove a condition previously exalted, is so plausible that in a former 2 work I regarded it as convincing. Further examination has entirely removed this belief. For this apparent wealth of synonyms and grammatical forms is chiefly due to the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction. It would be not only no advantage, but even an impossible incumbrance to a language required for literary purposes. The ' transnormal ' character of these tongues only proves that they are the work of minds incapable of all subtle analysis, and following in one single direction an erroneous and partial line of development. When the mind has nothing else to work upon, it will expend its energy in a lumbering and bizarre multiplicity of linguistic expedients, and by richness of expression will try to make up for poverty of thought. Many of these vaunted languages {e.g. the American and Polynesian) — these languages which have countless forms of conjugation, and separate words for the minutest shades of specific meaning — these holophrastic lan- guages, with their 'jewels fourteen syllables long,' to express the commonest and most familiar objects '- — so far from proving a once elevated intellectual condition of the people who speak them, have not even yet arrived at the very simple abstraction ^ required to express the verb ' to be,* ^ Appleyard, p. 69 ; Du Ponceau, p. 95 ; Howse, Cree Gram. p. 7 ; Pott, Die Ungleichheit d. mensckl. Fofen, p. 253 ; Steinthal, Charakier- istik, p. 176; Maury, La Terre ei T Homme, p. 463. ^ Origin of Lang. p. 28. See, too, Vater, Mithrid. iii. 328. * In American and Polynesian languages there are forms for ' I am well,' ' I am here,' &c., but not for ' I am.' In Elliot's Indian Bible ' I am that I am,' is rendered ' I do, I do' (compare the French idiom Ml fait nuit,' &c.) More than this, savage nations cannot even adopt the 46 On Lattguage. ch. iv. which Condillac assumed to be the earliest of invented verbs ! The state of these languages, so far from proving any retrogression from previous culture, is an additional proof of primordial and unbroken barbarism. The triumph of civilisation is not complexity but simplicity : and unless an elaborate Polytheism be more intellectual than Monotheism — unless the Chinese ideography, with its almost indefinite number of signs, be a proof of greater progress than our alphabet — then neither is mere Polysynthetism and exuber- ance of synonyms a proof of actual culture in the past, or possible progress in the future. If language proves anything, it proves that these savages must have lived continuously in a savage condition.^ I will here quote two high and unbiassed authorities in support of the same conclusion : — ' It has already been observed,' says Mr. Gamett,^ ' that very exaggerated and erroneous ideas have been advanced respecting the structure of the class of languages of which we have been treating in the present paper. They have been representedas the products of deep philosophical contrivance, and totally different in organisation from those of every part of the known world. The author of " Mithridates " regards it as an astonishing phenomenon that a people like the Greenlanders, struggling for subsistence among perpetual ice and snow, would have found the means of constructing such a complex and artificial system. It is conceived that there cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that a compli- cated language is like a chronometer, or a locomotive engine, a product of deep calculation, and preconceived adaptation of its several parts to each other. The compound parts are verb ' to be." A negro says, ' Your hat no lib that place you put him in." 'My mother done A-a for devilly ' (=is dead).— Hutchinson, Ten. Ytars' Wandenngs, p. 32. ' See among many other authorities Pott, Dit Vngl. der menschl. Ra^en, p. 86; Du Ponceau, Transl. of Zeisberger's Lenni-Lenapt Gram. p. 14; Crawford, Malay Gram. i. 68; Adelung, Miihrid.m. 6, 205. ^ Philological Essays, p. 321. CH. IV. The Infancy of Humanity. 47 rather formed like crystals, by the natural affinity of the com- ponent elements; and whether the forms are more or less complex, the principle of aggregation is the same.' 'In those which abound most in inflections,' says Mr. Albert Gallatin,^ 'nothing more has been done than to effect, by a most complex process, and with a cumbersome and unnecessary machinery, that which, in almost every other language, has been as well, if not better performed by the most simple means. Those transitions, in their complexness, and in the still visible amalgamation of the abbreviated pro- nouns with the verb, bear, in fact, the impress of primitive and unpolished languages.' Language, then, from whatever point of view we regard it, seems to confirm instead of weakening the inference to which we are irresistibly led by Geology, History, and Archaeology — that Man, The heir of all the ages in the foremost files of Time, is a very much nobler and exalted animal than the shivering and naked savage whose squalid and ghastly relics are ex- humed from Danish kjokken-mSddings, and glacial deposits, and the stalactite flooring of freshly-opened caves. These primeval lords of the untamed creation, so far from being the splendid and angelic beings of the poet's fancy, appear to have resembled far more closely the Tasmanian, the Fuegian, the Greenlander, and the lowest inhabitants of Pelagian caverns or Hottentot kraals. We believe that in Scripture itself there are indications that they appeared upon the surface of the globe many ages before those simple and noble-minded shepherds from whose loins have sprung the Aryans and Semites— those two great races to whom all the world's progress in knowledge and civilisation has been solely due. 1 Archceologia Americana, ii. p. 203, quoted by Mr. Gamett ( 48 ) CHAPTER V. PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DISTINCT THOUGHT. Wenn ein unendlicli Gefiihl aufwogt in der Seele des Dichter's, O dann mag er ahnen von fern das Geheimniss der Sprache, Wie in der Zeiten Beginn aus dem erwachenden Geist, Da er sich selbst und die Dinge vernahm, das lebendige Wort sprach Offenbarung und That, gbttlich und menschlich zugleich. Geibeu Language may with more accuracy be called a Discovery or a Creation, than an Invention of the human race. Un- doubtedly the idea of speech existed in the human intelli- gence as a part of our moral and mental constitution when man first appeared upon the surface of the earth. In this sense we may call language a divine gift, and may apply to it, with perfect truth, the passage of Tertullian : ' invenisse dicuntur necessaria ista vitse, non instituisse; quod autem invenitur fuit, et quod fuit non ejus deputabitur, qui invenit, sed ejus qui instituit. Erat enim antequam inveniretur.' ^ But the germs may perish for want of development, and like the seeds in the diluvium, or grains of wheat in the hand of a mummy, may lie hidden for centuries before they meet with that combination of circumstances which is capable of quickening them into life. Yet we do not agree with Lessing in supposing that if man discovered language by the exercise of his own endowments, i.e. if he merely evolved the speech-power which existed within him as an immanent ' Apolog. adv. Centes, xi. CH. V. Development of TJwiight. 40 faculty, long centuries would necessarily have been required for the purpose. The wants of primitive men, like the wants of infants, are few and simple,^ and wholly sensuous. It is certain, by universal admission, that the ultimate roots of language are /we/ in number; it is nearly certain that no lan- guage possesses more than a thousand, and that some have far fewer. These roots we regard as mere etymologic fictions'; but if, with Max Miiller, we suppose that they were ever used as words, there must, even on this theory, have been a period when men used but z.few words ; and consequently, since the notion of any revelation of these roots is expressly repudiated, there nmst have been a time, however short, in which man had no words, no articulate language at all, and, in which significant gestures could have been his only way for communicating his thoughts. And this time, however short, must also be postulated even if, in defiance of Scrip- ture, it be supposed that language was revealed. But why should it be held impossible that man once existed with nothing but the merest rudiments of speech ? There are whole nations even now which, if the testimony of travellers is to be accepted, possess very little more. Nor, indeed, is it necessary to look to the remotest parts of the earth to find how very few are the words which are necessary to express the wants of man. Mr. D'Orsey mentions that some of his parishioners had not a vocabulary of more than 300 words ; and although the assertion has been widely dis- puted, I should certainly be inclined to confirm it out of my own experience. I once listened for a long time together, to the conversation of three peasants who were gathering ^ Prof. Max Miiller traces back all language to 'roots,' and there he would stop, declaring the use of them to be an ultimate and inexplicable fact. Inexplicable indeed ! yet the 'theory of roots,' 'phonetic types,' incapable of further analysis, and, so far as appears, either wholly arbi- trary, or else containing in themselves some mystic inherent fitness, is offered to us in the place of theories, so simple, so natural, and in part so demonstrable, as those which trace the rise and gradual growth of language out of onomatopoeia and interjection. D 50 On Language. ch. v. apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred; the same word was made to serve a multitude of purposes,^ and the same coarse expletives re- curred with a horrible frequency in the place of every single part of speech, and with every variety of meaning which the meagre context was capable of supplying. Repeated obser- vation has since then confirmed the impression. If this be so in Christian and highly-civilised England in the nineteenth century, what may not have been perhaps ten thousand years before the Saviour was born into the world ? If, then, man once existed with only the germs of speech and of understanding, to what was their development due ? The question admits of distinct answer, and that answer is full both of interest and value. The first men who ever lived must have learnt for them- selves those simplest lessons which have to be learnt afresh by every infant of their race. Confused, yet lovely, was the multitude of influences and appearances by which they were surrounded ; how should they thrid the all but inextricable mazes of impressions so manifold ? Over their heads the sun, and moon, and the infinite stars of heaven,^ rose and set in endless succession ; the heavens outspread their illimitable splendour ; woods waved, and waters rolled, and flowers ex- haled their perfume, and fruits yielded their sweetness, and the hours of day and night and the four seasons of the year encircled them in their mystic dance. Had man been created unintelligent, and merely receptive, the waves of this vast tide of being must have broken over him in vain ; and, in the absence of a living spirit, the world must have con- tinued to seem unto all, save the Highest Being, a formless chaos — no better, for all its lustre and loveliness, than if the darkness had still brooded over the void abyss. But that 1 Just as in Chinese the same root may be a noun, a verb, and some- times also a particle. Heyse, § 134. ' See a glorious passage of S. Chrysostom, Or. xii. 385, quoted by Lersch, L 89 ; and Herbart, Lehrb. d, Psychol, p. 194. CH. V. Development of Thought. 5 1 soul, ' created in the image of God,' whose birth is recorded in the book of Genesis, bore no resemblance to the statue- man of Condillac's famous Traitk lies Sensations. Had it been so, the senses could only have produced a jarring multitude of heterogeneous impressions, and man would have continued to be that mere organised sensitive mass which Saint Lambert supposes him to be at the moment of his birth until ' Nature has created for him a soul ! " For unless there had also been in man the ' intellectus ipse ' of Leibnitz, unless there had been the intelligence, as well as the sensorium commune, even sensation would be impossible,^ seeing that in the complex act which we call sensation man opposes the internal action of his conscious individuality to the influence of external causes. Without this apperception, there could be no such thing as self-conscious sensation,^ nor could mankind ever have arisen to any higher region than that of mere organic impressions. But although at first the intellect be but a passive and dormant faculty, it is there, and it is the sole clue wherewith we disentangle the myriad-ravelled intricacies of sensuous impressions. And thus the senses become the gateways of knowledge; and a man born without the capacity for external sensations would also be of necessity soulless and mindless, because, though not the single source of all our thoughts and faculties, the senses are yet the necessary 1 Herbart, Psychol, p. 108. " See Vict. Cousin, Cours de Phil. iii. passim. 'Sensation,' says Morell, ' is not purely a passive state, but implies a certain amount of mental activity. It may be described on the psychological side as iresulting directly from, the attention which the mind gives to the affec- tions of its own organism. Extreme enthusiasm, or powerful emotion of any kind, can make us altogether insensible to physical injury.' Hence, a- soldier, during the battle, is often unconscious of his wounds. ' Numerous factsof a similar kind provedemonstrably, that a certain appli. <;ation,and exercise of mind, on one side, is as necessary to the existence of sensation, as tlie occurrence of physical impulse on the other.' — Psycho- logy, p. 107. In point of fact, some nations are as pre-eminent for the keenness of their senses as for the meanness of their intellect, which could not be the case if the senses created the intellect. 52 On Language. ch. v. condition of. their development. Thus it is that the senses, during the earliest days of man's existence, act the part of nursing mothers ^ to the soul, to which afterwards they become the powerful and obedient handmaids. They are the organs of communion between man and the outer world; they place him en rapfort with it, uniting man to the Uni- verse, and men to, one another. Thus they baptize man as a member of the moral and physical cosmos, and awakeii thereby the intellect, which would otherwise ^ remain infruc- tuous, like an unquickened seed. The first conception which man must learn is the concep- tion of his own separate independent existence, and without this conscious distinction between the Ego and the Non- ego, — not indeed as a notion so clear and accurate as to admit of expression by the nominative of the personal pro- noun, but as the general basis of all possible sensations, — he cannot advance a single step. And this lesson he learns by contact with the outer world, and mainly, beyond all doubt, from the organ of sight. At first he would regard himself (as all children do) rather as an object than a sub- ject ; ^ rather as ' me ' than as ' I ' ; rather as o5s than as lycii ; rather in relation to others than as ' the machine which is to him, himself.' But even this elementary lesson is sufficient for the purposes of further education; and As he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ' I ' and ' me,' And finds ' I am not what I see. And other than the things I touch : ' ' Heyse, I.e. " ' The earliest sign by which the Ego becomes perceptible is corporeal sensation.'— Feuchtersleben, Med. Psychol, p. 83, quoted by Fleming, Vocab. of Phil. p. 457. ' Mr. Browning, with that rare metaphysical accuracy which charac- terises him, no less than the other great poet of our age, chooses the /,^j>(f person as the only appropriate one for the meditations of the semi- brutal Caliban. ' Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos ; TlUnketh he dwelleth in the cold grey moon,' &c. Theology in the Island. CH. V. Development of TJiought. 53 So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him iu His isolation grows defined.' The child, like the primal man, who has advanced thus far, learns with rapid and intuitive instinct to separate and discriminate between the many distinct and different impressions caused by physical contact with the outer world. Thus, then, by means of an instinctive and reciprocal action, the senses develop the self-conscious individuality; and the self-consciousness, which contains indeed the germ of all intelligence, first quickens and then distinguishes, analyses, and combines, the impressions of those senses which have called it into life. And since two factors — the physical and the psychical — are indispensable to every true sensation, the two are so intimately related that, whereas without the psychical factor the physical could not exist, on the other hand, without the physical factor the psychical could not be developed. Speech is imdoubtedly the product of the thinking spirit ; but this spirit 2 received the first impulse of development from the impressions of the outer world and the needs of prac- tical life. At first, if we may trust the analogy of childhood, even sensuous influences must have been frequently repeated before they produced any definite impression. Feeling, which is a dull total impression, precedes sensation, to ' Tennyson, In Memoriam, xliv. ' Steinthal, Grammatik, Logik, und Psychol. 238 fg. Heyse, § 46. In this and the following remarks I have chiefly, though by no means . exclusively, followed this wise and clear thinker. I fear that the un- familiar words, intuition, representation, concept, &c. , will render this chapter tedious to readers unaccustomed to metaphysical enquiry; but I thought it better to adopt them than to confuse matters by that excessive looseness of English philosophical terms which we chiefly owe to the vacillating usage of Locke. I am greatly indebted to Fleming's Vocabu- lary of Philosophy. 54 Oti Language. ch. v.. which indeed some of the lowest organisms can never attain at all; for, as we have seen already, an act of atten- tion is required for every definite sensation, and it is not until after many sensations that we obtain a clear percep- tion. ' Light 1 strikes on the infant retina; waves of air pulsate on the infant tympanum, but these as yet produce neither sight nor hearing; they are only the preparations for sight and hearing. ... On the educated sense objects act so instantaneously as to produce what we call their sensations ; on the uneducated sense they act only so as to produce a vague impression, which becomes more and more definite by repetition.' It is not, however, long before the sensuous impression {Sinnes-eindruck) has kindled the electric fire of self-con- sciousness — in other words, the presentation soon becomes a perception or a sensation ; for by a perception ( Wahrneh- mung) we mean a conscious presentation in reference to an object, and by a sensation {Einpfindung) we mean a con- scious presentation in reference to the modification of our own being. The impression on the senses, by calling into reciprocal action the two parts of our nature, produces a sensation, i.e. a certain conscious change in the state of our own minds; and these sensations rapidly give us ^perception, i.e. they teach us something, which is at least subjectively true, respecting the qualities of matter. But sensation and perception are common to man with the more intelligent animals, and the perfection of human reason enables us to advance further than this. Sensations tell us nothing about objects, but only about properties or attributes; we rise from sensations therefore to intuitions 1 Lewes, Biog. Hist, of Phil. p. 442. That attention is necessary even for a sensation, we may see from the fact that ordinarily (without a definite act of abstraction and observation) we are wholly unconscious of the numberless reflections of light, sound, smell, &c., which are playing on our senses. In fact, fhe phenomena of abstraction, reverie, preoccupation, absence of mind, &c., all point to this conclusion. See Sir II. Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology. CH. V. Development of Thought. 5 5 {Anschauungeit)} which are a complex of all the sensations caused by an object. Sensations are analytical; they come to us from different senses, and tell us the shape, colour, sound, weight, hardness, &c., of an object : the intuition gives us the object itself as the synthesis of all these separ- able attributes, so that gradually we grow familiar with the sensuous perception, in its totality, as a ' collective impres- sion,' or definite picture, ' presented ^ under the condition of distinct existence in space or time ; ' and this we call an Intuition, i.e. according to the definition of Coleridge, ' a l^erception immediate and individual.' And when this intuition has, by the power of abstraction, been raised into a complete picture, capable of being ana- lysed into various elements, and is held fast in the con- sciousness as a permanent intellectual form, which may be banished and recalled at will, then we have a Representation ( Vorstellung) ^ — the first permanent product of intellectual spontaneity, the first definite intellectual exertion of the will. Lastly, by still higher processes of intellectual abstraction, in which the judgment for the first time plays a part, we raise the representation into the sphere of generality, and then possess a notion or concept {Begriff). A concept* grasps an object as the synthesis of all its constituent attributes or 1 Steinthal, Gram. Log. und Psychol. 261. His general outline of the psychological process differs in some particulars from Heyse's. Mr. Mill [Logic, i. 58 sq.) briefly touches on the same subject. He only alludes to perceptions as acts of the mind ' which consist in the recog- nition of an external object as the exciting cause of the sensation.' ' Mansell, Proleg. Log. p. 9. We mean, of course, an ' empirical intuition,' which, in the Kantian philosophy, corresponds to the repre- sentation of a sensible object. German, Anschauung. ^ Steinthal calls this Anschauung der Anschauung, i.e. a power of regarding the intuition (v. supra) as an Intuition, which is firmly fixed in the consciousness and memory. Grammatik, p. 295. * ' Conception ' should more accurately be used of ' the act of the under- standing, bringing any given object or impression into the same class with any number of other objects or impressions, by means of some character or characters common to them all ' (Coleridge, Church and State, Prel. Rem.) ; concept of the result of the act. 56 On Language. ch. v.' properties; the Representation or image {Vorsfellung) is subjective, and dififerent people may have different images of the same object; but the notion is the objective concept tion of the species, and being independent of all accidental marks of the individual representation, is and must be the same for all men. The representation is due to the analytic activity of Abstraction, but is entangled with the sensuous accidents of the individual object ; the notion (or concept) is the product of a higher creative activity of the thinking (logical) intelligence, and produces that ideal synthesis which enables us to think of a Genus or Species. It so far retrogrades to the concrete intuition as to reduce to unity a multitude of phenomena ; but this unity is not that of the immediate object, but one ideally recognised by the syn- thetic activity of the intellect. The representation is arrived at by a merely material analysis of the Intuition ; the notion^ by a formal and logical analysis ; and distinct knowledge is impossible without notions, which are thus the commence- ment of the development of pure logical thought. Nevertheless, words correspond not to notions, but to images or representations. They mark the object of per- ception, not in the totality of its essential attributes, but by some single mark whereby the image may be conceived and fixed in the intelligence. In fact, the representation {Vorstelhmg), which in ordinary, although not in philoso- phical language, is called the conception, is a mere empirical notion, derived from familiarity with the external properties of the object {Anschauungsbegriff, Erfahrungsbegriff), and this is what every word expresses. The logical conception may be indefinitely more accurate and profound, but must yet employ the same word for its expression. Thus, to men in general, ' bird ' simply means a creature with wings ; nor would their rough definition of it exclude either butterflies 1 ' Notions, the depthless abstractions of fleeting phenomena, the shadows of flitting vapours, the colourless repetitions of rainbows, have effected their utmost when they add to the distinctness of our know ledge.' Coleridge. CH. V. Development of Thought. 57 or bats ; yet the man of science has no other word than this (bird), to express the complex of essential characteristics involved in the accurate definition. And the philosopher uses the word ' man,' no less than the world in general ; although the philosopher thereby expresses an idea which it exhausts his intellect to describe or to define, while the world merely implies by it the animal which Plato charac- terised as ' a featherle.ss biped,' and which a modern philo- sopher has described as ' a forked radishwith a curiously carved head.' To illustrate this process : (i.) I see a bird flying, or a tree in bloom, and it makes z. sensuous impression on my retina; but if I am absent or preoccupied, I may be wholly unconscious of this impression, which does not become even a sensation until my consciousness is excited. But when this is done, when my Attention is drawn to it, I have (ii.) a perception ( Wahrnehmung). When I contemplate this perception as an inward picture, mirrored in my con- sciousness, I have (iii.) the intuition (Anschauung) of the flying bird and the blooming tree. If, by abstraction, I separate this individual phenomenon in its concrete totallity into its several component elements, and range those elements uflder some definite intellectual form as an ideal possession of my consciousness, I then have (iv.) the repre- sentations {Vorstellungen, vernaculd 'conceptions') of 'bird,' flying,' ' tree,' ' blooming.' But the analytic activity of the intelligence proceeds still further into particulars : it sepa- rates the elements of a representation, and apprehends them as so many independent representations. In the tree it dis- tinguishes between leaf, twig, stem, .root, and the properties of height, greenness, &c. — all of which furiysh so many separate representations. It further distinjguishes the species of a representation, such as tree, into oak, beech, pine,- &c., each regarded as special representations, and recognised by specific signs ; all of which I bear in mind when I use the word ' tree,' which thus, by material analysis, becomes to me (v.) an empirical concept (Erfahrungsbegriff), formed by a 58 On Language. ch. v. synthesis of observed characteristics, and expressing more or less adequately the nature of the object. Lastly, by still further acts of intellectual abstraction, I arrive (vi.) at the lo^cal notion ( Verstandesbegriff), which is no longer merely empirical or material, but which, by the synthetic activity! of the judgment, recognises the object as the sum-total of all those attributes (and those only) which constitute its essence. Once more then. From passive receptivity I am awoke by sensuous impressions into free, spontaneous, creative activity, whereby I pass through the stages of sensation and perception to that of Intuition, in which I first become independent of the immediate effect of the external object on my senses, and then free myself from the dominion of the senses, and possess an inward picture which I can contemplate without any assistance from them. Still ad- vancing, my intellect creates representations for itself, no longer merely retaining the sensuous picture, but forming it to an ideal existence, and using it as its own possession and its own production. Sensations, Perceptions, Intuitions are individual and special in their character ; but representations are general, and no longer refer to that which is single and concrete, or to the individual object of perception. In this sense all words are Abstracta. The real world of appearances, in which everything is individual, is recreated ^ by the intelli- gence into an ideal world of general conceptions. Thus, then, we have traced the psychological growth of the concepts, which may be represented by language. A word is a recognised audible sign for a special definite Intuition or concept. From the genesis of the concept we pass to the genesis of the sound which is accepted as its sign; and the questions which we have to consider are, How does the sound originate, and what is the connection, if any, between these two elements, the intellectual and the 1 Heyse, p. 86. 2 n,id. p. 88. CH. V. Development of Thought. 59 sensual, the concept and the sound? We need not fear that all such questions are insoluble. Speech is the expression of the free intellect, and if the laws and processes of the intellect are capable of being conceived and understood, why should speech,^ which is nothing miraculous, arbitrary, or accidental, but which is the natural organ and product of the intellect, be deemed incapable of similar comprehen- sion ? ' Hcyse, p. 20. ( 60 ) / CHAPTER VI. POSSIBLE MODES OF EXPRESSING THOUGHT. He winketli with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth with his fingers.— ProV. vi. 13. From what we have already observed, it is evident that every mode of expression serves only to describe internal sensations, not outward facts ; it throws light on that which is subjective, not on that which is objective; it expresses ourselves, not the world around us j sensations, perceptions, intuitions, not external things. But what is the medium of expression? Obviously it must have been one of the senses, which are the main gate- ways of knowledge, the portals of intercommunication between man and man, between men and the Universe around them. It is conceivable that a language (i.e. a mode of commu- nication) might have been invented which should use the medium of ^ tlie touch, the taste, or the smelL Yet such a language, in the case of the two latter, could not but be infinitely imperfect, difficult, and obscure, nor has the attempt ever been made. This is to a less degree the case with the touch. It is well known that among certain ani- mals the touch does serve all necessary purposes of inter- communication. Bees, for instance, to mention but one notorious case, communicate to each other the death of the queen by a rapid interlacing and striking together of the ^ Heyse, p. 29 ; Charma, Ess, sur le Lang. p. 5a cH. VI. Modes of Expression, 6i antennse. Nor is a tactile language wholly unknown to man. For instance, the Armenian merchants, as we are informed by the traveller Chardin, are able to inform each other of any modification in their bargains, however com- plex, without the notice of the purchaser, by holding their hands together under their mantles, and moving ^ them in a particular manner. Yet a language which required for its. possible development a constant contact, could never serve the purposes of so elevated a being as man. The two highest and most ideal senses remain, and these, as they affect the soul more nearly and powerfully than the others, were clearly the best adapted for the expression of thought, which is a modification of the intelligent subject. We find accordingly that all actual language addresses itself to the eye or to the ear. For in point of fact Art may be regarded as a language. We have read of a sculptor who conveyed, by means of a statue, the intense impression produced in his mind by the dawn of a summer day ; and there is scarcely a thought, an ernotion, or a fact that may not be conveyed by painting. Imitation — a fundamental principle on which rests the pos- sibility of any communication between two sentient beings — may appeal as directly to the eye as to the ear. Philomela effectually reveals, by the mute tapestry, her woven tale : — Os mutum facti caret indice. Grande doloris Ingenium est, miserisque venit solertia rebus ! Stamina barbarica suspendit Candida tell, Purpureasque notas filis iiftexuit albis. Indicium sceleris.' Shakspeare's mutilated Lavinia does not lack the means of revealing the authors of the outrage she has suffered. Pic- 1 Voy. en Perse, iv. 267, ed. Rouen. 'Tlie finger extended means ten ; bent it means five ; the bottom of the finger is one ; the haiid, a hundred ; the hand bent, a thousand. • By similar motions of the hand they indicate pounds, shillings, and pence — their faces all the while , continuing to be expressionless and blank.' - Ov. Met. vi. 38 sqq. 62 On Language. ch. vi^ tures and hieroglyphics continue to this day among various Indian tribes, a sure method of reporting facts; and we know from history that a rude sketch first conveyed to Montezuma the ominous intelligence that men in strange vessels and of strange garb had landed on his shores. Nay, more, the mighty invention of a written alphabet has trans- lated the sounds addressed to the ear into symbols for the eye ; and one-half at least of the thoughts of other men, whereof we become cognisant from day to day, is conveyed to us through the medium of sight. How easy and how natural would have been a language of gesticulation, addressed solely to the eye, is proved by the large use of gestures to supplement the lacunas of a miserable speech among some degraded savage tribes ; as, for instance, the Delaware Indians, who count by raising their hands a certain number of times, striking them as many times as there are tens. With savages generally, quot mem- bra, tot linguae ; and of course for the deaf and dumb an eye language is the only one that can exist. To them the * parole manuelle ' ^ is the only possible or intelligible speech, as it undoubtedly would be to the whole human race if the sense of hearing were to become extinct. And that such a language would be most rapidly developed, and would be the same throughout the globe, appears certain from the fact that deaf mutes from different countries can at once con- verse together with freedom, when their speaking country- men can hold no communication ;— and that many signs, even some which apparently are quite arbitrary,^ are mutu- ally intelligible to the deaf mute and the savage. * ^lian ^ relates an amusing instance of such a result. The tyrant Tryzus, that he might repress all possible means of con- spiracy, published an edict that his subjects were to hold no ' An expression of Jamet (Mhn. surl'Instr. des Sourds-muets, p. I J), quoted by Charma, p. 187. Condillac called it 'langage de la danse.' '^ See some curious confirmations and instances of this in Marsh's Lectures, ed. Smith, p. 486. ^ Hist. Var. xiv. 22. CH. VI. ' Modes of Expression, 65' communication with each other, either in public or in pri- vate. The order was at once rendered nugatory by an ex- traordinary development of the power of expressing thought by signs and gestures. When even this mode of intercourse was forbidden by the suspicious despot, one of the citizens went into the forum, and, without speaking a word, burst into a flood of tears. He was soon surrounded by a weep- ing multitude, who flew upon the tyrant and his bodyguard when he advanced to scatter them, and vindicated by his assassination their liberty of speech ! '• In truth, gesture is a most eloquent and powerful expo- nent of emotion, and may add almost incredible force to the utterance of the tongue. ' Every passion of the heart,' says Cicero,^ ' has its appropriate look, and tone, and gesture ; and the whole body of man, and his whole countenance, and all the voices he utters, re-echo like the strings of a harp to the touch of every emotion in his soul.' ' What would you have said had you heard the master himself?' exclaimed '.(Eschines to the admiring Rhodians, who had just heard him read the mighty oration of Demosthenes on the Crown ; and Demosthenes has doubtless told us one great secret of that eloquence which Fulmined o'er Greece, and shook the Arsenal To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne, when he defined gesticulation as the first, the second, and the third qualification of the successful orator. Who that in I See some excellent remarks in Marsh's Lectures, pp. 486-488. 'The language of gesture,' he says, 'is so well understood in Italy, that when King Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs, which, in the midst of the most tumultuous shouts, were perfectly intelligible to his public. And it is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian vespers was organised wholly by facial signs, not even the hand being employed.' ' De Oratore, iii. 216. 64 On Language. ch. vl' modern days has seen a Kemble or a Siddons, a Rachel, a Helen Faucit, or a Ristori, can be ignorant of what a language may be uttered by every motion and every look? Yet it is probable that even the first of our modern actors falls short in this respect of the skill of the ancient panto- mimes, of whose 'loquacissimge raanus, linguosi digiti, silen- tium claraosum, expositio tacita,' Cassiodorus^ gives so lively a description. These may have been the considerations which led Isaa Vossius deliberately to give the preference to gesticulation over language, and to regret that the whole human race does not banish ' the plague and confusion of so many tongues,' and adopt an universal and self-evident system of signs and pantomimic expression.^ ' Nunc vero,' he continues, ' ita comparatum est ut animalium, quae vulgo bmta creduntur, melior longe quam nostra hac in parte videatur conditio, utpote quse promptius et forsan felicius sensus et cogitationes suas sine interprete significent, quam ulli queant, mortales (!), prsesertim si peregrino utatur sermone.' * Idle as the com- plaint may be, it is founded on the fact that gesture is in many cases more rapid and intense in the effect which it produces than words themselves. The sidelong glance, the drooping lid, the expanded nostril, the curving lip are more instantaneously eloquent than any mere expression of dis- dain ; * and the starting eyeball and open mouth tell more of terror than the most abject words. M. Charma tells an anecdote of the actor Talma that, disgusted at the dispro- portion of praise which was attributed to the words of the poets, by which in the theatre he produced such thrilling 1 Var. iv. 51. * Many an amusing story has been told of the facility with which by such means of expression Englishmen have travelled all over the Con- tinent with no fragment of any language except their own. ' Is. Vossius, De Foematum Cantu, p. 66, Oxon. 1673. It was the love of paradox, apparent in this passage, that led Charles II. to say of Voss that he believed everything except the Bible ! * See Charma ^Ess. siir le Lan^. p. 21), who has treated this subject admirably. CH. VI. Modes of Expression. 65 effect, he one day, in the midst of a gay circle of friends, suddenly retreated a step, passed his hand over his forehead, and gave to his voice and figure the expression of the pro* foundest despair. The assembly grew silent, pale, and shuddering, as though CEdipus had appeared among them, when, as by a lightning-flash, his parricide was revealed to him, or as though the avenging Furies had suddenly startled them with their gleaming torches. Yet the words which the actor spoke with that aspect of consternation and voice of anguish formed but the fragment of a nursery song, and the effects of action triumphed over those produced by words.^ It is, however, easy to see that gesture could never be a perfect means of intercommunication. Energetic, rapid, and faithful, it is yet obscure because it is sylleptic, i.e. it ex- presses but the most general facts of the situation, and is incapable of distinguishing or decomposing them, and wholly inadequate to express the delicate shades of difference of which every form of verbal expression is capable. The flashing of a glance may belie years of fulsome panegyric ; a sudden yawn may dissipate the effect of a mass of compli- ments poured out during hours of simulated interest ; an irrepressible tear, a stolen and smothered sigh, the flutter of a nerve, or the tremble of a finger, may betray the secret of a life which no words could ever have revealed.^ The ' Garrick on rare occasions used, as he called it, ' to go his rounds,' i.e. to make his face and gestures assume in succession the aspects produced by the whole round of passions and emotions, from simple good humour to that of profound despair. 2 ' Whereto the Queen agreed With suck and so unmoved a majesty She might have seemed her statue, but that he, Low-drooping till he wellnigh kissed her feet For loyal awe, saw with a sidelong eye The shadaiv of apiece of pointed lace. In the Queen's shadow, vibrate on the walls. And parted, laughing in his courtly heart.' Tennyson, Idylls of the King, p. 2o8. £ ^ On Language. c^. vi. veiled and silent figure of Niobe may be more full of pathos than the most garrulous of wailing elegies. The wounds of the victor of Marathon, or the maimed figure of the brother of ^schylus, the unveiled bosom of Phryne, or the hand pointing to the Capitol which Manlius had saved, may have produced efiects more thrilling than any eloquence ; but such appeals were only possible at moments of intense passion, or under a peculiar combination of circumstances. The ancient orators, well aware of the power which lies in these mute appeals, made them gradually ridiculous by the fre- quency with which they employed them ; and the introduc- tion of a weeping boy upon the rostrum would produce but little weight when many of the audience knew that weeping may express a wide variety of emotions, and when an inju- dicious question as to the obscure cause of those moving tears might elicit the mal-kpropos complaint ' Se expmdagogo vellicari' ^ In moments of extreme passion, then, a language of gesture, a language appealing to the eye rather than the ear, is not only possible but extremely powerful, and one which will never be entirely superseded. And possibly some na- tures may be so sensitiye, some faces so expressive, that even during the mpst peaceful and equable moments of life the passing thought may touch the countenance with its brightness or its gloqm. But this could never be the case with any but a few ; and even with these, what attention would be found equal to read and interpret, without fatigue, symbols and expressions so subtle and so fugitive ? More- over, to the blind, and to all during the darkness, and whenever an opaque body intervened, and whenever the face was turned in another direction, such language would instantly become impossible. It is incapable of represent- ing the disti^ctness and e^iccessiveness of thought; it is 1 ' Puer, quid fleret, interrogatus, se ex psedagogo vellicari respondit.' Quint, vi. I. On the adoption of this trick before the dikasteria, see Aristophanes, Vesf, 568-571. CH. VI. Modes of Expression. 6^ limited on every side by physical conditions ; it requires an attention too exclusive and intense ; it would reach a shorter distance,! an^ appeal to a less spiritual sense. For though botk Sight and Hearing are ideal senses, as distinguished from the inferior ones of touch, taste, and smell. Hearing is more ideal in its nature, and reaches more nearly to the soul than Sight. It is the clearest, liveliest, and most instantaneously affected of the senses. That which is seen is material,^ and remains in space, but that which is heard (although in reality as permanent and as cor- poreal) yet to our blunt senses has a purely ideal existence, and vanishes immediately in time. Hence sound is espe- cially adapted to be the bearer, and the ear to be the receiver of thought, which is an activity requiring time for its successive developments, and is therefore well expressed by a succession of audible sounds. Juxtaposition in space appealing to the eye could only remotely and analogously recall this succession in time. Moreover, hearing requires but the air, the most universal of all mediums, the most im- mediate condition of life ; whereas the eye requires light as well, and is far more dependent on external accidents. The fact that even a sleeper is instantly awoke to consciousness by the tremor of his auditory nerve under the influence of the voice, is a proof of the impressive and immediate adapta- bility of sound to the exigencies of the intellectual life. So that hearing is the very innermost of the senses, and stands in the strictest and closest connection with our spiritual existence. The ear is the ever-open ^ gateway of the soul ; and, carried on the, invisible wings of sound,* there are ever thronging through its portals, in the guise of living reali- ties, those things which of themselves are incorporeal and ! Charma, p. 51. Heyse, 29. ' Heyse, 29 ; and see some beautiful remarks in Herder's Abhandlung ilber d. Ursp: d. Sprache, s. 101-108. ' Heyse, p. 31. ^ 'ETrea irTcpbivra, or (as Home Tooke called his famous work) language not only the vehicle of thought, but the wheels. 68 On Language. ch. vi. unseen. Wonderful, indeed, that a pulse of articulated air should be the only, or at any rate the most perfect means wherewith to express our thoughts ^ and feelings ! Without its incomprehensible points of union with all that passes in a soul which yet seems so wholly dissimilar from it, those thoughts and emotions could perhaps have no distinct exist- ence — the exquisite organism of our hearing would have been rendered useless, and the entire plan of our existence would have remained unperfected ! ^ Herder, Ideen.zur Gesch. d. Menschheit, p. 190. ( 69 ) CHAPTER VII. SOUND AS THE VEHICLE OF THOUGHT, •Words are the sounds of the heart, and writings its pictures.' Yangtsek A GREAT part of the world around us is inanimate and dumb ; yet such is the nature of all substances i that, by- means of sound, we can interpret to the intellect their inner- most peculiarity and constitution, even when light is absent, or the eye is most easily deceived. The inward shudder or oscillation of the component parts, even of lifeless objects, produced by any mechanical or external interference, betrays to us at once the degree of cohesion and homogeneity be- tween the component particles, and some of their most gene- ral and necessary properties. There is, as might have been expected, a close analogy between the phenomena of Light and those of Sound. Thus Sound,^ in general, corresponds to Sheen; Clear Sound to Brightness ; Echo to Reflection; Noise, a confused indistinct sound, to Glimmer ; Clang, a steady, pure, homogeneous sound, to Glow ; Tone, which is the element of music, and is derived from riha because it depends on the greater or lesser tension by which it is pro- duced, corresponds to Colour, and the relations between the different colours in a picture no less than those between the 1 In the earlier part of this chapter I am mainly following the guidance of Heyse {Syst. d. Sprachmissenschaft, § i6), but I generally use my own words, because 1 have sometimes to amplify and more often to condense. ^ Schall, Schein; Hall, Helle; Wiederhall, Wiederschein ; Gerausch, Schimmer or Geflimmer ; Klang, Glanz ; Ton, Farbe. 70 On Language. cic. vn. different intervals and harmonic relations of sound in music, are expressed by the word Tone. All these kinds of sound are produced out of lifeless sub- stances by mechanical influence ; but they all differ from articulate sound, and from all sound which is the dynamic product of the animal organism. For sound, thus sponta- neously produced, the Germans reserve the vs'ord Laut, for which we have no exact English equivalent, unless we choose a special sense of the word utterance. Voice {Stimme) is the capacity of dynamic sound-produc- tion, but in English is chiefly used of man alone. The lower order of animals, which have no lungs, and fish, whose element is the water which is not a conductor of voice, are dumb. The higher animals have each their own utterance, by which they are recognisable, and by which they recognise . each other. It has generally been asserted, and it is repeated by Heyse, that we cannot speak properly of a language of animals, because their utterances only express a general con- sciousness of existence, or at the best but a few sensations, a few longings and desires of the animal life {-^^-/ii), which, even in their highest possible development — even in the song of the nightingale — cannot attain to the expression of anything individual. With this conclusion, so like a thou- sand other hasty assertions ^ of human dogmatism, it is not necessary to agree, but, in order not to break the continuity of the subject, I have relegated all further examination of it to another place. Man possesses a voice, — a capacity for the dynamic pro- duction of sound, — as a mere animal Being in the yet dark and unconscious slumber of natural Life. The new-born infant enters the world with a cry, which is a mere natural sound, the expression of animal feeling, and is soon liable to various modifications for the purpose of expressing the differ- ent stirrings of life and sensation. These natural sounds ' See a paper on ' The Distinction between Animals and Man,' in the Anthropological Revieiu, No. 5. CH. vii. Sound as the Vehicle of Thought. 71 are no more speech than the cries of animals are ; no human intelligence is expressed by them ; and the origin of rational language cannot be explained by them alone. They are inarticulate and involuntary j they are mere modifications of the breath, and do not express the thinking spirit. Never- theless, they prove the possession of a high capacity, and this capacity is developed by man into significant speech, as the expression of his highest and innermost nature. His voice, independently of the words it utters, is capable, by natural flexibility, of expressing every variation of emotion, in all degrees of intensity ; and by virtue of the penetrating nerve-shaking influence of sound upon the soul, it can con- vey to others a sympathy ^ with the same feelings, and the impression of a free activity. It instantly and involuntarily stirs the attention of the hearer by an energy which, like that of the soul itself, is to the highest degree varied, energetic, and effectual, yet is at the same time ideal and unseen. The voice, then, by a natural necessity, by an organic connection, is the organ of the understanding ; and speech is the ex- pression of the thinking spirit in articulate sounds. The union in speech of sound and sense, the combination of the phonetic and the intellectual elements into one organic unity, will be the subject of our enquiry hereafter. At present we must say a few words on the mechanical means by which the emission of the voice is rendered possible. The voice of man is produced by a machinery far more exquisite ^ and perfect than that possessed by any other animal. The Larynx, with its cartilages and muscles, forms, in point of fact, a combination of musical instruments ; it is ^ The power of influencing by the •voice is found in all, but in very difiFerent degrees. Few had it in greater perfection than Dr. Chalmers, who, we are told, moved a whole congregation to tears by the few simple words, ' It was because God was very good to him. ' Every one lias experienced the effect of what Lamartine beautifully calls ' the gift of lean in the voice.' ° Ladevi-Roche, De POrig. du Lang. p. 49 ; et ibi Bossuet, Con- iiaissance de Dieu et de soi-mhne, p. 194. 72, On Language. ch. yii., at once a trumpet, an organ, a hautboy, a flageolet, and an ^olianharp. 'The air passing upwards and downwards through the larynx and trachea,^ forms its analogy with the wind-instruments ; the vibration of the chordce vocales, its resemblance to the stringed.' ' The voice ^ is produced by the larynx, which is situated beneath the base of the tongue, and in front of the pharynx. The sides of the larynx are formed by the two large thyroid cartilages, which rest on the annular cricoid cartilage. On the upper surface of the back of the cricoid cartilage are mounted two small cartila- ginous bodies, called the arytenoid, which are moveable in various directions by various muscles. To these arytenoid cartilages are attached two ligaments of elastic fibrous sub- stance, which pass forward to be attached to the front of the thyroid cartilage, where they meet in the same point. These are the instruments concerned in the production of sound, and also in the regulation of the aperture by which air passes into the trachea; and they are termed vocal chords. By the meeting of these ligaments in front, and their separation behind, the usual aperture has the form of a V; but it may be narrowed by the drawing together of the arytenoid cartilages until the two vocal ligaments touch each other along their whole length, and the aperture is com- pletely closed. In ordinary breathing the arytenoid carti- lages are wide apart ; but for vocal sounds it is necessary that the aperture should be narrowed, and that the flat sides rather than the edges of the vocal ligaments should be opposed to one another. When the ligaments are brought into position, by the contraction of certain muscles, the air, in passing through the larynx, sets them in vibration, in a manner very much resembling that in which the reed of a hautboy or clarionet, or the tongue of an accordion or harmonium, is set in vibration by the current of air made to 1 Hilles, Essentials of Physiology, p. 272. 2 I have abridged this account from Dr. Carpenter's Animal Physi- ology (p. 528), generally using his own words. CH. VII. Sound as the Vehicle of Thought. 73 pass beneath them. The rapidity of the vibration, and con- sequently the pitch of the sound, depends on the degree of tension of the vocal Ugaments.' ' When we reflect,' says Mr. HilleSji ' that the range of the human voice will extend, although rarely, to the compass of two octaves, and that in this range are included, in some singers, as many as 2,000 muior tones, we shall form some idea of the extreme delicacy of motion, of which the laryngeal muscles are capable when fully educated.' The elementary sounds of which the voice is capable are about twenty in number,^ and it is easy to see that the permutations and combinations of these sounds are amply sufficient to provide the world with an infinite variety of languages. The elements of articulate sound are three — 1. The aspirate,^ which is a mere strengthened expiration ; 2. The vowel sounds, produced by a continuous stream of air passing through the trachea, and modified only by the form of the aperture through which they pass ; and 3. The consonants,* for the utterance of which is required a partial or complete interruption of the breath in its passage through the organs in front of the larynx. These are of two kinds, viz. those * of which the sound can be prolonged, and the explo- "• Ubi supra, p. 275. ' Harris, Hermes, il. 2, 3rd ed. p. 325. ^ Heyse, p. 74. In pp. 78, 79, Heyse traces what he supposes to be the natural connection of the vowels with various emotions ; he admits, however, that language in its final stage confuses and neglects these primitive relations of sound to emotion, and makes the vowels mere signs in the service of the free understanding. Hence it is in inter- jections and other primitive words that we must study their original value. But alike for vowels and for consonants such enquiries seem to me both dubious and difficult. * Hence it is in the use of consonants, speaking generally, that the sounds uttered by animals differ from the articulate human voice. Aristotle speaks of ol iypd/i/MTOi ^6^01 oToi> Biiplav, Prohl. xi. 57. They have but one or two consonants at most. Id. x. 39. R, for instance, is called 'litera canina.' 'Irritata canis quod rr quam plurima dicit.' Lucilius. 'R is for the dog.' Shaks. * Carpenter, I.e. 74- On Language. ch. vii. sive consonants (p, p, d, t, g, k), which require a total stop- page of the breath at the moment previous to their pronun- ciation, and which therefore cannot be prolonged. The sound of the former is modified by the position of the tongue, palate, lips, and teeth, and also by the degree in which the air is permitted to pass through the nose. ■ Now, the natural sensuous life expresses itself in three- kinds of natural sound, viz. Interjections, Imitations, and- those sounds, expressive of some desire, which in imitation^ of the German Lautgeberden i we may roughly designate as vocal gestures. Aspirates and vowels are generally suffi- cient to express the mere passing emotions of the natural life ; consonants are more the expression of the free intelli- gence. Interjections are the arbitrary expression of subjective impressions ; Imitations advance a step further, spontane- ously reproducing something which has influenced the senses from without ; Lautgeberden, though like interjections they have their source in the subject, are not a mere utterance of passive sensation, but an energetic expression of will, though as yet only in the form of desire. At present, it will be observed, we are only dealing with the elements of articulate speech ; the natural sounds out of which, by the aid of the understanding, perfect language is developed, and which in themselves are the mere' expres- sions of animal feeling. In tracing the physical develop- ment of sound which corresponds to the psychical develop- ment of thought, we have not yet got beyond the means of finding vent for the sensuous impression, or at most the conscious perception. We have not even arrived at the root, which corresponds, in the development of sound, to the intuition {Anschauung) in the development of thought. The H/(7ri:/whichv corresponds to the representation {Vorstellung) is beyond the vocal elements which we have yet reached. The further steps of the Process, which are as yet unex- plained, will become evident as we proceed. > Heyse, p, 71. ( 75 ) CHAPTER VIII. INTERJECTIONS. Os SiSdffKei, ''EirtKovpo! — ^iffci iffrl to, ivS/MTa, &Tofi^r]idvT(iiv twv TpSiTUii &vffpd>T(i)v Tivd,s ^wyis KOTO Tuv Tpay/iaTuv. — Orig. c. Cels. i. 24. ' The theories of the interj actional and onomatopoetic origin pf language are not in reality different, and both of them might without impropriety he classed under the latter name ; for, in point of fact, the impulsive instinct to reproduce a sound is precisely analogous to that which gives vent. to a sensation by an interjection. When we see a person laugh or yawn we can hardly help following their example, not from an instinct of imitation, but from a nervous sympathy; and the same nervous sympathy ^ forces a child to reproduce any sudden sound which is not beyond its power of articulation, as any one may see who cares to try the experiment. This result, no less than the utterance of a cry of joy or pain, arises from a purely physical cause, namely, the general influence on the nerves communicated to the delicate organs by which the voice is produced. The reason why children and savages are more given to imitative and interjectional sounds is because of the greater delicacy and sensibility of their nervous organisations. Nevertheless, while aware of this fact, I have preferred, for the sake of clearness, to treat separately of these two phonetic elements ; and first of In- terjections. ' Wiillner, Veler d. Urspr. d. Sprache, p. 6, fg. ; Poggel, Ueler das Verhdltniss zwiscJten Form mid Bedeutung, § 5, 6. 76 On Language. ch. viii. Interjections 1 are of two kinds; namely, 1. Those which are caused by some inward sensation, such as the cry of anguish, and the exclamation of joy; sounds of the voice, which are neither definite in origin nor distinct in articulation, but are perfectly vague both as to the form they assume and the source from which they arise ; and, 2. Those which are evoked by some external impression, especially by perceptions of the ideal senses, sight and hear- ing. These stand on a higher stage than the last. They do not indeed, like imitations, express the external (^sxaiAtt of the thing perceived, but the inward excitement of the soul in consequence of the perception, whether it assume the form of astonishment, pleasure, surprise, disgust, or fear. In these the sound of the voice receives a more specific limita- tion, and vowels and aspirates are distinctly uttered. We do not purpose to trace in the half-obliterated records of language the natural connection between particular vowel- sounds and particular sensations ; but it seems clear that by the very constitution of man certain sounds are the natural and almost necessary exponents of certain conditions. There are certain ' inarticulate bursts of feeling not reacted on by the mind.' ^ This will appear at a glance if we com- pare the interjections of a Semitic with those of an Aryan language, and observe their almost complete identity. Thus, for instance, the 'PtXV nj< and 'PPi)^ which occur in the T ' T ? T ; Hebrew of the Bible (Ez. xxx. 2, vi. 1 1 ; Mic. ii. 7), are the same expressions of astonishment, fear, pleasure, or indigna- tion which we find in the Latin hahe, aha, &c., and which in so many Aryan dialects are worn down to the mere O of the 1 Heyse, p. 72, § 27. There is some meaning in the verse of Dr. King: ' Nature in many tones complains, Has m.any sounds to tell her pains ; But for her joys has only three, And those but small ones, Ha ! ha ! he 1 ' ' Ewald's Hebrew Grammar, § 440. CH. VIII. Interjections. yj vocative case. The '\T\ is ' the obscure deep sound of seri- ousness, of threatening, or lamentation,' and is therefore hke the Greek oua/, the Latin heu, eheu, vse in different circum- stances.'- The more definite expression of lamentation, SrC\T\ (Am. v. 1 6), offers an obvious analogy to the Latin ohe, while the ^D^i (Prov. xxiii. 29), ^n (Ez. ii. 10), and '^1^ (Mic. vii. I j Job X. 15), are almost identically the same with ai^oT, papae, phui, iKikixi, and even the Irish whilleleu ! We find the same exclamations. Ha! ha!, for surprise, Au-6 ! for sorrow, Abah ! for disgust, among the New Zealanders ; ^ and the Australian Ala ! differs little either in sound or meaning from the English Halloo ! Latin is particularly rich in genuine interjections ; and, besides this, Latin, Greek, English, and nearly all languages have a number of words which, although used interjec- tionally, are not really to be classed under this head, like the Hebrew Tv>^T\ m yivoiTo, ' God forbid ! ' Such are the Latin malum ! nefas ! macte ! amabo ! age, sodes, sis, nse, profecto, &c., some of which are verbs, and some are adverbs. Such too are the Greek aye, pess, '/% ay^u, SiZn, &c., and the English strange ! hark ! adieu ! welcome ! the deuce ! Very many of such spurious interjections are ex- plicable by some ellipse ; they are in fact abbreviated sen- tences as much as the single letter O (or 06) for ou, * not ! ' with which the poet Philoxenus ^ is said to have replied in writing to the tyrant Dionysius, who had invited him to the court of Syracuse. Under this head fall a large number of 1 See, too, Glass, JPAt/. Sacr. lib. iv. tract. 8. ^ Ch. Miss. Soc. New Zealand Gram. p. 57. Threkeld's Austral. Cram. p. 20. ' Egger, Notions J&lim. de Gram. Camp. p. 103. It is curious to see how a spurious interjection like Alas ! which comes from the exclama- tion Ai lassa, ' ah, me weary ! ' in the songs of the Proven9al trouba- dours, is never used by the common people. They instinctively recognise its artificial and aristocratic origin, just as they substitute 'the Fall,' ' Harvest, "&c., for the only Latin name of a season, Autumn. yS On Language. ch. vin. abbreviated oaths and exclamations, such as eccere, epol, mehercle, medius fidius, for per sedem Cereris, PoUucis ; ita me Hercules, Dius filius, juvet, &c.^ The Greeks, not very accurately, reckoned interjections under the head of adverbs; the Latins, correctly observing that the interjection is, as it y/tre, flung into the sentence (inter jacio), and is quite capable^ of expressing some emo- tion even if no verb be added, placed them separately as a distinct part of speech. This classification has given rise to the most amusing vehemence of argument. The interjec- tion, it is asserted, is incapable of grammatical analysis, and belonging to the inarticulate cries and sounds of instinctive language it is also incapable of etymology, and stands in no syntactical relation to the rest of the sentence. Home Tooke bewails that ' the brutish inarticulate Interjection, which has nothing to do with speech, and is only the miserable refuge of the speechless, has been permitted, because beautiful and gaudy, to usurp a place amongst words, and to exclude the Article from its well-earned dignity.' And when asked, ' Why such bitterness against the interjec- tion ? ' he replies, ' Because the dominion of speech is erected upon the downfall of interjections. Without the artful con- trivances of language, mankind would have nothing but in- terjections with which to communicate, orally, any of their feelings. The neighing of a horse, the lowing of a cow, the barking of a dog, the purring of a cat, sneezing, coughing, groaning, shrieking, and every other involuntary convulsion with oral sound, have almost as good a title to be called ■^ Energetic brevity is indispensable to an interjection ; hence, in all languages oaths assume a curt form, as ' morbleu' = par la mort de Dieu ; ' zooks,' by God's looks ; ' zounds,' by God's wounds, &c. ^ Priscian says, ' Interjectionem Grsecl inter adverbia ponunt,' and adds that the Roman grammarians separated the interjection, 'quia videtur affectum habere in sese verbi, et plenam motus animi significa- tionem, etiamsi non addatur verbum, demonstrare,' xv. 7. Quintilian (Jnstt. Or. i. 4) mentions the rearrangement of the parts of speech by the Romans, who had no article — and he adds, ' Sed accedit supeviori- bus interjectio. ' CH. VIII. Interjections. 79, parts of speech as interjections have (!). Voluntary inter- jections are only employed when the suddenness and vehe- mence of some affection or passion returns men to their natural state, and makes them for a moment forget the use of speech ; or when from some circumstance the shortness of time will not permit them to exercise it. And in books they are only used for embellishments, and to mark strongly the above situations. But where speech can be employed they are totally useless, and are always insufficient for the purpose of communicating our thoughts. And, indeed, where will you look for the Interjection ? Will you find it amongst laws, or in books of civil institutions ; in history, or in any treatise of iiseful arts or sciences ? No. You must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry, in novels, plays, and romances.' Neither the energy of this passage, nor the endorsement of it by Professor Max Miiller as 'an excellent answer to the interjectional theory,' move us at all.^ Whether, indeed, grammarians choose to rank the Interjection as a part of speech or not, is a matter of great indifference, although the fact that they are regularly declinable in Basque ^ shows that their unsyntactical character is merely an accident of language. But at any rate, on the confession of the adver- sary, they do not deserve all this scorn. We do not assert that a mere interjectional cry has of itself attained to the dignity of language, but that, like the imitation pf natural 1 I cannot see any force in the objection that ' if the constituent elements of speech were mere cries, &c., it would be difficult to under- stand why brutes should be without language.' — Max Miiller, Lee- tures, i. 355. Obviously, as has been observed a thousand times, the mere pffwer of articulation is not the source of language (flrig. of Lang. pp. 79, 164). Half the arguments aimed at the interjectional and onomatopoetic theories altogether miss their mark by not observing that all which those theories profess to explain is the cause which guided man in the choice of words to express thought. There would be force in the objection if we held with Hamann that speech is the 'Deipara unserer Vemunft;' or with Shelley, that 'He gave man speech, and speech created thought.' " Mentioned doubtfully by Mr. Msx^.— Lectures, ed. Smith, p. 197. go On Language. ch. viil sounds, it was a stepping-stone to true language, both hy sug- gesting the idea of articulate speech and by supplying a large number, if not the entire number of actual roots. I desire no better illustration of this than the one which Professor Miiller has suggested. ' Even,' he says, ' if the scream of a man who has his finger pinched should happen to be identically the same as the French h'elas, that scream would be an effect, an involuntary effect of outward pressure, whereas an inter- jection like alasl htlasl Italian lasso, to say nothing of such words as pain, suffering, agony, &c., is there by the free will of the speaker meant for something, used with a purpose, chosen as a sign.' Precisely ! but is that any reason why we should despise the word helas, or ridicule the theory which points out that in the supposed instance the interjection would have been the source, the root, the origin of the word ? Undoubtedly the cry of pain, as such, is not a word, but is a mere physical expression of pain due to the reflex action of the animal soul upon the organs of speech ; but this cry, by the law of asso- ciation, when repeated recalls the feeling itself; it becomes therefore first a symbol, and then a sign of the feeling ; it stands for our subjective intuition {Anschauung) of the feeling, and thereby at once is elevated from a sound to a word, becoming, in fact, as much a word as any other, because it stands in precisely the same relation to the thing which it signifies. In fact, it stands, if anything, on a higher grade of dignity than any ordinary word, because its signifi- cance is more absolute and immediate. Let us, for instance, reject the purely artificial word ' alas ! ' and take the natural interjection ah ! ach ! and we have at once not merely the probable, but the absolutely certain ^ root of a very large class of words in the Aryan languages, such as a.'xpi, achen, ache, anguish, anxious, angustus, and the word agony itself. When this fact is a little more widely expanded and illus- 1 Cf. Wedgwood, Etym. Diet. i. p. xii. See a list of the derivatives from the root in Garnett, Ess. on Engl. Dialects, p. 64. CH. viii. Interjections. 8i trated, we have the interjectional ^ theory proved. Inde- pendently of the many and wise students who have accepted it, it is a theory for which most important arguments may be adduced, and therefore it is not one which either can be or deserves to be sneered out of notice by a mere nick- name, such as that over wliich so many who are ignorant of the very rudiments of the subject have complacently chuckled. Professor Miiller himself admits that ' with interjections some kind of language could^ have been formed;' and when we have shown at least the extreme probability that a very large portion of existing language has had such an origin, surely all i friori objections must fall to the ground. If the science of Comparative Philology is to do nothing more. than To chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark ; — and if in that venerable receptacle for all ethnographic and philological theories we can only catch an archseological curiosity in the shape of some desiccated, never-spoken, lifeless 'root,' we cannot but think that it was hardly worth the trouble of being pursued ! An etymology of this kind is no etymology at all. What are we the wiser for being told that a whole class of words comes from a root ' il,' to go, and another class from a root ' ar,' to plough ? If this be all, one is somewhat weary of the information when it comes, unless, indeed, which of course often is the case, one has been rewarded during the search by the discovery or obser- vation of other linguistic or phonetic laws. Still, if these be regarded as ultimate etymologies, they throw no light what- ^ M. Miiller, Lectures, ii. 88. We see no great objection, and abso- lutely no ambiguity, in the words ' onomatopoetic ' and 'interjectional ; ' and we can assure Prof. Miiller that, so far as we know, no one has accepted the word ' Imsonic ' except the learned suggestor ! 2 Lectures, i. 353. F 82 On Language. ch. viii, ever on questions which we must regard as soluble, as in- teresting, and as important, viz. what is the origin of words ? Why were sounds chosen as the signs of all things which can become the object of thought ? and why were special sounds chosen in particular cases? To all these questions the interjectional and imitative theories are adequate, — ^iip to a certain point, — to furnish us with intelligent and valuable answers ; they throw a light on the germs and on the devel- opment of language, and they furnish a clear explanation of the origin and history of words in so many cases that we may fairly argue the existence of similar principles, even in the cases where the wear and tear of language have broken many important links in the chain of evidence. To refer words to some dry 'root,' which confessedly was never used in the intelligent speech of articulately speaking men, and to leave this root without any attempt at further explanation, is to offer us a caput mortuum as the prize of our researches, and to abandoii unnecessarily, as beyond our reach, many of the deepest problems of language and of human history. If, for instance (to recur to previous examples),^ a large class of words came from the root ' ach,' and another large class from the root ' dhu,' and if the former be an interjection, and the latter an onomatopoeia, we have got at final facts which give a new meaning and interest to the history of the derivatives from these roots ; but if we are told that a large family of words come from ' ar,' or ' ga,' or ' sal ; ' and if about 'ar,' and 'ga,' and 'sal,' nothing more can be said, then what have we learnt ? The roots are mere mysterious nonentities, which have taught us nothing and come from nowhere. The earth rests on the back of an elephant, and the elephant stands on a tortoise j but what does the tortoise stand upon ? But in point of fact it has repeatedly occurred to me that Professor Miiller really does agree to a very great extent with the theories which he often seems to repudiate : in other Origin of Lang. p. log. CH. VIII. Interjections. 83 words, that the argument is in great measure due to mutual misapprehension. For in his new volume he 'wishes to stand entirely neutraP with regard to the theory that all roots were originally onomatopceias or interjections (p. 92),^ de- manding only that the derivatives should be drawn according to the strictest rules of comparative grammar. If this be so, we entirely agree with him ; so far from wishing to arrive at derivations per saltum and ' undo all the work that has been done by Bopp, Humboldt, Grimm, and others during the last fifty years,' the majority, at any rate, of those who hold the sneeringly termed Pooh-pooh and Bow-wow theories to be both valuable and true, have always felt the profoundest respect and gratitude to those great men, and the keenest appreciation of the immortal discoveries which have resulted from their labours. The opponents of these theories constantly try to depre- ciate them by asserting that Interjections are purely animal, and Onomatopoeias either vulgar or childish. Now, as ap- plied to their primitive condition, their first stage, this language is capable of some sort of meaning. Nobody asserted that they were language, but only that they are the raw material of it. They are the steps by which man mounts to true language ; they are The ladder Whereto the climber-upward turns his face ! But when he once attains the utmost round. He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By wliich he did ascend. If, as we are convinced, they helped to suggest the very idea of speech, and supplied man ip part with the sounds which his tongue could modulate, and the plastic influence of his intellect could mould, it is surely ungracious to turn round and insult them as ' brutish and inarticulate.' And this, in the present instance, is the more unreasonable ^ Cf. also ii. 314, where he allows a possibly onomatopoeic origin to the root Mar which he traces through so many stages. 84 On Language. ch. vm. and inexcusable, because, as we have seen already, many- interjections have passed unaltered into the domain of finished language.^ They have their own province in the kingdom of speech, and if it be not universal, it is at least as noble as any other province. If they appear but seldom — as Home Tooke scornfully observes — in Law or History or Science, they are yet capable of adding both power and beauty to rhetoric, poetry, and the drama, and are entitled therefore to a splendid position in the domain of literature. Feeling and passion, no less — perhaps we might say far more — ^^than logic and abstract thought, demand their proper exponents in the Speech of Man, and it can hardly be correct to rank no higher than the purring of a cat, or the neighing of a horse, the expressions which give vent and utterance to the most passionate emotions in the instant of their most overwhelming power.^ Mr. Marsh has reminded us that the interjections of Whitfield, ' his Ah ! of pity for the unrepentant sinner, his Oh! of encouragement and per- suasion for the almost converted listener, formed one of the great excellences of his oratory; ' ^ and as in a former volume I endeavoured to redeem the onomatopoetic element of language from the charge of vulgarity by collecting many remarkable passages to show that onomatoposia often added a singular charm to the loftiest and loveliest passages of the greatest poets, so it would be easy to redeem Interjections from similar injustice by the same process. Take but passages like these : — ' They shall not lament for him, say- ing. Ah my brother ! or. Ah sister ! They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah lord ! or, Ah his glory ! ' — or the passion- ate outbreak, ' Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, . . . ^ A long list of words — and words full of tragic grandeur — ^might be adduced which come immediately and professedly from interjections ; such as oliiiii^in, aldj^u, 6^o^l)fw, dXaXdfu, ululo, ejulo, &c. " ' Echo des emotions profondes de I'ame, I'interjection traduit I'affec- tion du moment, de la minute, plus fidilement que toutes les descriptions ne pourraient le faire.' Chavee, Les Lances et les Races, p, 17. " Lectures, p. 196. cH. VIII. Interjectmis. 85 Ah ! I will ease me of mine adversaries.' And not to add many other Biblical apostrophes, who does not know Wordsworth's touching lines ? — She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be. But she is in her grave, — and oh I The difference to me ! Any one acquainted with poetry will remember how many exquisite passages owe, to an interjection, their beauty and their pathos. It was probably a lurking sense of some such truth that led Home Tooke to say that they were ' beautiful ; ' what he means by the qualification that they are also ' gaudy,' I can but dimly conjecture. Sanctius ^ loftily relegates Interjections from the region of speech with a dictum of Aristotle that ' all parts of speech must be originated by convention, not by nature.' Now, Interjections, he says, are natural, because they are found among all, resembling in fact the cries of birds and animals. Passing over for the present the arrogant assumption, which runs through such vast portions of human reasoning, that everything pertaining to man must differ in kind no less than in degree from its analogon among brutes, we may observe that the naturalness of interjections — their independence of what Home Tooke calls ' the artful contrivances of lan- guage ' — their truthfulness, and simplicity, and freedom from the degraded conditions by which language is made subser- vient to the concealment of thought — is in fact one of their chief glories. Another of their remarkable properties, ' which not ^ only vindicates their claim to be regarded as constituents of language, but entitles them unequivocally to a high' rank among the elements of discourse,' is the inherent and independent expressiveness, by which we may condense into a single ejaculated monosyllable all, and more than ^ Sanctius, Minei~va, i. 2. See Harris, Hermes, ii. 5. Home Tooke, Div. of Purley, i. 5. " Marsh, Lectures, p. 194. 86 On Language. ch, via all, oF a whole sentence ; condense it too with an impres- siveness which no mere sentence can emulate. And again, the interjection is ' subjectively connected with the passion or sensation it denotes, and is not so much the enunciation or utterance of the emotion, as symptom and evidence of it' — in other words it is subjective not objective, expressive not descriptive, and therefore may be rightfully considered as ' the appropriate language, the mother-tongue of passion.' Regarded from this point of view, it stands on a higher rather than a lower grade than the other constituents of human speech. If we look to savage nations as displaying to us a picture of the infancy of man, we shall expect to trace some of the earliest and most important facts of speech exemplified in their languages. We have seen already how prominent a part Onomatopoeia , plays in those languages ; nor is Inter- jection less predominant. The exclamations used by the excitable Indians, the Kafirs, or the New Zealanders, are beyond all comparison more rich and varied than those used by more advanced nations. It is undoubtedly one of the effects of civilisation to diminish the impressionable excita- bility of untutored races ; and as excitability finds in inter- jections its most natural utterance, we naturally expect to find them more numerous among primitive races, and we may reasonably suppose that at the dawn of humanity the interjectional element provided a larger ^ number of roots than it now could do. The ancients had some remarkable stories which show how fully they felt that utterance is the spontaneous and almost inevitable means for the expression of emotion. For instance, Herodotus ^ and other historians tell us how the dumb son of Croesus burst out with an articulate voice for ^ The very words Sprechen, sprache are etymologically connected witlx hrechm (cf. fmgor, frangere, pirfvii-i.), and like the phrases ^i)?oi ^avriv, rumpere vocem (Herod, i. 85 ; Virg. ^n. ii. 129), imply the interjectional outburst of speech. See Heyse, p. 114. ' Herod, i. 85. Cic. Div. i. 53, &c. CH. VIII. Interjections. 87 the first time when he saw a soldier on the point of assassin- ating his father. Aulus Gellius relates a story that ^gles, a dumb Samian athlete,^ seeing that he was being cheated by a deceitful lot in a sacred contest, cried out with a loud voice, and from that time recovered the power of speech. Pau- sanias has a similar anecdote about Battus of Cyrene, who first got over his impediment of speech in consequence of the horror caused by suddenly catching sight of a lion in the African desert. We are inclined to consider that these stories are not wholly fabulous, and at any rate we have heard a perfectly authentic instance of a lady, who for years had lost her voice, and who recovered it in consequence of the shock caused by a sudden emotion. She had been riding up a hill in Ireland, and being in advance of the rest of the party, came suddenly and unexpectedly on an exceedingly glorious view. Turning round eagerly to signify her delight, she found that the sudden effort had restored loudness and clearness to her voice, and from that time forward experi- enced no difficulty in speaking, although for a very long period she had only been able to use an inarticulate whisper. Expression, then, by a law of nature, is the natural and spon- taneous result oi impression ; and however merely animal in their nature the earliest exclamations may have been, they •were probably the very first to acquire the dignity and signi- ficance of reasonable speech, because in their case more naturally than in any other the mere repetition of the sound would, by the association of ideas, involuntarily recall the sensation of which the sound was so energetic and instan- taneous an exponent. In the discovery of this simple law, which a very few instances would reveal to the mind of man, lay the discovery of the Idea of Speech. The divine secret of language— /y^i? secret of the possibility of perfectly expressing the unseen and immaterial by an articulation of air which seemed to have no analogy with it — the secret of accepting sounds as the exponents and signs of everything ' in the 1 Aul. Cell. V. 9. Val. Max. i. 8. 88 On Langtiage. ch. vni. choir of heaven and furniture of earth' — lay completely revealed in the use of two or three despised interjections ! ^ To borrow a simile from the eloquent pages of Herder, they were the sparks of Promethean fire which kindled language into life. ^ The objection 'Why, then, did not animals also discover lan- guage ? ' rises so often from the grave where it was long since buried, and appears to be endowed with such inextinguishable vitality, that we must again repeat that it was not the mere possession of these vocal cries that enabled man to invent a language, but that, the Innate Idea of language being already in his mind by virtue of his divinely-created organism, the possession of these natural sounds taught him how, and supplied him the materials wherewith, to develop the Idea into perfect speech. We entirely agree with the remark of Wilh. von Humboldt, ' Die Sprache liesse sich nicht erfinden, wenn nicht ihr Typus in dem menschlichen Verstande schon vorhanden ware.' Ueber d. Verschied. d. menschl. Sprachbaues, p. 60. The same thing has been said from the beginning, rh 5^ Toi'i oScrt CTjfiavrtKcis ipwvas i(p£vpiaK€Lv Kal wpoariyopiaSj Tuv 6,v8pilnrav dvai tCiv t%v \o-^ikt)v Siva/xiv 8ebdei> ip iavrots KexT'Tjp.ivav, K.r.'K. Greg. Nyss. Contra Eunom.yM..-^, 848. ( 89 ) CHAPTER IX. LAUTGEBERDEN, OR VOCAL GESTURES. ' Isis et Harpocrates digito qui significat st ! ' Vet. Poeta ap, Varr. L. L. iv. 10. So far as I am aware, Professor Heyse, in his ' System der Sprachwissenchaft,' was the first to distinguish accurately between interjections which are the signs of individual emotion beginning and ending with the utterer, and which are, in fact, a concentrated soliloquy, and those which, like visible gestures, convey meaning to some other person, and generally intimate a desire or command. It was certainly Heyse who first ^ called the latter by the expressive and picturesque name of Lautgeberden or Begehrungslaute, vocal gestures or sounds of desire, like st ! ps / sch ! and to animals brr J He called them by this name both because they are often connected with gestures, and because they can be represented by them ; ss st I by the finger on the lips, &C.2 Such in English are tush ! pish ! pshaw 1 pooh ! which are expressive of contempt or aversion^ and can only be conceived of as addressed to another : hush ! hist ! ^ mum 1 hark ! halloo ! hip ! &c. ; and of this nature ' See Syst. der Sprach. p. 29. 'Die Lautgeberden. So nenne ich solche, zum Theil consonantische und dabei nicht syllabische Laute,' &c. ^ Compare the French zest 'interjection, qui ne se prend que dans cette acception proverbiale, " entre le zist et le zest" 'i.e. ' middling.' ' M. Nodier observes that it would hardly be supposed that etymo- logists could be found who derived st I from 'jilentium^ene.' 'Celaest cependant vrai, car il n'y a point d'idee bizarre dont ce genre d'erudition ne puisse offrir un exemple.' Diet. p. 87. 90 On Language. ch. ix. are many of the exclamations addressed to animals. 'Among them,' says Mr. Marsh,i who does not however refer to Heyse, 'are all the isolated, monosyllabic, or lc»nger words by which we invite or repel the approach, and check or encourage the efforts of others ; in short, all single detached articulations intended to influence the action or call the attention of others, but not syntactically connected with a period.' This class of interjections rises, in three respects, above those previously noticed ; — first, because they are mainly consonantal, and therefore approach more nearly than the others — in which consonants play a very subordinate part — to the complicated articulations of human speech ; secondly, because they have for their object, not merely expression, but communication ; and thirdly, because they do not originate in a mere passive feeling, but are, as has been already noticed, the energetic utterance of desire or will, and are spontaneous rather than involuntary. They hardly attain to the dignity of Language because they express no thought, and are the utterance rather of the feeling life than of the thinking spirit ; yet they, in common with the other natural sounds which we have mentioned, correspond to a new step in the development of the human intelligence. The Interjection corresponds to the dawn of sensation ; the mere Imitation is an analogon of the word into which it almost immediately passes ; the Vocal "gesture is an analogon ^ of the sentence, especially of the imperative sentence (com- pare St ! with the Latin sta !). And thus in the sphere of the natural life, the three chief steps in the develop- ment of Intellect and Language are foreshadowed or repre- sented. To recapitulate a little. Impressions affecting the senses produced a physical effect on the organs of sound, and thereby provoked interjectional expressions; the repetition ^ Marsh, Lectures, p. 196, = Heyse, p. 73. cii. IX. Lmitgeberden, or Vocal Gestures. 91 of these expressions recalled, by the law of association, the impressions of which they were the utterance, and recalled them not only in the mind of the speaker but also of the hearer. Hence the Interjection served as a sign, and could be recalled by the intellect, no less than the impression by the memory. Here, then, we are at once furnished with all the elements or requirements of speech, namely impressions producing sensations, sensations becoming rept«sentations {Vorstellungen), and representations expressed by signs. Thought receives its life from Sensation, and Language re- ceives from the interjectional elements its capability of being intuitively understood. Is any other origin of speech con- ceivable ? 1 Speech results from the combined working of the Intellect and the Senses, and no part of speech more directly and immediately illustrates this united activity of the Senses and the Intellect than the Interjection. Is it then strange that Interjections should become as it were the tap-root of all Language? If we extend the meaning of ' Interjection' to embrace the imitations of all spontaneous sounds expressive of physical conditions — not only the natural sounds of wrath, horror, disgust, &c., but those which express the sounds of yawning, sneezing, licking, heavy breathing, shuddering, &c. — then the words imme- diately reducible to this origin may be counted by hun- dreds j and if to thede we add their derivatives, they may perhaps be counted by thousands. And this is equivalent to saying that they alone can form a language ; for be it remembered that even the Bible itself says all that it has to say by the help of 10,000 words. And as we shall say no more on the Interjectional origin of Language, we will add what has long been a puzzle to us. While arguing against such an origin, Professor Miiller ap- pears to us to accept what is the same thing in other words. If, as is probable, he also seems to have at least modified ^ See on the whole subject F. Wiillner, Ueb. d. Urspr. d. Sprache, MUnster, 1838 {passim). 92 On Language. ch. ix. his originally strong hostility to Onomatopceia, we may yet perhaps live to see a change of view as complete, though less marvellous, than that of Herder. I allude to the only passage in which I can, from his writings, discover the faintest gleam of light on the question, 'What was the origin of roots ? ' Now if he confessedly gave up this question as insoluble, there would be no more to say ; but this he does not do. He rejects utterly and distinctly the miraculous origin of language, yet he says that phonetic types ' exist as Plato would say by nature, though with Plato we would add that when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of God! He rejects and nicknames the Interjectional theory of Language; yet on a page (i. 370) which, in spite of the generally matchless clearness of his style, gives me none but the very vaguest and most uncertain conception of his funda- mental belief on the matter, unless it be a complete acceptation of the Interjectional theory, he says, referring to Heyse, ' There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. ... It was the same with man, the most highly organised of nature's works.' In the note he says that this fact ' can of course be used as an illustration only, and not as an explanation.' Yet he adds, ' The faculty, peculiar to man in his primitive state, by which every impression from without received its vocal expression from within, must be accepted as a fact.' And in the text he continues, ' Man . . . was endowed not only, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by Interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopceia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate ex- pression to the rational conceptions of his mind.' This was 'an irresistible instinct;' the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression.' Now what explanations have we here ? Language was not revealed, yet ' phonetic types ' ' exist ... by the hand of God.' Language did not arise from Interjections or Imitations, yet it came from these plus an irresistible instinct whereby man gave ' more CH. IX. Lautgeherden, or Vocal Gestures. 93 articulate expression to the rational instincts of his mind.' ^ I leave the explanation as I find it. The postulated addi- tional instinct is either a mere development of the Inter- jectional faculty, or I can only repeat of it, ' Entia non sunt multiplicanda prseter necessitatem. Frustra fit per plura quod fieri possit per pauciora.' ^ Long after this passage was written I met with an almost verbally identical criticism of this passage in Steinthal, Philologie, Geschichte, und Psychologie (Berlin, 1864), p. 21. He ends, 'd. h. obwohl hier der Ursprung der Sprache erklart sein sollte, so bleibt er doch eben vbllig unerWart.' C 94 ) CHAPTER X. VOCAL IMITATIONS. ykp ''EvlKovpos IXeyep Sti. oixl IndTTHiivw oUtoi. iSevTO rh, ivSfuira, iWd, ^miKUS Kivoiiievoi,, us ol fiijcaovTet KoX irratpoVTes Kal fiVKiifievoi Kal iXaKTOvvres Kal ffTevd^ovres. — ProCLUS, p. 9. Epicurus, if he be correctly reported by Proclus, in the often-quoted passage which stands at the head of this sec- tion, espouses the views of the Analogists who argued for the natural origin of language, against the Anomalists who re- garded it as the result of convention. Thus much, at least, is certain : — the sounds to which language gave distinct meaning and regular articulation were all of them readily supplied by nature,^ partly as the involuntary expressions of feeling or desire — under which heads fall the Interjections and Lautgeberden — partly as the instinctive imitations of an external world of sound. The instinct of imitation has a far deeper foundation than is usually supposed, and plays a most important part in the» history of human progress. There is hardly a branch of art, there is hardly a mechanical invention which has not originated in the observation and copying of some process or phenomenon of nature. The instinct, as Herder observes, is common to men and to the higher animals, and is by no means the result of intelligent reflection, but an immediate product of organic sympathy. As one string sounds in ^ -rh. ivbftaTa, Kal ra ^■^/lara (pwval, a! 8J ^oival 0i5(ret, rh &pa dvdfMra Kal r& (i-^/MTa i