9 '. 
 
 Darnell Hmuetaitg Eihtarg 
 
 3tt)aca, SCem lark 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 P 131.N7806 1917 
 
 Origin and philosoph 
 
 ngin 
 
 I 
 
 of language, 
 
 3 1924 026 445 704 
 
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/cu31924026445704 
 
THE ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY 
 OF LANGUAGE 
 
The Origin and Philosophy 
 of Language 
 
 By 
 Ludwig Noire 
 
 "No reason without speech ; 
 No speech without reason." 
 
 Max MUller. 
 
 2na Edition 
 Revised and Enlarged 
 
 Chicago : : London 
 The Open Court Publishing Company 
 ^ — ^ 1917 
 
j; 
 
 'k 
 
 -4. 
 
 '^ 
 
 A 4 t O I 5" In 
 
 "The Word is the thought incarnate." — Miiller. 
 
 v#! 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Origin of Language 1 
 
 The Logos Theory 37 
 
 The Origin of Reason 49 
 
 Darwin and Max Muller 61 
 
 Max MiJLLER and the Doctrine of Develop- 
 ment , 75 
 
 Speech and Reason 90 
 
 Max Muller and the Problem of the Origin 
 of Language 107 
 
 Noire's Theory of the Origin of Language. . 128 
 
 Index 157 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.^ 
 
 "The evolution of variety from unity," says Geiger, 
 "seems to be the great fundamental law of all develop- 
 ment of nature and of mind. This law, in language 
 also, leads us back to a very insignificant germ, to a 
 primitive sound, which expressed the sole and infi- 
 nitely limited subject-matter that man first took notice 
 of or beheld with interest, and out of which the whole 
 wealth of language, nay — I am unhesitatingly con- 
 vinced — of all languages, through untold millenniums, 
 has been slowly unfolded." 
 
 The great merit of L. Geiger — who was unfortu- 
 nately too early lost to science^s that of having 
 shown how human reason and language ^jsexe origin- 
 ally contained in one and the same germ ; that we can- 
 not say that reason created language, buFthat the 
 contrary is true, that reason was 'gradually matured 
 and strengthened through the instrumentality of the 
 representative signs of sensory perceptionj that, ac- 
 cordingly, the word was beyond question the element 
 first in point of time, and that more universal, more 
 correct, more clear, and more conscious ideas were 
 first attained and formed through words, and after a 
 long course of development led through words to the 
 present state of mature rational thought. 
 
 ^From Die Welt als EntiDichelung des Geistes, by Ludwlg Nolri, 
 Chap IX, Part III. (Lelpslc : Velt & Co.) 
 
2 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 The childish and anthropomorphic view, that God 
 said to Adam, "This is a dog. This is an elephant," 
 still held the minds of men captive in the eighteenth 
 century, with the single difference, that the philoso- 
 phers of that day put human reason in the place of 
 God, and imagined that men by a kind of conventional 
 agreement or pact had given names to things — in 
 short, that they had invented language. As if an in- 
 ventive act of this character did not demand a pro- 
 digious power of mind — a degree of intellect and wis- 
 dom that must have been infinitely greater than that 
 at present possessed by the whole human race! It is 
 a fundamental error of human thinking, that we are 
 naturally predisposed to attribute conscious purpose, 
 reflection, and knowledge, which now generally guide 
 us in our daily affairs, universally to human acts, and 
 that we attempt to explain the latter by the former. 
 Ceres alone foresaw the stupendous results that were 
 to follow the insignificant beginnings of agriculture. 
 Copernicus did not think of the dangerous conse- 
 quences that his new doctrine involved for Chris- 
 tianity. And the historical Luther, — if he were to re- 
 turn to-day to earth, — would break out in violent anger 
 at the constantly extending emancipation of the human 
 mind that has sprung from his original reformatory 
 ideas, and at the progress of rational thought, sub- 
 versive of all positive creed. The result of a course 
 of development is frequently as different from its point 
 of origination as the flowering plant from the seed out 
 of which it has grown. 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 3 
 
 herder's THEORY. 
 
 The first to rise well above this anthropomorphic 
 view was Hsxder, whose divinatory genius in so many 
 other fields discerned truths that science only later 
 demonstrated by the help of accumulations of ma- 
 terial, and who, even where he erred, never failed to 
 give forth the most pregnant suggestions. The funda- 
 mental idea of his prize-essay, Ueber den Ursprung 
 der Sprache (Upon the Origin of Language), is sub- 
 stantially this : "Man," says he, "gives proof of re- 
 flection, when, amid the hovering dream of images that 
 flit before his senses, he collects himself into a moment 
 of wakefulness, to dwell voluntarily upon some par- 
 ticular image, to survey it in a brighter and steadier 
 light, and to abstract from it certain characteristics 
 that establish that this is this object and no other." 
 This he illustrates by the following example : "A man 
 sees, for instance, a lamb. It passes, as an image, 
 otherwise before his vision than it does before that of 
 other animals. Whenever man is placed so that he 
 must know a sheep, he is not disturbed by any instinct 
 (as the wolf or the lion) ; the sheep stands before him 
 exactly and entirely as represented by his senses. 
 White, smooth, woolly. His thoughtfully operating 
 mind seeks a characteristic mark. The sheep bleats. 
 The characteristic is found. The inner sense is at 
 work. The bleating — ^that which produced the strong- 
 est impression upon his mind, that which sprang forth 
 and disengaged itself from all other qualities accessi- 
 ble to sight and touch — that remains in his mind. The 
 sheep, let us say, returns. White, smooth, woolly. 
 Our man looks, touches, meditates, again seeks a char- 
 
4 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 acteristic mark. The sheep bleats ; and now he recog- 
 nises it. He feels inwardly: "Thou art the Bleating 
 One!" he has humanly recognised it, for he has dis- 
 tinctly recognised it; that is, recognised it by, and 
 called it by, a characteristic feature. By a character- 
 istic, a mark! And what else is this than an inner 
 mark-'woTd, a verbal cue? He recognised the sheep 
 by its bleating. This was the comprehended token by 
 which the mind clearly hit upon an idea. What else 
 is this than a word ? And what is all human language 
 but a collection of such words." 
 
 This theory Max Muller has called the Bow-wow 
 theory, and rejected it. 
 
 It cannot be denied that as an hypothesis of the 
 origin of language there is a good deal of truth con- 
 tained in Herder's statement of things. The most 
 important points to be noted are, that it (1) explains 
 how a visual image or percept is transformed into the 
 phonetic word; and that (2) it makes the creation of 
 language first appear as attached primarily to single 
 characteristic marks. 
 
 The weak points of the view lie in the facts (1) 
 that Herder leaves the origin of the word as a result 
 of the necessity of communication, entirely unnoticed: 
 and it is surely to be assumed that impulse of feeling 
 and the necessity of communication both potently in- 
 fluenced the origin of the first word ; and (2) that the 
 so-called onomatopoetic creation of language, that is, 
 the designation of things by the sounds they make, 
 has not yet been confirmed by any extant language. 
 Single words, like cuckoo, and the like, prove nothing; 
 and many names that appear to us as imitations can 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 5 
 
 be traced back to other roots that show no imitational 
 origin whatsoever. All the languages we know, on the 
 contrary reveal an inner conceptual connection be- 
 tween words that denote some crying, sounding ob- 
 ject, and primitive roots designating some human 
 activity. Herder himself, at a later period, gave up 
 his theory of imitations of sound, and again adopted 
 that of the revelation of language. His work on the 
 "Origin of Language," however, still remains the 
 earliest really philosophical work on the subject, and 
 may claim the merit of having pointed out the true road 
 upon which an explanation is to be sought. 
 
 THE INTERJECTIONAL THEORY. 
 
 Another attempt at explanation is that which seeks 
 to derive language from interjections, and which Max 
 Muller accordingly calls the Pooh-pooh theory. This 
 also possesses a certain degree of probability, for ac- 
 count is taken herein of the necessity of giving vent to 
 inner emotion by sounds and ejaculations, as also of 
 the endeavor to communicate with others, and above 
 all, of the example of animals, whose neighing, bark- 
 ing, roaring, crowing, and so forth, might seem to 
 represent a prototype— an abortive effort to acquire 
 phonetic speech. But in the investigation of known 
 human languages this principle, unfortunately, does 
 not find any kind of confirmation; no more so than 
 does the attempt to regard 1:he separate letters or 
 sounds of a word as symbolical vehicles of its meaning 
 — as the w in wind and wave, the 1 in fluo, light, love, 
 and so forth. Serious philological science regards all 
 such iattempts as failures, or at best as ingenious 
 diveirsiOns, 
 
/ 
 
 6 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 MAX MULLEr's theory. 
 
 The theory propounded by Max Miiller himself, 
 which has been jocosely called the Ding-dong theory, 
 is even less tenable. This distinguished scholar thinks, 
 that in every being a peculiar typical sound was 
 planted ; that originally in man there existed a copious 
 phonetic world — a real spring-time of speech — ^that 
 tunefully responded to the impressions of reality. This 
 is a true petitio principii, and explains nothing. For 
 we are still compelled to ask how and when this world 
 of sound passed into man, and how man came to 
 apply it to things ; and we should be obliged always to 
 fall back to the stage at which the first sound came 
 forth. And then we should be no farther ahead than 
 before. 
 
 Still it is quite easy to understand why so eminent 
 a scholar as Max Miiller should have hit upon this 
 singular idea. He was probably led astray by his 
 observation of children, to whom we usually turn when 
 in search of information concerning anything primi- 
 tively human. Now, it is true, daily experience 
 teaches that there exists in children an impulse to 
 speech, an incitation to language, and that they early 
 strive to call objects by the names they have heard. 
 And it has frequently been my experience that highly 
 intelligent men, to whom I had propounded Geiger's 
 theory of the priority of words to concepts, at once 
 resorted to the following counter-argument : "But look 
 at children. No sooner do they perceive things than 
 they designate them by words of their own creation, 
 which bear scarcely any similarity to those wHich have 
 been taught them. What is that but an awakening of 
 
THEOEIBS OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 7 
 
 the instinct of speech f" This, it must be admitted, is 
 true. But the genuine science of today is no longer 
 satisfied with reasoning of this kind. It demands an 
 explanation of the word ; it demands an account of its 
 origin. 
 
 The speech-instinct of the child is the repetition of 
 that long line of development which, we must assume, 
 proceeded from the origin of language up to the pres- 
 ent day. So long as the child does not feel this in- 
 stinct, so long as it merely contemplates, touches, 
 cries, asks for food, and so on, up to that time it repre- 
 sents the period of speechless humanity — the time at 
 which human nature had not as yet separated from 
 animal nature. And the fact, too, that the child even 
 during this period, before it begins to form concepts, 
 actually evinces an interest in objects, grasps at them, 
 and throws them away, this fact might seem to suggest 
 that even speechless humanity handled certain work- 
 ing-tools of its own. But the language-instinct is a 
 thing ingrafted in the child during a long succession 
 of generations. Our scientific curiosity, however, asks 
 for information concerning a time shrouded in the 
 deepest darkness, when the "word was made flesh, 
 and dwelt among us," when instinctive life first began 
 to pass into the clear consciousness of speaking 
 humanity. 
 
 geiger's researches. 
 
 To Geiger the further honor is due of having shown 
 that the oldest root-words, at least as far back as they 
 can be traced, express a human act, a human gesture ; 
 and he rightly observes that this act must probably 
 have been that which was the most interesting to man. 
 
8 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHX OF LANGUAGE 
 
 that of which he first had knowledge, which most 
 strongly riveted his attention, and which sympathetic- 
 ally re-echoed in his breast. This fact is to be 
 particularly noted. In our intercourse with our fel- 
 low-beings our countenance gradually assumes an 
 expression like that of the human counterpart before 
 us; tears and laughter are contagious; when we see 
 a person in imminent danger of life, we ourselves 
 anxiously go through the very movements which the 
 perspn must make to escape from the danger he is 
 in: the imitation of human actions is so natural to 
 us that we immediately feel and reproduce the cheerful 
 expression of joy, the convulsion and depression of 
 pain, as well as scorn and menace. \ In view of this 
 fact Geiger believes that the first cry of language 
 must have been an aping reflex of the face of another, 
 accompanied — from the fact that it was the result of 
 emotion — by sound. (Here, of course, we should 
 have had visual percept and speech-sound in one.) 
 And he held that a sound of this kind, periodically 
 repeated, must have recalled to mind a definite per- 
 ception, sensation, or visual image, and that thus the 
 first word, of whose content, of course, we can have 
 no idea, might have originated. 
 
 Be this as it may, it remains indisputable that every- 
 where in the designations of things we meet with 
 human action as that which first rendered objects inter- 
 esting. This human activity, is, of course, as , yet 
 entirely identical with animal activity. The Greek 
 Sepo), to flay, counts among its descendants Sep/no, 
 skin, Sopv, wood, SpCs, tree, and the English tree. 
 Skin is that which is pulled off; wood that which is 
 
THBOEIBS OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 9 
 
 stripped of bark; and so, tree. This same law, with 
 wonderful consistency, appears also in a number of 
 words that, judging them from their present meaning, 
 scarcely seem to exhibit any connection whatsoever. 
 Night, through the notion dark, black, is carried back 
 to the Sanskrit root ang, Latin ungo, to dye, to smear ; 
 ground and terra to a root denoting to grind, to crum- 
 ble; corn denotes something that has been husked; 
 thunder (a word that certainly sounds onomatopoetic), 
 according to Max Miiller, must be referred to the 
 Sanskrit root tan, to stretch, and is akin to tone or the 
 sound peculiar to a stretched cord. In the same man- 
 ner tener, tender, must be derived from thin, and the 
 latter again from the fact of tension. Schreihen, 
 ypaxjxa, and scribere, as well as the English write and 
 the German Riss, are identical with a root denoting 
 ritzen, to scratch. From the root da, to bind, are de- 
 rived words of the following meanings: yoke, gird, 
 husband, twins, sister, house, and innumerable others. 
 Language designates tools by words that correspond 
 to the human acts which they promote; they are 
 actively symbolised, so to speak. Scissors, hatchets, 
 and saws are things that shear (Swedish skdra, sickle), 
 hack, and saw. Everywhere, in all the formations of 
 words with which we are familiar, the conceptual ele- 
 ment is seen to prevail, but nowhere do we find direct 
 imitation of the sounds of nature. The names of the 
 majority of animals and plants designate the creatures 
 and things to which they refer, by color; and almost 
 in all languages we recognise as the most primitive 
 roots, human and animal acts symbolised in the form 
 of some characteristic gesture or posture; and even 
 
10 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 in historical times we find, that the development and 
 growth of language follow exactly the same course. 
 The abstract figure is traceable to a word that denotes 
 to knead a soft clay. The beautiful German word . 
 Dichter (poet) suggests the primitive untutored bard, 
 who was originally wont to dictate to a scribe the 
 words of his own invention. And, moreover, if the 
 imitation of the sounds of nature had originally been 
 the principle according to which words were formed, 
 it certainly would have occupied an extensive place 
 in languages, and would have long remained percepti- 
 ble and continued perhaps in active operation down to 
 the present day. 
 
 It is unmistakable that we have approached through 
 this explanation considerably nearer to the dark depths 
 from which the fountain of speech first bubbled. The 
 further question, — elsewhere touched upon — as to 
 whether man first possessed tools or speech, Geiger 
 decides in favor of the latter; and he bases his argu- 
 ment upon the fact, that the names of tools and of the 
 results they bring about, are expressed by roots that 
 denote human physical acts; hence, that all words 
 denoting grinding (mahlen), milling, and the like, were 
 originally connected with mal, mar {mordeo, which 
 meant to bruise, to crush with the fingers, and probably 
 also to crush with the teeth. Sculpo to cut out with a 
 chisel, is a collateral form of scalpo, which originally 
 meant to scratch with the nails. The root ve, the basis 
 of our weave, is traced back by Geiger, with a refer- 
 ence to vimen, with (willow), to the oldest practised 
 art; namely, the twisting of branches into lodge-nests 
 for primitive man, which afterwards led to weaving 
 or plaiting, an art possessed by all savage tribes. 
 
THEOKIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 11 
 
 But i must confess that to my mind this last argu- 
 ment possesses very little weight. Man, it is true, did 
 not have complicated, or even perfect, tools before the 
 possession of speech, — perhaps not even mill-stones; 
 but I am inclined to doubt, whether, notwithstanding 
 this fact, he might not have designated crushing with 
 stones and teeth interchangeably by the same root, as 
 well as all scraping with the hands and a stone, which 
 latter in this case would merely be a part of the hand. 
 
 There is also something far-fetched in Geiger's 
 hypothesis respecting the origin of the first word. His 
 sympathetic aping reflection of a gesture with accom- 
 panying speech-sound, I must admit, seems a rather 
 bold abstraction, in which Geiger manifestly wished to 
 comprise the three factors met with in the oldest roots : 
 (1) the phonetic word, (2) the visual percept, and (3) 
 human posture or gesture as the expression of an act. 
 
 NOIEE^S CONCEPTION. 
 
 Now I take it that man, who like the ape and other 
 aninjals is a social being, very early acquired a power 
 of communication, that is, a language of gesture or 
 attitude. Nothing stands in the way of such an as- 
 sumption, since we find this faculty very distinctly 
 marked and extensively represented throughout the 
 entire animal kingdom. Animals are trained to the 
 expression of significant gestures, as birds are to song, 
 which is at the same time the expression of an inner 
 emotion and a kind of communication, being intended 
 either to allure the female, or to entertain the brood- 
 ing bird. It is therefore not at all impossible, that in 
 the case of primeval men, living gregariously, gestures 
 were developed with a definite conceptual content, es- 
 
12 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 tablished as such, and transmitted by training to after 
 generations. We must, of course, conceive these ges- 
 tures as a summons to some appointed act or task, 
 as we find to be the case with ants, termites, bees, etc. 
 It would suffice now for some vehement animated ges- 
 ticulatory action of this kind to be accompanied in 
 every instance by a peculiar sound — let us call to mind, 
 for example, the many different sounds by which a 
 dog accompanies his signs of joy, grief, submission, 
 repentance, and impatience — and in consequence 
 thereof this gesture could very well be recalled to mind 
 by the sound; while, following the law of develop- 
 ment, the former would gradually recede, and the latter 
 ultimately attain absolute supremacy. As stated, this 
 is highly possible, and it increases in probability when 
 we take note of the fact that savage nations, ignorant 
 persons, and people who do not perfectly understand 
 a language, are always wont to emphasise their words 
 by lively gesticulation. 
 
 A possible origin of this kind ought to satisfy com- 
 pletely our inquisitiveness ; agreeably to what Dugald 
 Stewart, quoted by Max Miiller, maintains: 
 
 "In examining the history of mankind, as well as In examining 
 the phenomena of the material world, when we cannot trace the 
 process by which an event has Seen, produced. It Is often of Impor- 
 tance to be able to show how It may have been produced by natural 
 causes. Thus, although It Is Impossible to determine with certainty 
 what the steps were by which any particular language was formed, 
 yet If we can show, from the known principles of human nature, 
 how all Its various parts might gradually have arisen, the mind is 
 not only to a certain degree satisfied, but a check Is given to that 
 Indolent philosophy which refers to a miracle whatever appearances, 
 both In the natural and moral worlds. It is unable to explain." 
 
 Any one who will survey the successive develop- 
 ment of things as they start from the simplest ele- 
 
THEORIES OF THE OEIGIN OF LANGUAGE 13 
 
 ments, and through continued combinations effected 
 by the influence of the external world, early deviate 
 so much from their origin that the latter is scarcely 
 longer recognisable, will surely admit that the most 
 cutting sneer to be levelled at speculative philosophy, 
 in its confidence of victory, would be to demand it 
 to construct a camel a priori. But empiric historical 
 science has also cause to be modest, notwithstanding 
 that it follows the much surer road, constantly con- 
 trolled by present events, of inference from that which 
 now exists to what before existed; in which process 
 it employs as basis the solid foundation of innumer- 
 able facts, upon which it constructs ever narrowing 
 stages reaching up to an apex of unity, while the specu- 
 lative method endeavors to rest its complete structure 
 upon that apex. 
 
 I shall try to show by an example, how abundantly 
 also inductive science has cause to be satisfied with 
 the possibility of explanation. I shall suppose that 
 after the lapse of a few thousand years literary tradi- 
 tion had suffered an interruption, and that the world 
 was entirely left in the dark concerning the scientific 
 researches of our present epoch. Electricity will, by 
 that time, have become of tremendous importance, 
 and have found application in all departments of life. 
 Let us suppose now that some historian starts the 
 question (as the case is in our own time with the 
 question of fire) of how and in what manner human- 
 ity at first obtained possession and knowledge of this 
 wonderful natural agency. Does anybody really fancy 
 that the historian by continuous and successive in- 
 fluences would ultimately light upon the fact that once 
 
14 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 upon a time a certain physicist had hung up frog s- 
 legs by iron hooks upon copper rods? Certainly not. 
 But a thousand possibilities will occur to him, .and with 
 these he will rest satisfied. 
 
 I shall now, in addition to those above set forth, 
 submit another hypothesis, which also conforms to 
 experience as deduced from animal life, and the possi- 
 bility of which will hardly be contested by any one. 
 
 If we examine the phonetic utterances of the animal 
 world, we shall find that their foundation is a variety 
 of inner impulses, but that there is always present 
 the endeavor to make these impulses intelligible to 
 others. We find, principally, three kinds of sounds; 
 viz. : 
 
 1. Calls of Allurement, or Summons. These are an 
 expression of emotion, accompanied by an obscure 
 percept, and they aim at influencing the will and acts 
 of a kindred being. 
 
 2. War-Cries. Also the expression of emotion. 
 They endeavor to arouse fear and dismay in an enemy. 
 
 3. Calls of Warning. Only among social animals. 
 Emotion co-operates. The percept prevails. Endeavor 
 to work upon the will of others by arousing a similar 
 percept. 
 
 It is not difficult to discern in these three catego- 
 ries the subsoil of human speech. All three have this 
 in common with one another, that they spring from 
 the inner world of emotion, and strive in turn to 
 awaken emotion — the -first and third a kindred, and 
 the second an opposite emotion. In the first there is 
 present also either an obscure percept, as, for instance, 
 that of a female, or a still clearer one, as when the hen 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 15 
 
 calls her brood to newly discovered food. So, too, 
 in the third, is the percept of impending danger, which 
 by the cry, is also excited in distant or dispersed 
 companions. 
 
 The first human sound that deserved the name of 
 word, could not have dififered from these animal 
 sounds except by a higher degree of luminousness in 
 the percepts or images which accompanied it and 
 were awakened by it. Discipline must have helped to 
 bring it about that such a sound — just as the notes of a 
 bird — upon being often repeated, became a kind of 
 representative sign, which, along with the sensation, 
 also excited the faint image. Such sounds are inter- 
 jections. But interjections are not adapted to the 
 formation of language, because the emotional element 
 still prevails in them to such an extent that clear and 
 tranquil percepts cannot form, and, therefore, cannot 
 originate from the same. On the other hand, we are 
 able to imagine many possible ways in which a sound 
 as yet involved in the animal stage of development 
 could become the representative of a definite, inde- 
 pendent percept. 
 
 Should any one interpose, that for such a huge 
 edifice my hypothesis assumes a much too narrow 
 basis, let him call to mind the example I cited above, 
 in which, from the twitching of a frog's leg, through 
 continuous combinations and mental efforts, the mys- 
 terious, hardly dreamed of, domain of electricity was 
 put within the reach of human knowledge and power. 
 What we call chance has demonstrably played a prin- 
 cipal part at the beginning of the most important and 
 difficult advances of human civilisation. Such is the 
 
16 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 case with the acquisition of the agency of fire, which, 
 like tools, language, and religion, constitutes a truly 
 distinctive characteristic of man; how variously may 
 we not imagine its origin to have been, and how many 
 accidents may not have borne an active share in that 
 origin ! At all events, the task required human energy, 
 and, as Geiger says, we have reason to admire the 
 boldness that accomplished that feat, never before 
 achieved, when man, for the first time, approached 
 the dreaded flame and carried aloft over the earth the 
 burning log of wood — an inspired act, without prece- 
 dent in the animal world, and of immeasurable conse- 
 quence to the development of human civilisation. And 
 if we compare the oldest form of implement for the 
 production of fire by friction — as it is still found 
 among savage tribes, and even among civilised nations 
 in certain religious practices — which was a simple piece 
 of wood bored into a softer piece and set on fire by 
 continuous twirling; when we compare such an imple- 
 ment with the holes that are found bored in the same 
 way in stone axes, we are readily led to assume that 
 accident was the origin of this acquisition, and that 
 from this single thing and its further retention and 
 application all the rest resulted. 
 
 I assume that antecedently to the rise of language, 
 men lived together in herds or tribes. War, at that 
 time, was the universal natural state ; war against ani- 
 mals of other species, as well as against neighboring 
 tribes of the same species. It is not improbable that 
 a peculiar sound or call united the members of each 
 single tribe, so that by setting up their cry they could 
 call together those who were distant, dispersed, or had 
 
THEOKIBS OF THE OEIGIN OF LANGUAGE 17 
 
 lost their way, or could mutually encourage one an- 
 other when engaged in battle with a neighboring tribe. 
 Let us suppose now that once a member of one tribe 
 had warned his companions of the approach of an- 
 other tribe, by imitating the call or cry of the latter; 
 we should have here the origin of the first human 
 word, for this would be an instance where consciously 
 and intentionally an idea had been excited in the 
 minds of like and kindred creatures. 
 
 We have thus, in the most natural manner, con- 
 ducted into the province of the human word that which 
 we found in the animal state — namely, the call of 
 allurement, the war-cry, and the call of warning. 
 
 Geiger truly observes that "the thing -of greatest 
 interest to man has always been man," and seeks, ac- 
 cordingly, for the oldest designation of language in the 
 expression of human acts. But I should be greatly 
 surprised if man as man was not earlier manifest and 
 noticeable than any of his single acts, even his most 
 expressive pantomime or gesture. This latter is al- 
 ways an abstraction, and it seems to me that, not its 
 immediate perceptive knowledge of course, but its 
 being comprehended and designated by a word, must 
 have involved an enormous antecedent development. 
 Man entire, on the other hand, is a perfectly concrete, 
 known, and ever-recurring fact. Look at the animal 
 world. Animals, aside from that which interests and 
 affects their sensual life, wherein they are guided by 
 instinct, first of all acquire intelligent knowledge of 
 individuals o,f their own species, their friends and their 
 foes, other animals, and men. The marmot knows his 
 enemies, attacks the dog, assails man and tries to dis- 
 
18 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 able him. The dog knows his master: the dog of 
 Ulysses recognised his master when no one else knew 
 
 him. 
 
 * * * 
 
 I now ask the reader to accompany me in the fol- 
 lowing course of observation : 
 
 In addition to the instincts of nutrition, movement, 
 and the like, which find their immediate expression 
 through the life of the senses, there are further present 
 in young animals and men, born in them, certain ob- 
 scure ideas or percepts, and among these ideas is found, 
 because it is the most natural of all, the idea or per- 
 cept of beings that are exactly like themselves. Just 
 as the bird builts its nest, so does the infant know its 
 mother, who from the beginning constitutes its entire 
 world. It conceives, at the very outset, the entire ex- 
 ternal world as constituted like itself (Will Against 
 Will).^ 
 
 The child cries, it gets angry, it has desires, it is 
 
 'As a characteristic instance, let me quote the following passage 
 from Weitzel's Autobiography. This man, the son of a turbulent 
 period, — that preceding the French Revolution, — in describing the 
 impressions of his youth, when as a boy only six years old, he 
 Indignantly vents his rage against the existing social Injustices, 
 bewails his own sufferings and his mother's wretchedness. He says : 
 "In this frame of mind many a time I went out into the open air, 
 and shook my clenched flsts at the heavens, uttering Imprecations 
 and curses. 'May God be punished for this,' I exclaimed, 'may the 
 Holy Mother of God be punished for this !' Under the Impression 
 that the abused divinities were Incensed at my conduct, I challenged 
 them to destroy me by a blast of lightning : 'Do me some harm,' I 
 frantically exclaimed, 'kill me if you dare !' " — This naive anthcopo- 
 morphism brings back to my mind the touching reply of Lafontalne's 
 old maid-servant to the harsh words of the ecclesiastical zealot, 
 who, after embittering the last days of the poet's life by sancti- 
 monious austerities, still expressed his apprehension that the 
 departed one might, after all, have gone to hell. She said : "Dieu 
 n' aura jamais le courage de le damner." 
 
THEORIES OP THE ORIGIN OP LANGUAGE 19 
 
 amiable. Its most natural perceptual idea, therefore, 
 is that of being like itself, the representation of a 
 distinct personality, which, since it appears to it as a 
 mother administering nutrition, love, and care, is in- 
 deed the most important and the most interesting of 
 all things about it. The first word that a child learns 
 is that which denotes its mother; that word bursts 
 forth from its emotional life, from the impulse of its 
 will, and is accompanied by an actual represented 
 image. 
 
 Are we not, accordingly, justified in the inference, 
 that the primum cognitum was also the primum appel- 
 latumf That is, that the most natural, the most intel- 
 ligible, and the most interesting percept, first and 
 before all, was the cause of the first word. 
 
 Among the philosophers who have given their atten- 
 tion to this subject, this view has been both rejected 
 (Leibnitz) and accepted (Condillac, Locke, Adam 
 Smith). Some maintain that the earliest words were 
 proper names ; others, that they were nouns appellative. 
 Max Muller decides the question in this way. He 
 assumes three stages: the first is where the object is 
 designated after some quality or attribute (cavea, cave, 
 from Sanskrit root ku, to hide), where, accordingly, 
 a general idea is applied to a particular object and 
 becomes its proper name, just as in the case in which 
 a man first received the name of Great Head; secondly, 
 that this proper name is thereupon transferred to all, 
 or to many things like it; and, thirdly, that these 
 names are thereby raised to the rank of appellatives 
 or names of a genus. 
 
 This solution sufifers from the drawback that it is 
 
20 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 not a solution. When Max Mijller says, "The first 
 thing really known is the general," we are entitled to 
 ask, How came man by the knowledge and the desig- 
 nation of this "general" ? To be sure, at a time when 
 men were already in the possession of a couple of hun- 
 dred words by which they designated acts; qualities, 
 and characteristics, they may very naturally have ap- 
 plied such roots to the characterisation of things — 
 called their river, for example, Ach (water) or Rhine 
 (the flowing), their sea Saivs (the agitated), their lake 
 Meer (originally: a soft, marshy mass). A name of 
 this kind might then continue a proper name, or be- 
 come an appellative. Even at the present day we may 
 understand sea both as proper name and general con- 
 cept, specialised by adjectives: as "the White Sea," 
 "the Black Sea." Permutations of this kind have 
 taken place at all times and are being continually em- 
 ployed even at the present day. The "Red one," the 
 "Black one," in this sense, become proper names; 
 •Tartuffe and Eulenspiegel, in French, are names ap- 
 pellative. The magnet (derived from the city of Mag- 
 nesia) has given the designation of "magnetic" to one 
 of the most generally diffused forces, qualities — that 
 is, attributes — of things. 
 
 Of this problem I myself shall now attempt a solu- 
 tion, and, as I trust, with somewhat better success. 
 By two examples I shall briefly illustrate the subject 
 as conceived by the eminent men referred to : 
 
 Adam Smith, Condillac, and Locke say: A child 
 calls every man "papa," every young man "uncle" ' 
 or "Charley," or something similar; hence proper 
 names were the first names. 
 
THEORIES OF THE OEIGIN OF LANGUAGE 21 
 
 Leibnitz says: Children call every person man, and 
 use most frequently such words as thing, plant, animal; 
 hence general terms were the first words. 
 
 But how easily this contradiction is dissipated when 
 we take into consideration the fact that from the start 
 there is presented to the child, on the one hand, only 
 a limited number of words, and on the other, an equally 
 limited number of sensory perceptions^ Both these 
 classes, now, are mixed up with one another; that is, 
 with some one certain word the child associates a 
 number of similar sensory percepts, which it confounds 
 and interchanges, because as yet it does not know their 
 differences. And the words which the child most fre- 
 quently hears from its parents are either very special 
 in character, denoting beings that it meets oftenest, as 
 papa, uncle, and the like, or words of a very general 
 significance; which stands to reason, since one can- 
 not at once teach a child words like "forget-me-not," 
 "rhinoceros," "shoe-maker," and so forth. Naturally, 
 therefore, the child arranges all the facts of its expe- 
 rience under the head of words like those above cited, 
 and since it soon learns to distinguish "papa" and 
 "uncle" from all other beings, the general terms at the 
 second stage of its development alone remain to it. 
 But no inference can properly be drawn from facts 
 of this kind, because we are not concerned here with 
 words invented by the child itself, but with others 
 that have been communicated to it from a higher stage 
 of culture. The child's activity is at first one of gen- 
 eralisation ; that is, of connecting phenomena that re- 
 peatedly occur, with some one word that stands at its 
 disposal. Only later does it learn to classify and sub- 
 
22 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 divide correctly, as when it hears that "the Rhine is 
 a river," "the Hudson is a river," "the Mississippi is 
 a river." 
 
 From observations of this sort but one thing can 
 inferentially be established. Namely, this: that lan- 
 guage at its origin designated by its first words those 
 objects that were the most striking and the most in- 
 teresting to t^an, and proceeded then, by the help of 
 these words, to generalise — that is, to attach similar 
 things to some single word. The marked importance 
 of some object, which constantly occurred in some par- 
 ticular, isolated form, naturally must have led to the 
 attribution of some particular name to that object, and 
 proper names, accordingly, very probably^ belong to 
 the oldest words of humanity. 
 
 The science of language has proved that the roots 
 from which the words of today have risen, originally 
 denoted definite acts. But considering the endless flux 
 of the meanings of words and of the contents of con- 
 cepts, it is very difficult to assert that those meanings 
 — which are the furthermost limits that science by 
 retrogressive inference has reached — were their orig- 
 inal primitive meanings ; in other words, that the root 
 da at its origin means to bind, ga to go, mar to grind. 
 Even Geiger's ingenious hypothesis, that the first word 
 originated from the imitation of a facial gesture accom- 
 panied by the simultaneous utterance of sound, is 
 somewhat forced; for here we miss the element of 
 communication, which even in the animal world was 
 considerably developed, and from which, doubtless, 
 also human speech sprung. 
 
 The single and individual acts of man, as we have 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 23 
 
 remarked, are also abstractions, the representation and 
 connection of which by means of the word cannot be 
 put at the beginning, for the cogent reason that in in- 
 fant development we observe that the child fixes by 
 words only that which is personal and thus of frequent 
 recurrence, whereas flitting and transient acts and ges- 
 tures only affect its sensory life, make the child cry or 
 laugh, but do not produce calm reflection. We are 
 much inclined, therefore, to assign such roots as "bit- 
 ing," "grinning," "rubbing," "smearing," and so forth, 
 to the second stage of the evolution of language. 
 We cannot regard them as the original starting-point 
 of language. 
 
 On the contrary, for reasons that have been partly 
 alleged, we should rather assume that the names of in- 
 dividual men, the names by which they were called, 
 and proper names, were the earliest words. This, 
 moreover, explains a problem that has long occupied 
 the attention of the most eminent thinkers; namely, 
 how man, amidst the universal flight of phenomena 
 and the concourse of the things of the external world, 
 was able to fix and retain the particular, and, at once 
 by the aid of the word, to raise it to the general con- 
 cept. This is a faculty genuinely and purely human ; 
 one which we must endeavor to bring home to our- 
 selves as distinctly as possible. We listen to the 
 , human words so naturally imitated by the parrot, or 
 to a dog that barks at us and manifestly tries to tell 
 us something in his own language ; and all this affords 
 us great satisfaction, for we perceive in it, distinctly 
 drawn, the line of demarcation between man and beast. 
 But to hear an animal consciously utter even a single 
 human word, would fill us with dismay. 
 
24 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 \ 
 
 As we have stated, the creation of language, the 
 greatest miracle of which consists in the phenomenon 
 that amidst the universal dissolution and flux of intui- 
 tions it isolates by the phonetic word a single percept, 
 and by degrees condenses that percept into a mental 
 image, as something subsisting by itself, — this creation 
 of language can only owe its existence to some natural 
 and immediate contingency. It must originally have 
 operated with regard to objects whose duration, sta- 
 bility, and isolation from other natural phenomena had 
 been discovered and established beyond the shadow 
 of a doubt; whose mental representation, as well by 
 means of inner capacity of comprehension (innate 
 representative power of things like us) as by the con- 
 stant recurrence of the real object itself, became so 
 clear, so fixed, and unequivocal, that it could be said 
 that the representation of this object sprang forth with 
 the word from the head of man, like Pallas, in full and 
 complete panoply! But this object must have been 
 our companion and homologue man, and hence the 
 names by which men were called, their appellations, 
 were the first words? 
 
 H recently read an observation by Spielhageu in the Oegenwart, 
 which harmonises clearly with my view : "The uninterrupted, rush- 
 ing stream of impressions will change and widen the old channel 
 that the Impressions of youth have dug in our thought and sensa- 
 tion, and will obliterate the images that apparently no longer 
 possess any meaning of interest for us. I say apparently, for, in 
 reality, such is not the case. Even those who have travelled 
 farthest, those who have been most buffeted about by fate, even 
 those who have risen to the highest pinnacle of fortune, despite 
 their broad range of vision and exalted station, will constantly 
 surprise themselves in the act of unconsciously comparing their 
 present great world with the limited one of their childhood and 
 youth, and that they will always class new men and people under 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 25 
 
 But are we able to conceive of a way in which these 
 proper names could have become actual general names, 
 and general concepts thus begun their silent yet con- 
 tinuous operation? I do not believe that this can 
 prove so difficult a task. It would suffice that a num- 
 ber of such sounds were given, and that the images of 
 the individuals thus denoted should be constantly 
 called to mind by the utterance of the sound; in such 
 a case, in time, some peculiar feature of some one of 
 these objects might, at the utterance of the word, 
 gradually become excited in the mind of the hearer 
 and become attached to the word itself. I intention- 
 ally leave this exposition in its present vague and gen- 
 eral form, because a person cannot be too cautious in 
 speaking of that primeval time of transition from ani- 
 mality to humanity, and because every step forward 
 must be made with the utmost circumspection. I 
 merely recall to mind, that in the case even of people 
 of the present day, baptismal names are during early 
 childhood usually not employed as appellations or 
 names by which children are called, but that some 
 name is invented, suggestive of some striking peculiar- 
 ity of the child, or often in imitation of some favorite 
 sound uttered by the child itself. We might, accord- 
 ingly, merely reverse the process we are considering, 
 by supposing in a given individual the presence of 
 some peculiar movement of the mouth, with a show- 
 ing of the teeth, and to fancy this peculiarity also pres- 
 ent in another person, and finally, to imagine that the 
 
 the head of a few categories based upon a limited number of proto- 
 types, which they regard as normal — the few men, namely, who 
 have decisively influenced their early lives, or at least have wit- 
 nessed with interest the evolution of their youthful years." 
 
26 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 name of the former (phonetically, perhaps, connected 
 with the peculiarity in question) be transferred to the 
 latter individual. In an hypothesis of this kind we 
 should have the first beginning of the formation of the 
 concept. "What a feeble beginning!" the reader will 
 exclaim. But let him bear in mind how faint, upon 
 the whole, are all beginnings in the organic world. It 
 is an unquestionable result of modern linguistic re- 
 search, that the names of most animals are derived 
 from colors. The variety and heterogeneousness of 
 colors were circumstances that very early interested 
 man. Hence, may it not be legitimate to infer that 
 the appellation of some certain man who was distin- 
 guished by a certain color, and thus necessarily brought 
 to mind that color, was in the lapse of time conferred 
 upon others who were conspicuous by reason of the 
 same characteristic, and that by degrees it was trans- 
 ferred to animals, and finally became a generic name? 
 
 We have spoken of the part that appellations and 
 proper names very probably played in the formation 
 of language. I leave it to the reader to follow out 
 the hypothesis I have advanced, and shall only com- 
 pare my theory with those that other philosophers 
 have propounded, to point out wherein it differs from 
 theirs and wherein it may be justified in opposition to 
 theirs. 
 
 1) In Herder's otherwise ingenious theory the ele- 
 ment that occasions and forcibly produces speech- 
 utterance is entirely relegated to the background. We 
 cannot see what could have induced man to imitate 
 the bleating of the lamb, and to attach the concept of 
 the lamb to that imitation. According to this theory, 
 
THEOKIBS OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 27 
 
 primitive man must have been a meditative philoso- 
 pher, an embryonic scientist; but this he surely was 
 not. 
 
 2) The theory of proper names upheld by Con- 
 dillac, Adam Smith, and the rest, bears throughout 
 the stamp of the eighteenth century, which with its 
 customary subjective bias attributed to primitive man 
 the reflective powers and intelligent purpose of later 
 eras. According to Adam Smith two savages are sup- 
 posed to agree in denoting a pond, a tree, and a cave 
 by a given peculiar sound, and later to have con- 
 ferred these proper names upon other objects. But 
 even a tacit agreement of this character, the very per- 
 ception, in fact, of the pond or tree as independent 
 things, required a capacity of thought that could be 
 the result only of centuries of employment of speech. 
 
 3) Geiger's theory — incontestably the profoundest 
 of all that have hitherto been advanced — is based on 
 the fact of science that in all languages the object is 
 never immediately translated into the word, but that a 
 concept is in every case evolved from a concept, and 
 sound from sound. "Even proper names," -says Gei- 
 ger, "were all originally words that had a meaning." 
 As far back as the science of language leads us to the 
 most primitive meanings of roots, from which all 
 words have been formed, the roots denote some human 
 act plainly exhibited in gesture or attitude. 
 
 When we take into consideration the fact that lan- 
 guage unquestionably originated in the necessity of 
 communication (the parent of speech) it does not seem 
 impossible that a sound summoning men to some 
 works or other may have been the first word, as yet of 
 
28 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 very indefinite content, but which afterwards through 
 various similar sounds became differentiated. But just 
 the most important element of the soul of language 
 is here lacking — that tranquillity which is so necessary 
 for reflection and the incipient fixation of percepts. 
 Cries of this kind are and will remain interjections, 
 the essential ofi&ce of which is to bring about an imme- 
 diate effect without the help of any further representa- 
 tion, especially as they are enforced by perfectly 
 significant gestures, which in themselves constitute a 
 sufficient language. 
 
 Proper names are, to be sure, words of a meaning. 
 But if we recall to mind the particular occasions upon 
 which at the present day we are led to designate a 
 being by a name — to repeat, as it were, the primitive 
 process of creation — we shall find that it is upon the 
 occasion of the millions of cases in which we bestow a 
 proper name upon a man or animal. The fact that 
 among the thousands of proper names from certain 
 plausible motives we should pick out just this or that 
 name ; that the Indian should call his offspring Sleeper, 
 Runner, or Cat — this does not in the least detract 
 from the importance of the fact. Thus, when for a 
 long time we call a child by some endearing name, 
 like Da-da, Ba-ba, or the like, we actually bestow upon 
 the child a new name, suggested by some correspond- 
 ent peculiarity. We have, therefore, thing and name, 
 and not concept from concept. This point must not 
 be underrated. It clearly speaks, in addition to the 
 reasons previously adduced, in favor of the primitive- 
 ness of appellations, or names by which individuals 
 were called. Once again let me repeat that the rep- 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 29 
 
 resentation or percept of a congeneric being is the 
 clearest of all perceptual representations: the calling 
 bird possesses it as distinctly as it does the innate per- 
 cept of its nest. The perception of limbs, of parts, or 
 of acts, is an advanced abstraction. But the percept 
 and recognition of congeneric man was so natural to 
 the primeval human being that he applied it to every- 
 thing, and believed that every force acting upon him 
 emanated from a will like his own — just as a dog will 
 bark at the wind because he believes that it blows 
 intentionally against him. And the most natural, sim- 
 plest, most innate, and, at the same time, the most 
 interesting percept must have been earliest fixed by a 
 sound, and have shaped itself into the first word. 
 
 I revert again, in conclusion, to the hypothetical 
 example before adduced, in which the war-cry of a 
 tribe was supposed to become, among neighboring 
 tribes, the designation of that tribe. If it is true, as it 
 certainly must be, that the tribal community during the 
 earliest periods of social life wholly absorbs and subor- 
 dinates the individual so that he can scarcely as yet be 
 conceived as individualised, the hypothesis which I 
 advanced as the possible origin of speech obtains a 
 certain degree of probability; and granting that at 
 any time but a single representation became connected 
 with the word, it follows that the hitherto dormant 
 power of creation of language must have been thereby 
 stimulated, and have begun its at first hidden and 
 humble activity, until at last the day dawned when the 
 original springlets broadened into a river, and the 
 rivers into the boundless ocean of the human minds as 
 evolved through language. 
 
30 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 Let the reader but endeavor to recall to mind when 
 and under what circumstances the most immediately 
 and hardly controllable impulse to utter a sound arises, 
 and he will be obliged to admit that it is at the mo- 
 ment of the highest exultation of happiness (the 
 huzza of the mountaineers), or of deepest sorrow. 
 This impulse is not granted to insociable beings. 
 Beasts of prey have only decoy-calls and sounds that 
 excite fear. Cold-blooded animals possess no utter- 
 ance of the kind whatsoever. Hence the most primi- 
 tive impulse to the utterance of sound originated first 
 of all in the feeling of sympathy, and had the power, 
 also, to awaken sympathy. 
 
 But there is a fact of observation far more impor- 
 tant still, to the effect that whenever a common feeling 
 becomes very intense, particularly when a common 
 sensation, or the consciousness and impulse of com- 
 mon action, takes possession of men, sound spon- 
 taneously and involuntarily awakes in the vibratory 
 organs of our body and bursts irresistibly forth. Any 
 one, who as a boy, has been caught with the enthus- 
 iasm of juvenile combat, or any one who on some im- 
 portant emergency has lent a helping hand to some 
 urgent work, for example, to pull ashore a ship in 
 distress — will at once understand the truth of this re- 
 mark. The howl of the baboon, in putting a pack of 
 dogs to flight, is the prototype of this impulse within 
 the animal world. 
 
 Sounds like these, accordingly, must have been es- 
 tablished and developed with certain peculiarities dur- 
 ing that pre-linguistic period when man still lived as 
 an associate member of a tribe or herd, and it is a 
 
THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 31 
 
 perfectly consistent inference to assume that the diver- 
 sities and contrasts of the separate tribes were at- 
 tached and clung to these highly characteristic sounds. 
 
 In this way I have accepted and fully utilised in 
 my hypothesis all that is undoubtedly true in the theory 
 propounded by Max Miiller, which, we will remember, 
 was, that a certain sound is peculiar to every being, 
 and that the spontaneous utterance of this sound is 
 the most immediate expression of its nature. 
 
 What I regard as the chief excellence of my hy- 
 pothesis is this: that it alone can explain how man, 
 amidst the fleeting, ever-dissolving world of phenom- 
 ena, acquired the faculty to isolate a thing, to retain it 
 and to unite it with the word as a permanent perceptual 
 existence, a faculty denied all animals, and which in 
 the course of natural development has led to general 
 concepts and to the origin of human reason. 
 
 The first words were appellations of tribes or indi- 
 vidual men; and their perceptual content comprised 
 all that was known or observed of these tribes and 
 men. 
 
 Even at the present day these words of all words are 
 the most significant. Let the reader only ask him- 
 self whether he knows of any word replete with greater 
 significance than that representing a beloved being, 
 or than words like: The Romans, Shakespeare, 
 Beethoven. 
 
 But to close. In the statements above presented, 
 I have endeavored, by the aid of the established re- 
 sults of modern linguistic research, to construct the 
 lines by which a point is to be approximately deter- 
 
32 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 mined which otherwise must have remained inaccessi- 
 ble to research. 
 
 The reader must not forget that I have merely- 
 sought, in my hypothesis, to disclose the possible origin 
 of language. In this obscure province, of course, cer- 
 tainty can never be attained. In conclusion, there, 
 fore I shall propound another hypothesis, which like- 
 wise comprehends the possible origin of speech, and 
 which is likewise worthy of our attention. 
 
 It is a peculiarity of the law of evolution, which 
 will be found corroborated in the most various fields, 
 that a number of co-operating forces or factors may 
 produce a direction of development which is virtually 
 amazing when it is discovered that the development 
 makes directly in favor of some apparently wholly im- 
 material element, and is even guided by the latter. 
 We are very apt to forget, herein, that the stronger 
 forces balance one another, and that the significant 
 facfor — like the drop of water that causes the glass to 
 run over — naturally gains a decided preponderance. 
 I shall give a few examples. 
 
 That Louis Napoleon, in the year 1849, could open 
 the way to his subsequent political success was owing 
 in great measure to the circumstance that the other 
 national parties were engaged in violent quarrels ; that 
 no reconciliation or mediation seemed possible, and 
 that partly weary of internal strife, and partly 
 prompted by the notion that the "president" would 
 prove a mamieqiiin," an "imbecille," the people at 
 last accepted his dominancy. Such really is the ra- 
 tional explanation of the historical evolution of France 
 for a period of more than twenty years. And from 
 
THEORIES OP THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 33 
 
 exactly similar causes — from the implacable hatred of 
 Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Socialists- 
 grew up the septennate of MacMahon. We thus see 
 that from the co-operation of different forces there fre- 
 quently results an intermediate phenomenon, which 
 is entirely different, the individual traits therein not 
 being recognisable. 
 
 I shall further illustrate this point by a notable ex- 
 ample borrowed from aesthetics. In Schiller's beauti- 
 ful ballad "The Cranes of Ibicus" (Die Kraniche des 
 Ibykus) the exclamation of the murderer: "Behold, 
 Timotheus, the Cranes of Ibicus !" (Sieh da, sieh da, 
 , Timotheus, die Kraniche des Ibykus) has been mis- 
 understood by most readers. Or, they will say that it is 
 trivial, that the poet suddenly drops from his lofty 
 style into the commonplace. This is a great mistake, 
 a lack of sound aesthetic discernment. One thinks 
 that the impressive chorus of the Eumenides ought to 
 have been followed by a divine voice, crying: The 
 murderer of Ibicus is Timotheus ! Another riiaintains 
 that the murderer, deeply affected, ought to have 
 rushed into the midst of the arena, and exclaimed: I 
 committed the deed ! A third believes that the cranes 
 ought to have pounced on the murderer and thus drawn 
 upon him the revenge of the people. But the great 
 poet skilfully avoided such lame methods, and chose 
 an intermediate expedient that implies and includes 
 the ones above suggested. For, in that the murderer 
 at the appearance of the cranes utters his indiscreet 
 cry, (1) the cranes have actually fulfilled their mis- 
 sion (we behold the stately, ominous flight of the 
 silent accusers, amidst the stillness of the crowded 
 
34 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 amphitheatre) ; (2) the Eumenides also have revealed 
 their power, because amid general consternation and 
 awful silence the name of the murderer loudly re- 
 sounded; (3) the murderers have really and truly, 
 against their wish, impeached themselves. 
 
 It would thus be well for our sesthetical critics, in- 
 stead of attempting to shine by their own feeble light, 
 ever and deferentially to seek instruction and enlight- 
 enment from the grand and inspired instincts of our 
 great poets. 
 
 But to revert to the subject of language. At its 
 origin we had to assume two main factors; namely, 
 visual representation, or the inner perceptual image 
 that man wished to excite in his fellow-men, and the 
 means to effect this excitement — gesture or panto- 
 mime. Under the impulse of the moment this gesture 
 was at all times accompanied by an inarticulate sound. 
 If the reader ever witnessed untutored deaf and dumb 
 people trying to express their wants by means of ges- 
 ture-language, he will thoroughly understand what I 
 mean. Gesture, accordingly, is the main point; sound 
 is only an accompanying subsidiary element. 
 
 Now, this sound which with different gestures, took 
 on peculiar modifications, by virtue of this very differ- 
 entiation was able to attain a still more significant 
 kind of independence.* And if we merely suppose 
 
 •There is still another phenomenon within the domain of 
 human actlTlty that presents a striking analogy to this process ; 
 namely, the assumption by money of the function of exchange of 
 goods. Money has become, in the true sense of the word, a repre- 
 sentative entity. Still, In the beginning, when trade by barter 
 existed, the precious metal was obviously a subordinate medium of 
 exchange, because Its practical value was inferior to almost all 
 other things that served the needs of man. But Its various proper- 
 ties — Its divisibility, its capacity of being easily preserved for a 
 
THEOKIBS OF THE OEIGIN OF LANGUAGE 35 
 
 two primitive roots, for example He, he, or Ge, ge, the 
 call accompanied by the represented idea that the in- 
 dividual called is to come, and Haw, haw, denoting that 
 he is to go — we already have an origin of language 
 from which the same roots might evolve into others. 
 In anticipation of the shallow irony of opposing critics, 
 I shall baptise this theory of mine the Gee-haw theory, 
 and ask whether even the calls of peasants to their 
 horses are not also a kind of creation of language. 
 
 This hypothesis gains a high degree of probability 
 from the fact that as far as pur knowledge reaches, the 
 oldest roots were really the expression of human ges- 
 tures. 
 
 In this theory are also very distinctly represented 
 all the impulses and motives which must be supposed 
 to have operated in the first creation of language; 
 namely, (1) the necessity of communication, (2) the 
 
 long time, and many other advantages — soon caused it to be 
 received instead of all the others, as a universal medium of ex- 
 change. When more rapid circulation was demanded, u new species 
 of representation — bills of exchange and paper money — took the 
 place of metallic currency. Money, upon the whole. Is a highly 
 Instructive subject for the theory of evolution, because in money 
 the characteristics of evolution are symbolised as a particular 
 distinct phenomenon, extending over great historical periods of 
 time. As the word serves the mind alone, and Is detached from 
 the things, so money serves only to effect the exchange of objects, 
 for it never occurs to one to consider its practical value adaptable 
 for any other purpose, as for ornaments, etc. Such is the essential 
 nature of function. In the same manner in animal organisms, the 
 originally homogeneous parts, through constant activity, that is, 
 through evolution, have been fitted for the assumption of certain 
 functions. I believe, that if in the days of trade by barter we had 
 told anybody that the time would- come when we could pay for 
 houses and commodities with a few pieces of rag paper, the man 
 would have regarded us as crazy, just as the adversaries of the 
 theory of evolution regard him who now maintains that the nerves, 
 those wonderful conductors of sensation, were actually evolved 
 up to this function from originally homogeneous, equally sentient 
 elementary cells. 
 
36 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 sound emanating from common and concerted effort, 
 (3) the gesture that originates from the perceptual 
 image, and that naturally (4) is transformed into a 
 gesture that tallies as closely as possible with this rep- 
 resentation, and finally (5) the fixation of the connec- 
 tion between sound and perceptual image, which is 
 effected through frequent reiteration. 
 
THE LOGOS THEORY. 
 
 The designation which I wish to give to my theory 
 of the origin of language is the Logos Theory. Two 
 other designations, the Sympathy Theory, and the 
 Causality Theory, may, perhaps, also be suitable; but 
 they are incomplete, as they only embrace certain sin- 
 gle parts of the organic analysis with which we have 
 to deal. The Logos Theory, on the contrary, fixes the 
 centre of gravity of the question at the very point 
 where it must be sought — namely, in the origin of the 
 CONCEPT and in the union of the various contrary 
 things that had to meet and organically combine, in 
 order that human speech and thought — the greatest of 
 miracles, and the pride of creation — might arise and be 
 developed. The Mimetic and Inter j actional theories 
 of language are explanations of thought that appeal 
 to such people only as do not think. 
 
 I shall start, in the present investigation, from a 
 comparison of language with poetry. 
 
 Poetry, even at the present day, is essentially a 
 creation of language, that is, a creation of concepts. 
 And, so, too, all primitive creation of language was 
 poetry — lofty, ideal poetry. When, amidst the dis- 
 cordant, noisy, many-voiced choir of utterances indi- 
 cative of will and sensation, there was heard, for the 
 first time on earth, a sound that conveyed a clear, 
 intelligible sense, an objective meaning, that sound 
 
38 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 signalised a moment replete with sublimest poetry — 
 for then dawned the sixth day of the creation of the 
 world. 
 
 Examining the method of poetical utterance, we find 
 that external always acts upon external. This relation, 
 which is one of cause and effect, is the fundamental 
 rule of all cognition and comprehension of the per- 
 ceptible world. Everything must be referred to this 
 principle; through it all must be expressed; without 
 it no utterance is possible. In all the following exam- 
 ples, therefore, it must be tacitly assumed; because, 
 manifestly, whatever is internal as regards speech and 
 thinking, actually exists only when it attains to ex- 
 pression, that is, when an external phenomenon is 
 offered that strikes the senses. This first category, 
 accordingly, of the four which I assume,^ is distin- 
 guished from its fellows by the fact that here only 
 the purely mechanical process is regarded, while the 
 inner factor, the Will, apparently is not taken into 
 account. This, however, is the real source of intuitive 
 perception, the highest excellence of all poetry. 
 
 Says Horace: "Thou seest how Mount Soracte 
 stands forth, white, clothed with a mantle of deep 
 snow — the groaning branches bend beneath its weight 
 — rivers and brooks, rigid with frost, are arrested in 
 their course." All of which is external causality, ex- 
 ternal change, highly characteristic by reason of its 
 contrast to the previous natural state of things, when 
 Mount Soracte was clothed in green, when the trees 
 
 iThat part of the chapter of the original which explains the 
 other three categories Is omitted. The other three are : the effect 
 of external on internal; of internal on external; and of internal on 
 internal. 
 
THE LOGOS THEORY 39 
 
 spread forth their branches, and the brooks sped rest- 
 lessly along. 
 
 The converse of the last condition is illustrated in 
 the following parallel German and Latin statements: 
 
 "Dlffugere nlves, redeunt Jam gramina campis, 
 Arborlbusque comae." 
 
 "Vom Else befrclt slnd Strom und BSclie 
 Durch des Friihllngs holden belebendeu Blick." 
 
 "Es lacht der Mai, 
 Der Wald 1st frel 
 Von Keif und BlsgehSnge ; 
 Der Schnee 1st fort. 
 Am griinen Ort 
 Erschallen LustgesUnge." 
 
 [Snow disappears, and already the grass In the meadow Is sprouting, 
 Foliage corers the trees.] 
 
 [Released from Ice are brook and river 
 
 By the quickening glance of the gracious spring.] 
 
 [May smiles in glee 
 
 The woods are free 
 
 From ice to branches clinging; 
 
 The last snow yields. 
 
 In fresh green fields 
 
 The birds are gaily singing.] 
 
 All these, once again, are external changes, con- 
 ceived as causality — the more effective and the more 
 expressive, the stronger the contrasts that connect 
 them. In this passage, however, as it ever is in poetry, 
 the internal, the animate, is revealed in utterance like 
 "holden, belebenden Blick" "Es lacht der Mai" "Lust- 
 gesdnge" and "Vom Eise befreit." Grand and sublime 
 poetical passages frequently owe their beauty to the 
 manifest disproportion between cause and effect, 
 wherein a trifling external cause produces some tre- 
 mendous effect, which vividly illuminates and sets in 
 
40 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 relief the power and might of the author and origina- 
 tor. To this class belongs pre-eminently that cele- 
 brated passage of the Bible: "And God said, Let 
 there be light: and there was light." 
 
 The simple word is here the cause. Haydn has 
 musically interpreted the last word of this passage by 
 an endless strain of widely diverging accords, illus- 
 trating the immensity of the effect in contrast with the 
 simple motive word of command. Handel has ex- 
 pressed the opposite effect in his wonderful work "Is- 
 rael in Egypt" : "And he commanded the sea. And 
 the sea became dry," by introducing the command as 
 overpowering and omnipotent, whilst representing the 
 effect pianissimo — the sea humbly obeying. Both com- 
 posers strove to express the same by opposite methods. 
 Haydn depicts the majesty of the Creator by the great- 
 ness of the effect; Handel, by the audible diminution 
 of the effect, which, nevertheless, is conceived as great. 
 
 Here belongs also that sublime passage of Homer, 
 in which Zeus, by the mere movement of his dark eye- 
 brows, and by a nod of the head, causes great Olym- 
 pus to tremble — a passage, the beauties of which three 
 Roman poets have imitated : — 
 
 Horace: Cuncta supercilio moventis. 
 
 Virgil: Annult et totum nutu tremefecit Olympum. 
 
 Ovid: ConcuBsit terque quaterque 
 
 Caesarem cum qua terras, mare, sidera movlt. 
 
 Here, in order that the soul may vividly apprehend the 
 overpowering might of the Thunderer, a mechanical 
 effect is to be assumed throughout, — the effect of ex- 
 ternal upon external. Of course, I do not deny that 
 in the humbly obeying sea we may also assume an 
 ethical effect, and, at the same time, a mythological 
 
THE LOGOS THEOKT 
 
 41 
 
 form of expression. Here is portrayed the living God, 
 who has created all things, whose voice, therefore, is 
 listened to with trembling and awe, and is forthwith 
 obeyed by every created being. 
 
 Planting 
 
 TArttKing 
 
 Grinding 
 
 What the Logos is, how many contradictions it 
 must reconcile in order to become what its name pur- 
 ports, may be seen generally from 
 my work. The independence of our 
 percepts, due to their having assumed 
 in the mind definite lines of demarca- 
 tion, and to their having been placed 
 at the disposal of the intellect, so that 
 they can be summoned forth at any 
 time by the word and the general con- 
 cept — such is the highest achievement 
 of the Logos. With this performance, 
 the Logos entered into existence. This 
 character of combining and distinguish- 
 ing, it still preserves in all its functions, 
 as from the beginning so to the present 
 EMHg ) (Jay, when infinitely complicated mental 
 operations are performed with instinc- 
 tive certainty and lightning rapidity, so 
 that it seems almost impossible to fol- 
 low the course of the individual threads. 
 For the sake of greater clearness I shall 
 attempt to show, by means of the ac- 
 companying cut, what elements of 
 thought of a simpler order, and likewise concepts, may 
 be contained in a single concept, and how through the 
 reciprocal interaction of these concepts and of the per- 
 
 Batting 
 
 Preservation 
 
 Li/f. Ill 
 
42 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 cepts which they control, a concatenation of ideas con- 
 verges in that concept, and likewise again radiates 
 from it. The concept Bread is chosen. In our cut 
 the concept is developed genetically toward the top, 
 and teleologically towards the bottom. Proceeding 
 from the top and bottom, respectively, the concept be- 
 comes ever more special, that is, it includes more defi- 
 nitions. Starting from the middle, it passes into ever 
 more general concepts, which by reason of their more 
 general character can all be predicated of the notion 
 Bread, or be referred to it. 
 
 By an illustration of this kind it can be graphically 
 shown, how ideas can assume for man the part of 
 things real ; how man has acquired the power of bring- 
 ing together in his representative faculty the most re- 
 mote objects, and how he has thereby been enabled to 
 accomplish the great miracles of human industry and 
 commerce. But all this would be utterly inconceiva- 
 ble without concepts, which impart to percepts their 
 unity and self-dependence, and bring about and mul- 
 tiply their rational connection. Hence, also, no animal 
 can ever advance a single step beyond present percep- 
 tive representation, can never escape from the con- 
 straint which Nature has put about the narrow sphere 
 of its wants. Unfortunately, however, in apparent 
 contravention of this rule, ants to the present day 
 carry on a regular and methodical species of agricul- 
 ture, keep live-stock and domestics, like we! Nay, 
 they have even been caught in conversations and so- 
 cial entertainments of a full quarter of an hour's 
 duration — Heaven save the mark ! 
 
THE LOGOS THEOEY 43 
 
 The perception of causality subsisting between 
 things! Verily, this constitutes such a simple, plain, 
 and at the same time obvious and convincing means of 
 distinguishing the Logos, human reason, from animal 
 intelligence, that it seems inconceivable that this man- 
 ifest and clear boundary-line should not long ago have 
 been noted, and established as such. That this caus- 
 ality could be grasped by the mind, one of the two 
 causal members must at the start have necessarily ex- 
 isted as a percept or representation only, and its con- 
 nection with the others been effected by thinking, that 
 is by means of the concept. In "dug here" the pres- 
 ent aspect of the phenomenon refers to a past activity 
 as cause; in "thing for digging" reference is made to 
 a future activity as aim. In both cases two represen- 
 tations or percepts must be simultaneously present — 
 one of which, accordingly, can only be present by 
 representation; but this can be attained only through 
 the concept, the word. Therefore, man only, and the 
 animal never, will be found in the possession of tools. 
 
 The acts of a cognising man, through the percepts 
 that illuminate consciousness, seem to be connected 
 with one another, that is, governed by inner necessity. 
 
 Yet who could remain blind to the truth, that the 
 percepts connected with the will are the most natural 
 and most primitive of all ; that practical thinking, if I 
 may use this expression, or, thinking guided by in- 
 terest and founded on the subjective basis of will, 
 must alone be placed at the beginning of this develop- 
 ment, seeing that even today it forms the life-interest 
 of the majority of men? The emancipation of our 
 
44 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 thought from our desires and wants constitutes every 
 advance towards theoretical knowledge, and it cer- 
 tainly follows thence, that originally thought was 
 wholly coalesced with will ; that percepts, accordingly, 
 in the consciousness of primitive men, were not ar- 
 ranged in any causal, genetic, or intellectual connection, 
 but simply in the order in which through instinctive 
 impulses and emotion they had entered their various 
 incidental or natural connections. The will for a long 
 time remained absolute autocrat; all speech aimed at 
 practical efifects, sympathetical agreement, and incita- 
 tion to common action. From the earliest, instinctive 
 utterances of will, which, in the shape of sounds sim- 
 ultaneously uttered, encouraged men to perform the 
 primitive acts of digging, plaiting, etc., up to the kind- 
 ling eloquence of the popular orator who fired the souls 
 of his audience with martial enthusiasm, by his vivid 
 picture of desecrated graves and temples, of cities laid 
 waste, of women and children dragged away into cap- 
 tivity — throughout the same law unceasingly operates, 
 the action of will upon will through the sympathetic 
 frame of mind and its attendant percepts. Everywhere 
 we find imitation, everywhere will, everywhere activ- 
 ity. And for this reason my theory, which erects upon 
 this basis all that exists, has justly received the name 
 of the Sympathy Theory. 
 
 We see the active causality of our will produce 
 efifects, and, as it were in a dream, create forms, which 
 upon being taken up by the senses (passive causality), 
 are converted into percepts, to enter again our con- 
 sciousness as the reflected activity of volition. This, 
 however, is not a succession, although it may appear 
 
THE LOGOS THEORY 45 
 
 to US as such, but actual simultaneousness, unity, the 
 essence of causality and reason. One of the most im- 
 portant aspects of my theory is therefore aptly ex- 
 pressed by the designation Causality Theory. 
 
 But the most important element is still lacking — 
 the free, regular, and well-arranged combination of the " 
 percepts, as guided and irradiated by the light of cog- 
 nition, in a word, the Logos. For, despite the unity 
 of causality in the cases hitherto considered, the per- 
 cept still strongly clings to the will, to sensation, and 
 direct sensory intuition. To release it (the percept) 
 from this bondage of coarse, empirical reality, to ele- 
 vate it irrevocably into the ideal sphere in which with 
 perfect mental freedom it can enter innumerable other 
 combinations — to achieve this miracle, causality must 
 emancipate itself, and become a powerful and ever 
 ready instrument of the human mind. 
 
 Causality gained freedom solely through the rise 
 of concepts and words. The oldest words, dig, plait, 
 bind, separate, have no other content than that of 
 causal relation — the connection of two sensually per- 
 ceptible percepts that constitute their causal members, 
 the Logos. 
 
 The causal relation implied in all concepts and 
 words, that is their verbal fluidity, which has its true 
 basis in its derivation from activity, taken together 
 with the substantiality of the percepts themselves, ren- 
 ders possible their union and junction with one an- 
 other. In this manner words and concepts are brought 
 together and unified in the human judgment, and with 
 this we have reached abstract thought, and its ulti- 
 mate principle, the "ground of cognition," represent- 
 
46 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 ing the second class in the Schopenhauerian distribu- 
 tion. But all judgments, of whatever kind they may 
 be, have as their final condition merely intuitive per- 
 cepts, from which they proceed, to which they rede- 
 scend from their abstract altitude, and with reference 
 to which, perforce, they must find their application. 
 The union of percepts with percepts, of concepts 
 with concepts, of judgments with judgments consti- 
 tutes, accordingly, the essential character of thought. 
 But all this is Logos, and, consequently, my theory of 
 language is most fittingly and properly designated the 
 Logos Theory. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF REASON. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF REASON.^ 
 
 If I were to tell a man who had never seen ice and 
 was wondering what had happened to a lake in winter, 
 "The water is frozen," this would be an explanation. 
 This explanation contains two elements, viz. : 
 
 (1) A sound, which certainly cannot contribute 
 in the least to the explication of the matter. 
 
 (2) A concept, which in its accurate acceptance 
 likewise implies no more than the phenomenon itself, 
 as present before us and as received by us. 
 
 Why is this simple statement then accepted as 
 satisfactory? Here is a difficult question, and it may 
 not be answered without a consideration of the nature 
 and origin of reason. Locke has dealt with the prob- 
 lem and deduced from it the uncertainty and mere 
 seemingness of most human knowledge. 
 
 The distinctive feature of my answer to the man 
 is that the phenomenon is generalized by the concept 
 "frozen" or, more correctly, included under a general 
 definition. 
 
 Concepts are generalizations, and it is these gen- 
 eralized concepts that constitute the substance of 
 human knowledge. 
 
 'Translated from the German by T. J. McCormack. 
 
50 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 When it is real cold, all living creatures feel it. 
 But only the human being can say: "I am cold." A 
 man can say this on a hot summer's day, he can think 
 it, even when not affected by it. Why? Because he 
 possesses general concepts. 
 
 And how has he come to possess them? This is 
 the most perplexing of the questions that touch hu- 
 manity, for it touches the origin of reason, and reason 
 is man. 
 
 If I should say, "Man thinks because he speaks; 
 he has general concepts because he has words," I know 
 that nine-tenths of my readers would shake their 
 heads and say : "No. Man speaks because he thinks." 
 All great truths are known first as paradoxes, and a 
 long time elapses before people become accustomed to 
 them, before they leave the old way of thinking and 
 accommodate themselves to the new. How long it 
 was before men would distrust their eyes, and believe 
 that it was the earth that revolved and not the sun ! 
 
 Words are the fixed points which define the limits 
 of the concepts they have brought into existence. 
 Without words there would be only fleeting, shadowy 
 and disorderly impressions. An idea has never existed 
 in man without its material counter part, the word. 
 And yet I do not say that with every word as a sound 
 there must be an accompanying idea. Parrots imitate 
 our words, yet produce only sounds ; to them they are 
 sounds and nothing else, just as the words of an un- 
 known tongue are mere sounds to us. The sound is 
 
THE ORIGIN OF REASON 51 
 
 dead, the word is alive and the life of a word is in 
 the idea. 
 
 The great problem is, how ideas are united with 
 sounds and thus made alive. This question has en- 
 gaged the attention of philosophers of all ages, while 
 great acumen and imaginative talent have been exer- 
 cised in its solution. System upon system arose 
 wherein fancy and imagination were given full scope, 
 and I firmly believe there is no topic upon which so 
 great a variety of opinions has been expressed and 
 so many treatises written as upon the origin of lan- 
 guage. It was intuitively felt that this was the point 
 to place the lever, and that, if their efforts to move 
 the rock which buried the secret would be successful, 
 a fountain of everlasting and living truth would leap 
 forth to clarify the province of human thought and 
 human activity. 
 
 Yet, to reach this point, the flights of fancy were 
 first to be restrained. This was accomplished by com- 
 parative philology. Its cardinal and motive principle 
 was : There is a methodical, a scientific line of inves- 
 tigation which will lead to this secret and its elucida- 
 tion. Critical thought and not dogmatic doctrine must 
 guide us here, and careful investigations of empirical 
 facts are to form the basis of all our conclusions. 
 Whatever the ultimate result of our efforts may be, 
 it is not permissible to determine it beforehand and 
 employ it hypothetically, be its merits what they may. 
 Modern science has materially modified the ideas of 
 former times. The interest which, from the time of 
 
52 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 Plato to the eighteenth century, fettered philosophical 
 thought to such topics as these, has been displaced by 
 new interests of a totally different character. How- 
 radical these changes have been needs no better illus- 
 tration than the fact that the Societe de Linguistique 
 in Paris, ranking among its members the foremost 
 philologists of France, declares in one of the best 
 clauses of its constitution, "it will accept no manner 
 of contribution relating to the origin of language or 
 the construction of a universal tongue."^ 
 
 Thereafter imaginative works ceased to figure in 
 this realm. This was necessary and beneficent if we 
 consider what they had achieved. Yet philosophy, 
 too, was banished from the province of philological 
 investigation — a province in which philosophy is 
 ordained to act a vital part — and this was unwise. 
 
 For what else is philosophy than the discovering 
 of comprehensive and general points of view in all 
 sciences? It is not the empirical material gathered 
 together; it is the wonderful power of thought that 
 has raised Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton to 
 the rank of heroes in Natural Science. 
 
 With that interdict the question of the origin of 
 language was banished from its natural and true 
 sphere. The question was occasionally touched upon 
 by the physiological and evolutionary theories of 
 Helmholtz, Darwin, Broca and Kussmaul, and at 
 times was discussed in the empty phraseology of a 
 degenerate pseudo-philosophy. 
 
 ^Max Mflller, In a lecture delivered before the University of 
 Cambridge, May 28, 1868. 
 
THE OEIGIN OF REASON 53 
 
 It would have been, in my estimation, more worthy 
 of a philogical society that included the master-minds 
 of science to have said : "No philosophy has the right 
 to advance an opinion upon the origin of reason, the 
 nature of thought — its highest problems — without 
 having first recognized and taken cognizance of the 
 results of comparative philology; for language is the 
 body of thought and both came into being together." 
 Instead of this, the society divorced philosophy from 
 philology, and said: "Look about thee for another 
 source of information on the origin of language ; there 
 is nothing known of it here and we shall not trouble 
 ourselves further about subjects that lie beyond our 
 jurisdiction." Thus disowned, philosophy asked: "At 
 least tell me of the nature of human speech and 
 wherein it differs from that of animals, with which it 
 is so commonly compared. I must have some prin- 
 ciple to guide me in my speculative peregrinations." 
 No information on that point either; that's not within 
 our province. Thou shalt find what thou want'st in 
 Brehm's Animal Life; he has drawn up the complete 
 vocabulary of a singularly clever parrot. That will 
 show thee how far the linguistic power of an animal 
 goes." Thus the philologists said; and no less a con- 
 siderable man than Friedrich Miiller takes compassion- 
 ate leave in these words : "The difference between the 
 language of man and that of brute creation is quanti- 
 tative and not qualitative." 
 
 This certainly simplifies the matter greatly, for it 
 thus becomes a question of mere calculation. Brehm's 
 
54 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 "singularly clever" parrot, that Mezzofanti of brute 
 creation, could use in the neighborhood of 150 words 
 with intelligent discrimination; on the other hand, the 
 total vocabulary of English miners in certain districts 
 counts but 300. It is now plain how many words the 
 parrot will have to learn to arrive at that stage of 
 intelligence the English miner has attained and thus 
 be able to verify his claim to universal suffrage. It 
 would be a great step forward for all parrots, and they 
 could at once politely request that the nonsensical 
 prattlers of their human kindred should not be honored 
 with their name. 
 
 But levity aside. In order that the reader may 
 profit by this discussion, I propose to specify an 
 infallible criterion wihch will, in every case, enable 
 him to avoid confusion when oracular wisdom speaks 
 of the identity or analogy of human and animal speech. 
 
 One hundred years ago (1781) a plain and simple 
 man, Immanuel Kant, gave the world a commonplace 
 looking book. It was printed on gray paper, was highly 
 inaccurate and bore the strange title. Critique of Pure 
 Reason. This book had manifold and important conse- 
 quences, which cannot be enumerated here. One of 
 them which is perhaps best known Is that Berlin, after 
 Hegel, derived from this book its name the "City of 
 Pure Reason." 
 
 We may read to-day in the aforesaid book (Johann 
 Friedrich Hartknoch published it at Riga) all manner 
 of strange and useful things, as, for example: That 
 the whole business of the human reason is with repre- 
 
THE ORIGIN OF REASON 55 
 
 sentations (not with mere sensations), and that these 
 representations, arranged, co-ordinated and moulded 
 by concepts, become objects which are the only true 
 content of all our rational thinking, and that our 
 thought therefore assumes an objective character 
 throughout. And it follows thence that if we deviate 
 from the paths of empirical cognition, we shall lose 
 ourselves in hallucinations, extravagances and in the 
 mazes of a cognitive activity that has overstepped its 
 true limits. 
 
 Representations and objects then which are given 
 by the senses, but are moulded and formed by reason 
 and stamped by concepts ! Now we may reveal to the 
 reader the promised secret. It is this: Every word 
 in human speech had, originally, reference to an object 
 which was signified by a word, and words have, at the 
 very start, first received meaning and intelligibility 
 from those representations. 
 
 Let us return to the example given at the start. 
 "The water is frozen" and "I am freezing." Should 
 the question be 'put to the reader how the concept and 
 word "freezing" have arisen, the chances are a thou- 
 sand to one that he will launch into one of the current 
 theories as to the origin of language and answer, "From 
 a sensation, of course !" Freezing, shivering and chat- 
 tering with the teeth was the original symptom. You 
 can hear it plainly in the word freeze, frost, frigus, 
 froid! What a chill runs over one when it is men- 
 tioned! It stands to reason that people should per- 
 sonify other things, such as plants and water, and say 
 
56 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 of them, they freeze, they are frozen. Is not man the 
 "measure of all things" according to Protagoras, and 
 does not man imprint his own being on every other 
 existing thing? 
 
 And yet, how so easy, natural and reasonable this 
 all sounds, it is positively wrong. According to the 
 revelations of Kant, it is not possible that the sensation 
 of freezing has become a concept and a word otherwise 
 than through the long and round-about way of repre- 
 sentations of external objects and thus frozen (frigus, 
 piyos, piye'o) ) water must have found a lingual or (what 
 is the same thing) a rational designation long before ; 
 and without such designation or an analogous form of 
 concept the sensation could never have found expres- 
 sion or association whatever. 
 
 This follows unavoidably from the doctrine of 
 Kant. And strange! Comparative philology, without 
 knowing or dreaming of Kant, has fully established 
 this origin and natural growth of concepts after its 
 own fashion and by its own empirical methods. 
 
 Yet, instead of being converted by this great and 
 marvelous coincidence to the belief of the great genius 
 that had divined these results with prophetic glance, 
 it still continues to reject the aid of philosophy, even 
 in those depths where empiricism cannot penetrate, 
 and places its sole dependence upon instruments that 
 the hard and rocky soil defies. Far from following the 
 path of science, it seems to have devoted itself to 
 fumbling and groping about in regions of darkness, 
 whence only the light of philosophy can be its guide 
 
THE ORIGIN OF REASON 57 
 
 and illuminate its path to further empiric investigation. 
 Thus it is that comparative philology has yet to 
 learn from Kant, if it will ever keep in view the true 
 purpose of its mission, "the history of the human 
 mind." 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. 
 
DARWIN AND MAX MULLER. 
 
 The idea of cosmic evolution, in my opinion the 
 greatest conception ever formed by the human intellect, 
 is at the present day stirring and agitating the minds of 
 all. The name of Darwin suggests the idea of mighty 
 opposing forces, and the passionate controversy which 
 inflames the minds of men spreads from the sphere of 
 science down to the regions of daily talk, and is fought 
 out in a gigantic ever-growing mass of popular litera- 
 ture. Just as formerly there used to be no department 
 of science that did not at some point or other come in 
 collision with religious tradition and ecclesiastical or- 
 thodoxy, so that a clear understanding with and eman- 
 cipation from these powers became the first condition 
 of life and action to the awakening sciences, so at the 
 present day there is no department of human knowl- 
 edge but is compelled to bring its own supreme and 
 ultimate problems into relation with the idea of evolu- 
 tion ; nay, even to regard itself as a mere branch of the 
 great tree whose roots are lost in the immeasurable 
 past, while its topmost shoots reach into the broad 
 bright space of heaven, and its blossoms give gay 
 promise of the fruit that is to ripen for later genera- 
 tions. This mighty tree is the science of Man. 
 
 [The following chapters were originally published in 1879, 
 by Longmans, Green and Co., London, under the title Max 
 MUller and the Philosophy of Language.] 
 
 \ 
 
62 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 It is only by the study of its own past that the 
 human mind is enabled to solve the great riddle, and 
 attain a clearer understanding of itself and its place in 
 the universe, and at the same time to acquire a guiding 
 star, a compass in the dark kingdom of futurity, which 
 will preserve it from the vain wanderings and useless 
 expenditure of force so frequent and fatal in the past. 
 With a clear consciousness of the aim and a firmer 
 grasp of the means, the future development of the 
 human race will leave all previous attainments far 
 behind. Indeed, it is hardly too much to affirm that 
 the course of a few more centuries will enable our 
 race to look back upon this enlightened, cultivated 
 and refined nineteenth century of ours as a period of 
 barbarism and ignorance. 
 
 The idea of development, as has often .been re- 
 marked, is by no means a novel one. Its germs may 
 be traced back to that chosen people whose enlightened 
 glance first sought to trace the presiding influence of 
 reason in creation, back to the earliest Greek philoso- 
 phers ; among whom notably the deep-souled Heraklei- 
 tos, 'the Obscure,' conceived the world as an eternal 
 Becoming, with upward striving and downward fall 
 (this is how I understand ^ 68os ava Karot) : 2,400 
 years before Schopenhauer and Darwin, he proclaimed 
 their most characteristic doctrine in their own words: 
 'Hpa/cAeiTos iJ,tv yap avTiKpv's mXeiiov ovoiiA^ei waripa Kai 
 PaaiXia koi Kvpiov irdvTbiv. Hate and Strife lead to 
 generation, all being proceeds from discord, the 
 Struggle for existence rules the world and is its vital 
 principle; the iKirvptacni, or reconversion into the 
 primitive element of fire, alone promises concord and 
 peace, like the "negation of the will' or the Nirvana of 
 
DAKWIN AND MAX MULLER 63 
 
 Schopenhauer and the Buddhists. Like Schopenhauer 
 and Darwin, he failed to recognise the presence, beside 
 and above the hatred which breeds divisions and strife, 
 of the other great universal principle, almighty Love, 
 source of each new perfection, uniting and combining 
 all things, suffering and enduring, pardoning and aton- 
 ing, devoting and sacrificing all — even life itself. 
 
 In the classical literature of Germany, the idea of 
 development presents itself from time to time with 
 more or less clearness and conscious precision. In his 
 lectures upon empirical anthropology Kant did not 
 hesitate to assume as self-evident the descent of man 
 from beings of inferior grade, i.e. from the lower ani- 
 mals. The mind of Lessing, impregnated as it was 
 with the ideas of Spinoza, could not possibly pursue 
 any course which was inconsistent with the education 
 of the human race, by natural means and forces, into 
 steadily developing enlightenment and independence. 
 Herder's 'Thoughts on the Philosophy of History' are 
 simply a sketch of the development of the human race 
 towards a gradually progressive perfection. He, too, 
 bestows penetrating and, so far as the then state of 
 empirical science allowed, comparative consideration 
 upon the physical difference between man and animals, 
 though he lays much more stress — and in this many 
 modern Darwinians might take a lesson from him — 
 upon the inner principle, the mental development, 
 which is after all the chief thing, though, strange to 
 say, it is almost entirely ignored, or only incidentally 
 mentioned, by the modern school of evolutionists. 
 
 The question has been vigorously debated, whether 
 Goethe can be claimed as a supporter of the Darwinian 
 theory of descent, whether he is to be quoted, as by 
 
64 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 Haeckel, as one of the founders of the doctrine, or 
 regarded, on the contrary, as an adherent of the theory 
 of types. I must confess the controversy seems to me 
 an idle one. The juvenile enthusiasm which took pos- 
 session of the octogenarian poet when he heard how 
 the French Academy had listened with lively sympathy 
 and interest to the controversy between Cuvier and 
 Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, while the political storms of 
 the July Revolution were raging outside their walls, 
 this very enthusiasm itself shows that the question for 
 him lay not merely between one scientific theory and 
 another, but between the victory or defeat of a whole 
 system, namely, of a view of the universe, in which 
 mind as well as matter was allowed its place. This 
 may sound paradoxical when Darwinism is the subject 
 of discussion, but it will only do so to the thoughtless 
 majority who make no distinction between materialism 
 and monism, which are as far apart as the poles. To 
 show that this was the case, I will quote Goethe's own 
 significant expressions, together with Lazarus Geiger's 
 comments upon them :^ — 
 
 'When the July Revolution broke out, and the faithful 
 Eckermann found his master in a lively state of excitement 
 about the great events which were taking place in Paris, he 
 began to talk about the errors of the fallen ministry; upon 
 which Goethe replied: "We don't seem to understand each 
 other; I have nothing to say about those people, my concern 
 is about a very different matter. I am speaking of the con- 
 troversy, of such supreme scientific importance, between 
 Cuvier and Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, which has at last broken 
 out openly in the Academy. From henceforward, in France 
 as elsewhere, natural science will recognise the supremacy 
 of mind over matter; the great maxims of creation will 
 
 »Z«r EntioichelungsgeacMcMe der Menechheit, p. 114. 
 
DARWIN AND MAX MULLER 65 
 
 reveal themselves, and we shall penetrate the mysteries of the 
 divine laboratory. This event is incredibly precious to me, 
 and I have a right to rejoice that I am alive to witness the 
 victory won at last by the cause to which my life has been 
 devoted, and which I have made peculiarly my own " The 
 idea of which Goethe already witnessed the victory in the 
 spirit, of which he hailed the proclamation by Geoflfroy de 
 St. Hilaire, — the idea of cosmic evolution, — will, I doubt not, 
 do as much for the world's freedom as any other great world- 
 historical thought of the past. For sooner or later we shall 
 learn from it what man may expect and demand from him- 
 self, from humanity and from nature.' 
 
 Anyone who, like Schiller, makes the specific char- 
 acter of mankind to consist in freedom, and like him 
 regards liberty and authority as the two great subjects 
 of human interest,^ is necessarily compelled to reject 
 the notion that the human will is guided or influenced 
 by any superhuman, or extra-human will, however 
 exalted, noble, and pure the conception of it may be. 
 The fact that man is his own creator is alone able to 
 lend value, dignity, and elevation to his being: the 
 abundant powers which have procured him supremacy 
 over the rest of the planet interest us alone if they are 
 the product of his own efforts, not if they are merely 
 cast into his lap by fortune ; and in no other light can 
 we regard any higher being to whose favour man may 
 be assumed to owe his precedence. The true kernel 
 and substance of universal history in Schiller's eyes 
 was the image of the human race wrestling its way to 
 an ever higher level of liberty, force and morality. 
 In this sense was the sketch conceived of that Jena 
 Inaugural address of which Carlyle has said: 'There 
 has perhaps never been in Europe another course of 
 
 "Frelheit und Herrschaft, der Menschheit gross Gegenstdnde.' 
 
66 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 history sketched on principles so magnificent and philo- 
 sophical.' After he had carried the picture of primseval 
 savagery back to its remotest stage, and contrasted 
 with it the glittering image of contemporary culture, 
 he says in conclusion :^- 
 
 'What opposite pictures 1 Who would suspect the refined 
 European of the eighteenth century of being a brother — 
 a few more steps advanced — of the modern Canadian, or 
 the ancient Celt. All these powers and experiences, these 
 aesthetic impulses, these creations of reason, have been 
 implanted and developed in man during the progress of 
 a few centuries; all of these wonders of art, these colossal 
 triumphs of industry, have all been educed from this begin- 
 ning. What roused those to life, what lured these into 
 being? What conditions had the human race to pass through 
 between the two extreme points : how did man, the unsociable 
 troglodyte, develop into the intelligent thinker, the culti- 
 vated man of the world? This is the question to which 
 Universal History supplies the answer.' 
 
 The few centuries of which Schiller speaks in this 
 passage are no longer enough for the historian of 
 mankind. Pre-historic science allows us to glance into 
 a vast abysmal past, for which the measures of former 
 chronology are as inadequate as a mundane foot-rule 
 for the distances of Sirius. The further we recede 
 into obscurity, the slower naturally we must expect to 
 find the course of progress. There was a time when 
 men did not know the use of fire, when they were 
 destitute of the very simplest instruments such as we 
 can now hardly dissever from the conception of hu- 
 manity ; and yet even then man was already himself — 
 for man had the gift of speech. 
 
 It seems, then, that, with the exception of one 
 short luminous period, the actual realm of human 
 
DARWIJJ AND MAX MULLEE 67 
 
 history is enveloped in profound obscurity : an imrneas- 
 urable past, replete with riddles and mystery, for the 
 interpretation of which only a few dumb witnesses 
 spring from the bosom of earth, forces itself upon the 
 mind of the enquirer as a problem only to be worked 
 out with difficulty and by slow degrees. What then, 
 we may well ask, is the need, where the sense of 
 venturing rashly beyond these distant borders, and 
 seeking to discover connecting links common to human 
 kind with other beings (in whom the characteristic of 
 humanity — reason — is wanting), in order that man 
 may be brought into genealogical relationship with the 
 latter? And yet this is the question which does most 
 to stimulate our curiosity, and the consideration of 
 this question — which for us is the supreme one, since 
 it concerns the genesis of man — is not to be evaded; 
 however often we may set it aside as presumptuous 
 and unanswerable, so often it will present itself anew, 
 and refuse to be silenced till the ghost of the problem 
 is laid by its solution. 
 
 The ideas of Lamarck and Darwin are founded 
 upon a comparison of the innumerable organic forms 
 which cover the surface of our globe, and possess, in 
 spite of almost infinite variation, a kind of internal 
 coherence or similarity of nature which it is impossible 
 to deny. Schiller says of the savage tribes whose cus- 
 toms and mode of life were brought to the knowledge 
 of Europe by modern voyages of discovery : — 
 
 'We see nations in the most various stages of civilisation 
 encamped around us, like children of different ages clustered 
 round a grown-up person, who remind him by their example 
 of what he once was himself, and of the point from which he 
 started. A wise hand seems to have spared these tribes until 
 
68 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHT OF LANGUAGE 
 
 the exact moment when our own culture has made sufficient 
 progress to allow of our making a useful application of the 
 discovery to ourselves, and by the help of this mirror restoring 
 the lost beginnings of our race.' 
 
 What Schiller here maintains to be possible and de- 
 sirable within the limits of the specific notion of 
 humanity — namely, to explain and interpret the pres- 
 ent as a vast development of the past — is extended by 
 Darwinism so as to include man as the last link of a 
 much greater, almost invisibly prolonged, chain of de- 
 velopment, of which the first link would have to be 
 sought in the most rudimentary form of animal life, 
 the, to all appearance, formless and structureless Amoe- 
 bae. What Schiller says of primitive, wholly uncivilised 
 races, is applied by the theory of descent to the count- 
 less forms of the animal kingdom; these answer to 
 the real infancy of our race, the chrysalis state, the 
 stages which it had to pass through before it could 
 attain to human culture and thereby to its present 
 height of development. A brilliant Frenchman spoke 
 of a posterite contemporaine, referring to the judgment 
 of foreigners upon the productions of domestic litera- 
 ture; and we might describe the manifold forms of 
 animal life as an antiquite contemporaine, since Nature 
 herself seems to have preserved in them an image of 
 our own original embryonic state, and to have spread 
 out before us innumerable copies of it only to encour- 
 age reflective comparison and earnest meditation on 
 our origin. 
 
 While acknowledging ungrudgingly the high scien- 
 tific value of Darwinism, the philosophic thinker has 
 no right to close his eyes to its foibles, its incomplete- 
 
DARWIN AND MAX MDLLEK 69 
 
 ness and its one-sidedness ; and it should also be 
 expressly and emphatically distinguished from the 
 Monistic doctrine of development. 
 
 Praise has often, and rightly, been bestowed upon 
 the calm caution of Darwin's proceedings, who, like a 
 true naturalist, only began to draw his conclusions 
 after he had collected together an imposing mass of 
 materials, based upon observations carefully sifted and 
 verified. And it seems to me that we may fairly expect 
 the gallant band of naturalists who fight under his ban- 
 ner to accept all the obligations imposed by their own 
 motto, Natura non facit saltus. As it serves for the 
 Alpha and Oniega of their practical observations and 
 theoretic inferences ; as it is the tacit premise and the 
 avowed conclusion of all their labours, it ought also to 
 be rigidly respected in their whole procedure, and we 
 ought not to have to complain of rash guesses by which 
 things heretofore divided by immeasurable chasms and 
 abysses are brought together or deduced one from the 
 other. 
 
 The one-sidedness of contemporary Darwinism 
 consists mainly in its endeavour to refer everything to 
 external causes, while internal qualities, as it seems, 
 are ignored or undervalued. 
 
 To take an illustration: when it is observed that 
 white foxes are to be met with mostly in the Polar 
 regions, the phenomenon admits of an obvious expla- 
 nation upon Darwinian principles. The white colour 
 is an example of protective mimicry; the animal es- 
 capes the pursuit of its natural enemies more easily 
 when it is the colour of the surrounding snow ; and if 
 we assume the same conditions to continue unchanged 
 for a sufficient time, it is easy to imagine how foxes of 
 
70 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 every other colour might die out and the white alone 
 survive. In this case external circumstances alone are 
 considered; for the gradual protective adaptation to 
 the conditions given is simply the result of a selection 
 accomplished under the compulsion of these same 
 conditions. The will, the inner disposition of the ani- 
 mal itself, need not be taken into consideration at all. 
 Here, accordingly, Darwinism is within its rights, 
 though, if we are to be perfectly candid, it must be 
 confessed that the word used to explain the fact — 
 that is to say, heredity — is itself an unsolved mystery, 
 or a mere word of which the meaning is still to be 
 sought. 
 
 But the case is altogether different when the animal 
 escapes from the dangers which threaten it on all sides 
 by the development of appropriate mental qualities, to 
 borrow human expressions, such as caution or cunning, 
 or by the increasing delicacy of its sense-perceptions, 
 or whatsoever else, when this development is the result 
 of continuous practice in encountering and avoiding 
 those dangers : for here we have to do with a conjoint 
 physical and psychic progress, effected by the will, or 
 individual effort, by the energetic impulse of self-asser- 
 tion and self-preservation, which in the course of gen- 
 erations rises to astounding heights. 
 
 Is not the first result like a gift of chance, or the 
 lucky number of a lottery, while the latter may be 
 compared with the wealth acquired by painful indus- 
 try? Those who refer only to external, purely me- 
 chanical causes, when dealing with cases of the latter 
 kind, have hardly understood, let alone mastered, the 
 
DARWIN AND MAX MULLER 71 
 
 great problem of the doctrine of development, and 
 they have certainly no right to a voice in matters of 
 philosophy. 
 
 The heretical assumption that mind and conscious- 
 ness can be traced back to material forms, and the 
 consequent confusion of the external and internal 
 qualities of things, have hindered Darwinism from 
 entering on a serious philosophic examination of its 
 true principles and speculative premises; this want 
 of critical reserve has made itself fatally visible in the 
 rash inferences and thoughtless disregard of real dis- 
 crepancies which characterise their attempts to com- 
 pare and connect things radically heterogeneous in 
 their nature and circumstances. 
 
 If the whole animated world is to be derived from 
 an organised cell, and yet the assumption only slipped 
 in, as it were by the way, with a cavalier 'Accordez- 
 nous seulement ce petit bout, nous en deduirons le 
 reste,' the proceeding betrays as complete and naive 
 ignorance of the magnitude and difficulty as well as of 
 the real gist of the problem, as that of Sir William 
 Thomson and his disciple Helmholtz, who would have 
 the germs of organic life imported by meteorites from 
 distant worlds, or that of Haeckel, who suspects car- 
 bon itself to be the actuial vehicle of life: the latter, 
 indeed, a very instructive illustration of modem myth- 
 making — nomina^numina. 
 
 Is it really so hard to understand the impossibility 
 of finding the starting-point for a theory of the 
 universe in matter, the conception of which is only the 
 secondary element of our knowledge, while the im- 
 mediate element of certainty is given by consciousness, 
 feeling, will ? 
 
72 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 It is time to recognise the truth that, when a chem- 
 ist shows us how oxygen and hydrogen, acids and 
 alkaHes, rush into combination, he is only, exhibiting 
 a process which remains absolutely unintelligible to 
 us as long as we regard it from a merely mechanical 
 point of view, whilst it becomes plain and simple as 
 soon as we compare it with analogous processes in 
 ourselves, e.g. with the functions of respiration or 
 nutrition, since the mental qualities, the feeling, im- 
 pulse, or will, which we associate with those processes, 
 are what we are best acquainted with in ourselves. 
 
 Still more grave is the error or self-deception of 
 the Darwinians who attempt to explain the nature of 
 man, the eternal riddle of the Sphinx, the great mys- 
 tery of the universe, partly by external, i.e. negative, 
 causes, partly out of mere corporeal factors. 'Love's 
 Labour's Lost,' or 'Much Ado about Nothing,' are the 
 comments that suggest themselves when we contem- 
 plate the ant-like industry of the anthropologists who 
 fill the world with their appeals, and imagine them- 
 selves to be on the verge of discoveries when they 
 have collected a few more cranial measurements or 
 statistics about blue and black eyes, and dark or fair 
 hair. The whole affair will be brought to an end by 
 its own excesses, and will only serve to raise a smile 
 when posterity looks back on the pitiful disproportion 
 between the means employed and the result aimed at. 
 
 Still less, however, can the gap which severs man 
 from other animals be bridged by ingenious physio- 
 logical terms, such as brachycephalous or makroce- 
 phalous, or arbitrary classifications, like homo alalus, 
 a compound which reminds us strongly of the tradi- 
 tional xylosideros, or 'wooden iron,' or even by the 
 
DARWIN AND MAX MULLEE 73 
 
 observation that the bodily structure of man is not 
 distinguished from that of beasts by any specific ana- 
 tomical mark. The latter argument indeed may be used 
 directly against the theory of Darwinism. For it' is 
 an obvious retort, that if the notorious superiority of 
 man is unattended by any marked bodily divergence 
 from the animal type, the superiority must have some 
 other cause; and this brings us round directly to the 
 assumption of some self-subsisting, substance inde- 
 pendent of the body, i.e. the human soul. 
 
 At this point it is necessary to notice the attitude 
 which Professor Max Miiller has taken up and hith- 
 erto maintained in relation to Darwinism. All those 
 who, with more or less skill and candor, have taken 
 up arms against the Darwinian theory, have put the 
 name of Max MuUer in the front rank as a crushing 
 argument, a mighty bulwark, entrenched behind which 
 they could discharge their own feeble shafts against 
 the great disturber of the public peace. And in this 
 they are not, from one point of view, much to blame, 
 for it is my firm conviction that Max Muller is the only 
 equal, not to say superior, antagonist, who has entered 
 the arena against Darwin. 
 
 'There is in man a something, I am not afraid to 
 call it for the present an occult quality, which distin- 
 guishes him from every animal without exception. We 
 call this something reason when we think of it as an 
 internal energy, and we call it language when we 
 perceive and grasp it as an external phenomenon. No 
 reason without speech, no speech without reason. Lan- 
 guage is the Rubicon which divides man from beast, 
 and no animal will ever cross it. I may express my 
 conviction that the science of language will yet enable 
 
74 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 US to withstand the extreme theories of the Darwini- 
 ans, and to draw a hard and fast line between man 
 and brute. Let the experiment be tried, and the most 
 intelligent of apes be reared and trained among men: 
 he will not speak, he will remain brutish; while the 
 rudest human waif from the most savage tribe will 
 promptly acquire from human intercourse this first 
 characteristic of humanity.' 
 
 With these weighty arguments our hero confronted 
 undauntedly all the onslaughts of irate Darwinians, 
 and concluded resolutely his defence of the seemingly 
 abandoned fortress. 
 
 'Here is reason, here language, here humanity. 
 None shall pass here; none penetrate into the sanc- 
 tuary who cannot tell me first how reason, how speech, 
 was born.' 
 
 And the shouting bands of the assailants were 
 struck dumb, for they could give no answer. 
 
MAX MULLER AND THE DOCTRINE OF 
 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 The principles of development as applied to language 
 have found no more determined advocate than Max 
 Miiller in his letter to Chevalier Bunsen 'On the Tu- 
 ranian Languages,' published in 1853, and in several 
 chapters of his lectures on the science of language. 
 But, as already intimated, I distinguish expressly be- 
 tween Darwinism and the monistic theory of develop- 
 ment. 
 
 In his otherwise admirably luminous and profound 
 'Lectures on Darwin' there is one vulnerable point, 
 namely, when he lays down the alternative: 'Either 
 Kant is in the right or Darwin ; one excludes the other.' 
 It is true that Kant regards reason as what is given 
 immediately, as the necessary, indisputable base of all 
 knowledge, so that it might naturally be inferred that 
 he admitted it to be an irreducible, special gift vouch- 
 safed to man by the divine influence. But in many 
 passages of his writings he lets it be clearly seen that 
 human reason has not existed from eternity, and there- 
 fore must be conceived as having arisen from natural 
 causes through the co-operation of natural forces. 
 When he lays down the distinction between 'receptive 
 sensation' and 'spontaneous thought,' according to 
 
76 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 which animal life and human reason appear to occupy 
 two distinct camps, on the one hand, as Schopenhauer 
 has pointed out, he took the matter too easily; while, 
 on the other, he expressly conceded that both sensa- 
 tion and thought, by the co-operation of which all 
 knowledge is effected, might after all prove to be 
 derived from a common root. 
 
 Still, the reference to Kant may be justified, espe- 
 cially in England, where the great discoveries made by 
 the author of the 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' continue 
 for the most part a terra incognita. The same, indeed, 
 may be said of many, if not of most of the German 
 representatives of Darwinism, who seem to know 
 about Kant only just what serves their own purpose; 
 e.g. the theory of the origin of the solar system, which 
 under the name of the La Place-Kantian cosmogony 
 is taught even in secondary schools. The important 
 fact is overlooked or ignored, that materialism, as long 
 as Kant was alive or the influence of his spirit active 
 among the teachers of philosophy, did not so much as 
 dare to open its mouth. 
 
 Reason, the peculiar gift of man, which marks him 
 off from every other being, is the source and starting- 
 point of all knowledge. So Kant affirms, and Max 
 Miiller coincides, only adding that reason and the gift 
 of speech are accorded to man at the same moment. 
 Ratio et oratio are one, they are related to each other 
 like body and mind, the otjter and the inner ; they are 
 distinguishable but not separable. Without speech 
 there can be no thought, as the Greeks felt when they 
 used the same word o Aoyos for both. Speech is there- 
 fore the most faithful mirror of the human mind; it 
 contains a wealth of wisdom in itself, and throws much 
 
THE DOCTBINB OF DEVELOPMENT 77 
 
 valuable light both upon the intellectual life of the 
 primitive world and upon the degrees of external cul- 
 ture reached by the race in a hoary antiquity of which 
 every other remaining trace has been obliterated. The 
 treasure chest is there, and the key to open it is com- 
 parative philology. No praises, no glorification of this 
 science can exaggerate its real importance. 
 
 'I make bold to say that during the last hundred, and 
 still more during the last fifty years. Oriental studies have 
 /contributed more than any other branch of scientific research 
 to change, to purify, to clear, and intensify the intellectual 
 atmosphere of Europe, and to widen our horizon in all that 
 pertains to the science of man, in history, philology, theology, 
 and philosophy. We have not only conquered and annexed 
 new worlds to the ancient empire of learning, but we have 
 leavened the old world with ideas that are already ferment- 
 ing even in the daily bread of our schools and universities." 
 
 'But let us look at what has been achieved by the masters 
 of comparative philology, and many others, who followed 
 their banners. The East, formerly a land of dreams, of 
 fables, and fairies, has become to us a land of unmistakable 
 reality: the curtain between the West and the East has been 
 lifted, and our old forgotten home stands before us again in 
 bright colours and definite outlines. Two worlds, separated 
 for thousands of years, have been reunited as by a magic 
 spell, and we feel rich in a past that may well be the pride 
 of our noble Aryan family. We say no longer vaguely and 
 poetically Ex Oriente Lux, but we know that all the most vital 
 elements of our knowledge and civilisation — our languages, 
 our alphabets, our figures, our weights and measures, our art, 
 our religion, our traditions, our very nursery stories — come 
 to us from the East; and we must confess that but for the 
 rays of Eastern light, whether Aryan or Semitic or Hamitic, 
 that called forth the hidden germs of the dark and dreary 
 West, Europe, now the very light of the world, might have 
 
 iMax MUUer : Ofttpg from a German Workshop, vol. It. p. 322. 
 
78 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 remained for ever a barren and forgotten promontory of the 
 primeval Asiatic continent. We live, indeed, in a new world; 
 the barrier between the West and the East, that seemed 
 insurmountable, has vanished. The East is ours; we are its 
 heirs, and claim by right our share in its inheritance. We 
 know what it was for the Northern nations, the old bar- 
 barians of Europe, to be brought into spiritual contact with 
 Rome and Greece, and to learn that beyond the small poor 
 world in which they had moved, there was an older, richer, 
 brighter world, the ancient world of Rome and Athens, with 
 its arts and laws, its poetry and philosophy, all of which 
 they might call their own, and make their own by claiming 
 the heritage of the past. We know how, from that time, the 
 classical and Teutonic spirits mingled together, and formed 
 that stream of modern thought on whose shores we ourselves 
 live and move. A new stream is now being brought into 
 the same bed, the stream of Oriental thought, and already 
 the colours of the old stream show very clearly the influence 
 of that new tributary. Look at any of the important works 
 published during the last twenty years, not only on lan- 
 guage, but on literature, mythology, law, religion, and phi- 
 losophy, and you will see on every page the working of a 
 new spirit. I do not say that the East can ever teach us 
 new things, but it can place before us old things, and leave 
 us to draw from them lessons more strange and startling than 
 anything dreamt of in our philosophy. 
 
 'Before all, ,a study of the East has taught us the same 
 lesson which the Northern nations once learnt in Rome and 
 Athens, tfiat there are other worlds beside our own; that 
 there are other religions, other mythologies, other laws, and 
 that the history of philosophy from Thales to Hegel is not 
 the whole history of human thought. In all these subjects 
 the East has supplied us with parallels, and with all that is 
 implied in parallels; viz., the possibility of comparing, meas- 
 uring, and understanding. The comparative spirit is the truly 
 scientiiic spirit of our age, nay, of all ages. An empirical 
 acquaintance with single facts does not constitute knowledge 
 in the true sense of the word. All human knowledge begins 
 with the Two or the Dyad, the comprehension of two single 
 
THE DOCTRINE OP DEVELOPMENT 79 
 
 things as one. If in these days we may still quote Aristotle, 
 we may boldly say that "there is no science of that which is 
 unique." A single event may be purely accidental; it comes 
 and goes, it is inexplicable, it does not call for an explanation. 
 But as soon as the same fact is repeated, the work of com- 
 parison begins, and the first step is made in that wonderful 
 process which we call generalisation, and which is at the root 
 of all intellectual knowledge and of all intellectual language. 
 This primitive process of comparison is repeated again and 
 again, and when we now give the title of Comparative to the 
 highest kind of knowledge in every branch of science, we have 
 only replaced the old world intelligent (i. e. interligent), 
 or inter-twining, by a new and more expressive term, 
 comparative.'^ 
 
 As Greek was the language of humanity in the 
 fifteenth century and onwards till the eighteenth, till 
 the age of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, so Sanskrit is 
 the language of the world for the nineteenth century 
 and its immediate successors. 
 
 'The fact is, the time has not yet come when the full 
 importance of Sanskrit philology can be appreciated by the 
 public at large. It was the same with Greek philology. When 
 Greek began to be studied by some of the leading spirits of 
 Europe, the subject seemed at first one of purely literary 
 curiosity. When its claims were pressed on the public, they 
 were met by opposition, and even ridicule; and those who 
 knew least of Greek were most eloquent in their denunciations. 
 Even when its study had become more general, and been 
 introduced at universities and schools, it remained in the 
 eyes of many a mere accomplishment — its true value for 
 higher than scholastic purposes being scarcely suspected. At 
 present we know that the revival of Greek scholarship affected 
 the deepest interests of humanity, that it was in reality a 
 revival of that consciousness which links large portions of 
 mankind together, connects the living with the dead, and thus 
 
 Whips from a German Workshop, vol. Iv. p. 344. 
 
80 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 secures to each generation the full intellectual inheritance of 
 our race. Without that historical consciousness, the life of 
 man would be ephemeral and vain. The more we can see 
 backward, and place ourselves in real sympathy with the past, 
 the more truly do we make the life of former generations our 
 own, and are able to fulfil our own appointed duty in carrying 
 on the work which was begun centuries ago in Athens and 
 at Rome. But while the unbroken traditions of the Roman 
 world, and the revival of Greek culture among us, restored 
 to us the intellectual patrimony of Greece and Rome only, and 
 made the Teutonic race in a certain sense Greek and Roman, 
 the discovery of Sanskrit will have a much larger influence. 
 Like a new intellectual spring, it is meant to revive the broken 
 fibres that once united the South-eastern with the North-west- 
 ern branches of the Aryan family; and thus to re-establish 
 the spiritual brotherhood, not only of the Teutonic, Greek, and 
 Roman, but likewise of the Slavonic, Celtic, Indian, and 
 Persian branches. It is to make the mind of man wider, his 
 heart larger, his sympathies world-embracing; it is to make 
 us truly humaniores, richer and prouder in the full percep- 
 tion of what it is meant to be. This is the real object of the 
 more comprehensive studies of the nineteenth century; and 
 though the full appreciation of this their true import may be 
 reserved to the future, no one who follows the intellectual 
 progress of mankind attentively can fail to see that, even 
 now, the comparative study of languages, mythologies, and 
 religions has widened our horizon; that much which was lost 
 has been regained; and that a new world, if it has not yet 
 been occupied, is certainly in sight.'' 
 
 And what is it after all that thus suddenly stirs the 
 heart of the grave student, the diligent labourer in the 
 toilsome quarries of philology, so that with poetic en- 
 thusiasm, like Moses looking down upon the Land of 
 Promise, he proclaims to children and children's chil- 
 dren the advent of a new, glorious, unimagined era of 
 intellectual light? How comes he to this role of new 
 
 'M. Mtiller : Chips, vol. It. p. 361. 
 
THE DOCTEINB OF DEVELOPMENT 81 
 
 inspired prophet ? It is because he knows that through 
 these newly disclosed treasures, which his own labours 
 have done so much to bring to light, men will be 
 enabled 'to reconstruct the lost beginnings of our race,' 
 and to draw up into the light of day, link by link and 
 century by century, the chain which unites our life 
 to-day with the long-forgotten generations of the past, 
 and to free at least a portion of it from the obscuring 
 debris of ages ; in fact, to cast new light upon the great 
 riddle of the world, the human mind, the human race 
 and its unique and marvellous destiny upon earth. 
 
 Max Miiller's services with regard to the publica- 
 tion of the Vedas are too well known for me to dwell 
 on them here. On September 14, 1874, he laid the last 
 sheets of the 'Rig- Veda with the Commentary of 
 Sayanakarya' before the Congress of Orientalists, then 
 sitting in London, only alluding briefly to the labors 
 of which this gigantic work was the fruit. He himself 
 said of this oldest book of the Aryan world : 
 
 'Its publication would have been simply impossible with- 
 out the enlightened liberality of the Indian Goverment. For 
 twenty-five years I find, that taking the large and small 
 editions of the Rig- Veda together, I have printed every year 
 what would make a volume of about six hundred pages octavo. 
 Such a publication would have ruined any bookseller; for it 
 must be confessed that there is little that is attractive in 
 the Veda, nothing that could excite general interest. From an 
 aesthetic point of view no one would care for the hymns of 
 the Rig- Veda. . . . Nothing shows the change from the purely 
 aesthetic to the purely scientific interest in the language and 
 literature of India more clearly than the fact that for the 
 last twenty-five years the work of nearly all Sanskrit scholars 
 has been concentrated on the Veda. But I say again, there 
 is little that is beautiful, in our sense of the word, to be found 
 in the hymns of the Rig- Veda, and what little there is has 
 
82 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 been so often dwelt on, that quite an erroneous impression 
 as to the real nature of Vedic poetry has been produced in 
 the mind of public. . . . When some years ago I had to pub- 
 lish the first volume of my translation, I intentionally selected 
 a class of hymns which should in no way encourage such 
 erroneous opinions. 
 
 'It was interesting to watch the disappointment. What, 
 it was said, are these strange, savage, grotesque invocations of 
 the Storm-gods, the inspired strains of the ancient sages of 
 India? Is this the wisdom of the East? Is this the primaeval 
 revelation? Even scholars of high reputation joined in the 
 outcry, and my friends hinted to me that they would not have 
 wasted their life on such a book. 
 
 'Now, suppose a geologist had brought to light the bones 
 of a fossil animal, dating from a period anterior to any in 
 which traces of animal life had been discovered before, would 
 any young lady venture to say, by way of criticism, "Yes, 
 these bones are very curious, but they are not pretty?" Or 
 suppose a new Egyptian statue had been discovered, belong- 
 ing to a dynasty hitherto unrepresented by any statues, would 
 even a schoolboy dare to say, "Yes, it is very nice, but the 
 Venus of Milo is nicer?" -Or suppose an old MS. is brought 
 to Europe, do we find fault with it because it is not neatly 
 printed? If a chemist discovers a new element, is he pitied 
 because it is not gold? If a botanist writes on germs, has he 
 to defend himself because he does not write on flowers? 
 Why, it is simply because the Veda is so different from 
 what it was expected to be, because it is not like the Psalms, 
 not like Pindar, not like the Bhagavadgita, it is because it 
 stands alone by itself, and reveals to us the earliest getms of 
 religious thought, such as they really were, it is because it 
 places before us a language, more primitive than any we 
 knew before, it is because its poetry is ,what you may call 
 savage, uncouth, rude, horrible, it is for that very reason that 
 it was worth while to dig and dig till the old buried city was 
 recovered, showing us what man was, what we were before we 
 had reached the level of David, the level of Homer, the level 
 of Zoroaster, showing us the very candle of our thoughts, our 
 words and our deeds," 
 
 'Chips, vol. Iv. p. 374. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT 83 
 
 No comment is needed to show that the writer of 
 these words has found in the history of human de- 
 velopment, from its first tottering steps to its self- 
 conscious maturity, a task to stimulate and an aim to 
 employ the utmost energy and the richest gifts. His 
 keen sight was able to detect traces of humanity in the 
 recesses of an impenetrable past, where feebler eyes 
 could see nothing but indistinguishable mist, and for 
 that very reason thought the boundary between man 
 and beast had disappeared. 
 
 The importance of the subject warrants me in 
 adding yet a few more quotations from another writer, 
 intellectually akin to Miiller, in which, after having 
 reached by an independent path substantially similar 
 conclusions, he expresses his admiration for the newly 
 breaking light in almost identical terms. I refer to 
 Lazarus Geiger. 
 
 'The study of languages,' says this distinguished thinker,* 
 'has attained in our days to incomparable philosophical im- 
 portance, since it provides a key to a side of the world and 
 of life which natural science could not have reached, and 
 casts light both upon what we are and what we have been, 
 upon human reason and human history. . . . The eye ranges 
 in imagination, through unfathomable distances, towards the 
 moment of creation, and the great secret, the secret of human 
 development, begins to stir in our minds with a dim promise 
 of revelation. 
 
 We ask how the imagination of a people can be con- 
 stituted, by what motives it can be governed, when we find 
 the Persians tending dogs with such anxious care, and the 
 Egyptians building sepulchres for the embalmed corpses of 
 the sacred Apis, of which sixty-four generations were pre- 
 served at Memphis; and this question occupies us so much 
 that the wiser doctrines of the same periods, which are 
 
 ^Geiger : Zur Entwlckelungsgeschichte der Menschheit, pp. 2, 12, 14. 
 
84 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 not wanting either if we cared to hear them, meet with com- 
 parative neglect. This reminds us of an anecdote told by 
 Max Miiller about that, in our eyes, most important portion 
 of Sanskrit literature, the Vedic writings. When the gifted 
 Rosen, who died while in the prime of youth, was occupied 
 in the British Museum in copying the Vedic poems, which 
 he began to publish in the year 1838, the Brahmin Ram 
 Mohun Roy, who was in London at the time, could not contain 
 his astonishment at such an undertaking. The Upanishads 
 were the most important part of 'the Veda to him, and 
 seemed much more worthy of publication; for the latest 
 portions of the Vedas contain a kind of mystical philosophy, 
 in which it is possible to discover an approach to monotheism 
 or pantheism, which seemed to the Hindoo reformer, as to 
 so many others, to be the ne plus ultra of religious wisdom. 
 But the primitive Vedic hymns, altogether heathenish, some- 
 times naive and often simply quaint, in which the youth of 
 mankind breathes with such delightful freshness, these are 
 to us the true treasure of Indian literature, notwithstanding 
 the secret feeling of shame with which the modern civilised 
 Hindoo might be tempted to regard them. They contain no 
 religious system that can be of value to us, but they are 
 themselves a text book for the religious history of mankind.' 
 'Especial attention should be paid to the germs of specu- 
 lation contained in the primitive collection of sacred poems, 
 known as Rig-Veda Sanhita, the existence of which until 
 the present day must be regarded as a piece of rare good 
 fortune, if the human jace is right in regarding the knowledge 
 of its own origin and of the laws of its growth as an object 
 of longing and desire. Unlike all other known literatures, in 
 which we find everywhere new forms either rising from the 
 ruins of an expiring past, or resulting from intercourse and 
 the intermixture of ideas proper to distinct nations, in the 
 Vedic hymns we seem to have to do with an original inde- 
 pendent growth, not a secondary formation built up by the 
 destruction of what went before, but a manifestation of fresh 
 young human life, springing in full bloom directly from the 
 bosom of nature, a spiritual form with words and deeds not 
 yet petrified, and allowing us to watch in the act of becoming 
 
THE DOCTRINE OP DEVELOPMENT 85 
 
 what elsewhere is only to be met with as finished and com- 
 pleted. Hence it is that these hymns contain the key, not only 
 to the subsequent development of India, nor even only to that 
 of the kindred nations who started to a certain extent from 
 the same root, but also in virtue of the natural unity which 
 characterises the common course of development throughout 
 its species, to all the creations of speculative energy which 
 the world has seen, or, in other words, to the whole domain of 
 reason, to all the lasting conquests won by it since the first 
 moment when man began to form convictions out of retained 
 perceptions, and manifold thought, belief and knowledge be- 
 came a possibility.'" 
 
 'The rise of philology as an independent science, apart 
 from any outer or practical aim, as a science of the pre- 
 historic condition of mankind, which dates from the begin- 
 ning of the present century, is an event of incredible im- 
 portance to the history of humanity. Comparative philo- 
 logy overturned the former confused ideas relating to the 
 earliest civilisation and migration of primitive populations. 
 Related and non-related nations were distinguished from each 
 other, and a more delicate and unerring instrument was 
 provided for the classification of races than that afforded by 
 the indication of natural history or anthropology. Even the 
 remotest distances of the past seemed by the light of hope 
 to promise precise knowledge of the circumstances of periods 
 of primitive antiquity, the very existence of which had 
 hitherto been unrevealed by history." 
 
 This complete agreement between two of the most 
 distinguished intellects of the century, this unanimous 
 tone of enthusiasm in referring to the new and abun- 
 dant spring of knowledge which has broken out in our 
 days from undreamt-of depths, is a sufficient testimony 
 to the importance oi the subject with which we are 
 concerned. This is nothing less than the history of 
 
 ^Geiger : Vrsprung und EntwicJcelung der menschlichen Sprache 
 und Ternunft, p. 119. 
 
 •Geiger : Vrsprung der Sprache, p. 16. 
 
86 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 human development, the solution, that is to say, of the 
 most ancient and most sacred problem, a solution which 
 for the first time seemed to come within the range of 
 possibility when the discoveries of comparative philo- 
 logy revealed the stores of information preserved in 
 the genealogies of words and notions, respecting the 
 primitive ages of human thought, and the origin, 
 growth and maturity of the supreme distinguishing 
 mark of humanity, that which explains and makes pos- 
 sible all the rest — reason and speech (Aoyos). 
 
 Whoever wishes to explain humanity must under- 
 stand what is human; he must know the points upon 
 which everything else turns, and from which every- 
 thing else must be derived. Language contains the 
 key to the problem, and whoever seeks it elsewhere 
 will seek in vain. 
 
 Max Miiller's aim and object, then, is to elucidate 
 the doctrine of human development ; only he has sought 
 this doctrine where alone it was to be found, in the 
 mind, in thought, that is to say, in language. The 
 question as to the origin, the germ, the first beginning 
 of this wonderful gift, he was content for the present 
 to leave open or unanswered. As a philologist he was 
 only concerned to use the materials provided by lin- 
 guistic research to pave the way back to that past 
 which had been hitherto lost in impenetrable night, 
 and from this point of view he might consider that it 
 would be time enough, when the primitive state of 
 mankind had assumed a clearer outline in the light of 
 philology, to begin to think of exploring the other side 
 of the mountain range where the clue of philology 
 begins to fail. 
 
 It might have been supposed that the modest caution 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT 87 
 
 of such a plan would have received the approval of 
 every intelligent thinker ; to begin by understanding the 
 problem in its relation to the human mind, to certify 
 every step by a reference to the real body of thought, 
 and to pursue this back to its ultimate root — what 
 could be simpler or more scientific? But temperate 
 reasoning fails to make itself heard above the storm 
 of passionate controversy; and thus it came to pass 
 that the violent Darwinians, who, after the manner of 
 disciples, went far beyond the boundaries set by their 
 master's judgment, began a campaign against Max 
 Miiller, in which first one philologist and then another 
 was exalted at his expense, till compelled to retire 
 before the successful defence of one who, in self-de- 
 fence, was defending truth rather than himself. 
 
 The dignified candor of the words with which 
 Max Miiller begins his protest against the premature 
 and inverted reasoning of the hyper-Darwinists shows 
 to the more advantage by contrast with those violent 
 attacks. He lays down, as the only test and standard, 
 the one interest by which all scientific laborers alike 
 should be inspired : 
 
 'The question is not, whether the belief that animals so 
 distant as man, a monkey, an elephant, and a humming 
 bird, a snake, a frog, and a fish, could all have sprung from 
 the same parents is monstrous, but simply and solely whether 
 it is true. If it is true, we shall soon learn to digest it. 
 Appeals to the pride or humility of man, to scientific courage, 
 or religious piety, are all equally out of place." 
 
 I believe that in what precedes I have indicated 
 with sufficient clearness, though but in general outline, 
 what is the attitude assumed by Max Miiller in relation 
 
 'M. Miiller : Lectures on Darwin. 
 
88 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 to the theory of Development, and to Darwinism in 
 particular. He severs himself from -the followers of 
 Darwin, and indeed begins a critical attack, when, 
 overlooking or dismissing offhand man's real char- 
 acteristic, — reason and speech, — they treat external 
 causes and structural transitions as a sufficient scien- 
 tific explanation of the greatest marvel and mystery of 
 creation. The narrowness of this view has-been em- 
 phatically characterised by Lazarus Geiger also : 
 
 'We may obtain some idea of the skeleton and even of the 
 external appearance of a lost animal species by the help of 
 geological fragments ; we can draw general inferences respect- 
 ing an imperfectly developed race of men from primitive 
 cranial remains, but it would be hard to form any idea, from 
 the appearance of the fragments which we find in the Nean- 
 derthal, in what way the head, of which they formed part, 
 carried on the business of thinking when it was alive." 
 
 'Fortunately (continues this gifted writer), the history 
 of the mind also has its primaeval remains, its deposits and 
 petrefactions of another kind. They offer more instructive 
 information than will perhaps be anticipated; if carefully 
 pursued, they lead to unexpected, but, as I am persuaded, 
 none the less assured results.' 
 
 To cast light upon the vast background of our past, 
 the past of the human mind, as it is developed in 
 language, and may be disclosed and interpreted by 
 science, this has been the lifelong task, the supreme 
 goal of all the labours of Max Miiller. He himself 
 has spoken plainly enough to this effect: 
 
 'Every man forms his own scheme of life, and every 
 student must belong to some army and carry the plan of the 
 campaign in his head to determine and direct the choice of 
 his own march. I belong to those who say with Pope, "The 
 
 'Zur Enttcickelungsgeaehichte der Menschheit, p. 45. 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF DEVELOPMENT 89 
 
 proper study of mankind is man;" and when I set before 
 myself the question, which was the right, or at least the most 
 fruitful method for the study of mankind, the conviction soon 
 formed itself in my mind that in order to know what man 
 is now, we must first of all observe and establish what man 
 has been and how he became what he is.' 
 
SPEECH AND REASON. 
 
 The words 'origin of species' were the charm with 
 which Darwin stirred men's minds, and roused into a 
 flame the glowing ashes of dormant curiosity about the 
 question, whether things in general and organic beings 
 in particular have existed from all times as now, or 
 whether they came into existence as it were, histor- 
 ically, by virtue of natural causes, and if so, of which. 
 
 This question, when transplanted into the realm of 
 natural science and proposed for solution, with the 
 help of the vast mass of materials furnished by accum- 
 ulated observations, had the great recommendation of 
 restoring philosophic thought and deductive method 
 to the place of pure empiricism; though this had its 
 justification in the vagaries of the philosophy of na- 
 ture; and, indeed, as the exact method of sense-per- 
 ception, must always form the indispensable and solid 
 foundation of all natural science. 
 
 The nature of a species consists, as the name 
 already indicates, in what is special, i.e. peculiar to 
 itself. The particular marks itself off from the gen- 
 eral, it becomes more independent, more original; it 
 gains in character, in individuality. Accordingly, the 
 doctrine of development has for its object, in concert 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 91 
 
 with historical enquiry, to trace back each particular 
 appearance to its most nearly universal form; that is 
 to say, in the case of living beings, to trace the species 
 to its most general type, to pursue the stream of de- 
 velopment backwards from the familiar and infinitely 
 manifold data of the present to its earliest beginning, 
 so far as may be possible to the ever limited power 
 of human reason. And the final goal of its efforts will 
 always be that moment, hid in the twilight of an im- 
 measurable past, when our system, then a gigantic 
 globe of vapour, broke from the deathlike slumber of 
 universal oneness, and those first modifications accom- 
 plished themselves, out of which hereafter the Wille 
 sum Leben wrestled its way to the joys and sorrows 
 of mortal being in the person of countless individuals. 
 
 In the midst of this vast process of development, 
 which fills the imagination with awe-struck wonder, 
 and which is accomplished so silently and tranquilly 
 that our reason, aware of the closer causal connection 
 which binds the being of one moment to the becoming 
 of the next, is forced towards the view that all is hap- 
 pening by the fixed, inexorable laws of necessity, — in 
 the midst of this we see one star dawn on the horizon, 
 within which is concealed the sacred mystery of a new 
 species, called to a higher measure of freedom, con- 
 sciousness and perfection, and occupying a place apart 
 from all the rest of nature, since in it are laid the 
 foundations of the kingdom of conscious mind, of the 
 life which is ordered by individual foresight and 
 choice. 
 
 This species is the human race ; the dawning light 
 which heralds its advent upon earth is reason. The 
 contrast between this and the nearest analogues we can 
 
92 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 find for it among beings of any other kind is so strong 
 that we are always ready to set the latter aside offhand 
 as mere natural impulse or instinct, which leaves us 
 only the wiser by a word, a word to which any mean- 
 ing, possible or impossible, may be attached or not 
 attached at discretion. 
 
 Still, reason, or the mental life of man, constitutes 
 a new specific distinction, without an exact parallel in 
 any other part of nature, a differentiation which we 
 must seek to derive from more general natural causes. 
 No problem is at once so difficult and so well worthy 
 of solution, except, perhaps, the kindred question re- 
 garding the first origin of organization and life. 
 
 The great law of progressive individualisation and 
 specialisation, by which alone the unceasing course of 
 cosmic development is to be explained and elucidated, 
 must supply the foundations also of the life and 
 growth of reason. 
 
 That whereby the functions of reason are accom- 
 plished, the inner organic tissue, the means whereby 
 the whole of the material and spiritual universe is 
 embraced, constructed and expressed, is afforded by 
 those mysterious entities which have formed the object 
 of study in every healthy system of philosophy up to 
 the present day ; sometimes they are called, in Platonic 
 phrase, ideas, sometimes notions, but, for the most 
 part, concepts or conceptions. They are the exclusive 
 property of man — no other animal can ever participate 
 in them; and it is, therefore, either crass misconcep- 
 tion of the nature of the case, or simple misuse of 
 language, when modem materialists speak of the 
 'thinking power of animals.' 
 
 Concepts cannot be formed without the help of 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 93 
 
 words. The sound, the word, is the body of the con- 
 cept; language is thus the external side, the body of 
 thought or reason. Thus it was that the one essential, 
 which may, however, be considered from the two 
 aspects, from without and from within, was desig- 
 nated by the Greeks by a single word, Aoyos, which 
 does not distinguish them, but includes them both. 
 
 There are certain truths which, in the earlier stages 
 of development, are taken for granted by primitive 
 thought as given directly and certainly in conscious- 
 ness, which, however, become lost in the age of re- 
 flection, in consequence of a peculiar one-sidedness 
 which has come to characterise the progress of 
 thought, so that much mental effort has to be expended 
 in rediscovering them. To this number must be reck- 
 oned the great and important truth that thought is 
 accomplished by means of words alone, that thought 
 is just as little possible without language as language 
 without thought. 
 
 I said that this truth was matter of direct conscious- 
 ness to the childlike thought of primitive peoples. As 
 a confirmation of this I may quote the graphic expres- 
 sion of the Polynesians, who, according to Farrar, 
 describe thinking as 'talking in the stomach,' i.e. inter- 
 nally. But the divine Plato also had no other defini- 
 tion to put into the mouth of Sokrates. 
 
 '"What do you mean by thinking?" asks Theaetetus. 
 Sokrates: "I mean the conversation which the soul holds 
 with herself in considering of anything. I speak of what I 
 scarcely know ; but the soul when thinking appears to me to be 
 just talking — asking questions of herself and answering them, 
 affirming and denying." " 
 
 'Plato, Theaet, 189, 90, Jowett'a translation, vol. HI. p. 416. 
 
94 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 And how then does mankind come to lose this 
 instinctive certainty? Because, in the first age of 
 systematisation and reflection, men accustom them- 
 selves to speak of the idea or thought as something 
 inward and spiritual with which the formal sound of 
 the mere word is to be contrasted. And thus the error 
 gained ground that thought was the prius, and had an 
 independent existence in the human mind, before the 
 existence of words as a token to express the process 
 that was going on without them. 'The Philosophers,' 
 says Hamann, 'have in all ages given truth a letter of 
 divorce, in that they have put asunder those things 
 which nature has joined together, and conversely.' 
 
 'The conception of cause,' says Goethe, 'is the 
 source of infinite error.' If we look closely we shall 
 see that this sentence applies to all the fundamental 
 errors in which the human mind has been entangled 
 for ages, and from which it will seek in vain to escape 
 so long as it does not recognise their deep metaphysical 
 root. From Demokritus and Epikurus onwards mate- 
 rialists continue credulously to repeat that the body is 
 the cause of mind ; they are unable to understand that 
 causal relations cannot be established between things of 
 altogether disparate quality any more than they can be 
 affirmed of what is one and indivisible. And from 
 Plato onwards, the idealists repeat that mind is the 
 cause of bodies, so that they have no choice but to 
 regard the world as a phantom, a creature of their 
 own imagination, or else to bridge the chasm between 
 mind and body by such tours de force as the concursus 
 divinus, pre-established harmony and the like rash in- 
 ventions. On the other hand, Spinoza's monism, Kant's 
 criticism, and Schopenhauer's theory of will contain 
 
SPEECH AND EEASON 95 
 
 the key of the problem in their hidden depths, for 
 these great thinkers made the metaphysical base or 
 conditions of the knowledge of the world the object 
 of their investigations. 
 
 Whenever we start from one side of a thing and 
 endeavor to deduce the other side of it causally from 
 this, we land ourselves in hopeless contradictions: 
 there is no escaping the vicious circle. The explana- 
 tion of the most important, most truly human quality 
 of mankind has not escaped this fate. The wheel of 
 Ixion continues its giddy revolutions, bringing to the 
 top in turn the words now 'Reason and therefore 
 speech,' now again, 'Speech and therefore reason.' 
 The truth that the two, ratio and oratio, are one and 
 the same being, only conceived from different points of 
 view, that one is the inner and spiritual, the other the 
 outer and corporeal side of the monad, this truth, not- 
 withstanding its distinct and convincing advocacy by 
 the most illustrious thinkers of the last half century, 
 has hardly begun to take root in the minds of those 
 who have chosen as their especial study to unriddle the 
 great problem of the human mind, and a fortiori has 
 had no influence on the thoughts of the general edu- 
 cated public. 
 
 The most influential champion of this idea is Max 
 Miiller. As formerly Spinoza's great disciple, Goethe, 
 formulated the fundamental monistic doctrine in the 
 simple words, as indubitable as unambiguous: 'No 
 mind without matter, no matter without min<^ so Max 
 Miiller with equal clearness and confidence:^ 
 
 'Without speech no reason, without reason no speech. 
 
 'Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. It. p. 73. 
 
96 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 It is curious to observe the unwillingness with which many 
 philosophers admit this, and the attempts they make to escape 
 from this conclusion, all owing to the very influence of lan- 
 guage, which in most modern dialects has produced two 
 words, one for language, the other for reason; thus leading 
 the speaker to suppose that there is a substantial difference 
 between the two, and not a mere formal difference.' 
 
 Further on he comments upon some acute observa- 
 tions of Locke, who appears to have been the first, 
 before Herder, to call attention to the inseparable 
 connection between speech and thought, and accord- 
 ingly insisted on the need of serious philological criti- 
 cism, in the interests of reason itself, in order that 
 the speaker and the listener may no longer be misled by 
 phrases of which they do not understand the sense.^ 
 
 "In all this there is no doubt great truth, yet, strictly 
 speaking, it is as impossible to use words without thought, as 
 to think without words. Even those who talk vaguely about 
 religion, conscience, &c., have at least a vague notion of the 
 meaning of the words they use; and if they ceased to connect 
 any ideas, however incomplete and false, with the words they 
 utter, they could no longer be said to speak, but only to make 
 noises. The same applies if we invert our proposition. It 
 is possible, without language, to see, to perceive, to stare at, 
 to dream about things; but without words not even such 
 simple ideas as white or black can for a moment be realised.' 
 
 All want of clearness, all confusion, all the inter- 
 minable debates as to whether thought and reason 
 shall be ascribed to animals, to babies, and to untaught 
 deaf-mutes, are merely verbal disputes, and proceed 
 from the fact that the words used have not had asso- 
 ciated with them the clear and definite matter of con- 
 
 =Ib. p. 76. 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 97 
 
 ception which belongs to them, but are employed in a 
 general, vague and misty fashion. 
 
 'A child knows as certainly before it can speak the differ- 
 ence between sweet and bitter (i.e. that sweet is not bitter), 
 as it knows afterwards (when it comes to speak) that worm- 
 wood and sugar-plums are not the same thing. A child re- 
 ceives the sensation of sweetness; it enjoys it, it recollects 
 it, it desires it again: but it does not know what sweet is; 
 it is absorbed in its sensations, its pleasures, its recollections; 
 it cannot look at them from above,* it cannot reason on them, 
 it cannot tell of them." 
 
 Similarly Lazarus Geiger: 
 
 'It is easy to see that blood is red and milk white; but 
 to abstract the redness of blood from the collective impres- 
 sion, to find the same notion again in a red berry, and, in 
 spite of its other differences, to include under the same head 
 the red berry and the red blood — or the white milk and the 
 white snow — this is something altogether different. No animal 
 does this, for this, and this only, is thinking." 
 
 We thus arrive at the apparently paradoxical prop- 
 osition: the so-called general conceptions are some- 
 thing special, something peculiarly and exclusively 
 proper to the human reason; they embrace and com- 
 prehend the whole world, so far as this is within the 
 scope of human powers of perception ; they can, how- 
 ever, only become realised by means of their bodily 
 equivalents, sensible sounds or words. Speech is not 
 the garment, it is the body of reason. 'Without speech 
 no reason, without reason no speech.' 
 
 *I have expressed this thought In the words : 'Language gives 
 mankind a standpoint exterior to things and above them,' and I 
 have given the grounds of it In detail In my Einleitung und 
 Begrilndung einer monistiachen ErJeenntniaatheorie, p. 93, sq. 
 
 "Max Mailer, loo cit. p. 77. 
 
 'Geiger : Uraprung der Sprache, p. 110. 
 
98 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 After this it should not be difficult to perceive why 
 all previous attempts to explain human reason and 
 establish a satisfactory system of psychology and per- 
 ception have proved abortive. The reason is that in 
 all of them human reason was conceived as something 
 absolute and irreducible, while its history and its past, 
 which might have supplied the desired solution, were 
 neglected, although a priceless instrument for the pur- 
 pose lay ready to hand in comparative philology, which 
 is nothing but the study of the history of this same 
 reason itself. Take any animal away from its place in 
 the chain of organic life, and its nature will remain for 
 ever an insoluble problem; but viewed a£ a link in the 
 progressive chain of development, we find its explana- 
 tion in all that has gone before it. 
 
 What is required, then, is to apply what Darwin 
 has done for organisms to that department of organic 
 life to which we give the name of human notions, 
 rational concepts or words. We want, in fact, a new 
 'origin of species.' Every notion, every word which 
 presents itself in the course of the development, is 
 something new and special, a fresh step towards spe- 
 cialisation and individualisation, which can never be 
 conceived by itself nor thought of as breaking forth 
 out of nothing by some generatio cequivoca; but as a 
 new element of reason, generated by unbroken filia- 
 tion from earlier elements, it serves to exalt, to 
 heighten, and enrich the inner mental force which we 
 call reason ; and at the same time as a principle of ex- 
 planation, as a token and monument of the growth of 
 this reason, it serves to raise for a moment the thick 
 veil of mystery in which it is enveloped. 
 
 Upon this track and thus retracing our steps to- 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 99 
 
 wards the past, we arrive at more and more simple 
 elements, corresponding to the elementary state of the 
 reason, till at last by the light of philological research, 
 in conjunction with deductive philosophic speculation, 
 we approach boldly towards the narrowing circle with- 
 in which as yet there is neither thought nor speech, and 
 where therefore the cradle and origin of reason is 
 to be found. 
 
 Etymology, or the study of roots, a science founded 
 and admirably worked out by German diligence, may 
 form the pride and joy of an age otherwise to all ap- 
 pearance estranged from such ideal pursuits; and 
 it is this science which may claim to furnish, from its 
 hidden stores, the richest and most startling informa- 
 tion about our proper nature, our prehistoric past, and 
 the paths by which the human mind has attained to its 
 present vigor, enlightenment, and perfection. 
 
 In language we possess, as it were, a magic mirror 
 of the past of our race, and its external circumstances 
 and vicissitudes. The science of knguage casts its rays 
 into the primeval night from whence no other evidence 
 can I'each us. From this point of view she is a worthy 
 sister of paleanthropology, the science of prehistoric 
 man; for human thought attaches itself also to the 
 dwellings, tools, arms and implements of human action, 
 and where thought has left its vestiges, its voice is still 
 heard by the keen and discerning senses of the inves- 
 tigator. But the words, the vestiges of language give 
 clearer and more valuable information than any other 
 relics, for they extend back to a time where even the 
 threads of prehistoric research are broken off, when 
 man was without tools, without fire, without any of 
 
100 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 those contrivances which we are now accustomed to 
 regard as indispensable attributes of humanity. 
 
 'There is a peculiar charm,' says Max MuUer,' 'in watch- 
 ing the various changes of form and m&aning in words pass- 
 ing down from the Ganges or the Tiber into the, great ocean 
 of modern speech. In the eighth century B.C. the Latin dialect 
 was confined to a small territory. It was but one dialect out 
 of many that were spoken all over Italy. But it grew — it 
 became the language of Rome and of the Romans, it absorbed 
 all the other dialects of Italy, the Urabrian, the Oscan, the 
 Etruscan, the Celtic, and became by conquest the language 
 of Central Italy, of Southern and Northern Italy. From 
 thence it spread to Gaul, to Spain, to Germany, to Dacia on 
 the Danube. It became the language of law and government 
 in the civilised portions of Northern Africa and Asia, and it 
 was carried through the heralds of Christianity to the most 
 distant parts of the globe. It supplanted in its victorious 
 progress the ancient vernaculars of Gaul, Spain, and Portugal, 
 and it struck deep roots in parts of Switzerland and Walla- 
 chia. When it came in contact with the more vigorous idioms 
 of the Teutonic tribes, though it could not supplant or annihi- 
 late them, it left on their surface a thick layer of foreign 
 words, and it thus supplied the greater portion in the diction- 
 ary of nearly all the civilised nations of the world. Words 
 which were first used by Italian shepherds are now used by 
 the statesmen of England, the poets of France, the philoso- 
 phers of Germany; and the faint echo of their pastoral con- 
 versation may be heard in the Senate of Washington, in the 
 cathedral of Calcutta, and in the settlements of New Zealand. 
 
 'We thus see how languages reflect the history of nations, 
 and how, if properly analysed, almost every word will tell 
 us of many vicissitudes through which it passed on its way 
 from Central Asia to India or to Persia, to Asia Minor, 
 Greece, and Italy, to Russia, Gaul, Germany, the Britsh Isles, 
 America, New Zealand, nay, back again, in its world-encom- 
 passing migrations, to India and the Himalayan regions from 
 which it started. Many a word has thus gone the round of 
 
 ''Lectures, vol. U. p. 274. 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 101 
 
 the world, and it may go the same round again and again. 
 For although words change in sound and meaning to such 
 an extent that not a single letter remains the same, and 
 that their meaning becomes the very opposite of what it 
 originally was, yet it is important to observe, that since the 
 beginning of the world no new addition has ever been made 
 to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the 
 substantial elements of nature. There is a constant change 
 in language, a coming and going to words, but no man can 
 ever invent an entirely new word. We speak to all intent 
 and purpose substantially the same language as the earliest 
 ancestors of our race, and guided by the hand of scientific 
 etymology we may pass on from century to century through 
 the darkest periods of the world's history, till the stream of 
 language on which we ourselves are moving carries us back 
 to those distant regions where we seem to feel the presence 
 of our earliest forefathers, and to hear the voices of the 
 earthborn sons of Man." 
 
 But it is not the history of the outer world alone, 
 nor, so to speak, the mere material conditions of 
 human life in prehistoric ages which are mirrored for 
 us in language and the strata so carefully distinguished 
 and explored by our science. It is even more impor- 
 tant to us as a record, a document revealing to us the 
 emotions, the thought, and the feeling of a world long 
 since mouldered into dust. And in this respect philol- 
 ogy stands alone, and neither requires the help of any 
 other science, nor can concede to any other the right 
 to the work which is reserved for itself alone. 
 
 The history of language, as I have already said, is 
 the history of the growth of human reason. And 
 from this point of view the science of language has not 
 only afforded precious information respecting the past 
 history of reason, but it will also, we may hope, de- 
 
 'Lectures, vol. il. p. 286. 
 
102 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 liver us from the indescribable and vexatious blunder- 
 ing which verbal ambiguities, and confused thought 
 issuing in the misuse of words, have brought upon the 
 human race. To quote once more the words of Max 
 Miiller : 
 
 'He who would examine the influence which words, mere 
 words, have exercised on the minds of men, might write a 
 history of the world that would teach us more than any, which 
 we yet possess.^ 
 
 'I do not speak here of that downright abuse of language 
 when writers, without maturing their thoughts and arranging 
 them in proper order, pour out a stream of hard and mis- 
 applied terms which are mistaken by themselves, if not by 
 others, for deep learning and height of speculation. This 
 sanctuary of ignorance and vanity has been well-nigh de- 
 stroyed; and scholars or thinkers who cannot say what they 
 wish to say consecutively and intelligibly have little chance in 
 these days, or at least in this country, of being considered 
 as depositaries of mysterious wisdom. Si non vis intelligi 
 debes negligi. I rather think of words which everybody uses, 
 and which seem to us so clear that it looks like impertinence 
 to challenge them. Yet, if we except the language of mathe- 
 matics, it is extraordinary to observe how variable is the 
 meaning of words, how it changes from century to century, 
 nay, how it varies slightly in the mouth of almost every 
 speaker. Such terms as Nature, Law, Freedom, Necessity, 
 Body, Substance, Matter, Church, State, Revelation, Inspira- 
 tion, Knowledge, Belief, are tossed about in the wars of 
 words, as if everybody knew what they meant; and as if 
 everybody used them exactly in the same sense; whereas 
 most people, and particularly those who represent public 
 opinion, pick up these complicated terms as children, begin- 
 ning with the vaguest conceptions, adding to them from time 
 to time, perhaps correcting, likewise at haphazard, some of 
 their involuntary errors, but never taking stock, never either 
 enquiring into the history of the terms which they handle 
 
 "Lectures, vol. 11. p. 573. 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 103 
 
 SO freely, or realising the fulness of their meaning according 
 to the strict rules of logical definition. It has been frequently 
 said that most controversies are about words. This is true; 
 but it implies much more than it seems to imply. Verbal dif- 
 ferences are not what they are sometimes supposed to be — 
 merely formal, outward, slight, accidental differences, that 
 might be removed by a simple explanation, or by a reference 
 to "Johnson's Dictionary.'' They are differences arising from 
 the more or less perfect, from the more or less full and 
 correct, conception attached to words: it is the mind that is at 
 fault, not the tongue merely. 
 
 'Here' (continues our author, after showing by a num- 
 ber of well-chosen instances to what curious self-deceptions 
 reason is exposed through her own creations) 'a large field is 
 open to the student of language. It is his oiBce to trace 
 the original meaning of each word, to follow up its history, its 
 changes of form and meaning in the schools of philosophy, 
 or in the market-place and the senate. He ought to know 
 how frequently different ideas are comprehended under one 
 and the same term, and how frequently the same idea is ex- 
 pressed by different terms. ... A kistory of such terms as 
 to know and to believe. Finite and Infinite, Real and Neces- 
 sary, would do more than anything else to clear the philoso- 
 phical atmosphere of our days.'" 
 
 An historical criticism of language is alone able to 
 furnish an empirical criticism of human reason. The 
 fact that Max Mtiller fully recognised the nature of 
 the task he proposed to himself, justified him in the 
 profound utterance which has hitherto been so little 
 understood: 'All future philosophy will be a philos- 
 ophy of language.' 
 
 This great truth, ripened in the consciousness of 
 the age, though first revealed in full to a single brain, 
 and first proclaimed by a single eloquent voice with 
 all the force of truth and conviction, still could not 
 
 '"Lectures, vol. 11. p. 621. 
 
104 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 appear suddenly in the world like a creation out of 
 nothing. It is not an uncommon thing for two kindred 
 minds to give expression simultaneously to the same 
 thought without knowing of each other's existence. 
 The history of science contains more than one instance 
 of this kind, from the controversy about priority be- 
 tween Newton and Leibnitz down to the interpretation 
 of hieroglyphs, from the discovery of oxygen to the 
 formula of the principle of the conservation of force, 
 about which such a dust has been raised of late, though 
 at last the credit of it has been rightly assigned to the 
 modest and illustrious thinker, Robert Mayer. In the 
 same way, independently of Max Miiller, the writer 
 already quoted, Lazarus Geiger, has expressed with 
 equal definiteness the essential point of future philo- 
 sophy — 'an empirical criticism of human reason 
 through the criticism of language,' while the main 
 outlines of the future edifice have been boldly traced in 
 his thoughtful and profound works. 
 
 But such a thought must have precursors as well ; 
 it flashes more or less distinctly across the works of 
 all those who are striving after the common goal, till 
 at last it breaks like a thunder cloud and clears the 
 atmosphere of the fogs and vapors of secular error 
 and prejudices. Among these precursors of Miiller 
 and Geiger, the first place belongs to Theodor Waits, 
 whose writings unfortunately were little regarded and 
 less esteemed during his lifetime, when all minds were 
 under the spell of the Schelling-Hegelian phrase- 
 mongering, and all healthy thought was stifled. A few 
 quotations will suffice to show that the idea of a his- 
 tory of the development of thought and reason had 
 occurred to him. 
 
SPEECH AND REASON 105 
 
 'In common with Kant' (he says), 'I can only conceive 
 the task of philosophy as that of establishing a science which 
 should explain the foundations of experience. 
 
 'Neither criticism nor construction, nor any combined 
 application of the two, will lead to the desired goal; nothing 
 can do this but a history of the development of thought. 
 
 'I have tried to found psychology upon unquestionable 
 physiological facts, in order that it, and philosophy in general, 
 might be made independent for the future of the wrangling 
 of philosophical schools, which turns upon vague general 
 notions as to which it is easy to dispute, because every one 
 may attach a different meaning to them, until a preliminary 
 history of development establishes the distinction between 
 sound and unsuccessful attempts towards the formation of 
 concepts. Speculation, which does not reach a ground of 
 direct experience, is, and always will be, a subject of dispute.'" 
 
 In his lectures on psychology Waitz expresses him- 
 self still more clearly ; he lays down that, 'the function 
 of psychology, in relation to other philosophic studies, 
 is that of foundation, for the formation of our ideas 
 has a collective history, upon which their substance 
 is dependent. They become scientifically serviceable 
 only when it appears that they are not merely individ- 
 ual or accidental products of an unconscious process, 
 but the necessary results of development, the products 
 of laws of universal application, i.e. of laws to which 
 the cultivation of their inner life must be always and 
 entirely subject.' 
 
 Waitz was thus well aware of what was required; 
 he was only uncertain as to the means by which the 
 goal was to be attained. With inexhaustible zeal he 
 turned first to physiology, then to comparative psycho- 
 
 ^Grundlegung der Psychologie. .Preface. 
 
106 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 logy, and lastly to anthropology, as a contribution to 
 which his epoch-making work, 'Die Anthropologie der 
 Naturvolker' was compiled. 
 
 But he passed unsuspectingly by the richest, clear- 
 est, most trustworthy source upon which the historian 
 of the development of human reason can draw. The 
 discovery of this source was reserved for Max Miiller 
 and L. Geiger. 
 
MAX MULLER AND THE PROBLEM OF THE 
 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 
 
 'However paradoxical it may seem, I maintain that we can- 
 not possibly know individuals, or discover any means of 
 accurately determining the individuality of a particular thing. 
 'General terms are not only influential in bringing lan- 
 guages to perfection, but also simply indispensable to their 
 existence. Continuous speech would be absolutely impossible 
 if there were only the proper names {nomina propria) of 
 individual things, and no general names (nomina appella- 
 tiva).' 
 
 In enunciating these weighty truths in his 'Nou- 
 veaux Essais sur I'Entendement humain,'^ Leibnitz 
 threw fresh light upon the nature of language and 
 thought. His precursor was Locke, who had declared 
 that 'what words serve to denote are general ideas.' 
 
 'In this manner' (continues Leibnitz, speaking of the 
 formation and origin of general ideas), 'the whole doctrine 
 of genera and species — about which so much ado is made in 
 the schools, and which has so little influence outside them — 
 might be reduced wholly and solely to the formation of 
 abstract ideas of greater or less comprehensiveness to which 
 certain names are given.' 
 
 Are not these words still worthy of laying to heart? 
 Do they not contain the great doctrine that, before 
 
 'Leibnitz : Sew Essays on Human Understanding. Chicago, 1916. 
 
108 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 disputing about how the genera and species in the 
 world are constituted, we should first come to an 
 understanding as to what is meant by the words, and 
 how such conceptions arise in thought, or in our mind ? 
 But this by the way. 
 
 If we look the problem of human language in the 
 face, we shall be surprised and dazzled by the same 
 marvel as in all the other creations of nature; namely, 
 the vast and extravagant abundance and variety of 
 forms joined with the incredible simplicity and paucity 
 of the means. Who would believe, before his atten- 
 tion was called to it, that all human language has been 
 produced by the various combinations of an insignifi- 
 cant number of sounds, and that all human thought is 
 inseparably bound up with this seemingly unpromising 
 instrument, and is accomplished solely through this 
 simple, mechanical apparatus of articulate sound-pro- 
 duction ? 
 
 But, we have still to ask, what is the mental coun- 
 terpart to this mechanism, to the word considered as a 
 sound? What is the idea, the meaning of the words? 
 And how does it come to pass that particular ideas 
 come to be expressed by particular sounds and made 
 intelligible thereby? Are they things of the outer 
 world, which are simply retained by phonetic signs, 
 and reproduced in the mind by their help, something 
 in the manner of Cicero's dictum: 'Vocahula sunt 
 not(2 rerum,' a dictum which seemed to all antiquity, 
 down to the age of Leibnitz and Locke, to exhaust the 
 whole problem ? 
 
 If new light is to be thrown upon the important and 
 obscure problem of the origin of language, these ques- 
 tions must be submitted to renewed and serious criti- 
 
MAX MULLER'S THEORY 109 
 
 cism. And the time seems to have arrived when they 
 must be more energetically and fruitfully attacked if 
 the magnificent results of comparative philology are 
 not to remain a mere heap of scientific material, but 
 to prove a valuable possession for humanity and con- 
 tribute to decide the ultimate and supreme questions 
 of philosophy and anthropology. 
 
 The profound insight and philosophic temper of 
 Max Miiller is novi^here more evident than in his hav- 
 ing been the first among the students of language to 
 dive into these obscure abysses with the torch of 
 empirical knowledge; which he himself had been 
 among the first to kindle, in search of a satisfactory 
 answer, such as is to be found nowhere else, to the 
 question what is the origin of the human mind. 
 
 Miiller took as his starting-point the view of Locke, 
 quoted above, respecting the nature and essence of 
 human speech. He quotes the words of the great 
 English thinker, who, after having shown how uni- 
 versal ideas arise, how the mind, after having observed 
 the same colour in chalk, in snow, and in milk, compre- 
 hends these several perceptions under the general idea 
 of white, thus continues: — 
 
 'This I may be positive in, that the power of abstraction 
 is not at all in brutes, so that the having of general ideas is 
 that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes. 
 For it is evident we observe no footsteps in these of making 
 use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have 
 reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstract- 
 ing or making general ideas, since they have no use of words, 
 or any other general signs."" 
 
 This power of abstraction, or having general ideas, 
 
 ^Lectures on the Science of Language, toI. 1. p. 405. 
 
110 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 Max Miiller continues, is realised by means of lan- 
 guage and language only, which is the exclusive prop- 
 erty of mankind, in virtue of its humanity. That 
 which is language seen from without is reason seen 
 from within. It is the obvious mark of distinction 
 between man and beast. The origin of human develop- 
 ment can therefore only be elucidated by the discovery 
 of the origin of language. And if we ask what new 
 contributions have been brought to light from the ma- 
 terials hitherto examined by comparative philology, in 
 aid of this enquiry, 
 
 'The result,' says our author, 'if we look back on our former 
 lectures, is this. After we had explained everything in the 
 growth of language that can be explained, there remained 
 in the end, as the only inexplicable residuum, what we called 
 roots. These roots formed the constituent elements of all 
 languages. This discovery has simplified the problem of 
 the origin of language immensely. It has taken away all 
 excuse for those rapturous descriptions of language which 
 invariably preceded the argument that language must have 
 a divine origin. We shall hear no more of that wonderful 
 instrument which can express all we see, and hear, and taste, 
 and touch, and smell; which is the breathing image of the 
 whole world; which gives form to the airy feelings of our 
 souls, and body to the loftiest dreams of our imagination; 
 which can arrange in accurate perspective the past, the pres- 
 ent, and the future, and throw over evers^hing the varying 
 hues of certainty, of doubt, of contingency. All this is per- 
 fectly true, but it is no longer wonderful, at least not in the 
 Arabian Night's sense of that word. "The speculative mind," 
 as Dr. Ferguson says, "in comparing the first and last steps 
 of the progress of language, feels the same sort of amaze- 
 ment with a traveller, who, after rising insensibly on the 
 slope of a hill, comes to look from a precipice of an almost 
 unfathomable depth to the summit of which he scarcely be- 
 lieves himself to have ascended without supernatural aid." 
 
MAX MULLEE'S THEORY 111 
 
 To certain minds it is a disappointment to be led down again 
 by the hand of history from that high summit. They prefer 
 the unintelligible which they can admire, to the intelligible 
 which they can only understand. But to a mature mind 
 reality is more wonderful than complication. Roots may 
 seem dry things as compared with the poetry of Goethe. 
 Yet there is something more truly wonderful in a root than 
 in all the lyrics of the world. 
 
 'What, then, are these roots? In our modern languages 
 roots can only be discovered by scientific analysis, and, even 
 as far back as Sanskrit, we may say that no root was ever 
 used as a noun or as a verb. But originally roots were thus 
 used, and in Chinese we have fortunately preserved to us a 
 representative of that primitive radical stage which, like the 
 granite, underlies all other strata of human speech. Roots, 
 therefore, are not, as is commonly maintained, merely scien- 
 tific abstractions, but they were used originally as real words. 
 
 'What we want to find out is this. What inward mental 
 phase is it that corresponds to these roots, as the germs of 
 human speech?' 
 
 How much fresh and vivid truth in a simple form ! 
 How much to instruct and stimulate philosophic 
 thought — but alas, for the majority of the philosophers 
 of to-day only the voice of one crying in the wilder- 
 ness ! The problem of the origin of language is 
 brought into a simple and concrete shape, and a nar- 
 row path pointed out which, even though its course 
 lie through dim and tangled thickets, cannot fail to 
 lead us to the goal at last. Seek the origin of these 
 roots, of the residuum left in the crucible of the 
 analyst; comparative philology will show you the de- 
 velopment of linguistic life out of the germ-cell. 
 Omne vivum ex ovo; and the ova which the physi- 
 ology of languages has discovered in its empirical 
 researches are roots. By their development and unin- 
 
112 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 terrupted growth all the known languages of the world 
 have reached their marvellous stature, and become the 
 body of reason and the instrument of mind. By the 
 help of these roots and their intellectual equivalent 
 man has taken spiritual possession of the whole crea- 
 tion, as he, at the same moment, cast it in their mould 
 and stamped it with their impress. 
 
 But once more, whence these roots? How were 
 they formed? How made into a lasting possession? 
 How did they receive their significance? When Max 
 Miiller's Lectures were delivered, two theories were 
 chiefly in vogue among students of the theory of lan- 
 guage, both of which he has the merit of having driven 
 out of the temple of philological science. 
 
 These two theories, however, rested upon one com- 
 mon, general, and widely-spread error, an error so nat- 
 ural as to be readily excusable. As language expresses 
 everything by sounds, the first thing seemed to be to 
 discover the causal connection which was assumed to 
 exist between the sound and its meaning, at least in 
 the case of elementary sounds or roots. 
 
 The theory of onomatopoeia, or the imitation of 
 natural sounds, had always been a favourite with the 
 philologist of ancient and modern times, and it was 
 this to which Max Miiller gave the name of the 'Bow- 
 wow theory.' 'As any process in the external world,' 
 observes Geiger, 'is only comparable with a word in 
 so far as it is itself audible, and indeed only entirely 
 comparable with a word of similar sound to its own, 
 it is intelligible that the hypothesis should have been 
 regarded as especially luminous and attractive.' 
 
 Even the divine Plato, in his incomparable dialogue 
 the 'Kratylos,' had referred to the possibility of such 
 
MAX MULLEK'S THEORY 113 
 
 an origin for languages, though he immediately adds, 
 with deeper insight : 'To imitate the voices of animals 
 is by no means the same thing as to name them.' 
 Leibnitz also wished to have the imitation of sounds 
 recognised as a fruitful source of verbal roots, espe- 
 cially with reference to the voices of animals. 
 
 'To this number belongs the Latin word coaxare; which 
 is used of frogs, and answers to the German quaken. The 
 cries and noise of these animals seem to have furnished the 
 origin of a number of other German words. Because of the 
 noise made by frogs the word is applied nowadays to the 
 empty talk and chatter of those who are called in the diminu- 
 tive Quackeler. As, however, the cry or sound of an animal 
 is a sign of life, by which the presence of a living animal 
 is recognised without its being seen, the old German word 
 queck (English "'quick") is also derived from the same source; 
 other still surviving traces of it are met with in quick-si\vtv, 
 in the German erqukken, to strengthen or refresh; while the 
 weed that no efforts are able to extirpate from the field is 
 called Quecks or g«icfe-grass." 
 
 It is hardly necessary to observe that these com- 
 parisons are untenable in substance. 
 
 Herder embraced the same view; he held that the 
 observant human mind adopted the cries of animals as 
 signs. Men said to the sheep, 'Thou are the bleater,' 
 and proceeded to associate the cry of the animal with 
 the idea of it. W. von Humboldt, too, in his suggestive 
 work, 'Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen 
 Sprachbaus,' assumes the imitation of natural sounds 
 to have been at least an important factor in the origin 
 of language, though he was not blind to the difficulties 
 and inadequacy of an hypothesis which would turn 
 human language into a concert of animal cries : — 
 
 "UteiB Essays book ill, chap. 2. 
 
114 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 'This representation is in a way pictorial ; as an image 
 represents the way in which an object appears to the eye, 
 language represents the way in which it is perceived by the 
 ear. As the imitation here has always to deal with inarticu- 
 late tones, there is a constant struggle between articulation 
 and this kind of representation, and according to the result 
 of the contest ' the inarticulate element predominates so as 
 hardly to deserve the name of language, or disappears so far 
 as to be unrecognisable. For this reason it cannot be denied 
 that there is a degree of rudeness about any language in 
 which this element is conspicuous ; it is feeble when there is 
 a free and vigorous linguistic feeling, and it tends gradually 
 to disappear with the progressive development and refinement 
 of language.' 
 
 This theory, however plausible and seductive it 
 may seem at first sight, is directly opposed to the facts 
 of any language yet examined. This truth was clearly 
 and resolutely maintained by Max Miiller, until at 
 length there was an end of these recurring attempts to 
 find the origin of language in a source which, on ap- 
 proaching, proves to be a mirage in the desert sand. 
 
 'Our answer is,' he says,'' 'that though there are names 
 in every language formed by mere imitation of sound, yet 
 these constitute a very small proportion of our dictionary. 
 They are the playthings, not the tools, of language, and any 
 attempt to reduce the most common and necessary words to 
 imitative roots ends in complete failure. . . . We cannot 
 deny the possibifity that a language might have been formed 
 on the principle of imitation; all we say is that as yet no 
 language has been discovered that was so formed. . . . There 
 are of course some names, such as cuckoo, which are clearly 
 formed by an imitation of sound. But words of this kind are, 
 like artificial flowers, without a root. They are sterile, and 
 are unfit to express anything beyond the one object which 
 they imitate. ... As the word cuckoo predicates nothing 
 
 'Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. 1. p. 409. 
 
MAX MULLEK'S THEORY 115 
 
 but the sound of a particular bird, it could never be applied 
 for expressing any general quality in which other animals 
 might share. . . . Cuckoo could never mean anything but 
 the cuckoo, and while a word like raven has ever so many 
 relations, from a rumor down to a row, cuckoo stands by 
 itself like a stick in a living hedge. . . . Many more instances 
 might be given to show how easily we are deceived by the 
 constant connection of certain sounds and certain meanings 
 in our own languages. . . . Most of these onomatopoeias 
 vanish (as in the case of thunder, katze, squirrel, &c.) as 
 soon as we trace our own names back to Anglo-Saxon and 
 Gothic, or compare them with their cognates in Greek, Latin, 
 or Sanskrit. The number of names which are really formed 
 by an imitation of sound dwindle down to a very small 
 quotum, if cross-examined by the comparative philologist, 
 and we. are left in the end with a conviction, that though a 
 language might have been made out of the roaring, fizzing, 
 hissing, gobbling, twittering, cracking, banging, slamming, and 
 rattling sounds of nature, the tongues with which we are 
 acquainted point to a different origin.' 
 
 The second theory, which also has numbered dis- 
 tiilguished representatives, deduced language from the 
 natural cries expressive of human feeling, following in 
 this the precedent of Epicurus, and among the mod- 
 erns, of De Bosses^ and Condillac. This view, which 
 regarded the cries of joy and pain as the starting- 
 
 ^Trait6 de la Formation m^caniqiie des Langues, 1756. As this 
 theory, in spite of its complete refutation by Max MuUer, still 
 possesses numerous adherents among naturalists, It may be men- 
 tioned, to save them from needless exercise of their imaginative 
 powers, that this ingenious work contains everything in the sem- 
 blance of reason which it is possible to put together upon an 
 absurd foundation. They may read there how the Utera canina, r, 
 betokens what is disagreeable ; how the tone of pain is deep, oh, heu, 
 liilas; that of surprise higher, oh, ah; of Joy short and recurring, 
 ha, ha, ha, he, he, he; of displeasure and contempt labial, fl, vae, 
 puh, pfui; that of doubt and negation nasal, hum, horn, nan, &c.; 
 and that all the most necessary words are derived from these 
 sources. 
 
116 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 point of human language, was aptly characterised by 
 Max Miiller as the 'Pooh-pooh!' or inter jectional 
 theory. 
 
 The conclusions of comparative philology were as 
 fatal to this theory as to the preceding one. To quote 
 again from Max Miiller :^ 
 
 'There are, no doubt, in every language interjections, and 
 some of them may become traditional, and enter into the 
 composition of words. But these interjections are only the 
 outskirts of real language. Language begins where interjec- 
 tions end. There is as much difference between a real word, 
 such as "to laugh," and the interjection ha, ha I between "I 
 suffer" and oh! as there is between the involuntary act and 
 noise of sneezing and the verb "to sneeze." We sneeze and 
 cough, and scream and laugh, in the same manner as animals ; 
 but if Epicurus tells us that we speak in the same manner 
 as dogs bark, moved by nature, our own experience will tell 
 us that this is not the case. 
 
 'An excellent answer to the interjectional theory has been 
 given by Home Tooke. 
 
 ' 'The dominion of speech," he says, "is erected upon the 
 downfall of interjections. Without the artful contrivances of 
 language, mankind would have had nothing but interjections 
 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 parts of speech 
 as interjections have. Voluntary interjections are only em- 
 ployed where the suddenness and vehemence 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." 
 
 'One short interjection may be more powerful, more to 
 the point, more eloquent than a long speech. In fact, inter- 
 
 'Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. 1. p. 420. 
 
MAX MULLER'S THEOEY 117 
 
 jections, together with gestures, the movements of the muscles 
 of the mouth and the eye, would be quite sufficient for all 
 purposes which language answers with the majority of man- 
 kind. 
 
 'As to the attempts at deriving some of our words etymo- 
 logically from mere interjections, they are apt to fail from 
 the same kind of misconception which leads us to imagine 
 that there is something expressive in the sounds of words.' 
 
 Both theories, alike the Bow-wow and the Pooh- 
 pooh theory, were finally demolished by the same 
 philosophical reflection, the germ of which is contained 
 in the words of Leibnitz cited at the beginning of this 
 chapter -J 
 
 'If the constituent elements of human speech were either 
 mere cries or the mimicking of the cries of nature, it would 
 be difficult to understand why brutes should be without lan- 
 guage. There is not only the parrot, but the mocking-bird 
 and others, which can imitate most successfully both articu- 
 late and inarticulate sounds; and there is hardly an animal 
 without the faculty of uttering interjections, such as huff, hiss, 
 baa, &c. It is clear also that if what puts a perfect distinc- 
 tion betwixt man and brutes is the having of general ideas, 
 language, which arises from interjections and from the imita- 
 tion of the cries of animals, could not claim to be the outward 
 sign of that distinctive faculty of man. All words, in begin- 
 ning at least (and this is the only point which interests us), 
 would have been the signs of individual impressions and 
 individual perceptions, and would only gradually have been 
 adapted to the expression of general ideas. The theory which 
 is suggested to us by an analysis of language, carried out 
 according to the principles of comparative philology, is the 
 very opposite. We arrive in the end at roots and every one 
 of these expresses a general, not an individual, idea. Every 
 name, if we analyse it, contains a predicate by which the 
 object ta which the name applies was known.' 
 
 ''Lectures on the Bcience of Language, vol. i. p. 424. 
 
118 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 In Other words, it is not an account of the essence 
 of language to say that a definite external object elicits 
 a particular sound or cry from a sensitive, perceptive 
 being — a view corresponding to Steinthal's theory of 
 reflex-sounds : the essence of language lies in the fact 
 that the sound serves to say something, that with the 
 saying something is thought, and that something is 
 predicated of the object thought and spoken about. 
 
 And in reference to this Max Miiller enunciates a 
 truth of incalculable importance, which will procure 
 him the epithet, with the judicious, of 'the Darwin of 
 the mind': for he puts forward, as an unquestionable 
 result of philological enquiry, the filiation of ideas 
 which is met with uninterruptedly in continuous 
 development. 
 
 'Never,' he observes, 'in the history of language, so far as 
 we are able to trace the course of its development, do we find 
 an object or an idea associate itself all at once with a sound, 
 for no apparent reason, as if by a kind of generatio CBquivoca. 
 The object exists only by the idea which we have of it, and 
 to our consciousness the idea itself only exists by means of 
 the sound which is the body, the symbol, so to speak, of the 
 thought.' 
 
 Exactly the same results have been reached by 
 Geiger ; and to afford still further confirmation of Max 
 Miiller's view, I may quote some of the most important 
 passages of this 'Ur sprung der Sprache': 
 
 'In the nature of the mind, as in that of the body, there 
 is no saltus; the one is developed out of as minute elements 
 as the other. 
 
 'Slow development, differentiation of opposites from im- 
 perceptible variations, is historically the only cause of changes, 
 on the one hand, in the meaning given to a word, and, on 
 the other, in the meaning attached to the notions desig- 
 
MAX MULLER'S THEORY 119 
 
 nated. ... I have not succeeded in discovering any point at 
 vifhich a conception appears that cannot be traced to some 
 other conception, and for which, therefore, the mind would 
 be compelled to seek a sign outside, e.g. in a noise, nor yet 
 any new impression giving occasion to a new vocal move- 
 ment.' 
 
 Geiger rests his view, as appears from these words, 
 upon the favourite idea of Leibnitz — natura non facit 
 saltum; that, on the contrary, all changes are effected 
 rather as transitions of the infinitely little — a thought 
 which, as Leibnitz expressly notes, involves the ques- 
 tion as to the interval between man and beast, which, 
 however remote and inconceivable its existence, still 
 must have been lived through, and which it is the espe- 
 cial object of the science of language and philosophy to 
 reconstruct by their joint efforts as they try to reopen 
 the choked-up source of the origin of speech. 
 
 The capital idea of the filiation or genealogical 
 connection of all human conceptions had certainly pre- 
 sented itself to the versatile mind of the great Leibnitz, 
 though not with the clearness possible to later stu- 
 dents with a more abundant supply of scientific mate- 
 rial. Indeed, there is scarcely any thought which 
 agitates the minds of the present day but may be found 
 in the germ in the writings of Leibnitz. Take, as an 
 example, his refutation of the Lockian doctrine that all 
 ideas have their roots in sensations and are derived 
 from thence : 
 
 'Have you already forgotten, dear Philalethes, that our 
 ideas reside originally in the soul, and that all thoughts pro- 
 ceed originally from that original base, without any other 
 creature being able to exercise any direct influence upon the 
 soul." 
 
 ^Leibnitz THew Essays IV. Chap. 4, Open Court Publishing Com- 
 pany, Chicago. 
 
120 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 If this idea is sound — and all philological observa- 
 tion and research confirms and advocates it, and indeed 
 could only become possible as a science by assuming its 
 truth — then a foundation of inestimable solidity has 
 been secured for further investigation, and the prob- 
 lem of the origin of language, which has hitherto 
 hovered before us in the remote haze of distance, is 
 brought at once within the attainable, clearly cir- 
 cumscribed boundary of the horizon. 
 
 The inferences which Max Miiller deduced from 
 this important elementary truth are, in their main 
 features, somewhat as follows : 
 
 1. The sounds of language are at all times and 
 everywhere significant. It is in virtue of this quality 
 alone that they form a part of speech. The interjec- 
 tional and imitative theories are herewith condemned. 
 
 2. Nothing in language is dead that has not once 
 been alive. This explains and sets aside the apparent 
 exceptions presented by inflection-terminations, infixes, 
 affixes, and the whole formal apparatus of language. 
 The word fruchtbar could not be formed unless the 
 second syllable had a meaning, and though that mean- 
 ing is lost to the feeling of contemporary speech, 
 science shows us that it originally meant fruit- 
 bearing. 
 
 3. Language passed from the simplest beginnings — 
 monosyllabic, primary roots — first to secondary and 
 tertiary roots, and then, through the luxuriant abun- 
 dance of forms belonging to the poly^ynthetic or agglu- 
 tinative stage, to the clearness and precision, to the 
 wonderful richness of thought and expression belong- 
 ing to modern and inflected languages. The cradle of 
 speech is the goal of the science of language. 
 
MAX MULLBR'S THEOEY 121 
 
 4. The mental counterpart of roots are certain 
 fixed rational elements, nearly all of the nature of 
 predicates, though a few, the pronominal class, are 
 demonstrative. And as the roots, considered as sounds, 
 are phonetic types, so their rational counterparts in the 
 mind are rational types; those are phonetical types, 
 these conceptual types, or rational concepts. These, 
 we repeat, are the fixed forms or norms with which 
 language — that is to say, rational thought — ^has 
 stamped as its own the whole of creatiouj 
 
 5. The original mental content of the roots, their 
 earliest meanings, so far as comparative philology can 
 trace them, prove to have been only sensible percep- 
 tions or impressions. 
 
 As the last paragraph contains the boundary to 
 which Max Miiller has led his troops, and where he 
 has left them encamped in view of the impregnable 
 fortress, some further discussion must be allowed me 
 here. For Max Miiller himself ventured on an attack 
 from this point, which could not but end in failure 
 since this last proposition, though true as far as it goes, 
 is not the whole truth. 
 
 His words are : 
 
 'AH roots, i.e. all the material elements of language, are 
 expressive of sensuous impressions, and of sensuous impres- 
 sions only." 
 
 'The only definition we can give of language during that 
 early state is, that it is the conscious expression in sound of 
 impressions received by all the senses."^" 
 
 I said that, starting from this position. Max Miiller 
 has hazarded an onslaught upon the mysterious for- 
 
 'Lecturee on the Science of Language, 9th edit. li. p. 372. 
 "Cftips from a German Workshop, 11. p. 54. 
 
122 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 tress which hides the origin of reason and language 
 from the eyes of mortals. The theory which he ad- 
 vances in conformity with this leading principle is as 
 follows :^^ 
 
 'There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of 
 nature that everjfthing which is struck rings. Each sub- 
 stance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less 
 perfect structure of metals by their vibrations, by the answer 
 which they give. Gold rings differently from tin, wood rings 
 differently from stone; and different sounds are produced 
 according to the nature of each percussion. It was the same 
 with man, the most highly organised of nature's works. Man, 
 in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed, like 
 the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by 
 interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoeia, he pos- 
 sessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expres- 
 sion to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty 
 was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct 
 of the mind, as irresistible as any other instinct. So far as 
 language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the 
 realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to 
 want them. His senses become fainter when, as in the case 
 of scent, they become useless. Thus the creative faculty which 
 gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time 
 through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when 
 its object was fulfilled. The number of these phonetic types 
 must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was 
 only through the same process of natural elimination which we 
 observed in the early history of words, that clusters of roots, 
 more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one 
 definite type. Instead of deriving language from nine roots, 
 like Dr. Murray, or from one root, we must suppose that 
 the first settlement of the radical elements of language was 
 
 "^Lectures, vol. i. p. 440. It should be remembered here that 
 Professor Max MUller himself was never fully satisfied with his 
 approximation to Heyse's theory, but regarded It rather In the 
 light of a makeshift, and Indeed In his lectures upon Darwin's 
 philosophy of language has pursued the search for some other Issue. 
 
MAX MULLEE'S THEORY 123 
 
 preceded by a period of unrestrained growth— the spring of 
 speech — to be followed by many an autumn.' 
 
 I believe it will be in accordance with the purpose 
 of the present essay if I mention here those (com- 
 paratively few) points on which Geiger separates him- 
 self from Max Miiller, and enters upon what I venture 
 to regard as a truer and more direct course towards 
 the desired goal. These two points are : 
 
 1. A more consistent adherence to the vital prin- 
 ciple that, language is able to develop or derive ideas 
 only from ideas. Geiger observes, with special refer-- 
 ence to Max Miiller's hypothesis : 
 
 'The assumption of a now exhausted power of linguistic 
 creation, and the kindred one of a perfect condition for 
 primeval man, is a resort to the incomprehensible, and not 
 far removed from a confession that it will always in the 
 nature of things be impossible for us to discover the true 
 sense of primitive roots, or to explain the process of the 
 formation of language.' 
 
 Geiger himself remains faithful to the principle that 
 the process must have, been the same at the origin as 
 in all subsequent development of language, only in- 
 definitely slower in operation. Accordingly he does 
 not assume a number of vocal sounds with correspond- 
 ing ideas to have existed in the beginning, but a single 
 sound, excited by one definite idea. 
 
 'The key to the meaning of a word lies only in a pre- 
 ceding one. . . . The mass of meanings really contained in 
 existing words converge at last to a single centre, but this 
 can lie nowhere except in the first origin of language itself. 
 . . . Why is it that words begin by meaning so little and in 
 general mean less and less the further back we trace them? 
 
124 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 I can give no other answer than this: Because in the begin- 
 ning the sum of man's perception was not greater.'" 
 
 2. Max Miiller treats the 'impressions received by 
 all the senses' as a source of the first workings of 
 language, while Geiger allows this to hold good only 
 of perceptions derived from the sense of sight. 
 
 'A conviction which has forced itself irresistibly on my 
 mind, after consideration of all the linguistic material I have 
 been able to obtain, is that the perception to the growth of 
 which language bears witness in mankind is that which takes 
 place through the sensation of sight. . . . The most essential 
 characteristic of man is his power of distinguishing, and his 
 interest in the distinction of, objects by visual perception.'" 
 
 But in spite of these new and undeniably fruitful 
 explanations, it was not reserved for Geiger to reach 
 the final goal, as he hoped, and indeed, as appears 
 from some indications, believed himself to have done. 
 Comparative philology could not accomplish this by 
 its own unaided methods; it was necessary for philo- 
 sophy, the science of mind, to approach the problem 
 simultaneously from another side, and then only the 
 victorious advance could be made by the allied troops 
 under the supreme command of philosophic thought. 
 
 After reading my book, 'On the Origin of Lan- 
 guage/ Max Miiller wrote to me, and while acknowl- 
 edging the progress made, continued : 
 
 'Now I come to my difficulties. The real problem seems 
 to me to lie in the origin of thought, or, to put it briefly, in 
 the transition from perception to conception. Explain to me 
 how man becomes able to conceive "two," and you will have 
 explained to me the origin of language.' 
 
 ^Vraprung der Sprache, p. 130. isjb. p. 142. 
 
MAX MULLER'S THEOET 125 
 
 This is both true and profound. It is altogether 
 impossible to pass from perception, that is to say, from 
 a purely sensuous impression, to thought, just as it is 
 impossible to derive mind from matter in motion. 
 Cosmic evolution can only be conceived by assuming 
 feeling, the origin of reason can only be reached by 
 assuming conception. 
 
 Thus while all preceding writers on the philosophy 
 of language. Max Miiller and Geiger included, have 
 followed the universal tradition in deriving language 
 and thought from the passive element of perception, 
 I have entered upon the opposite course, and affirmed : 
 
 'Language is the child of will, of an active, not of a 
 passive state; the roots of words contain the proper activity 
 of men, and receive their significance from the effects of this 
 activity in so far as it is phenomenal, i.e. visible. Human 
 thought arises from a double root, the subjective activity, or 
 the^willj^ and the objective phenomenon which is accessible to 
 the senses.' 
 
 Max Miiller has since expressed his full assent to 
 this view. 
 
 The task upon which philosophy and comparative 
 philology are engaged is one of supreme importance, 
 though only duly understood and estimated by the 
 more intelligent few. The work is nothing less than 
 to renew, to reconstruct, and complete on an empirical 
 base the gigantic work done by Kant, to fathom and 
 interpret the origin and growth of that supreme mir- 
 acle of creation, the human reason. Such a task is 
 far higher in importance even than theories of the 
 rise and fall of planetary systems.^* 
 
 "If tMs assertion seems too bold, I will quote an unimpeachable 
 witness to Its truth. Buckle, to my thinking the most pronounced 
 
 ^'.^■^-■^ 
 
126 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 And when the solution has been uttered, in accord- 
 ance with the conviction so confidently expressed by 
 
 and logical of modern determinists, i. e. of the philosophical school 
 which recognizes everywhere only an iron system of natural laws, 
 even Buckle found himself compelled to malie the following admis- 
 sions, which from his point of view are certainly not a little 
 remarkable. 'The highest of our so-called laws of nature are as 
 yet purely empirical. You are startled at that assertion ; but it la 
 literally true. Not one physical discovery that has ever been made 
 has been connected with the laws of the mind that made it ; and 
 until that connection is ascertained, our knowledge has no eure 
 basis. On the one side we have mind; on the other side we have 
 matter. These two principles are so interwoven, they so act upon 
 and perturb each other, that we shall never really know the laws 
 of the one, unless we also know the laws of both. Everything is 
 essential; everything hangs together and forms part of one single 
 scheme, one grand and complex plan, of which the universe is the 
 theatre. They who discourse to you of the laws of nature, as if 
 those laws were binding on nature, or as if they formed part of 
 nature, deceive both you and themselves. The laws of nature have 
 their sole seat, origin, and function in the human mind.' (A. 
 Buckle : The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge — 
 Lecture delivered 1858.) And to discover the laws of this mind 
 in its essential function, thought, is the lofty aim of the science 
 of language. For the rest these words of Buckle point unmistak- 
 ably to a very welcome fact, which is accomplishing itself in the 
 consciousness of the age, namely, that the reign of materialism la 
 drawing to Its close, and that a higher, nobler, and more worthy 
 theory of the universe will take Its place. Every indication seems 
 to promise that the great synthesis which has been from all times 
 the supreme goal of philosophy will accomplish itself, even before 
 the close of the century. I may quote in proof of this another 
 passage, from a recently published article In the Revue des Deui 
 Mondes upon the doctrines of Epicurus : 'Epicure est le premier 
 dans I'antiquitg qui ait nii r^solUment ce qui £talt hors des prises 
 dlrectes et de la port^e des sens. A ce titre, 11 pent Stre considers 
 comme I'expression confuse et inconsciente du positivisme qui &i- 
 Clare gu'il n'y a pas d'objet pour I'esprit humain en dehors des lots 
 de la nature. II a le premier creusfi le fossS qui s'Slargit tons les 
 Jours et qui s^pare la m^taphysique de la science de la nature. Pour 
 les esprits spSculatifs les questions d'origine et de fin sont les plus 
 importantes de toutes, celles auxquelles tout le reste se rapporte ; 
 pour les autres 11 n'y a qu'une seule fitude, celle des phinomgnes et 
 
MAX MULLEE'S THEORY 127 
 
 Max Miiller, and fully shared by the present writer, all 
 future philosophy will be exclusively the philosophy 
 of language. 
 
 de leur d^pendance reciprogue. . . ., demandant seulement ft la 
 nature morte les secrets qu'elle lul rfvfele pour dclairer le Jeu et les 
 resBorts de I'organlsme vlvant. Cette separation date d'Eplcure : 
 Bl une telle glorle a 6ti r&ervfie ft celul qui a dlvls^ I'esprlt humaln 
 en deux parties presque IrrficonclUables, quelle glolre n'attend pas 
 celul qui lera cesser ce divorce et qui, par la mitaphyalgue et la 
 physique riconciliiea dans une Juste mesure d'lnd£pendance et de 
 services rficiproques, reconstruira I'uniU scientiflque de I'eeprit 
 humain. — (E. Caro : Bevue dea Deux Monies, Nov. 1878, p. 112). 
 
MY OWN THEORY ON THE ORIGIN 
 OF LANGUAGE 
 
 Although it is not the primary object of the present 
 pages, the reader will perhaps not take it amiss if I 
 venture to indicate briefly what is the solution of the 
 problem suggested in my own work 'Der Ur sprung 
 der Sprache.' I believe the best way of doing this will 
 be to take the concluding words of the first series of 
 Max Mtiller's 'Lectures on the Science of Language.' 
 which contain the last results of his varied and pro- 
 found investigation into what he so strikingly calls 
 'the body of human thought,' and which he recom- 
 mended to the attention of philosophic students as a 
 starting-point for further inferences. 
 
 The reader will see from his own words how near 
 he was to the real solution, and may indeed wonder 
 how it was that he failed to force the last barrier 
 which divided him from the mysterious birthplace of 
 human thought, and to bring it into the full light of a 
 satisfying and self-supporting explanation. 
 
 As we have already seen, one of Max Muller's 
 chief merits is the emphatic and consistent opposition 
 and successful resistance which he offers to the ancient 
 and inveterate error, that things as such naturally con- 
 
NOIEE'S THBOKT 129 
 
 nect themselves in the human mind with sounds, which 
 then, in some inexplicable way, turn into names, or 
 audible tokens of the things.^ 
 
 This error is the harder to exterminate,^ as it rests 
 upon an immovable conviction that the objective 
 world, the world of things, which we perceive with our 
 external senses, supplies the primary and indispensable, 
 because the most natural, material for human knowl- 
 edge, and therefore also contributes chiefly to the for- 
 mation of human language; that, accordingly, people 
 talked about the bright sky before they talked about a 
 bright intelligence, of breath before life, of blows be- 
 fore punishment, as the image must be known and 
 
 I'Vocabula sunt notae rerun' had been aaid as long ago as by 
 Cicero, and Herder chose this dictum for the motto to his epoch- 
 making essay, On the Origin ot Language. 
 
 'How deeply rooted this error Is, appears from the fact that 
 an otherwise meritorious philologist like M. Br€al relapses Into It 
 again and again, notwithstanding Max MOller's conclusive refuta- 
 tion. Thus, In connection with the root ihar he raises the ques- 
 tion : 'D6slgnalt-ll le porteur d'un fardeau, ou le fardeau lul- 
 mSme . . . . ou Venfant que la m6re porte dans son sein?' And 
 again : 'II n'est pas vralsemblable que dans la pgrlode monosyl- 
 lablque 11 n'y eflt pas encore de termes pour dfislgner le soleil, le 
 tonnerre, la flamme. Mais du moment que ces mots sont entrfis en 
 contact avec les Slfiments prouominaux, pour former les yerbes, leur 
 sens est devenu plus flulde, et lis se sont riaolua en racines slg- 
 nlfiant briller, retentir, iriiler.' (M. Brtel : Les Racines des Langues 
 Indo-BuropSennes, p. 3, 4.) This Is Indeed Inverting the order of 
 things, and planting a tree with its leader In the ground, that the 
 roots may grow upwards. The remark on p. 6, that the root sarp 
 points to the name of a reptile, and that the names of the parts 
 of the body, pad foot, nds nose, dant tooth, card heart — all corre- 
 sponding to the simplest Ideas — must have existed before the verbal 
 roots to which they are related, calls to mind Pott's jest and the 
 remark appended to It by Curtlus (Oriech. Etym. p. 108). *Pott 
 gives as a ludicrous example of this method of proceeding, that the 
 root gen, drawn out of gena, should have the signification "to be a 
 cheek" ; and. Indeed, If we had to translate the root as, which 
 Leo Mayer extracts from asinus, the only meaning tfiat could be 
 proposed for it would be Indeed "to be an ass." ' 
 
130 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 named before the imagination. It is an undoubted 
 truth, which philosophy and philology agree in admit- 
 ting, that speech and language arrive far later at the 
 point of designating mental qualities than sensible 
 objects.^ But it is one thing to maintain that these 
 objects were the first material, the earliest objects of 
 human thought and speech, and quite another thing to 
 profess to answer the question how they first came to 
 be known and named. 
 
 Let us hear Max Miiller himself speak now :* 
 
 'There is a petrified philosophy in language, and if we 
 examine the most ancient word for name, we find it ndman 
 in Sanskrit, nomen in Latin, namo in Gothic. This naman 
 stands for gnaman, and is derived from the root gna, to 
 know, and meant originally that by which we know a thing. 
 
 'And how do we know things ? 
 
 'The first step towards the real knowledge, a step, which, 
 however small in appearance, separates man for ever from all 
 other animals, is the naming of a thing, or the making a 
 thing knowable. All naming is classification, bringing the 
 individual under the general ; and whatever we know, whether 
 empirically or scientifically, we know it only by means of our 
 general ideas. 
 
 'At the very point where man parts company with the 
 brute world, at the very first flash of reason as the manifesta- 
 tion of the light within us, there we see the true genesis of 
 
 2'Tlius the fact that all words expressive of Immaterial con- 
 cepts are derived from words expressive of sensible ideas was for 
 the first time clearly and definitely put forward by Locke, and Is 
 now fully confirmed by the researches of comparative philologists. 
 All roots, i. e. all the material elements of language, are expressive 
 of sensuous impressions ; and as all words, even the most abstract 
 and sublime, are derived from roots, comparative philology fully 
 endorses the conclusions arrived at by Locke.' — Max MilUer: 
 Lectures on the Science oj Language, vol. 11. p. 372. 
 
 "Max MflUer : Lectures on the Science 0} Language, 1. p. 432, sq. 
 
NOIRB'S THEORY 131 
 
 language. Analyse any word you like, and you will find that 
 it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to which 
 the name belongs. 
 
 'What is the meaning of moon? The measurer. 
 
 'What is the meaning of sun? The begetter. 
 
 'What is the meaning of earth? The ploughed. 
 
 'If the serpent is called in Sanskrit sarpa, it is because it 
 was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea 
 expressed by the word sarp. An ancient word for man was 
 the Sanskrit marta, the Greek brotos, the Latin mortalis. 
 Marta means "he who dies," and it is remarkable that where 
 everything else was changing, fading, and dying, this should 
 have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man. 
 
 'There were many more names for man, as there were 
 many names for all things in ancient languages. Any feature 
 that struck the observing mind as peculiarly characteristic 
 could be made to furnish a new name. In common Sanskrit 
 dictionaries we find S words for hand, 11 for light, IS for 
 cloud, 20 for moon, 26 for snake, 33 for slaughter, 35 for fire, 
 37 for sun. The sun might be called the bright, the warm, 
 the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf, the lion, 
 the heavenly eye, the father of light and life. Hence that 
 superabundance of synonyms in ancient dialects, and hence 
 that struggle for life carried on among these words, which 
 led to the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the 
 less fertile words, and ended in the triumph of one word, 
 as the recognised and proper name for every object in every 
 language. On a very small scale this process of natural selec- 
 tion, or, as it would better be called, rational elimination, may 
 still be watched, even in modern languages, that is to say, even 
 in languages so old and stricken in years as English and 
 French. What it was at the first burst of dialects, we can only 
 gather from such isolated cases as when von Hatrtraer counts 
 S,744 words all relating to the camel. 
 
 'The fact that every word is originally a predicate — that 
 names, though signs of individual conceptions, are all, with- 
 out EXCEPTION, derived from general ideas — is one of the 
 most important discoveries in the science of language. It 
 was known before that language is the distinguishing char- 
 
132 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 acteristic of man; it was known also that the having of 
 general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between 
 man and brutes; but that these two were only different ex- 
 pressions of the same fact was not known till the theory of 
 roots had been established as preferable to the theories both 
 of Onomatopoeia and of Interjections. But though our mod- 
 ern philosophy did not know it, the ancient poets and framers 
 of language must have known it.' For in Greek, language 
 is logos, but logos means also reason, and alagon was chosen 
 as the name, and the most proper name, for brute. No animal 
 thinks and no animal speaks, except man. Language and 
 thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead 
 sounds, thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to 
 speak low, to speak is to think loud. The word is the thought 
 incarnate. 
 
 'Now, the last question of all in our science is this : How 
 can sound express thought? How did roots become the signs 
 of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of measuring 
 expressed by md, the idea of thinking by man? How did ga 
 come to mean going; sthd standing; sad sitting; da giving; 
 mar dying; kar walking; kar doing? 
 
 'The 400 or 500 roots which remain as the constituent ele- 
 ments in different families of language are not mere inter- 
 jections, nor are they mere imitations. They may be called 
 phonetic types, and whatever explanation the psychologist or 
 the metaphysician may propose, to the student of language 
 these roots are simply ultimate facts.' 
 
 Here follows the attempt quoted in the preceding 
 chapter to account for the origin of roots in accordance 
 with Heyse's method. But the author adds immedi- 
 ately, with wise insistence on the distinction between 
 what has been scientifically established and what is 
 still mere hypothesis : 
 
 "Ancient philosophy, too, knew no higher term for the supreme 
 ruling principle of order In the world than the two similarly related 
 words yovs and X670S. 
 
NOIRE' S THEORY 133 
 
 'There may be some value in speculations of this kind, 
 but I should not like to endorse them, for we have no right 
 to say that a vague analogy is an explanation of the problem 
 of the origin of roots. If there is any truth in the results at 
 which we have arrived after a careful and unprejudiced 
 analysis of all the facts before us, all that we have a right 
 to assert is that language begins with roots, and that these 
 roots are neither more nor less than phonetic types or typical 
 sounds. What lies beyond them is no longer, or if we speak 
 historically, is not yet language, however interesting it may 
 be for psychological researches. But whatever exists in real 
 language is the upshot of these roots. 
 
 'Words are various impressions taken from those phonetic 
 moulds, or, if you like, varieties and modifications, perfectly 
 intelligible in their structure, of those typical sounds, which, 
 by means of unerring tests, have been discovered as the 
 residuum of all humain speech.' 
 
 It was thus that Max Miiller spoke and wrote in 
 1860; eighteen years later he was able to say with 
 truth : 
 
 'Those who have read the "Lectures on the Science of 
 Language" will remember how strongly I opposed any attempt 
 on the part of the students of language to go beyond roots, 
 such as we actually find them as the result of the most careful 
 phonetic analysis. It was thought at the time that my protests 
 against all attempts to ignore or skip those roots, and to derive 
 any word or any grammatical form straight from mere cries 
 or from imitations of natural sounds, were too vehement. But 
 I believe it is now generally admitted, even by some of my 
 former opponents, that the slightest concession to what, not 
 ironically, but simply descriptively, I called the bow-wow and 
 pooh-pooh theories in the practical analysis of words would 
 have been utter ruin to the character of the science of 
 language." 
 
 ^Contemporary Review, February, 1878 : On the Origin of 
 Reason, p. 466. 
 
134 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 He continues : 
 
 'But to show that a certain road, and the only safe road, 
 leads us to a mountain wall, which from our side can never 
 be scaled, is very different from saying that there is, or that 
 there can be nothing behind that mountain wall. To judge 
 from the manner in which some comparative philologists 
 speak of roots, one would imagine that they were not only 
 indiscernibilia, but , Palladia fallen straight from the sky, 
 utterly incomprehensible in their nature and origin.' It was 
 in order to guard against such a view, that at the end of my 
 Lectures I felt induced to add a few lines, just as a painter 
 when he has finished a landscape dots in a few lines in the 
 background to show that there is a world beyond. The science 
 of language, I felt, had done its work when it had reduced 
 the vague problem of the origin of language to a more definite 
 form, viz. What is the origin of roots? How much has been 
 gained by that change of front, those will best be able to ap- 
 preciate who have studied the history of the innumerable 
 attempts at discovering the origin of language during the last 
 century. 
 
 'Beyond that point, however, where the student of lan- 
 guage is able to lay the primary elements of language at 
 the feet of philosophers, the science of language alone, apart 
 from the science of thought, will not carry us. We must start 
 afresh, and in a different direction; and it was in order to 
 show to what quarter I looked for a solution of the last prob- 
 lem, the origin of roots, that I appealed to the fact that 
 everything in nature when set in motion or struck, reacts, 
 that it vibrates, and causes vibrations. This seemed to me 
 the highest generalisation and at the same time the lowest 
 
 'This onesidedneas and stubbornness prevails equally in the 
 opposite camp among philosophers, who cannot make up their minds 
 to recognize the dependence of thought upon language, and never 
 abandon the received theory : 'That at some time or other in the 
 history of the world, men had accumulated a treasure of anonymous 
 general conceptions, to which, when the time of intellectual and 
 social intercourse had arrived, they skilfully attached those 
 phonetic labels which we call words.' — Max MUller : Lectures on the 
 Science of Language, ii. p. 371. 
 
NOIRE'S THEOET 135 
 
 beginning of what is meant by language. The two problems, 
 how mere cries, whether interjectional or imitative, could 
 develop into phonetic types, and how mere sensations could 
 develop into rational concepts, I left untouched, trusting that 
 philosophers by profession would quickly perceive how some 
 of the darkest points of psychology might be illuminated by 
 the electric light of the science of language, and fully con- 
 vinced that they would eagerly avail themselves of the ma- 
 terials placed before them and ready for use to build up at 
 last a sound and solid system of philosophy.' 
 
 This appeal to the professed philosophers should 
 have received, the candid reader might imagine, an 
 immediate and hearty response. What a magnificent 
 undertaking — worthy at once of its former develop- 
 ment and useful and necessary to its future achieve- 
 ments — was here set before philosophy. How eagerly 
 such an opportunity must be seized of rehabilitating 
 herself in the eyes of the world, which for something 
 like the last fifty years has looked upon all philosophy 
 as simply a bore, a mass of indigestible quibbling, chaff 
 by which no old birds are to be caught, only fit to stuff 
 the empty heads of the professors with self-conceit 
 and arrogance, and those of the students with non- 
 sense and vain imaginations ! Hie Rhodus, hie salta! 
 Now is the time to prove your mettle! A philosophy 
 that can solve such a problem as the present has given 
 a pledge of substantial value and established an un- 
 assailable claim to universal respect. But what actu- 
 ally occurred? Max MuUer will tell us : 
 
 'I confess I have often wondered at the apathy, particu- 
 larly of the students of psychology, with regard to the com- 
 plete revolution that has been worked before their eyes in the 
 realm of language. They siiilplj' looked on as if it did not 
 concern them. Why, if language were only the outward form 
 
136 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHT OF LANGUAGE 
 
 of thought, is it not clear that no philosophy, wishing to gain 
 an insight into the nature of thought and particularly into its 
 origin, could dispense with a careful study of language? What 
 would Hobbes or Locke have given for Bopp's 'Comparative 
 Grammar' ? What should we say if biologists were to attempt 
 to discover the nature and laws of organic Ufe without ever 
 looking at a living body ? And where are we to find the living 
 body of thought, if not in language? What are the two prob- 
 lems left unsettled at the end of the Science of Language : 
 
 'How do mere cries become phonetic types? and 
 
 'How can sensations be changed into concepts? 
 
 'What are these two, if taken together, but the highest 
 problem of all philosophy, viz. : 
 
 'What is the origin of reason?' 
 
 The position from which I started to attempt the 
 solution of this problem may be stated, in accordance 
 with the widest possible generalisations, in somewhat 
 the following manner : 
 
 1. Language is a product of association, and of the 
 community of feeling which is developed, intensified, 
 and finally carried to perfection by community of life. 
 
 2. Language is a product of an active, not of a 
 passive process ; it is the child of will, not of sensation. 
 In the place of sensations, the mere sense-impressions, 
 from which it is and always will be impossible to 
 extract anything in the nature of rational concepts — i.e. 
 permanent typical classifications of reason always 
 capable of being summoned up anew by the appro- 
 priate word — in the place of these we must set the 
 active will, or spontaneous activity, which is indeed 
 commonly recognised as present in the phenomena of 
 animal life, but which the Monistic philosophy affirms 
 to be at the root of all phenomena without exception. 
 
 3. From these two points we proceed to the fol- 
 
NOIEB'S THEORY 137 
 
 lowing conclusion: There is not only a sympathy of 
 joy and a sympathy of sorrow expressing themselves 
 in the specific human forms of laughter and tears, as 
 well as in the impulses towards common movements, 
 out of which dancing, singing, and music develop 
 themselves later, but there is also a sympathy of the 
 will, of activity directed outwards which only becomes 
 phenomenally apparent in its effects. 
 
 4. This common sympathetic activity was origin- 
 ally accompanied by sounds, which, as in games and 
 dances, broke out from the violent stress or excitement 
 of the common action, and as they recurred with every 
 repetition of the particular form of activity they be- 
 came so intimately associated with it as to acquire 
 the power of recalling the memory of the action. This 
 is the origin of human thought, for it is the origin of 
 phonetic types (roots). 
 
 5. It follows of itself from the foregoing propo- 
 sitions that human thought has a double root:^ first, 
 
 'This fact, which has been overlooked by all preceding philoso- 
 phers, is nevertheless of supreme, I may even say of fundamental 
 Importance for all philosophy. For here for the first time we find 
 a terminus medius between those two ever-distant poles, subject and 
 object, the union of the activity and Its effect in the action. Though 
 this is necessarily most clearly apparent in that creation of the 
 human mind, language, yet it was by no inconsiderable labor that 
 I was enabled to discover It there. This is due to the fact that the 
 first, or subjective root, is obscured by the preponderance and 
 brilliancy of the second, or objective root, so that it is either 
 overlooked or treated as Immaterial. At any rate, that which we 
 now see so clearly in the life of the mind, lies at the base of all 
 existence, and must serve us for a torch to illuminate and interpret 
 the last and deepest secret of the world, the life of the individual. 
 And already intimations of this truth are dawning upon the most 
 distinguished scientific thinkers of the day. Thus the admirable 
 Claude Bernard observes : 'Matl6re vivante et conditions ex- 
 t^rleures : la vie r^sulte constamment du rapport r^clprogue de ces 
 deux facteurs.' 
 
138 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 the individual activity which, bound up with the man 
 himself, is at his disposal always, to produce as much 
 of the resolved effect as its development allows; and 
 secondly, this effect itself, which becomes apparent, 
 and as grasped in common by the sense of sight, lays 
 the foundations for the possibility of a mutual under- 
 standing. It is only by means of this visible effect that 
 the sounds acquire their meaning, and the more the 
 effects, i.e the activities of the speech-constructing race, 
 are specialised, the more significance will belong to 
 their verbal roots. 
 
 6. Hence it is that the life of language stands in an 
 indissoluble relation to the development of human 
 action. And it is by no means a casual coincidence 
 that, at the very time when the magnificent science of 
 comparative philology is pursuing the origin of human 
 conceptions to the roots buried beneath the accumu- 
 lations of thousands of years, the science of Anthropo- 
 logy should have applied itself with equal zeal to the 
 primeval history of human industry, as it is to be 
 traced by the rudest stone implements, the earliest 
 evidences of the existence of what Franklin called the 
 tool-making animal, and which we call the not merely 
 gregarious, but cooperative animal. And there is an 
 equally significant and instructive parallel to be drawn 
 between the matter of the two sciences, for just as 
 when we go back to primitive ages the tools become 
 more and more imperfect and undeveloped, so that 
 the rough-hewn stone is the germ at once of hatchet, 
 wedge, knife, hammer, saw, &c., so among words, the 
 farther we trace their history backwards, the less sig- 
 nificance they possess, the more molluscous their struc- 
 ture becomes, and instead of being able to grasp a 
 
NOIEE'S THEOEY 139 
 
 single precise meaning, the philologist finds as it were 
 a jelly-like mass slipping through his hands. 
 
 7. About this, however, there is no doubt: the 
 earliest meanings of verbal roots referred to human 
 action. Philology might have arrived at this conclu- 
 sion without extraneous help, for the most familiar, 
 known, and intelligible of objects must always have 
 been the self-determined action of man. An impartial 
 glance at any dictionary of roots will serve to verify 
 this assertion. We do not find there Sun and Moon, 
 Nose and Mouth, Thou and I, nor yet anything about 
 shining, flashing, or burning — no thoughtful etymolo- 
 gist, even if he found them, would allow them to pass 
 as primitive intuitions; such is the power of truth! — 
 what we do find are words signifying to dig, strike, 
 scrape, scratch, to tear, numerous roots denoting to 
 rub, and starting from that conception, to smear, 
 anoint, and colour, others again for plaiting and bind- 
 ing, and others again which mean to share, or to divide. 
 
 If we consider for a moment seriously how thought, 
 or in other words how language, could arrive at such 
 a conception as that of shining, or flashing, we might 
 imagine this to be one of the simplest and most natural 
 intuitions. But this is not the case. Primitive man 
 was dumb in the face of light, he could not name it, for 
 the act of naming is not a mere outbreak of meaning- 
 less sound, it consists in assigning a known quality to 
 the thing named. One of the two sources of thought 
 is wanting in this case, and it is only when the element 
 of personal activity has been added that it becomes 
 possible to attain to such a conception.^ Accordingly 
 
 'Jacob Grimm In his Deutsche Orammatih (ii. 85) speaks of the 
 transitions from notions derived from one sense Into those derived 
 
140 OKIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 we find in language that light and darkness, day and 
 night, fire and sun, are only a colour, or rather some- 
 thing coloured, a conception at last intelligible to 
 primitive man, who coloured, or painted, himself. To 
 colour, however, goes back to smearing, or anointing, 
 and these to rubbing, or grinding. How far we are 
 still overshadowed by this line of primitive thought 
 may be judged from the fact that even at the present 
 day we speak of the colouring of the sky. 
 
 8. But not by any means everything that we are 
 in the habit of regarding as human activity will find 
 an equivalent expression in the most primitive collec- 
 tion of verbal roots. A naive but highly unscientific 
 theory of language, the direct descendant of the easy, 
 rough and ready mode of explaining everything in 
 vogue in the eighteenth century, which has numerous 
 representatives even at the present day, supposes the 
 
 from another, as In the case of sound and colour, e.g. Milan 
 (sonare) hell (sonorus, later lucldus), old high German hraht 
 (strepitus), new high German pracht (splendor) &c. and observes: 
 'It is a remarkable fact that In most of these cases the earlier mean- 
 ing is taken from sound, the later from colour.' According to our 
 theory, this is not at all surprising. What comes into evidence 
 in these words is the element of force, energy, and this can only 
 be reached by proceeding from the subjective root of voluntary 
 activity. And It is the world of sound not of light that falls 
 within this department. I can express a loud sound (Schall, Hall, 
 — skal) by a violent blow, Schlag, which brings out the sound (cX 
 Donnerachlag), but I cannot produce a bright light by my own 
 action, and accordingly we meet In various languages with such 
 expressions as schreiende, or criant, while In colloquial English we 
 speak of 'loud' colours, or a 'noisy' taste. Similarly In the Big- 
 Veda we find, 'The fire cries with light' (vl. 3, 6), and 'The sun 
 cries like a new-born child' (Ix. 74, 1 ; cf. Max Mtiller, Chips, li. p, 
 100). And so also the poet sings: 'La dove '1 sal taoe' (Dante, 
 Inf. 1. 63) and 'lo vennl in loco d'ognl luce muto' (ib. v. 28) 
 And from these indications we may learn to what root and fun- 
 damental signification the Latin clams must be traced. The orig- 
 inal form is not, as the dictionaries have it, clara luce, bat clara 
 voce. 
 
NOIEE'S THEORT 141 
 
 development of language to have begun with such no- 
 tions as 'papa' and 'mamma/ eating and drinking, and 
 the like, from which origin the rest of language is to 
 have grown. This hypothesis also may be completely 
 refuted by the study of roots. Such conceptions as 
 hunger and thirst make their way into language, and 
 therefore into thought, by long and circuitous paths 
 only. For how is eating conceived? As a division. 
 The German Metzger (butcher) and Messer (knife) 
 take us back to the root mat, to divide, mats in Gothic 
 is food (meat), matjan, is to eat. The German 
 Fleischer is the Latin carnifex,^° the Greek SatTpos, 
 that is to say, one who carves, or distributes portions, 
 and to these words belong also Saivv/uu, to feast, and 
 Sais, a meal. The Homeric verse : 
 
 Mot'pas Sacrtra/iei'oi Saivvvr' ipiKvSea Salra. — Od. y 66. 
 offers an interesting example of "the specialisation of 
 different words out of one original rational concept. If 
 in this sentence we take Sairviiove's as a subject, the 
 thought in its original form would run somewhat thus : 
 'The dividers divided the parts, and divided the glor- 
 ious division -.^^ that is to say, the guest divided the 
 portions and feasted on the glorious banquet. Sim- 
 ilarly, the Hebrew akal, to eat, and maakelet, sacrificial 
 knife, are related, not by any means that the latter is 
 regarded as an instrument for eating, but that both 
 words point to an earlier meaning of akal, the dividing 
 or portioning out of food. 
 
 How is this to be explained? According to our 
 
 loin what we must presume to have been the original signifi- 
 cation of the word. 
 
 "More easily in German : Die Theiler theilten die Theile und 
 theilten die herrllche Theilung. 
 
142 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 theory, which, indeed, receives a remarkable confirma- 
 tion from the fact, for the simple reason that the object 
 which received a name in the first instance was not 
 individual eating and drinking; these are animal func- 
 tions which are necessary to the preservation of life, 
 and can be carried on without language; it was not 
 till these actions were brought into the focus of com- 
 mon attention, just because they began a 'dividing' 
 among the different members of the assembled com- 
 munity, that they were for the first time attended to, 
 conceived, and named by the community, or, in other 
 words, became the object of rational thought. 
 
 In the same way it is easy to understand how the 
 ideas of dividing and of pasturing flocks came to run 
 into one another : e. g. in the Greek re'/^w, in reference 
 to which Jacob Grimm gives numerous examples of the 
 connection between the ideas of taking and grazing i'-^ 
 how the peasant calls the fields of the community the 
 Gemarkung, a fact which throws new light on the old 
 German mark — wood, which should on no account be 
 explained, as by J. Grimm and Weigand, as 'the dark,' 
 but referred with mark, merken, &c., to a word of 
 (boundary-) marking: how the Gothic faihu, cattle, 
 Sanskrit pagu (pecu, pecu-nia), originally meant the 
 cattle that was tied up (from pag, paga, bond) ; or, as 
 Geiger has it, 'possession,' the same transition appear- 
 ing in the Hebrew miqneh, the Gothic skatts (treasure) 
 — Slav, skot (cattle), cattle itself — capitate. 
 
 All this proves afresh the perversity of the view 
 which traces language to the imitation of natural 
 noises, since, in the earliest utterances of the human 
 tongue, instead of meeting with bellowing bulls and 
 
 ^Oeschichte der Deutschen Sprache, p. 29. 
 
NOIEE'S THEORY 143 
 
 rustling woods, we find rather what we are accustomed 
 to call abstractions, but which are, in fact, nothing but 
 the impress of human thought. 
 
 9. Human thought, human thinking, is an active 
 process, a self-conscious, self-confident activity, not as 
 a crude materialism imagines, the accidental play of 
 unconscious atoms. Common action is the source to 
 which we have traced it, the foundation upon which it 
 has rested ever since the first entrance of mankind into 
 the kingdom of reason. During the hundreds of thou- 
 sands of years which the human race must have passed 
 through before reaching its present height of develop- 
 ment, the union between the two has only become 
 closer and more intimate. Language is the voice of 
 the community. Even now the highest achievement 
 possible is to order, direct, and apply the forces of 
 individuals to a common end, in united, organised 
 activity, that is to say, in work — for work is nothing 
 but organised activity, whence it is that idlers excite 
 the scorn of the community — whereby also the count- 
 less wonders of industry have become possible, and all 
 the changes of the earth's surface which turn it into a 
 lordly residence for man. It is, indeed, a marvellous 
 reflection that all these results depend upon a feeble 
 breathing, a spoken sound : that is to say, upon a slight 
 vibration of the air ! 
 
 The space allotted here only allows me to give a 
 brief and meagre sketch of the arguments on which I 
 have based the solution of the problem as stated by 
 Max Miiller; if, however, I have been successful in 
 doing so, I shall have shown : 
 
 How rational concepts could and must arise by 
 natural means; 
 
144 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 How they could unite with sounds, which, though 
 originally only utterances of an instinctive impulse, 
 thereby acquire significance, and so become trans- 
 formed into phonetical types, or roots ; 
 
 And it will not be permissible to evade the con- 
 cluding question : How the world of things, which we 
 always assume to have its appropriate qualities char- 
 acterised and denoted in language, was brought into 
 the illuminated space of rational thought, or, what 
 comes to the same thing, into the storehouse of lin- 
 guistic expression ? My theory must stand or fall with 
 the answer to this question : if it is not borne out by the 
 facts of the case, it is irretrievably condemned, if, 
 however, it is in harmony with them, it receives a 
 conspicuous confirmation which approaches to the 
 highest degree of human certainty attainable. 
 
 But in order to answer this question aright, there 
 is another belonging more properly to the domain of 
 metaphysics which should be dealt with first; the 
 question namely : What is a thing? Not to weary the 
 reader with a prolonged metaphysical discussion, it 
 will be enough to quote the definition given by Albert 
 Lange in his meritorious 'History of Materialism:' 
 'We give the name of thing to a group of phenomena, 
 which, making abstraction of remoter relations and 
 internal changes, we grasp and conceive as one.'^^ 
 
 It follows undoubtedly from this definition that 
 things have no existence for animals; for even the 
 most extreme Darwinian will hardly venture to main- 
 tain animals to be capable of this. 
 
 To men a tree is a single being or thing which 
 
 "Lange : OescMchte des Materialismus, 3rd edit. 11. p. 217. 
 
NOIEE'S THEOKT 145 
 
 grows from the root upwards and has a trunk and 
 branches; but this is just what it can never be even 
 to the most highly endowed ape that climbs about its 
 stem and has accustomed dwellings and places of ref- 
 uge under the well-known leafy roof. It is beyond the 
 limits of possibility that any monkey tribe should ever 
 endeavour to take up a tree by the roots and plant it 
 in another spot. And if we find accounts in modern 
 books of natural history of agricultural ants who sow 
 their seeds and wait patiently till they come up, the 
 mildest expression for such vagaries of the imagina- 
 tion is scientific lunacy. 
 
 How then does it come to pass that there are things 
 for men? 
 
 Simply because he has the gift of speech, because 
 he can give them a name. And I will add, that this, 
 his highest faculty, is also the source of his most fatal 
 errors, since he imagines whenever he finds a word 
 that a real being or thing must exist to be designated 
 by it. As Lazarus Geiger well observes : 
 
 'We see, in fact, words and thoughts wrestling together, 
 and the latter hardly escape bondage;" nay, we see from 
 the earliest known time to the present day how the nature of 
 beings has been made the object of inquiry when the beings 
 themselves had no other reality than that lent them by the 
 intuitions of the remote past which associated them with these 
 magic sounds."' 
 
 "The eame was, said by Bacon (quoted by Max MuUer, Lectures, 
 1. Preface) : 'Men believe that their reason Is lord over their 
 words, but It happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and 
 reactionary power over our Intellect. Words, as a Tartar's bow, 
 shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily 
 entangle and pervert their Judgment.' 
 
 i^Gelger : Ureprung und Entwiclcelung der menschUotten 
 Sprache und Temun/t, 1. p. 100. 
 
146 OKIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 Naming a thing is not the same as designating or 
 denoting it. I can describe something quite unknown 
 to me, e.g. a place, in such a way that I could recog- 
 nise it again; but naming is always significant, the 
 attributing of an already known quality, an act of 
 generalisation, of classification. 
 
 Naming also serves the purpose of indicating 
 objects which are recognised in thought; the only 
 essential is that the differentiae of the thing should be 
 already known objectively, in order that the name 
 may be applied to them, that it may be classed by their 
 help, or as Kant expresses it, that the thing may be 
 recognised in the notion, i.e. the word. (Kant divides 
 perception into sensation, reproduction in the imagina- 
 tion, and recognition in the idea.) 
 
 We have, however, no right to assume that man, 
 in his primitive state, was already possessed of this 
 wonderful intellectual faculty, this power of rational 
 thought that rules us now with supreme sway and 
 forms our truest nature, while by its help we grasp all 
 the objects around us, conceive, explore, and at the 
 same time indicate and name them. Such a course 
 would be too easy, or indeed rather a mere petitio 
 principii, an explanation by means of that which itself 
 stands in most need of explanation. 
 
 No ; man did not call names for the sake of naming, 
 or use signs for the sake of signifying; but he used 
 signs, and thereby attained to the power of using 
 names also ; or, in other words, of betokening again by 
 a sound what he had noted before. How the latter step 
 was taken has been pointed out above, and is indeed 
 the most important part of my theory. 
 
 And how and why, we must inquire next, did men 
 
NOIRE'S THEORY 147 
 
 come to use signs for things? Simply because they 
 modified them for the purposes of their own life by 
 their own action, by their associated efiforts. Men dug 
 caves, plaited twigs, stripped the beasts of their skin, 
 the trees of their bark. Hence was developed the 
 marvellous hitherto unexplained gift of abstraction, 
 and this in the most natural way. Man learnt to con- 
 ceive a thing as he learnt to create things. These things 
 became possessed, for him, of an independent existence 
 in his consciousness by means of the word associated 
 with them. The period of spiritual creation began; 
 the light glimmered feebly and inconspicuously at first 
 which now illumines earth and heaven with its rays — 
 the divine light of reason, 
 
 I will quote, in elucidation of what has been said 
 above, a passage from my book 'On the origin of 
 Language' ; 
 
 'The thing which derives its fixity from language is an 
 object of human action, and the first germ of the newly cre- 
 ated world of abstraction must always lie in the associated 
 labour expended in changing or modifying surrounding na- 
 tures. A den or cave is already an abstract idea, for it may 
 be large or small, excavated in stone or sand, situated in one 
 place or another; it may have been met with twice or thrice, 
 and still it is always a thing of the same kind, and with the 
 same word corresponding to it. When such a change in th€ 
 external world has been effected, and has entered and been 
 made at home in human consciousness never more to disap- 
 pear," the first step is herewith hewn, by the joint toil of rea- 
 
 "For what contributes to the fulfilment of life's work Is spon- 
 taneous and of certain recurrence: 'Not every random perception 
 is raised to the dignity of a general notion, but only the constantVy 
 recurring, the strongest, the most useful; and out of the endless 
 number of general notions that suggest themselves to the observing 
 and gathering mind, those only survive and receive definite phonetic 
 
148 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 son and speech, in the hard rock, where a second and then 
 others must follow, till aeons hence the lofty summit is 
 reached, and reason enthroned on high sees all the world 
 beneath as the theatre where her might and glory is displayed, 
 and ventures forth upon new flights through the unexplored 
 realms of heaven not even here without a clue, any more than 
 at the hour of her birth, afforded by her own — ^but now purely 
 ideal — constructions.'" 
 
 expressions wMch are absolately requisite for carrying on the work 
 0] life.' — M. MilUer, Lectures, il. 340. 
 
 When Locke remarked that all words expressive of Immaterial 
 Ideas are derived from words expressive of material subjects, he 
 added : 'By which we may give some kind of guess what kind of 
 notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds 
 who were the first beginners of language.' 'Nothing,' says Max 
 MilUer In the above cited article (Contemporary Review), 'is more 
 likely than that their daily occupations should have supplied the 
 first concepts through which the framers of language gradually laid 
 hold of everything that attracted their attention. If they had a 
 word for plaiting, they could derive from it not only the name of 
 the spider, but likewise of the poet who weaves words and thoughts 
 together. I agree with Aufrecht that we should derive from a root 
 vaTih, to spin, the Sanskrit ArnavdiM, spider, Greek (/0os web, 
 and v/ivos, poem ; while Greek expressions, such as 86\ovs Kal ju^rtc, 
 liiSovs Kal /iiJSea, olKodo/irniaTa, 8X;8oy, Kiqphv vipalveiv^ show how 
 many branches spring from one single stem.' Cf. also the Latin, con- 
 suere dolos, texere fraudes; the Homeric, kokol 0peirJ ^vaaoSofi^iav 
 (Od. 17, 66) ; the German, Ritnke Schmieden; and Innumerable 
 other instances of what we call the metaphorical life of language. 
 
 We have but to look at the most abstract sciences, at mathe- 
 matics and astronomy, to see how even at the present day, remote 
 as they seem to be from the fresh hues of reality, the same doom 
 falls upon them. What Is an arc, a chord, a radius, a circle? 
 Take the first sentence that comes, e.g. the beginning of Kepler's 
 first law : 'The areas swept out by the vector drawn from the 
 sun, &c.' What Is 'area'? A space made dry and stamped bard — 
 a floor. What 'swept' is we know. What Is 'vector' ? one who rides 
 or moves in a vehicle. What is to draw? Anglo-Saxon dragon, 
 old high German tracan, to drag or carry. And if we ask why 
 these notions are so deeply rooted in our consciousness and our 
 memory, the answer is not hard to see, all that Is wanted is — the 
 will. 
 
 I'L. NolrS : Der Ursprung der Spraehe, p. 346. 
 
NOIRE' S THEORY 149 
 
 And now I may say that my theory certainly tallies 
 remarkably with and is confirmed by the fact that 
 things are brought within the horizon of the human 
 reason, or first grow into things, in proportion as they 
 suffer the effects of human action and have names as- 
 signed to them accordingly. This law applies invariably 
 to the oldest substantives, which, as we have seen, all 
 belong necessarily to the objective world. Things 
 were, so to speak, ticketed by the human action that 
 spent itself upon them, and drew an ever increasing 
 number of them within its range, and modified them in 
 accordance with human requirements. The things thus 
 marked out receive their names forthwith from the 
 action of which they are made the object. 
 
 Thus a tree is characterised in primitive language 
 as wood upon which some work has been spent, as 
 something split, or barked, or to be burnt. Grain is 
 that which we crush, pound, or grind; ground, and 
 terra, take their names from grinding, crumbling ; and 
 the sea {meer, mare, mor,) in like manner cannot dis- 
 own its relationship with moor, morass, a mass of the 
 consistence of liquid mud. An animal is meat, spoil of 
 the chase, or something flayed. The root for flay, or 
 strip off, denotes at the same time either skin, fur, or 
 flesh, for both are the work of human action and char- 
 acterise a produced or phenomenal result. Thus again 
 the scales of fishes are named from the idea of shell- 
 ing; the shell of a fruit from that of cracking and shell- 
 ing (skar, skal), after which the word came, by way 
 of a drinking bowl (Trinkschale) , to signify a human 
 skull, because skulls as well as shells were used for 
 drinking vessels. 
 
 Geiger, who was familiar with this law of the 
 
150 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 development of meanings, though he did not succeed 
 in deducing the necessary conclusions from it, has 
 summed up his statement in a single sentence, which I 
 transcribe, with notable modifications derived from my 
 own theory: 
 
 'The process of naming advances from the common 
 actions which exclusively interest the language-making race, 
 and which are the one chief root of thought, to those things 
 which are affected by human action, either in the way of 
 generation or transformation, which is the second root. A 
 multitude of implements are named genetically; the tree is 
 traced, from the first moment of its treatment by human 
 hands, through all the stages of its successive transformations 
 to bean;s, boards, and tables. Passing steadily through every 
 form, language reaches each one when, and only when, it is 
 brought directly into passive relation with the special ever- 
 stimulating subject of the linguistic faculty, the action of 
 men.'" 
 
 The fact that Geiger did not draw the last and 
 most important of conclusions on this subject leads 
 him often to express surprise at the discovery of start- 
 ling instances which are perfectly in accordance with 
 the above law, but can only be certainly and adequately 
 explained by my theory. Thus he says: 
 
 'Wood, the name of which in vXrj and materia has come 
 to furnish the substratum of every idea of matter in general, 
 was the prevailing material in primitive times, and is derived 
 from shaving, e.g. in iiXov; and shaft, S6pv, likewise named 
 by the ancients from the fundamental notion of breaking off 
 or stripping (Seipu), came to designate wood as a material. 
 An especially important point about this word is its wide dif- 
 fusion throughout all the branches of the Indo-germanic stock 
 
 ''Geiger : Vrsprung und Entwickeliing der menschliclien Sprache 
 und Yemunft, 1. p. 42. L. NolrS, loc. cit. p. 311.. 
 
NOIEE'S THEOET 151 
 
 of languages. (HoUun-der, tree"). Two reasons may be 
 given why the notion of wood should be reached through 
 that of stripping off the bark rather than from that of felling 
 the tree; both have probably had a share in the result. In 
 the first place the notion of wood is undoubtedly earlier than 
 the possession of tools for felling trees; and in the second 
 place, the phenomenal principle of naming holds good here, 
 for the wood is the flesh of the tree which becomes visible 
 when the bark is torn or flayed off. But it is in the highest 
 degree remarkable that the tree takes its name from its 
 wood, and thus borrows its designation as living wood from 
 a mode of human activity."" 
 
 The reader who accepts my theory will see nothing 
 wonderful in this, nor be surprised at the analogous 
 transition of ideas in wood and tree. 
 
 He says elsewhere : 
 
 'In almost all cases we observe that the words for body 
 are taken from the dead body, or corpse. 2<5^a as, indeed, 
 had been observed by Aristarchos, is used by Homer for the 
 dead body only. Whence this eccentricity of language to start 
 from the notion of the corpse in order to name the human 
 body itself?"" 
 
 I must confess that this seems to me so far from 
 strange that I should be surprised rather if the case 
 were otherwise. Tlie rational perception of man starts 
 from the objective world, and he ended by giving 
 to his own body the name first applied to the disjointed 
 limbs of animals or human beings. We speak now of 
 our own flesh, skin, bones, &c., without thinking of the 
 source of these conceptions, and yet the most cursory 
 
 i»Sk. dras wood and tree, Mru wood spear ; Goth, triu tree ; 
 Irlsb, daur. Old Slav, drevo. 
 
 ^L. Gelger : Vrsprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen 
 Sprache und Temunft, li. p. 27. 
 
 2ilb. p. 136. 
 
152 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OP LANGUAGE 
 
 reflection will show that they could have no other 
 natural origin than this. For the same reason we find 
 most members of the human body conceived by lan- 
 guage as joints, and accordingly etymologies like that 
 given by Bopp for the 'doing organ' are impossible; 
 kara, the hand, as Geiger justly observes, cannot be 
 derived from kar, to make. Nor can Bauch (stomach) 
 be the scientific ceso-phag-ns, its relations are rather 
 with Bug, Eng. bow, bowels. 
 
 These few examples will suffice to show that my 
 theory is in complete accordance with the facts of 
 etymology; that language does not — as would follow 
 from the inter jectional theory — conceive objects in so 
 far as they excite pleasure or disgust, even less, as the 
 mimetic theory imagined, in as far as they are howling 
 and roaring; nor yet, at least not in its earliest crea- 
 tions, in so far as they are active, but simply in so far 
 as human action has touched, modified, reconstructed 
 them ; in a word, in so far as they have received form. 
 
 This is one of the most important and fruitful con- 
 clusions of comparative philology, and it agrees with 
 this that even such things as are removed by nature 
 from the reach of human influence nevertheless be- 
 come objects of human thought in the same way as the 
 rest, that is to say, they are named as they would be if 
 the human hand had formed them. 
 
 Thus Teich (ditch, to dig), lacus, Lache and Loch, 
 like the Celtic loch, all attach themselves to the funda- 
 mental notion of that which is dug; from the root ku 
 or sku we have both the German Hohle, hole and hol- 
 low, as well as the Greek koiAos and the Latin cesium, i. e. 
 the vault of heaven; similarly we still speak of the 
 highest point of a mountain, though this point (Spitze) 
 
NOIRE'S THEORY 153 
 
 is only what has been pointed, made into a point; so 
 a^ain the ideas of weaving, plaiting, and binding are 
 applied not only to the mechanical acts of man, but 
 to anything offering an analogous appearance, e.g. 
 Ranke, Winde, Schilf (runners, bindweed and sedge). 
 Thus face comes from fades, originally the majce or 
 shape of a thing, an expression repeated in modern 
 languages, feature being evidently a mere corruption 
 of factura, the make ; thus the significant word figure 
 is directly related to fingo and figulus, and points to a 
 derivation from the potter's art ; so, also, forma, if we 
 compare it with Sk. gharma (pot), and formaceus 
 (clayey). Thus we find that man could not designate 
 his own form, nay, not even that dearest and most 
 familiar object, the human countenance, except by as- 
 sociating it with an action of his own, and conceiving 
 it as a product of the same. 
 
 This power of conceiving the world of things ac- 
 cording to their forms, this division of the interchang- 
 ing appearances of the outer world by sharp and 
 definite outlines — a faculty which has been so de- 
 veloped that the scientific eye now discerns qualities of 
 things which are still invisible to the material eye 
 reinforced by the most powerful instruments — this 
 power is the distinguishing human gift of intuition. It 
 is wanting, except in a rudimentary degree, to ani- 
 mals, and in man himself is one of the fruits of lan- 
 guage, and the creative, formative activity so closely 
 connected therewith. The reader will easily realise 
 how this is if he recalls the differences that exist be- 
 tween different kinds of human vision, between the 
 way in which the products of his art appear to the 
 eye of the master who is wont to create them himself 
 
154 OEIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 ■whether he be locksmith, mechanic, builder, or sculp- 
 tor, and to that of the uninstructed layman. 
 
 Form is a general factor in all things; every pro- 
 gressive step towards the perfecting of human order 
 and activity manifests itself thus. Nothing else touches 
 the reason so closely as this, which is the mode of 
 filling space, and appeals to the most intellectual of the 
 senses, that of sight. For thought is the sight of the 
 mind, and language, as I have said elsewhere, is woven 
 of light and tones. Unceasing, unbroken progress in 
 the formation of things is the fundamental rule of de- 
 velopment ; and even more unceasing, more unbroken, 
 less obvious but not less certain progress is of the 
 essence of language. 
 
 I have sketched in its most general traits the earli- 
 est period in the growth and development of language. 
 There was a time when man, or, at least, the thought 
 of man, knew neither man nor wife nor child, neither 
 sun nor moon, no beast, no tree, no I nor thou, no here 
 nor there, but instead a limited store of sounds with 
 which he accompanied his action, and which associated 
 themselves with the objects produced or modified by 
 the action. This is the period of the objective creation 
 of language. 
 
 A vast revolution must have been effected in the 
 mental life of man when he began to lift his eyes, 
 hitherto fixed upon the ground, upwards to the eternal 
 stars, to the heavens standing fast for ever while he 
 himself grew and withered and passed away, to the 
 rosy dawn ushering in another day and chasing away 
 the horrors of the night, to the clouds, chased by the 
 storms, who after long languishing drought — 
 
NOIRE'S THEORY 155 
 
 'gnadig ernst den langerflehten Regen 
 
 Mit Etonnerstimmen und mit Windesbrausen 
 
 In wilden Stromen auf die Erde schiitten.' 
 
 Such a revolution must have been effected — not 
 necessarily on a sudden and without preparation, but 
 slowly and gradually like every other development; 
 the forces of nature must have been sympathetically 
 felt and conceived by the kindling fancy as animated 
 active beings, while objects passed imperceptibly into 
 subjects, and language and thought assumed the char- 
 acter they wear to-day, which seems to us so natural 
 that we delude ourselves it must have been the same 
 always. 
 
 This period coincides with the origin of religion, 
 which, as Geiger says, has exercised an incredible and 
 almost boundless influence upon the development of 
 human sentiment and fefeling. The rise of mythology 
 is a necessary and highly important stage in the de- 
 velopment of language, that is to say, of the intellectual 
 life of humanity. Linguistically, it may be described 
 as the period in which subjects began to mark them- 
 selves off from the indefiniteness of the thought- 
 process, and began to form themselves into indepen- 
 dent existences. 
 
 Otfried Miiller foresaw the truth of this: 
 
 'The mythological mode of expression, (he says) which 
 turns evers^hing into persons, and every relation into an act, 
 is something so unique that we are forced to assume for its 
 growth a special period in the civilisation of nations."^ 
 
 ''OttTled Miiller : Prolegomena zu einer tclssenschaftliehen 
 Mythologie, p. 73. 
 
156 ORIGIN AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 
 
 And at this point I must stop, for here the master 
 has begun to speak,^^ from whom we have to learn, and 
 for the present only to learn. 
 
 ^^Max Miiller : Introduction to the Science of Religion. Four 
 Lectures delivered at tlie Royal Institution. (Longmans, 1878.) 
 On the Origin and Growth oj Religion, as illustrated hy the Re- 
 ligions of India. (Longmans, 1878.) 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abstraction, this power of, 109. 
 Adam, 2. 
 
 Animal, the tool-making, 138. 
 Apparatus of articulate sound- 
 production, mechanical, 108. 
 
 Bible, the, 40. 
 
 Book of the Aryan world, the 
 
 oldest, 81. 
 Bow-wow, theory, the, 4, 112, 
 
 117. 
 Bread, the concept, 42. 
 Brehm's animal life, 54. 
 Broca, 53. 
 
 Carlyle, 65. 
 Causality, 43. 
 
 Cause, the conception of, 94. 
 Ceres, 2. 
 
 Children, 21; observation of, 6. 
 Cicero's dictum, 108. 
 Circle, the vlcloijs, 95. 
 Coaxare, 113. 
 Communication, 22. 
 Concept, the general, 23, 25, 49. 
 CondlUac, 20, 27, 115. 
 Consciousness, 71. 
 Copernicus, 2, 53. 
 Cosmic development, 92; evo- 
 lution, 125. 
 Cranes of Iblcus, the, 33. 
 Critique of Pure Reason, 55. 
 Cuckoo, 4. 114. 
 Cuvier, 64. 
 
 Darwin, 53, 61, 62. 
 Darwin of the mind, the, 118. 
 Darwinians, 71, 73. 
 Darwinism, violent, 87. 
 De Bosses, 115. 
 
 Die Anthropologie der Natur- 
 volker, 106. 
 
 East, the, 78. 
 
 Epicurus, 115, 116. 
 
 Errors, fundamental, 94. 
 
 Eumenldes, 33. 
 
 Evolution, a peculiarity of the 
 law of, 32; cosmic, 61. 
 
 External always acts upon ex- 
 ternal, 38. 
 
 Force which we call reason, the 
 Inner mental, 98. 
 
 Forces, the co-operation of dif- 
 ferent, -33. 
 
 Franklin, 138. 
 
 Galileo, 53. 
 
 Gelger, 1, 6, 10, 11, 16, 64, 88, 97, 
 
 112, 145, 149. 
 Geiger's theory, 27. 
 General, the, 20. 
 Generalisation and comparison, 
 
 79. 
 Qeneratlo equivoca, 118. 
 Genesis of man, the, 67. 
 German and Latin statements, 
 
 parallel, 39. 
 German diligence, 99. 
 Germ language, 1. 
 Gestures, 12, 34. 
 God, 2; the living, 41. 
 Goethe, 63, 94; Spinoza's great 
 
 disciple, 95. 
 
 Hamann, 94. 
 
 Handel, 40. 
 
 Harmony, pre-established, 94. 
 
 Hartknoch, Johann Frledrlch, 
 
 55. 
 Hegel, 55. 
 Helmholtz, 53, 71. 
 Herakleitos, "the obscure," 62. 
 Herder, 63, 96, 113; theory, 3. 
 
158 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Heredity, 70. 
 
 "History of Materialism," 144. 
 
 History, universal, 65. 
 
 Homer, 40. 
 
 Horace, 38. 
 
 Ideas, general, 117, 130; the 
 great problem of, 51; the 
 filiation of, 118. 
 
 Ideas only from ideas, 123. 
 
 Imagination, the, 130. 
 
 India, development of, 85. 
 
 Indian literature, 84. 
 
 Instinct, 17. 
 
 Intuition, 153. 
 
 Invention, 25. 
 
 Ision, the wheel of, 95. 
 
 Kant, 56, 125, 146. 
 Kepler, 53. 
 
 Knowledge, human, 50. 
 Kratylos, 112. 
 Kussmaul, 53. 
 
 I/afontaine, 18. 
 
 Lamarck, 67. 
 
 Lange, Albert, 144. 
 
 Language, growth of, 10; phi- 
 losophy of, 103 ; the Rubicon 
 which divides man from beast, 
 73 ; is the child of wUl, 125 ; 
 is petrified philosophy, 130. 
 
 Laws of nature have their sole 
 seat, origin, and function in 
 the human mind, 126. 
 
 Leibnitz, 113, 117 ; the favourite 
 idea of, 119. 
 
 Lessing, 63. 
 
 Locke, 20, 49, 96. 
 
 Lockian doctrine, the, 119. 
 
 Logos is, what the, 41, 45. 
 
 Luther, the historical, 2. 
 
 Man and beast, distinction be- 
 tween, 110 ; forms his own 
 schemes of life, every, 88. 
 
 "Man thinks because he 
 speaks," 50. 
 
 Mayer, Eobert, 104. 
 
 Mechanical point of view, a, 72. 
 
 Memory, 137. 
 
 Metaphysical base of the know- 
 ledge of the world, the, 95. 
 
 Mimetic and Interjectional theo- 
 ries, 37. 
 
 Mind, the kingdom of con- 
 scious, 91; kindred, 104. 
 
 Mirror, language a magic, 99. 
 
 Monad, 95. 
 
 Monism, 94. 
 
 Monistic doctrine, the funda- 
 mental, 95 ; philosophy, 136 ; 
 theory of development, the, 
 75. 
 
 MuUer, Max, 4, 6, 9, 19, 31, 73, 
 86, 102, 114. 
 
 MuUer, Otfried, 155. 
 
 Murray, Dr., 122. 
 
 Mythology, the rise of, 155. 
 
 Names derived from general 
 
 ideas, 131. 
 Newton, 53. 
 No saltus. In the nature of the 
 
 mind, 118. 
 
 Omne vivum, ex ova. 111. 
 
 One, two single things as, 79. 
 
 Onomatopoeia, the theory of, 
 112. 
 
 Organization and life, origin of, 
 92. 
 
 Oriental studies and scientific 
 research, 77. 
 
 Oriental thought, 78. 
 
 Origin and growth of the hu- 
 man race, 84, 90. 
 
 Paleanthropology, 99. 
 Paradoxes, great truths are 
 
 known first as, 50. 
 Parrot, the, 23. 
 Perception, the passive element 
 
 of, 125. 
 Percepts, obscure ideas or, 18. 
 Philology, comparative, 57, 98. 
 
INDEX 
 
 159 
 
 Philosophy, the history of, 78; 
 
 the highest problem of all, 
 
 136. 
 Phonetic utterances, the, 14. 
 Phrasemongering, 104. 
 Plato, 52, 112. 
 Poetry, 37. 
 Polynesians, the, 93. 
 "Pooh-pooh!" or Interjectlonal 
 
 theory, the, 116. 
 Prehistoric past, our, 99. 
 PriMS, the, 94. 
 Progress, psychic, 70. 
 Protagoras, 56. 
 
 Ratio and oratio are one and 
 
 the same being, 95. 
 Eeallty, empirical, 45. 
 Keason Is man, 50. 
 Eeaaon, the dawning light of, 
 
 91; no speech without, 97; 
 
 what Is the origin of? 136. 
 Eelteratlon, frequent, 36. 
 Relations, casual, 94. 
 Bellglon, the origin of, 155. 
 Kepresentatlon, 43. 
 Elddle, the great, 62. 
 Big-Veda Sanhita, 84. 
 Eoots, primitive, 5; what are, 
 * 111. 
 
 Sanskrit philology, importance 
 
 of, 79. 
 Schiller, 33, 65, 67. 
 Schopenhauer, 62. 
 Smith, Adam, 20, 27. 
 Sound, primitive, 1, 49. 
 Speech, the parent of, 27; no 
 
 reason without, 97. 
 Sphinx, the eternal riddle of 
 
 the, 72. 
 
 Splelhagen, 24. 
 
 Spinoza, 63. 
 
 Spirits, classical and Teutonic, 
 78. 
 
 Stelnthal's theory of reflex- 
 sounds, 118. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 12. 
 
 St. Hilalre, Geoffroy de, 64. 
 
 Substance, self-subsisting, 73. 
 
 TartufEe and Eulensplegel, 20. 
 
 Theory, pooh-pooh, 5; the In- 
 terjectlonal, 5; Ding-dong, 6; 
 the Gee- haw, 35; Logos, 37; 
 sympathy, 37, 44; of proper 
 names, 27. 
 
 Thinking, 97, 143. 
 
 Thomson, Sir William, 71. 
 
 Thought, abstract, 45. 
 
 Tlmotheus, 33. 
 
 Tooke, Home, 116. 
 
 Two or the Dyad, the, 78, 124. 
 
 Ulysses, 18. 
 
 Vedas, the, 81. 
 
 Vedlc poetry, the real nature of, 
 
 82. 
 Verbal disputes, 96. 
 Vibrations, 122. 
 Von Humboldt, W., 113. 
 
 Waltz, Theodor, 104. 
 
 Win, super-human or extra- 
 human, 65 ; Schopenhauer's 
 theory of, 94. 
 
 Word, origin of the, 4, 17. 
 
 Words, the first, 24; the in- 
 fluence of, 102. 
 
 World, the objective, 129. 
 
 Zeus, 40.