THE ORIGIN OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH

THE ORIGIN OF THOUGHT
AND SPEECH

BY
M. MONCALM

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY
G. S. WHITMARSH

“Language is the autobiography of the human mind.”
The Science of Thought (Max Müller).

“Language is our Rubicon which no brute will dare to cross.”
The Science of Language (Max Müller).

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., Ltd.
DRYDEN HOUSE, 43 GERRARD STREET, W.
1905

With the approval of the Author’s representative, the translator has at times followed the exact words of Max Müller rather than the literal translation, where the latter has differed slightly from the former.

The thanks of the translator are due to friends who have kindly revised the MS. and a portion of the proof sheets.

The books used by the Author in this work are:—

Max Müller.

Introduction to the Science of Religion.
Origin and Growth of Religion.
Chips from a German Workshop.
The Science of Language.
The Science of Thought.
Natural Religion.
Physical Religion.
Anthropological Religion.
Theosophy, or Psychological Religion.

Ch. Darwin.

Origin of Species.
The Descent of Man.
Expression of the Emotions.

L. Noiré.

Der Ursprung der Sprache.
Die Lehre Kants, und der Ursprung der Vernunft.

CONTENTS

THE ORIGIN OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH

INTRODUCTION

When opening my eyes in the morning, and whilst still struggling with an inclination to sleep, I review the day and what it will have in store for me; but the pictures drawn are confused, and my will takes no part in it.

For some time I have been haunted by the impression that the mental faculties of the generality of men have not succeeded in throwing off a species of torpor resembling that of a person hardly awake; the supposition that this torpid condition prevents our minds from attaining that degree of lucidity to which they have a right to aspire, is perhaps a hallucination, yet possibly I may be right in thinking it.

How many confused ideas traverse my brain in one day, and how seldom those come of which I follow the thread. We know well that injunction so often given by parents to children, and by schoolmasters to their pupils: “Try to concentrate your attention.” It almost seems as if that which we require of children is beyond my powers, for I have hardly resolved to disentangle a problem of whatever kind, when, under the form of useless, futile, inept thoughts, obstacles heap themselves across my path. I conclude from this that a fatal somnolence paralyses my faculties.

When a person has to be awakened who is disinclined to be disturbed, he is violently shaken. What movement would suffice to energise a man whose mental powers were drowsy? I do not see anything from the outside; and a personal effort could not be looked for, from an enervated will.

And yet I am possessed by the desire to penetrate the mystery of my existence; I ask myself what I am, and why I am on this earth; from the moment that I put this question to myself I feel that the awakening may be possible for me. I know two classes of men who never ask it; first those who do not see that there is any problem to solve; and secondly those who are content with infantine and superficial teaching; or more or less elaborate and learned, but coming from one who appears to himself to be the depository of a collection of supernaturally inspired truths. I own that I do not belong to the first of these divisions, since I shall have no rest as long as I am ignorant of what passes in me and around me; neither do I belong to the second of these classes, since those who compose it are content to believe; but faith is not knowledge, and I am anxious to comprehend what has been discovered, known, and established by evidence. But how shall I submit to this labour of research, when the habitual condition of my thoughts is to wander at will amongst my impressions, and when I am so incurably absent-minded?

We live in an atmosphere of many and varied ideas; ideas true and false, good and bad; they pulsate in the air we breathe; they are like the winged antheral seeds which are lifted up by the slightest breeze of autumn and carried afar; they are little heeded; but should it happen that these seeds attached themselves to our garments we should notice how strikingly the one form varied from the other.

Amongst those ideas which wander at large is this aphorism—that we are ignorant of that of which we know not the commencement, or in other words of that which we do not examine from the practical point of view; he who wishes to learn how something is made, whatever it may be, must know how to begin it. This truth has so ancient a date that we cannot conceive of a time when it was absent from the mind of man; only it had the common lot of all truths with which we are so familiar that apparently there is nothing to learn from them, and this aphorism appears at first sight to be the ramblings which we hear but to which we do not listen.

To me it is of value, as it strengthens my conviction that the mist which obscures my vision will not be dissipated until I have traced certain problems to their source; I know by experience that few phenomena are easy of explanation when their appearances only are examined at any given moment; and close questioning fails to elicit light, whilst ignorance prevails concerning their beginning.

How does it happen that in spite of such unfavourable circumstances, often with no clear purpose, and with eyes half shut, humanity can advance? For the progress is indubitable. The public conscience has developed; and its actions make themselves felt; civilised nations have become more humane; they understand better than they did formerly that peace is more profitable than war; certain social problems are being seriously discussed, and some are on the point of solution. In the physical sciences, as well as in mechanical arts, progress is most marked. But I see that though imagination, observation, and a talent for invention have had much to do with this progress, the capacity of imitation has also been a powerful factor. When William Herschel gave up music for astronomy, he perfected the optical instruments which were in use at that time, and manufactured some excellent telescopes at comparatively moderate prices, with the result that his fellow astronomers and their successors were able to devote themselves to the study of the heavens with greater ease and readiness; and the discovery of Uranus was soon followed by that of a large number of celestial bodies. Again, at one of the National Exhibitions of our time, there was shown to all comers the model of a recently invented apparatus for the conveyance of the wounded on battlefields; since which, each country now produces its own design with various improvements, and the victims of the barbarism, still lingering in war, were benefited by these modern appliances, due entirely to the art of imitation.

In short, progress exists, but not all along the line. As thought travels slowly in its own domain, so mental science is behindhand. A true idea is not mechanically reproduced, it must be tended for it to bear fruit, but what tendance would avail, if it is only with difficulty that we discriminate between what we know already, and what we do not yet know, for this distinction must accompany conscious progress.

Everything around us tends to keep us in this penumbra, which is so favourable to inertia, ignorance, sleep. Certain groups of philosophical ideas become condensed and systematised; in some systems there are one or two great thoughts only. This suffices—these systems remain, germinate and direct contemporaneous generations as well as those of the future. It may also happen that these same ideas invade brains little prepared to receive them, and thus deviate from their course, err as they advance, and end by becoming so travestied that it is no longer possible to know what they were at their origin—a swerving movement has taken place, which causes suffering to contemporaries, and, still more, to those who come after. Thus the bulk increases, the bulk of truth and the bulk of error; and this fatal expansion of the true and the false, intertwined the one with the other, pursues its encroaching and troublous way.

This confusion is something impersonal; it is an opaque body which interposes itself between the truth and ourselves, and prevents us from contemplating it; but the confusion may also arise directly from those whose mission it is to guide us. I open a book written by some grave thinker who, I imagine, knows his subject thoroughly, and I begin to read in all confidence; at first I think I understand him; then I am stopped by a word, and I wonder what meaning the author has attached to it; a little further I come upon the same word, which now seems invested with another signification; this disconcerts me, and I close the book. I take another, but the same disagreeable surprise awaits me, and I find everywhere terms whose meaning varies to suit the convenience of the author; and what we are to understand by these words is nowhere explained. These defects arise probably from the fact that certain philosophers, taking their confused opinions for new ideas, seek for words in which to express them, and not finding them in their vocabulary, they coin them, using terms to which no precise meaning is attached; which terms remain more or less enigmatical to the authors themselves, and, consequently, unintelligible to the readers; in this way does the confusion of ideas arise and is propagated. A philosopher, I think it was Haman, made the following very true and very alarming statement: “Language is not only the basis of our power of thought, but also the point from which our misunderstandings and errors spring”; and Hobbes also says: “It is obvious that truth and falsehood dwell only with those living creatures who have the use of speech.”

But all that I have just said indicates merely a superficial portion of my passing impressions; in going below the surface I find in the past other causes for our present perturbation of mind. For centuries we have frequented schools in order to learn to distinguish truth from error, yet it is always a mixture of truth and error that we are taught. What result had we attained on the eve of the twentieth century? We are still asking ourselves whether science does or does not harmonise with religion. After that we cannot but give ourselves up to the deepest despondency, we cannot but fold our arms in despair and question whether we shall ever see things clearly.

Amongst our ancestors there were sometimes found men of great resolution who, in order to punish themselves for cowardice and luxury, administered discipline to themselves; the idea is not so extravagant as it appears to some people. A few good strokes of the whip might result in reviving or strengthening the will, and in forcing it to resist the moral supineness which is so apt to increase; but physical discipline is no longer in use amongst us, and in my own case I have substituted an illustration of which I try never to lose sight. I picture to myself an ideal potter, whose whole ambition would be to make good vessels, and, having succeeded in making some of great solidity, he would choose out those of the finest shape for the market. He attains success, and his thoughts being occupied with his pottery only, at last he makes vases of absolute perfection. With what feelings of envy I contemplate this creature of my imagination, who is to serve as my model, and yet whom the want of concentration of thought prevents me from imitating.

It would have been perhaps prudent on my part to follow the example of this workman, and to accustom myself to reflect on subjects less immeasurably above me than those which have such a powerful attraction for me; but I yield to the impulse—once given. I often lose myself when pondering on the world where destiny has placed me; and I ask myself—How did life first appear on the earth? Was there nothing but a cellule from whence all that fills space came? Was there one cellule for the vegetables and another for the animals? If man did not spring from the cradle of all things that live and grow on the surface of the globe, was he an individual of his own species at the beginning, or two individuals, or many? After what fashion did man speak at his first appearance? What were his thoughts? “How can it be explained,” I asked myself again, “that of all the members of the animal kingdom, one only should have marvelled at and pondered on his position with regard to the universe and himself? That one only should have manifested the desire to understand his role in life, whilst all the creatures that surrounded him, lived contentedly in blissful ignorance? It would be impossible to conceive of a horse, an elephant, or a mammoth disquieting itself concerning its origin and the end of its being; why has man only sought a solution of these problems?” The learned scholars who occupy themselves with these questions are far from agreeing unanimously concerning them; thus I—I, who am only one link in the interminable chain of units which composes humanity, past, present and future; I, in my own individuality must live and die in my ignorance. I revolt against this prospect, which I yet recognise as inevitable; I refuse to acknowledge myself beaten, and I feel myself irresistibly driven to seek for more knowledge; then feeling unable to supply the lack, I cease to be anxious, and fall asleep again.

Sometimes when led to investigate the inner tribunal, conscience, I contemplate a phenomenon purely intellectual and moral, which the uproar raised by the conflict of so many heterogeneous ideas cannot make me forget, although it does not intrude itself upon me with violence; on the contrary, it waits with an unparalleled patience and discretion at my door. It is the phenomenon named religion.

We read in the Bible that Moses, having noticed a burning bush that yet was not consumed, went up to it, the more closely to investigate this marvel. For many people religion has borne the same aspect that the burning bush did for Moses, and those, like Moses, have approached it in the endeavour to discover what it could be. Religion has always compelled attention, its metaphysical side has been described in voluminous theological and philosophical treatises; historians on their side have made many researches concerning the forms in which it has clothed itself on earth during a long succession of centuries, and amongst many peoples; it is even said there are learned men who have studied all the Bibles and catechisms; and it is added that few amongst them know what religion really is. It does not on that account play a less important part in our existence; it is from religion that all those acts of devotion and charity spring, to which millions of human creatures give themselves. There are few who ask themselves whence comes this breath which inspires them so fully, and since when has its influence extended itself amongst us; to be nourished with its fruits sufficed. Such is the disposition of soul of the majority of those for whom religion is more than a name—whatsoever it be—pronounced in an unknown tongue. Would it not be natural to desire to make its acquaintance more closely? Apparently not; we accept it as something known by intuition, without concerning ourselves with its aspect.

This strange fact I have also noticed. When studying history very attentively, and with an attitude of mind free from all prejudice, it is possible to fix the exact period at which errors, more or less generally acknowledged as such, have first crept into the world; but I have vainly sought in history for the corresponding moment when truths first made their appearance; truths, which have been accepted, if only by a few isolated individuals, or by certain groups of individuals, of whatever race, or of whatever period of the life of humanity they might be. But as it is acknowledged that amongst the errors which trouble us, we possess some truths, it is evident that they have manifested themselves; but when and how? At this I do not arrive.

This silence of history indicates, I think, that the truths of which we seek the commencement have been revealed to man in prehistoric days. I do not feel that I know positively concerning the first human beings who appeared on the earth; I picture them like soft wax ready to receive a definite form from the hand which created them. These first comers who knew nothing, never having had any training, and possessing only their five senses to aid them in arriving at knowledge, were infinitely better placed than I am to embrace truth, since I should have to disentangle myself from a vast mass of ideas which disfigure the natural simplicity of my soul; I should have to forget, even the truths which I believed myself to possess, and to transform myself into white plastic blank wax, with no impress whatsoever, and to wait until my Creator traced the image He wished; this is now not possible. I should not be now here if I could have been contemporaneous with my ancestors, and I had been permitted to follow in the steps of their pilgrimage, this would have pleased me well.

I perceive my friends are uneasy—“Take care,” they say, “an Idée fixe is dangerous.”

But is it quite certain that an Idée fixe is always harmful? Have they never seen a man wandering in a forest without any fixed determination to quit it? Is it credible that our first parents had no fixed idea of discovering the import towards themselves, of the vast world in which they had been placed, knowing nothing of the reason of their position? Equally ignorant of the reason why the sun, the moon, fire, hurricanes, storms, thunder, rivers, mountains existed, always above and around them. The whole of nature itself required to be interrogated. In what way could this settled determination have harmed them? It is true that they are all dead, but determination did not kill them. And their Idée fixe must have been very tenacious and powerful for this thirst for knowledge to have descended with their blood into our own veins; their wish to gain information is reproduced in us; this is the legacy that our fathers have left us, and the singular feature of the legacy is that unlike others, of which the parts are subdivided and diminished, this in its entirety has passed down to each of the milliards and milliards of inheritors.

Must we then feel that we are destined to ask perpetually, and to receive no answer? That need not be. Many things that our ancestors could not fathom are clear to us; what was unknown to them is known to us. That which prevents us from following up this line of progress through these phases is that each reply brings forth anew fresh questions, and thus it will be to the end—if the end should ever arrive. This last question we do not put to ourselves, which is an indication that we are not careful to arrive at the answer. When I compare the present state of our knowledge, and of our condition of mind, to which I have given the epithets of torpor and inertia—and they are rightly given—to that which held sway in the dark ages when the earth rested on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise swam in the void, I must acknowledge that we now see things more truly.

But to start from the point of the sum of our acquired knowledge in this march of progress would be fatal to us; the ground we have won will only retain its solidity in proportion as we keep in sight the path we have trodden, with all its encountered and vanquished obstacles, and that will only be by pursuing the same path again in company with our ancestors.

Here my friends interpose—“That would be a vain task, you cannot picture humanity in its infancy, that is an impossibility.”

Doubtless, and since I am too practical to attempt the impossible, abstaining from every superhuman effort, and submitting my imagination to a strict discipline, I will again consult history, but not history as I know it, nor that history which is written in our days, polished, cautious, honestly critical, that which notes the old traces of humanity when they occur on the route mixed with events, and which treats the eternal truths as though they had no existence, and, truly, they do not belong to its dominion. I would study the other history, which at first was related, not written, because speech came before writing. I should try to collect information from the ancient literatures of the people concerning the manner in which our ancestors depicted divinity to themselves, especially with regard to dealings with mortals at the time when visits between the celestial inhabitants and those on earth were common.... We possess the Old Testament of the Hebrews, the sacred books of the Hindoos, and the mythology of the Aryan family; the mine is rich, so rich that I should have time to die a thousand times before I should have finished the task of searching in this mixed medley of historical remains, fantastic recitals, sublime thoughts, and flagrant falsehoods. Happily this work of digging in the past in quest of an idea is not the work of one man nor of one epoch, but that of many men and many epochs, and it never ceases.

Moreover, a short time ago no one imagined that documents very much more ancient than those I have just named, would have been discovered in hitherto unexplored regions of the physical and mental world. Two enterprising men, Darwin and Max Müller, visited and studied them. Darwin sought to explain what the origin of organic beings might have been, and in what way they passed through a series of evolutions, from one form to another of great dissimilarity. He who speaks of evolution implies researches into the beginnings of things; this was exactly what I needed. All the world knows Darwin’s name, even those who abstain from dealing with scientific problems; he has some ardent admirers who are not careful to define very accurately what it is they admire in him, and some furious adversaries, who, judging mainly by hearsay, have formed a conception of him which is either very superficial or very false.

The development of human reason has been one of the objects of Max Müller’s researches. This great thinker, who is at the same time the first philologist of our time, has sought in the science of Language for the origin of thinking man. Very few amongst the men of the world, who are nothing more than men of the world, know what the name of Max Müller represents, even the existence of a science of Language is unknown to them.

Even if Darwin and Max Müller have not been absolutely the first to strive to go back, the one to the origin of the organic world, the other to the dawn of human speech, no others have yet walked in this darkness so courageously and so perseveringly as these two men.

Not only have the journeys of exploration been much multiplied of late, but a principle of action has been extracted from beneath the scaffolding used in the building up of new theories; which is, “If you have an idea, and you wish to see whither it may lead, take it from its first commencement, and advance confidently.” This is what I am about to do.

I am undertaking a long journey; I carry with me but few plans; turning my eyes away from whatever might attract my curiosity either on the right hand or the left, I shall still more carefully guard myself from being dazzled by the mirages which I am told are frequent in those countries; or frightened by the phantoms which it is possible I may meet on the road. I shall always remind myself that one hour of feebleness, indecision, hesitation might cause me to lose my equilibrium, and that it would only require one moment of dizziness to cause my retrogression to the elephant and the tortoise. God forbid! It is to the opposite pole to which I shall direct myself; if truth exist, reason is here to find it.

CHAPTER I
HYPOTHESES

Thinkers of all times have asked themselves the question whence does this world come on which we live. Curious to know whether the universe was self-made, or was the work of a great primal ancestor, or personal Creator; philosophers who considered the matter in its entirety have left us two hypotheses.

“According to one, chaos reigned at the beginning, or in other words, the possibility of everything; and from the midst of this chaos certain realities were evolved,”[1] from an inherent aptitude for development; this aptitude has been named in many ways, such as “natural selection,” “survival of the fittest.” The Greek sages were already acquainted with the thought implied in these terms. Empedocles said that the fittest would always preponderate, since conservation is an integral part of their nature; whilst what is unfit, or not in accord with the surroundings, must disappear. But the partisans of this theory find themselves confronted by a serious difficulty: if a blind force has produced the universe, whence comes the order which reigns in nature? It is freely acknowledged, even by those with small powers of observation, that the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe are divided into animal and vegetable, which are again subdivided into distinct classes, separated by distinct lines of demarcation. If we admitted that the vegetable and animal kingdoms were not at first so entirely separated as they are at present, there would always remain a question awaiting reply: How is it to be accounted for, that two families issuing from the same source, become so separated, and have remained distinct ever since?

Amongst the propagators of the second hypothesis, some admit the existence of a primordial germ possessing the power of infinite production; others believe in a Personal Creator who formed all things, whether by the means of pre-existent material or from nothing. In accepting this theory of a reasonable Being we must at once lay aside that of pure chance, since to Him is attributed the permanence of the separation described above, this separation or division is of such a nature as to induce the impression that thus it is by premeditation and co-ordination. Certain philosophers putting aside the question of the origin of the organic world in its entirety, have restricted their field of investigation, and taken it in detail. Thus: What is the origin of man? How is it that man thinks and speaks? What is human thought and human speech? Is it man’s nature that compels him to speak, or has language been from the first a matter of convention? The Greeks whilst pursuing their researches amongst the lofty regions of metaphysics expressed some very subtle theories on this subject, coupled with vast systems which comprehended the whole of humanity. By these they weighed the words spoken, their derivation, the ideas which these words represented, and the primitive source of the various phenomena exhibited by man, for the ancients recognised man’s indivisibility.

Heraclitus considered that each object combines in itself a thought and its expression, emanating from the object, and that man is the recipient only; that he breathes a spiritual atmosphere; thus it is that every name necessarily designates the object it denotes.

Plato said that all the objects of the external world have in them something which constitutes their essence, and that this essence is capable of being transmitted from objects themselves into the human mind; that ideas constitute the essence of objects, and that words are therefore necessarily related to the constituent parts of the objects, and their impression on the human understanding.

Epicurus said that human language is the result of the pressure exercised by the external world on the sensitive essential matter in man, and that as soon as man sustains this pressure he emits words spontaneously; the most ancient words used seem to have been expressive sounds, and with the human race it was as natural for them to talk as to groan, to cough, or to sneeze.

Thus the Ancients did not distinguish speech from conception.

The problem of the origin of speech, treated in antiquity with as much depth as calmness, profoundly agitated the minds in the Middle Ages, and the theologians naturally introduced this variant in their exposition of the subject: Has language a divine or human origin? The Christian philosopher replies: “The intellect of God created the world, and the human soul, made in the likeness of the mind of God, has in itself the source of all knowledge: thought and language are of divine origin; left to himself, with only the help of his own powers, man would never have found a means of expressing his thoughts.” Such was the belief of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages; and they accepted the fact of a primordial language which men must have received directly from the Creator; this opinion was perpetuated until the most recent times. But from the earliest Christian centuries there were certain philosophers such as Gregory of Nyssa, who, whilst acknowledging the existence of a primitive universal language, considered that it redounded more to the glory of the Almighty Creator to endow man simply with the power of speech, and they deny that this language with its grammar and orthography was divinely revealed.

The materials for the study of these questions are lacking. The only document in our possession on the origin of mankind—the Old Testament—was carefully consulted; there we read that God created man after His image, that He made him of the dust of the earth, that He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that man became a living creature. The Bible narrative is one of simple facts, and it was necessary to look upon them as so many facts, for any effort to pierce beneath the surface of these mysterious words was like groping in the dark. Another recital was also given in Genesis. God brought all the animals of the earth, and the birds of the air to Adam that he might name them, and whatsoever Adam called every living thing that was the name of it. This seemed difficult to interpret, and renewed the questions under other forms. Did man at the beginning resemble a newly born babe who cries but cannot speak? In this case how did he begin to express his thoughts? If man was created an adult, but did not receive a complete language from heaven, how did he acquire the faculty of speech, this faculty which we know to be the distinguishing mark of humanity, and which is missing in other creatures?

The eighteenth century decided that this way of treating a scientific question left much to be desired; it resulted in a cul de sac, and a fresh beginning had to be made. Some philosophers, thinking to simplify matters, affirmed that primitive man, tired of wandering through woods like other animals, decided to group themselves into companies; the members of this society, feeling the necessity of making themselves mutually understood, expressed themselves at first by the aid of signs and gestures, then by sounds peculiar to the things denoted, afterwards, in one way or another, actual words were pronounced. This reasoning was used in the eighteenth century, and not knowing where to find better, those who employed it felt satisfied with their perspicacity; language which was formerly considered as a gift direct from God, became a physiological endowment, a conventional art; this century had an intense horror of the supernatural, so that it readily accepted any system in which God did not appear.

The lack of reflection shown in the building up of these hypotheses concerning the commencement of humanity has been severely criticised, and that they were very superficial must be conceded. It is equally clear that all these tentative efforts had this in common, that they were the results of the influence on immature minds of the period, of the necessity of explaining the awakening of human reason in a rational manner.

The search was continued. At last the nineteenth century considered that a solution had been found. Certain ideas which had received attention during divers periods were now collected, sorted, re-examined more closely, and classified, and from these labours there arose the two theories of interjection and imitation. According to the first, language consists of sounds drawn involuntarily from man by his emotions and feelings; by degrees man became accustomed to reproduce similar exclamations when wishing to express the same feelings, and these exclamations would serve as the roots of words; this is the interjectional theory. The imitative or onomatopœic proceeds from another source; when man was confronted by all the objects of the exterior world he began to imitate the sounds emitted, such as the cries of various animals, the whistling of the wind, the fall of a stone; the many sounds which fill the air were reproduced by the human voice and formed the basis for future words. Objections to both of these theories are not lacking. If emotions such as joy, pain, anger, love, disgust—or if physical sensations such as result from the sting of a bee or from a blow of the fist, could furnish the roots of a language, and if it were the same with the imitation of noises produced by nature, the sounds of the words should retain a definite impress of these emotions and feelings, and should reproduce, if only approximately, these various noises. Even if we admit that a small number of primitive men set themselves to imitate the murmur of the stream, the rolling of the thunder, the barking of a dog, the groans of the wounded, the only result would have been infinite variations of clamour quite impossible to distinguish or to understand. Strictly speaking, the prolonged sound of “bée” and “mou” might awaken the conception of a goat and cow in the mind; but in order to convey the idea of a herd of oxen it would be necessary to avoid equally the sound of “bée” and “mou,” as belonging exclusively to the two special animals. The warbling notes of birds have always attracted attention, and essays have been made to reproduce them by imitative harmony, but the various peoples have given various interpretations,[2] and in the generality of cases there is no resemblance between the names of animals and their cries.[3] After examining the testimony of the name “cuckoo” (no doubt convincing taken by itself), which is the prominent argument brought forward by the advocates of the imitative theory called by Max Müller the bow-wow theory, we are not able to advance further in that direction. Darwin in his book, The Descent of Man, promulgates the idea that language may have originated from interjections and imitations, but elsewhere in the Expressions of the Emotions he hastens to add with his accustomed frankness: “But the whole subject of the differences of the sounds produced under different states of the mind is so obscure that I have succeeded in throwing hardly any light on it; and the remarks which I have made have but little significance.”[4]

Scholars and literary men have taxed the resources of all the treasures of their imagination in endeavouring to picture the beginnings of language; in the present day many efforts are made by learned men to discover, from nurses surrounded by their charges, how the first words were reproduced by primitive man. It would be as useful to study the nature of primitive rocks amongst a mass of bricks and mortar, since the chasm is wide between the thoughts which our little ones have when they first begin to speak and those which primitive man had in trying to name his surroundings. We who speak because we know point out father or mother to a little child, naming them at the same time—“this is mother,” “this is father;” by degrees attributes become connected in the child’s mind with these names; such as mother’s hair, or her dress; or father’s beard, his pin; and whilst naming them we again point them out; and when the child pronounces these words in its own fashion, that is incorrectly, is this defect in pronunciation to be a sign-post to us—pointing out the direction to be followed in judging of primitive language? At a later period the child distinguishes between the mother’s smile and the father’s voice; later still its mind comprehends all the moral and physical attributes covered by these two terms; and thus with all other objects—“here is the cow,” and “here is the piece of sugar,” which so soon become familiar to the child, with their cognate words, milk and sweetness. Our children thus learn to speak under very different conditions from those in which our first ancestors found themselves, when with no previous experience they tried to put forth their first words.

Conjectures increased and developed into systems, which, however, contained nothing beyond germs of fresh conjectures and fresh systems, of which none rested on a reasonable basis.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was quite natural that there should be uncertainty as to the path to be followed in seeking the beginning of human speech. Was it necessary to trace all the known languages to their source? Would not the same feeling of confusion arise when attacking all the dialects spoken on the surface of the earth as oppressed those who were at the base of the Tower of Babel? An idea which was universally adopted rather tended to check the progress of this study: it sprang from the theory that humanity had received the gift of speech from the Creator; and as the Jewish people alone were thought to be the recipients of a supernatural revelation, it followed that Hebrew must be the earliest language, and consequently that all existing languages were derived from the Hebrew. It is hardly possible to conceive the number of works put forth by the learned to remove any doubt with regard to this strange affiliation; the difficulty was to support or prove the supposition that Hebrew had given birth to Greek, Latin, and the rest; this Biblical language was tortured and twisted about in the endeavour to prove the descent of the others from it, but no satisfactory result was obtained. It was by the advice of Leibniz that as many facts as possible were collected concerning the modern languages then in use. He asked for the assistance of monarchs, European princes, ambassadors, missionaries, and travellers. It was during these investigations that the attention of certain philologists was directed to Sanscrit, a language which had been dead 300 years before the Christian era, and about which the learned in Europe had troubled themselves very little.

At the time of Plato and Aristotle a vague notion was current in Greece that India, as well as Egypt, was the birthplace of matchless learning, only it was not known in what this learning consisted, and even the name of the Vedas (the most ancient collection of sacred writings of the Hindoos) was unknown to the philosophers. The first Christian writers who mentioned the religions of India, and who knew up to a certain point how to distinguish Brahminism from Buddhism, never quoted the Vedas; this name is first used by some Chinese converts to Buddhism, at the beginning of the Christian era, who had undertaken a pilgrimage to India, considered by them as a holy land. In the sixteenth century Francis Xavier went there as a missionary, but without knowing Sanscrit; in the seventeenth century Roberto de Nobili, another missionary, acquired the language, and caused a compilation to be made of Hindoo and Christian doctrines. It was not well done; the French translation was sent to Voltaire, who praised it and spoke of it as the most precious gift for which the West had ever been indebted to the East. The Père Calmette, who had heard of the importance of the Vedas, was the first European to obtain authentic fragments, but these attracted little attention in Europe. In the early part of the nineteenth century some members of the Asiatic Society residing in Calcutta discovered a collection of Sanscrit MSS., amongst them some portions of the laws of Manu, two epic poems, the Râmayana and the Mahâbhârata, some philosophical treatises, works on astronomy and medicine, plays and fables. These works possessed great interest for those scholars who were occupied with the study of humanity, such as Herder, Schlegel, Goethe, and Humboldt. For the most part the preconceived ideas with which these literary men received them tended to diminish the benefit to be derived from them to a great extent, as they endeavoured—consistently with the spirit of the time—to establish the identity of thought running through the sacred literature of the Hindoos and the Bible. They also sought to point out the supposed connection between the historical recitals of the Old Testament, the Indian legends, and the Greek and Latin mythologies. Certain MSS. containing passages from the sacred code of the Hindoos having been translated by Anquetil Duperron, Schopenhauer drew from it the foundations of his own philosophical belief; nothing less than the genius of this German scholar would have sufficed for the presentation of the sublime truths which the original contained, by means of this very defective translation. One of the first historiographers of Buddhism was the Abbé Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, but yet his labours have not served to raise the veil hiding the true meaning of the Brahman writings, for without the knowledge of the early Sanscrit, it was not possible to seize the inner meaning of a literature which the sages of India had required fifteen centuries to complete. Thus it was that Europe only knew the more accessible portions, and those better calculated to strike the imagination, but not necessarily the most important. “Much had been said and written about Buddhism, enough to show the Roman Catholic clergy that the [Lamas] of Thibet had anticipated them in the use of auricular confession, the rosary, and the tonsure; and to disconcert philosophers by showing them that they were outdone in positivism and nihilism by the inmates of Chinese monasteries.”[5]

The strangeness of this religion attracted public attention, which was especially directed towards certain blemishes, which had crept into it during a decadent period, and tarnished its original purity, and although learned men continued to devote themselves to a study more and more deeply penetrated with the Sanscrit language, they were yet so unprepared for the results which must inevitably follow this study, that certain German universities became the scenes of veritable scandals, when some of the learned declared that they had found a community of origin between the people of Athens, of Rome, and of India, and the stupefaction of the philologists knew no bounds when, in 1833, Bopp’s work appeared, The Comparative Grammar of the Greek, Latin, Gothic, Sanscrit, Zend, Lithuanian, Slavonic, and German Languages, whilst the effect on the younger students was quite bewildering.

But that which created the greatest furore in all Europe was the promulgation of the scientific discoveries of Eugène Burnouf, Professor of Oriental Languages in the Collège de France. Long centuries had passed during which no original Sanscrit document had come to light, and now in the short space of ten years three complete collections of Oriental literature were known, the sacred books of the Brahmans, of the Buddhists, and of the Magians. “The critical examination and restitution of the Zend texts, the outlines of a Zend grammar, the translation and philological anatomy of considerable portions of the Zoroastrian writings were the work of the learned young French scholar.”[6]

A few proper names and certain titles were up to this time all that could be deciphered of the cuneiform inscriptions on the walls of Persian palaces. Classical or oriental scholars had hitherto only seen in them a quaint conglomeration of nails, wedges, or arrows; but when at last the meaning was disentangled, it suddenly flashed upon the discoverers that there was a close relationship between languages hitherto held to be quite distinct. Facts, at first only suspected, now received full confirmation; those previously unknown were discovered and claimed, if only provisionally, in the name of Science. Historians and philologists pressed eagerly into this new path. In looking back they could see that the human family was divided into three distinct groups, the Semetic family, the Aryan family—sometimes called the Indo-Germanic—and the Turanian class, the northern division of which has the name Ural-Altaic given to it occasionally. I use the word class advisedly, as the characteristic traits hardly merit the rank of family. They also discovered that human speech had equally marked divisions, making three groups or families, corresponding to the three great human races. The Semetic family produced the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the Arabic of the Koran, and the ancient language graven on the monuments of Phœnicia and Carthage, of Babylon and Assyria; the Greek and Latin, Persian and Sanscrit, the Germanic languages, Celtic and Slavonic, all belong to the Aryan family; from the Ural-Altaic group come the Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic and Finnic; there still remains the Chinese language, which is monosyllabic and stands by itself, the only remnant of the earliest formation of human speech.

These discoveries caused a complete change in the methods adopted by philologists; at the present time the ancient systems of the classification of tongues are entirely abandoned. The comparative philologist ignores altogether geographical locality, the varying ages of languages, and their classical or illiterate character. Languages are now classified genealogically, according to their real relationship; and Hebrew, coming down from its pedestal, took its natural place amongst the languages of the Semetic family.[7]

I revert here for a moment to the past in order to quote a page from Plato, which shows us the small esteem in which the purely speculative method, in the treatment of philosophy, was held by one of the profoundest minds of antiquity:—

“Dost thou see that very tall plane-tree?” said Phædros to Socrates.

“Certainly, I do.”

“Tell me, Socrates, is it not from the foot of this plane-tree that they say Boreas carried away Oreithyia from the Ilissos?”

“So they say.”

“But tell me, O Socrates, dost thou believe this mythe to be true?”

“Well, if I did not believe it, like the wise people, I should not be so very far wrong; and I might set up an ingenious theory and say that a gust of Boreas, the north wind, carried her down from the rocks in the neighbourhood, and that having died in this manner, she was reported to have been carried off by Boreas from thence. As for myself, Phædros, I think these explanations, on the whole, very pleasant; a man is, after all, not much to be envied, if it were only for this, that when he has set right this one fable, he is bound to do the same for a second, then a third, and thus much time is lost. I, at least, have no leisure to spare for these things, and the reason, my friend, is this, that I cannot yet, according to the Delphic line, know myself; and it seems to me ridiculous that a man who does not yet know this, should trouble himself about what does not concern him. Therefore I leave these things alone, and, believing what other people believe about them, I meditate, as I said just now, not on them, but on myself—whether I be a monster more complicated and more savage than Typhon, or a tamer and simpler creature, enjoying by nature a blessed and modest lot.”[8]

“Thus, to the mind of Socrates, man was pre-eminently the individual ... he is ever seeking to solve the mystery of human nature by brooding over his own mind, by watching the secret workings of the soul, by analysing the organs of knowledge, and by trying to determine its proper limits; and thus the last result of his philosophy was that he knew but one thing, and this was, that he knew nothing.”[9]

More than 2300 years have elapsed since the intercourse between Socrates and his disciple took place. But the problems which we of the twentieth century have not yet succeeded in solving, have so entirely absorbed our attention, that it seldom occurs to us to measure the distance which separates us from the commencement of philosophical studies. Although the scientific equipment of our forefathers occupies a small portion of our thoughts in our leisure moments, we yet discover—in comparison with ourselves—how very indigent they were.

This earth was unintelligible to the Greeks, they looked upon it as a solitary being, without a peer in the whole universe; to us it is a planet; one of many, all governed by the same laws, all moving round the same centre. It is the same with man who also remained a riddle to the ancients. An intelligent study of the world’s history, which they knew but imperfectly, has enriched our language with a word which never passed the lips of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle—humanity. Where the Greeks saw barbarians, that is, human beings other than themselves—we see brethren; those whom they called heroes and demi-gods are our ancestors; those who appeared to them strangers, united by no ties, are to us one family in work and suffering, divided by language and severed by national enmity, but pressing forward step by step almost unconsciously towards the fulfilment of that inscrutable purpose for which the world was created. As we have ceased to see in nature the working of demons or the manifestation of an evil principle, so we deny in history an atomistic conglomerate of chances, or the despotic rule of a mute fate; we turn over the leaves of the past seeking for a hidden train of thought in the actions of the human race; we understand that every effect has its cause; that connecting links run through the moral world, as well as the physical world; that there is nothing irrational in either history or nature, and we believe that the human mind is called upon to discover in both the manifestations of a Divine Power, the source of our existence.[10]

This result, however, we could not have attained without first recognising the fact that man is no isolated being, complete in himself; that if he is to be effectively studied he cannot be disassociated from his family, all the members of which are governed by the same laws, all move round the same centre, and all receive their light from the same focal point. He is one of a class, of one genus or kind, whom it would be impossible to estimate correctly, if we set aside his relations to his fellows.

“To understand man,” an illustrious naturalist has said recently, “it is not sufficient not to separate him from those whom he resembles in every point; it is quite as necessary to study him in connection with those closely related to him, the inferior animals.”

Hitherto I have not mentioned a hypothesis which has been promulgated in our days on the origin of man, which would have been considered the most remarkable this century had seen, had it not appeared simultaneously with another treatment of a like subject equally noticeable for its profundity in another direction.

During a voyage which he made in South America, Darwin had been struck by the very close affinity which existed between the living and the fossil species of this continent; this link between the past and present appeared to him to throw considerable light on the obscurity which enveloped the question of the origin of species. The degree in which organs were capable of modification was especially to be taken into account; the study of the variation of animals and plants under domestication led Darwin to the path he followed; the uninterrupted reproduction of characteristics in the structure of organic beings, intensified rather than attenuated by a succession of modifications, caused him to see in all living creatures, not independent entities, the one apart from the other, but descendants from common ancestors now extinct.

Evolution, like many another theory, may be dangerous if not thoroughly grasped, and if it lead to a denial of the permanence of the well marked lines of demarcation in nature. Evolution, according to Darwin, starts from beginnings which are quite distinct; and leads on to well defined ends; thus Darwin does not acknowledge only one common progenitor for all the great natural races, but many, and nothing more clearly demonstrates his transparent sincerity in scientific matters than what his critics are pleased to call his inconsistencies.

At the end of many years of persistent labour, Darwin published his book on the Origin of Species.

I do not propose to give a summary of it. The author does not adopt the method of a learned writer expounding his system; his attitude is that of a naturalist who, during his excursions, examines nature in its innumerable and most minute details; when two facts, both of which he considers true, appear to contradict each other, he notes both equally, since he is too sincere to conceal that one from the public which apparently invalidates his theory. Moreover at each step he avows that this theory is not yet entirely free from the fog which invariably envelops each new idea at its birth. An explorer such as he is, who has succeeded in explaining so many mysteries, might very naturally become elated, but it is not so with him; his thoughts never seem directed towards himself; with all his genius, self does not appear to exist with him; the only things that are prominent—with a distinct existence—are the phenomena which he studies.

The notion that all organic beings have been such as we now see them from the beginning, was almost inevitable, as long as the theory was held that the formation of the world was of comparatively recent date; and those who, without further investigation, held the traditional belief of the independent and individual creation of each species, could only offer one explanation, if all animals—all plants—are as they are it is because it has pleased the Creator to make them so. Because the Darwinian theory has cast a doubt on the successive creation of living things, it has been said that Darwin’s views were inimical to religion. These impressions are transitory—as were those expressed by Leibniz when he reproached Newton with introducing “occult qualities and miracles into philosophy;”[11] and when he attacked his law of gravitation “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed religion.”[11]

After explaining in what manner nature had produced all the variations of plants and inferior animals from a small number of germs, Darwin did not feel himself under the necessity of adding one more to the germs in order that what was afterwards termed humanity might appear on the scene; the principle of evolution as already applied to the organic world, would suffice to explain all difficulties; the natural forces all engaged in the same movement, would spread and branch out in various directions, until they reached the culminating point of incorporation with the human creature.

Darwin’s book, the Descent of Man, contains the genealogical table of this higher animal which the author so often compares with the lower animals. If both have so much in common, such as the chemical composition of their bodies—their germinal vesicles—their laws of growth and reproduction; it is—so he conceives—that both have come from the same ancestor; moreover, all helps to prove that man has received from his prototype amongst the mammifers, all the special characteristics of its own organs. Thus it is easy to understand that in the eyes of many naturalists the embryonic structure is of more importance for an accurate classification than that of an adult, since the embryo is that condition in which the animal has undergone the least modification, thus it better represents the original form of the primitive progenitor.

For a species of one of the inferior animals to have attained the level of man, it was necessary that, following an universal law, it must have undergone variations both corporally and mentally, during a long succession of generations; the primary causes of these variations is not clearly understood, but it has been proved that the conditions of life or environment to which the living beings submitted were potent agents in the renewal of phenomena. Like all other creatures man increased out of all proportion to his means of subsistence, and thus began the struggle for existence, when those who were best equipped for the fight survived in the greatest numbers, and left the greatest number of robust descendants. Man acquired the capability of expressing his wants by means of language, at first, perhaps, little different from that of the inferior animals, but the continued use of language reacting on the brain furnished a means for the further development of those mental faculties which of themselves constitute a real distinction between man and beast. This difference, however, does not become pronounced until a certain period of man’s existence, as during the earliest stages the intelligence of the newly created human beings does not differ from that of other mammifers. It begins to dawn a little later, then gradually increases, and at last becomes most strongly marked, even if a comparison be made between the intelligence of a highly developed monkey and that of the lowest savage, who has failed perhaps to find words with which to express the most elementary emotions. But men are not all on the same level; without speaking of the vast difference that exists between the faculties of a Papuan and those which we know to have been possessed by a Newton or a Kant, we notice a very sensible difference between the mental powers of two individuals of the same race; but we always find these extremes are connected by shades of difference which gradually melt imperceptibly the one into the other. Darwin arrives at the conclusion that the distinctions to be drawn between the intellect of man and the intelligence of animals is one of degree rather than of kind.

Darwin shares the opinion of those who consider the moral consciousness in man as that which distinguishes him specially from the inferior animals, and he conceives its origin to be found in the social instincts whose most important constituent parts are family ties and the emotions to which they give rise. This consciousness makes man capable of approving of certain acts and disapproving of others. After having been overcome by a temporary passion, he reflects and compares the already weakened motives causing him to act as he did, with the appeal made to him by his family and social instincts, and he resolves to act differently in the future; the opinion of his neighbours influences him, but it is not so much the opinion of the community in general as that of his own small circle to which he belongs.

Social instincts are found also amongst a large number of inferior animals, but with them, this mutual sympathy does not extend to all the species of their class, as with man it reaches only to the members of their own small community.

With the progress of civilisation and in proportion as the smaller communities become larger, so man’s reason leads him to extend his sympathy to all the men of his nationality; arrived at this point, there remains a very impalpable barrier between that and the inclusion of men of all races in feelings of universal benevolence; but if these races are separated from his by strong dissimilarities in external appearance and in habits of life, it would take much time for him to learn and recognise in them the constituent parts of humanity similar to himself.

The moral consciousness which raises man to a level not attained by beasts, leads him to conceive and apprehend the precept, “Do unto others as you would they should do unto you.” The sympathy which extends beyond the limits of humanity, such as compassion for animals, seems the last quality to be developed. The moral sense in man has its counterpart in animals of the inferior order; under the influence of man the animal becomes more capable of improvement by the increased exercise of his intelligence, by habits, by instincts of heredity, so as to have transformed the prototype of the wolf and jackal to that of a dog.

There is nothing to lead us to suppose that primitive man had felt the existence of a principle higher than nature. There is much to indicate that what we mean by religious feeling was not known to him; but the aspect of the question undergoes a change if by religious sentiment we understand belief in invisible spirits, for this belief was universal. This is natural; as soon as certain faculties of the imagination awoke in man, such as astonishment, curiosity, he would seek to understand all that passed around him; his first idea would be that all the phenomena in nature would proceed from the presence inherent in them of a power compelling to action in the same way as man feels himself obliged to act. This belief in the course of age would easily tend towards fetishism, then to polytheism and finally to monotheism; it would simultaneously inculcate many strange superstitions, of which some produced terrible effects, such as the sacrifice of human lives to a powerful being eager for human blood, since savages readily attribute to these superior powers the desire for vengeance as well as all the other evil passions they themselves possess.

Amongst civilised peoples the conception of an all-knowing, an all-seeing God, exercises a powerful influence on morality; man learns little by little, no longer to regard the praise or blame of society as his sole guide; this external guidance is replaced by personal inward convictions which come from his reason and which is conscience. Religious devotion is a very complex human sentiment; it is composed of love, submission, gratitude, hope, and perhaps of other elements; no creature is in a position to experience so complicated an emotion whose intellectual faculties have not attained a level of medium development. Yet something approaching this may be seen in the depth of affection manifested by a dog for his master, which is a combination of complete submission, of fear, dependence, and perhaps also of other qualities.

Learned writers have for some time agreed in looking upon language as the barrier separating man from animals; all books on logic state the fact. But this special characteristic of the human race attracted Darwin’s attention in a very small degree. “Man, however, at first, uses, in common with the lower animals, inarticulate cries to express his meaning, aided by gestures and the movements of the muscles of the face.”[12] “Certain animals,” he says, “do not lack the physical conditions necessary for articulate language, since there is not a letter in the alphabet that a parrot cannot pronounce.” Darwin goes even beyond this. “It is not the mere power of articulation that distinguishes man from other animals, but it is his large power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas.”[12]

It would be difficult to be more explicit, and it must be owned that this was a great concession on Darwin’s part; but afterwards, and perhaps with the object of weakening the force of this statement, he adds: “The fact of the higher apes not using their vocal organs for speech, no doubt depends on their intelligence not having been sufficiently advanced.”[13] However, no effort of thought, in the present state of our knowledge, would cause us to understand how any number of thousands of centuries passed in roaring and barking could enable wolves and dogs to join a single definite idea to a single definite sound; and if we said that, by the help of specially favourable environments some unknown species of primitive animal had acquired the power of speech, and had succeeded in imparting the knowledge to its descendants, and in thus elevating them to the level of human beings, we should only be relating fantastic tales, which would have no connection with scientific research.

Darwin does not allow himself to be affected by this consideration. “In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term ‘man’ ought to be used.”[14] It is evident that if the gradations were imperceptible, there would be no possibility of marking the precise point where the animal ended and man began; “the admission of this insensible gradation would eliminate, not only the difference between ape and man, but likewise between black and white, hot and cold, a high and a low note in music; in fact, it would do away with the possibility of all exact and definite knowledge, by removing those wonderful lines and laws of nature which ... enable us to count, to tell, and to know.”[15]

I will now bring together some passages which are scattered in various parts of the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man which have especially attracted criticism.

“It is interesting to note that all that we are, all that we see, has been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”[16]

And again: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”[16] “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”[17] “In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on newly laid down foundations; that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”[18]

Again elsewhere: “The moral sense or conscience, as Mackintosh remarks, has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action. It is summed up in that short but imperious word ought,” and Darwin proceeds to quote Kant’s apostrophe as follows: “Duty! wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel. Duty! whence thy original?”[19]

Darwin continues: “This great question, ‘Whence thy origin?’ has been discussed by many writers of consummate ability; and my sole excuse for touching on it is ... that, as far as I know, no one has approached it exclusively from the side of natural history.”[20]

“But as the feelings of love and sympathy and the power of self-command become strengthened by habit, and as the power of reasoning becomes clearer, so that man can appreciate the justice of the judgments of his fellow-men, he will feel himself impelled, independently of any pleasure or pain felt at the moment, to risk his life for his fellow-creature, or to sacrifice himself for any great cause. He may then say, I am the supreme judge of my own conduct, and, in the words of Kant, I will not in my own person violate the dignity of humanity.”[21]

The warmest admirers of Darwin wish that he had expressed himself more definitely. Some amongst them are astonished to find the word “Creator” in certain editions of the Origin of Species, and not in all; others have drawn attention to the fact that Darwin could say in all good faith, “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.”[22] Darwin’s line of thought has perhaps not been perfectly grasped, and his commentators have been numerous. This, however, is certain. From the moment when the author of the Descent of Man considered that he had discovered in social instincts the first germ of the idea of duty, it becomes a matter for surprise that he yielded to the desire of referring to Kant and of quoting his apostrophe to Duty. But it is quite evident that Darwin did not see in the universe only the fortuitous result of a combination of matter; he admitted the existence of a law acting from the beginning and continuing to act. In order the better to grasp his thought, it is necessary to be in a position to define his terms. He speaks of natural selection, but in ordinary parlance selection presupposes the existence of distinction and judgment; and to distinguish and choose, intelligence is necessary; and if the essential nature is intelligent, what is this nature?

The endeavour to prove that man has descended from a creature not originally man has deeply stirred our generation, and the greater number amongst us only yielded to a natural repugnance in repulsing the idea with indignation. However, because this inward feeling tells us that a proposition is false, it does not necessarily follow that it is so; in looking at it more closely, we have to admit that many humiliating facts are accepted by us without demur. We are not scandalised at the notion of being composed of the same chemical elements as the inferior animals, nor do we revolt against the injustice of the circumstances and restraints imposed upon all by the facts of birth and death; but this unreasoning submission has no more rational basis than the revolt of our feelings, in presence of the assumption, that an animal only was our ancestor. The notion that animals so dissimilar as the monkey, the elephant, the bird, fish, and man could have proceeded from the same parentage seems too monstrous to be true; from the scientific point of view this feeling is of no value; in the face of all the assertions of our moral convictions science, as such, remains immovable; the only weapon admitted in a scientific encounter is fact opposed to fact, argument to argument. Moreover, any appeals which can be made to our pride, our dignity, our piety, would be equally wide of the mark, so long as proof is lacking that man possesses something which has no existence in lower animals either actually or potentially.

It is a matter for regret to have to acknowledge the fact that the union of a profound knowledge, combined with true sincerity in research, is insufficient to endow the world with a well established truth. The world is too hasty in accepting or rejecting a new system before giving itself the trouble to divide the system into two parts, one of which can be placed at once amongst evident truths, whilst the other must be subjected to minute investigation and close testing. Precisely after this manner does Darwin’s work lend itself to a division into two parts, the former is the history of the formation and gradual development of the organic world, represented by plants and animals, including man (The Origin of Species), but it is also the history of the formation and gradual development of man considered as a being composed of body and spirit (Descent of Man). In the author’s mind this portion of the subject is closely connected with the former.

At first sight it would appear that a tribunal, which was quick to distinguish truth from error in this teaching, had not been found. Certainly scientific materialism has no voice in the matter, since its mission is only to deal with material and actual facts; and when from the facts accumulated conclusions are deduced as applied to origins, this would be out of its sphere, and the conclusions reached can only be arbitrary; thus Darwin’s theory not being found free from the taint of idealism, it was condemned without trial. Religious dogmatism did not show itself any more capable of deciding the question, for this dogmatism, whose domain is faith, considered that due reference was not made to Divine intervention, and concluded that the theory was only judged by the light of science, and thus condemned it unheard. But all condemnation, which cannot prove itself to be just, has no scientific value, only one tribunal is competent of judging and solving the question, and that is the science of language, it alone possesses documentary evidence. The exact point at which the animal ceases and man begins can be determined with precision since it coincides with the beginning of the “Radical Period” of language, and language is reason.

CHAPTER II
OUR ARYAN ANCESTORS

Some of the studies undertaken and carried on in a tentative groping fashion, with the purpose of ascertaining the nature of that complex being man, have been placed before you. I have mentioned the more or less fantastic suppositions set forth on the subject, and I have dwelt rather more fully on a recent system, of which the fundamental portion (a magnificent scientific monument, to which experimental tests have given a solid basis) is followed by a second part which treats especially of the descent of man. The time has now come to examine the studies of a school of philosophy, which, guided by a new theory, searches in the past, and passes under review all previous conceptions, suppositions, or even misconceptions of the previous schools.

The science of language, based on the close connection between thought and speech, only dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first problem presented to it is that of origin—the origin of thought and speech in man—which two united in their essential parts, make man what he is. The means by which this science works is called comparative philology; it is by the analysis of languages—living as well as dead—that it seeks to discover the infancy of human thought. It is evident that in order to penetrate thus deeply, this analysis must follow the whole progress of speech since it first sounded; to no other school of philosophy had this idea occurred; all others ignored the fact that previous to the commencement of human language, no vestige of humanity could exist; therefore, probably, another fact had been ignored; that the only archives in which it is possible to study the history of humanity and the development of reason are those of language.

Wherever sacred writings exist, we find in them the most ancient languages of the people who possess them; this is the case in Persia, China, Palestine, Arabia, and India; thus it is in these writings which are looked upon as being divinely inspired, that search must be made for the genesis of the successive thought of these peoples.

But these ancient writings differ widely the one from the other; for the most part they contain ideas which are the product of various ages; often also, as in Greece, and Rome and Persia, we find ourselves confronted by thoughts or theories which had already arrived at a high degree of development, or are beginning to lose their first clearness. Only amongst the Hindoos is it possible to follow step by step the growth of the conception, and the transformation of the names which clothe them. The Vedas show us more clearly than any other literary monument in the world, the uninterrupted course of the evolution of language and thought from the first word pronounced by our ancestors to our own most recent reflection.

India does not possess remains of ancient temples nor of ancient palaces. Edifices of this kind were probably unknown before the invasion of Alexander. The Hindoos have always felt themselves strangers in the land, and the constant efforts of the kings of Egypt and of Babylon to perpetuate their names during thousands of years, by means of bricks and blocks of stone, did not occur to them until suggested by foreigners. But on the other hand, from the most remote times, they have possessed sacred writings, and they still preserve them in their ancient form. The number of separate works in Sanscrit of which the manuscripts are still in existence is now estimated at more than ten thousand. What would Plato and Aristotle have said, had they been told that there existed in that India which Alexander had just discovered—if not conquered—an ancient literature, far richer than anything they possessed at that time in Greece, and dating back so far that the old Sanscrit which clothed the religious and philosophical thought of these early inhabitants was a dead language. This literature has not ceased to increase, and contains the canonical books of the three principal religions of the ancient world; the Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of the Magians, written in Zend, the ancient Persian; the Tripitaka, the sacred books of the Buddhists, which contain moral treatises, dogmatic philosophy, and metaphysics; and the sacred writings of the Brahmans called the Vedas.

It would be difficult to say whether the Old Testament, or certain portions of the Vedas, have existed for the greater number of centuries; it is certain that the Aryan race had no existence previous to the Vedas. The name Veda signifies “knowing, or knowledge”; veda, Greek οἰδα, is a verb with the same meaning in Sanscrit as in Greek, “I know.” The book of the Vedas contains an epitome of the most ancient Brahmanic science, and is composed of four collections of hymns; that which is called Rig-Veda (hymns of praise) is the true Veda, and the other Vedas are to the Rig-Veda what the Talmud is to the Bible. The Rig-Veda, which for more than three thousand years had laid the foundations of the moral and religious life of innumerable millions of human creatures had never been published until Max Müller put forth a complete edition, accompanied by authorised commentaries on Indian theology.

The composition of these hymns occupied many centuries, and in 600 B.C. the collection seems to have been complete. Some early treatises on these hymns tell us that at this date the theological schools had accomplished a great undertaking, that of counting every verse, every word, every syllable of the hymns; the number of syllables is 432,000, the number of words 153,826, and the number of verses as computed in these treatises varies from 10,402 to 10,622. Until the introduction of writing, the Vedic hymns were entirely preserved by memory, with such accuracy and fidelity that the rules contained in the treatise for the repetitions correspond with great exactness with the actual text, its accents, metre, and the divinity it praises. The Rig-Veda now forms the foundation of all philological and mythological studies, as well as those connected with the science and growth of religion; without it we should never have obtained any insight into the belief of our ancestors.

We will now transport ourselves to the cradle of the Aryas “Noble,” according to some writers situated on the Asiatic continent, according to others more to the north, between the Baltic and the Caspian seas. This will suffice for the first stage; I shall make few demands on history, or on grammar.

There was a time when the great mass of the Aryan people was hesitating on the eve of abandoning their early habitations, previous to a dispersion in two directions. This people was composed of two branches, the tribes of the north, and those of the south; the former went towards the north-west of Asia and Europe; here they established themselves, and the great historical nations—historical, since most of them have played noted parts amongst the nations—the Celts, Grecians, Romans, Germans and Slavs were their descendants. Endowed with every aptitude for an active life, they fostered these capabilities to the highest degree; society was founded by them, morals brought to a greater perfection, the foundation of science and art established, and the principles of philosophy laid down. Although constantly in conflict with the Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryans became in their descendants the masters of the world. Whilst the northern division followed a north-westerly direction, the southern went to the mountains lying to the north of India; crossing the passes of the Himalayas, and following the long watercourses, they descended into the vast fertile valleys, and from that time India became as their own land. These pleasant dwelling-places of the Aryan colonists, protected on the one side by high mountains, and on the other by the ocean from all foreign invasions, were not disturbed by any of the ancient conquerors of the world; around them kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties were created and became extinct, but the inner life of the tribes remained undisturbed by these events. The ancient Hindoos were calm, contemplative dreamers, a nation of philosophers, who could only conceive of disputes in themselves, in their own thoughts; the transcendental nature of the atmosphere in which his ideas worked, and in which the Hindoo lived, could not fail to retard the development of practical, social, and political virtues, and the appreciation of the beautiful and useful. The Hindoo saw nothing in the past but the mystery of the Creation, in the future but the mystery of his destiny; the present offered nothing to him that could awaken physical activity, and apparently had no reality for him; no people ever existed who believed more firmly in a future life, or who occupied themselves less with this one; such as they were in the beginning, such they remained. The only sphere in which the Indian mind moves freely is the sphere of religion and that of philosophy. In no other part of the world have metaphysical ideas taken such deep root as in India; the forms in which these ideas were clothed, in epochs of varying culture, and in the midst of divers classes of society, were alternately those of the grossest superstition and of the most exalted spiritualism.

It has been asserted that in these two Aryan branches must we look for our ancestors. How shall we verify the truth of this assertion? What family likeness must we seek in order to recognise the relationship? How feel certain that the languages we speak have been derived from them? “If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin—if no historical documents existed to tell us of the Roman empire—a mere comparison of the six Romance dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common.”[23]

Let us conjugate the verb to be in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Walachian, and in Rhætian, and we shall see that it is clear: first, that all are but varieties of one common type: secondly, that it is impossible to consider any one of these six dialects as the original from which the others had been borrowed, since no single one contains the elements composing them. “If we find such forms as j’ai aimé, we can explain them by a mere reference to the grammatical materials which French has still at its command, and the same may be said of j’aimerai, i.e. je-aimer-ai, I have to love, I shall love. But a change from je suis to tu es is inexplicable by the light of French grammar; it must have been a part of some language antecedent to any of the Romance dialects; it is, in fact, the verb to be in Latin, which solves this difficulty; each of the six paradigms is but a metamorphosis of the Latin.”[24]

It was known that the roots were the same in all the Aryan languages, that the same grammatical changes were common in many of the words in everyday use, such as father, mother, heaven, sun, moon, horse, and cow, as well as in the principal numbers; but it was the study of Sanscrit in its primitive form which first led the learned to the discovery of the reason of the vowel changes in certain words in use in our day, and which changes the English word to wit, to know, into I wot, I know, and the German ich weise into wir wissen; these changes are the result of a general law, the application of which can nowhere be more clearly appreciated than in the Vedic Sanscrit, and which was unknown until this language was studied in the Veda. (I will here note that Sanscrit not being the original from which the other Aryan dialects have their being, but an elder brother, when Max Müller makes use of a Sanscrit phrase he does it to give an idea of the process through which the language has passed which he considers preceded Sanscrit.)

There is another list of paradigms which, under a less familiar aspect than the first, presents the same phenomenon. Conjugate the verb to be in Doric, Latin, old Slav, Sanscrit, Celtic, Lithuanian, Zend, Gothic, and Armenian, and you will see that the nine are varieties of one common type, and that it is impossible to consider any one of them as the original of the others, since, here again, none of the languages possess the grammatical material out of which these forms could have been framed. Sanscrit cannot have been the source from which the rest were derived, since Greek, in several instances, has retained a more organic form than the Sanscrit. Nor can Greek be considered as the earliest language from which the others were derived, for not even Latin could be called the daughter of Greek, since Latin has preserved certain forms more primitive than the Greek. Hence all these nine dialects point to some more ancient language, which was to them what Latin was to the Romance dialects; only at that early period there was no literature to preserve to us any remnant of that mother-tongue that died in giving birth to all the modern Aryan dialects.[25]

There is one fact to be noted. If a comparison be made of the verb to be in these dialects, it will be seen that Sanscrit is no more distinct from the Greek of Homer, or from the Gothic of Ulfilas, or from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred, than the Romance dialects from each other; that, in fact, the resemblance is more striking between Sanscrit and Lithuanian, and between Sanscrit and Russian, than between French and Italian. This circumstance proves that all the essential grammatical forms of these languages had been fully framed and established before the first separation of the Aryan family took place, that is to say, at a time before there were any Grecians to speak Greek, or any Brahmans to invoke God’s name in Sanscrit.

The science of comparative philology enables us to have glimpses of the social condition of our Aryan ancestors before they left their first abode. All historical documents of this period are lacking, for the simple reason that the time of which we are speaking is anterior to any historical records; “but comparative philology has placed in our hands a telescope of such power that where formerly we could see but nebulous clouds we now discover distinct forms and outlines.”[26]

We see that our ancestors were no savages, but agricultural nomads, that they laboured, made roads, possessed the art of weaving and sewing; they built towns, kept domestic animals, lived under a kingly government, and counted at least up to one hundred. We learn this not only from the words father, mother, son, daughter, heaven, earth, but also from house, town, king, dog, cow, hatchet, and many others, which are found to be the same in the German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit. They are the same because they all point to some more ancient language, the mother-tongue in use before the separation of the various Aryan tribes. From this period the other words also date, expressing all the degrees of relationship, even those by alliance, thus giving clear proof of the early organisation of family life.

At the same time a decimal system of numeration also existed, the numbers from one to a hundred, “in itself one of the most marvellous achievements of the human mind, produced from an abstract conception of quantity, regulated by a spirit of philosophical classification, and yet conceived, matured and finished before the soil of Europe was trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton. Such a system could only have been formed by a very small community, in which by the help of a tacit agreement, each number could only bear one signification. If we were suddenly obliged to invent new names for one, two and three we should quickly feel the great difficulty of the task; to supply new names for material objects would be comparatively easy, as these have different attributes which could be used in their designation; we could call the sea, the salt water; and the rain, the water of heaven; numbers are, however, such abstract conceptions that it would be foolish to attempt to find in them palpable attributes, and thus give expression to a merely quantitative idea.”[27]

Since the names of the Aryan numbers up to one hundred are the same, it proves that they date from a time when our ancestors lived under circumscribed conditions united by common ties. This is not so with the word thousand; the names for thousand differ in German and Slavonic, because they have their rise after the dispersion of the race. Sanscrit and Zend share the name for thousand, which proves the union of the ancestors of the Brahmans and Zoroastrians—after their exodus—by the ties of a common language.

In this way the facts of language—which are so simple that a child could seize them—enable us to travel from the known to the unknown, and prove our descent from the once small family of the Aryas.

Man in the abstract has been studied for long years. Max Müller contemplates this abstraction in the Aryan man; this has not previously been attempted. Certainly we Aryans of to-day differ greatly from our first parents, but not in toto; the ties which connect us have not been severed, and he it is—our Aryan ancestor—who will help us to understand how we are verily the children of our fathers.

CHAPTER III
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

It is possible to distinguish in ourselves four things: sensation, perception, conception, and the signs by means of which we designate objects, that is their names; these enable us to separate the one from the other. We must not imagine that these four exist as separate entities, “no words are possible without concepts, no concepts without percepts, no percepts without sensations.”[28]—Science of Thought, p. 2.

These four constituent elements of thought are merely four different phases in the growth of what we call our mind.

I employ these terms because they are in use in philosophical language; there are also many others constantly on the lips of philosophers, some of them newly coined. This is greatly to be regretted, as much of our confusion of thought arises from this superabundance of philosophical terms. If such words as impression, sensation, perception, intuition, presentation, conception, soul, reason, and many others could for a time be banished from our philosophical dictionaries, and some only readmitted after they had undergone a thorough purification and were made to return to their primitive signification, an immense service would have been rendered to mental science; as every writer defines them as he will, or uses them without definition; and he seems to imagine that because there are so many words, there must also be so many variations, “Because in the German language there are two words: verstand and vernunft, both originally expressing the same thing, the greatest efforts have been made to show that there is something to be called verstand, totally different from what is called vernunft; and as there is a vernunft by the side of a verstand in German, English philosophers have been most anxious to introduce the same distinction between understanding and reason into English”;[29] and “because we have a name for impression, and another for sensations, we are led to imagine that impressions do actually exist by the side of sensations. But what was originally meant by impression was not something beside sensation, but rather one side of sensation, namely, the passive side, which may be spoken of by itself, but which in every real sensation is inseparable from its active side.”[30]

All the various shades and developments of sensation were doubtless distinguished and named for some very useful purpose; but the inconvenience was great when the terms became too numerous. “We may safely enjoy the wealth of language accumulated by a long line of thinkers, if only we take care not to accept a coin for more or less than it is really worth. We must weigh our words as the ancients often weighed their coins, and not be deceived by their current value.”[31] When we have bravely resolved to throw away superfluous words, we need not imagine that we are the poorer, since we have only lost what we, in reality, never possessed. So powerful, however, is the action of words on thoughts, that as soon as we throw away a word, we feel ourselves to have been robbed of the thing itself; the sun rises just the same, though we say now that it does not rise. Those things which we call mind, intellect, reason, memory, in fact the soul, have no existence as such—that is apart from ourselves. This assertion may sound very terrible to those philosophers who imagine that the dignity of man consists in the possession of these and other powers; at last there arises a complete mythology, a philosophic polytheism, when these are spoken of as distinct possessions, independent powers, with limits not very sharply defined; and however orthodox that polytheism has become, it is never too late to protest against it. In making use of these terms it should be understood that they represent certain modes of action and phases of the Ego.

It is to be regretted that our modern languages have nothing to replace the word “mind,” such as there is in the Sanscrit language, meaning “working within.” As soon as we speak of mind we cannot help thinking of an independent something dwelling in our body, whereas by mind I mean nothing but that working which is going on within, embracing sensation, perception, conception, and naming, and the worker who accomplishes this is the Ego.

Thus the Ego means nothing but consciousness of itself.

There is one word which it would be desirable to reintroduce into our philosophical phraseology and that is Logos; it means the word and the thought combined. Logos is a single intellectual act under two aspects; it is an untranslatable word. We were told at school that it was strange that the Greeks should not have distinguished between Logos Speech and Logos Reason, and it was represented as a progress toward clearer thought that later writers should have distinguished between Logos the spoken word and Logos the inner thought.

But the Greeks were right: no doubt it may be an advantage to be able to distinguish between two sides of the same thing, but that advantage is more than neutralised if such distinction leads us to suppose that these two sides are two different things. Let us avoid the very common error that things which can be distinguished can therefore claim an independent existence; we can distinguish between an orange and its peel, but no orange can grow without peel, nor peel without the fruit.

Let it not be supposed that I am such a bigoted upholder of the unity of the Ego as to wish to see all these names banished from our philosophical dictionaries. Let us use the word Sense when speaking of the Ego as perceiving. Let us use Intellect when the Ego is simply conceiving; and the word language when it is speaking; let us even use the word memory when we wish to speak of the partial permanence of the work done by sensation, perception, and conception; and let us use Reason or Reasoning for the process which produces what the logicians call propositions and syllogisms; but let us never forget that neither to remember nor to reason implies the possession of a thing called reason or memory. All our mental life will remain just the same though we deny the existence of the terms which obscure our vision; let us hold fast to the existence of the Ego, it exists in its entity, it only is the worker, and it receives its highest expression in the Logos.

This truth, that thought and language are inseparable, that thought without language is as impossible as language without thought has only recently been affirmed by comparative philologists. Many learned writers are still unwilling to admit that ideas without words are impossible though at the same time they are quite willing to concede that words are impossible without concepts.[32]

We possess an immense number of books on logic, yet we are met everywhere by the same vagueness on this subject. John Stuart Mill speaks of language as one of the principal elements or helps of thought, but he never mentions any other instruments. This lack is probably owing to the unfortunate influence of modern languages which have two words, the one for language, the other for thought; this gives the impression that there is a substantial instead of an apparent difference between the two; it is also owing to the dislike of philosophers to allow that all which is most lofty, most spiritual in us should be dependent on such miserable crutches as words are supposed to be. Yet it is evident that we cannot advance one step towards philosophy without acknowledging the fact that we think in words and words only. This thought would be less difficult to grasp if we defined clearly what are thoughts. Sensation, pain, pleasure, dreaming, or willing cannot be called true thought, but variations of inward activity; in the same way as shrieks, howls, or even the sounds of real words, taken from a foreign language, are no more language than our emotions are thoughts. The word Logos expresses this, since it had originally the two meanings of gathering and combining, and so became the proper name of all that we call reason; but as it also means language, it tells us that the process of gathering and combining, which begins with sensation and passes on to perception and conception, reaches its full perfection only when the inward activity takes form in the Logos or speech.

Language therefore is not as has been often imagined, thought plus sound; but thought is really language minus sound; words are the external symbols of thought, sounding symbols when we articulate in a loud voice, but mute when we confine ourselves to merely thinking them, since it is a fact that we think in words, and it is not possible to think otherwise. The possession of a language is shown even in the tracing of whole sentences by ideographic signs, which need not be pronounced at all, or as in the astronomical signs in our almanacks which may be pronounced differently in different languages: or we may substitute algebraic signs for words; we could as well calculate without numbers as apply our reason without words I have freely and fully admitted that thoughts may exist without words, because other signs may take the place of words between persons speaking different languages possibly between deaf and dumb people. Five fingers held up are quite sufficient to convey the concept of five, thus the hand may become the sign for five, both hands for ten, hands and feet for twenty. In America and Australia where many dialects are spoken this method has attained a great degree of perfection, but we notice that in all cases under review each one thinks in his own language and then translates his thought into pantomime.

A final fact adduced against the theory that it is impossible to think without language, which was very popular, is that deaf and dumb people cannot speak, and yet can think; this argument has no great value, as it is now averred that “a man born dumb who had always lived among deaf and dumb people, and had not been taught to express thoughts by signs would be capable of few higher intellectual manifestations than a monkey or an elephant; and this in spite of the fact that no naturalist could distinguish any difference between the size of their brains and those belonging to men who could speak.” For deaf mutes to be able to think and reason, they must have learned from those who use words, then only can they substitute other signs for their words and concepts. Still Professor Huxley accords to these unfortunate men certain intellectual heritages derived from their parents.

These are some of the chief points in the science of language. The fundamental law which this science lays down of the unity of thought and speech is a torch which may throw light on the origin of man.

CHAPTER IV
ANIMALS

Whilst philosophers and moralists have studied men, and naturalists animals, Darwin considered it necessary to collect information concerning both men and beasts simultaneously before making a biography of the human being. With the modesty so often characteristic of a great genius, the English naturalist acknowledges that “many of the views which have been advanced are highly speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous. False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”[33]

Although there is no doubt that the facts observed by Darwin and recorded in the Origin of Species, are perfectly correct, I hope to be able to dispose of the opinion that “man and animals follow parallel lines in their lives, but that man advances more quickly, and has taken his place in the front rank.”

Whilst making a short résumé of remarks which Noiré and other learned writers have made on animals, I also propose to draw a comparison between the two who are so closely connected—the superior and inferior animal.

Darwin was not alone in his endeavour to prove that there exists no essential difference between man and beast; some have even asserted that the intelligence of certain animals is not only equal to, but at times, superior to that of man. We must be on our guard, however, against those numerous anecdotes which have led even philosophers astray; we will also divest our minds of prejudice and preconceived notions, that we may introduce some order into ideas which have been disturbed by superficial observers and the makers of false systems, those enemies of true science; let us candidly own the smallness of our knowledge concerning the mind of an animal; we do not in the least know how they philosophise, nor how an ox recognises his stable door. Instead of having recourse to animals and seeking to draw parallels between their mental faculties and ours, let us examine ourselves to find out what passes in our own minds. We shall then discover that we never in reality perceive anything unless we can distinguish it from other things by means, if not of a word, yet of a sign; that is till we have passed through the four stages of sensation, perception, conception, and more important than all, for our present purpose, of naming. When it is once acknowledged that concepts are impossible without words, and that man alone amongst organised beings possesses the power of language, and that the mental faculties of animals are different from ours in kind, and not only in degree, it naturally follows that a genealogical descent of man from animals is an impossible assumption.

Formerly, in comparing the characteristics of man and animals it was contended that the latter were ruled by instinct in place of the reason which was the attribute of the former; and although an affirmation is not an explanation it appeared sufficiently plausible and was accepted. But the fact is that both man and beast possess instinct. If the spider weaves his net by instinct, a child takes his mother’s breast also by instinct; both are with regard to instinct at one level. Man involuntarily extends his arm to protect himself if he suddenly perceives an object near him on the point of striking him. “If we tear a spider’s web, and watch the spider first run from it in despair, then return and examine the mischief and endeavour to mend it. Surely we have the instinct of weaving controlled by observation, by comparison, by reflection, and by judgment.”[34]

No one has hitherto succeeded in explaining and analysing the instinct said to be in animals. Cuvier[35] and other naturalists have compared it with habit.[36] This comparison gives an accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but does not necessarily explain its origin.

As reason develops in man, instinct plays a less important part; whereas a cat chases a mouse, a bird flies, and fish swim by instinct from their birth to their last day; and the actions of ants, bees, and moles, do not cease to amaze us, because they are inseparable from their structure and their vital functions. The natural impulses which guide birds and insects in making their nests, hives, and storehouses, cocoons of silk with which they have so enriched our world and theirs, are the results of constant and repeated acts, during the course of innumerable generations. The fact of not distinguishing the instinct which is in man from that found in animals and thus attributing man’s conscious acts to the natural leanings which guide unconscious creatures, has perhaps caused Renan to assert that the monotheistic tendency of the Semitic race belongs to it by a religious instinct.

It is certain that impressions are received both by man and by animals; with both the knowledge of objects proceeds from the impressions made on the senses, thus transmitting the image to the intelligence; but there the likeness ends; the capacities differ. The animal remains the slave—in every sense of the word—of his organs; the sight of a bone to gnaw, the corner in which he lies, the signs of friendship that he receives from human beings, call forth in a dog a chain of feelings taking the place of the chain of ideas called out in man.

Man’s capabilities of introducing intermediaries between the intention and the fulfilment of his object witness to his wideness of mind, his experience of the past and prevision of the future; all those things that he owes to his power of imagination and conception even in the case of things having no real existence, or which do not exist as yet; he reproduces at will the outward likeness of what is not at the moment before him. Thus man who names an object, thinks it; but the animal from not possessing language cannot think it and cannot reproduce it when out of its sight.

The use or non-use of tools creates a great gulf between man and the brutes. The most intelligent animal, a monkey of a high order, never uses a tool—even the most primitive—to accomplish his will; no one can ascribe to the animal creative actions, that is, it does not fashion an implement that it may attain another end; it has never been known to carry an object from one spot to another that it might act as a ladder to bring the animal nearer to the fruit it desired to reach.

But this concession, I think, we may make to Darwin; that even in the sphere of mental activities we can never entirely separate ourselves from the brute creation. We experience in ourselves a certain condition of mind, where fancies alternate with passing agitation; these proceed from intense, but confused emotions. This condition does not allow of clear explanation even to ourselves, since it has nothing in common with true thought, which is inseparable from the consciousness of objects, and therefore is lacking in words with which to express itself. To Mendelssohn this mental condition was perfectly known, and he says, “It is exactly at that moment when language is impotent to express the experiences of the soul, that the sphere of music opens to us; if all that passes in us were capable of being expressed in words, I should write no more music.”

A flock of birds about to migrate, all follow an unanimous impulse in uttering at starting a few high clear notes, perhaps impelled by an unknown motive, their inclinations and wills find collective expression therein, by a mutual impulse which comes from soundless depths of the life of the senses, carrying all before it. This universal sympathy, however difficult to explain, is one of the noblest possessions of the inferior animals; even the aptitude they display for certain mechanical acts of labour does not stand on the same level; but in the vocal manifestations of birds there is no indication of true thought, the basis of real language.

Now come, my dog, for a tête-à-tête. It would be impossible to hold converse with ants, bees, monkeys, moles, or birds, as I should not acknowledge them as my compeers, I should not admit them as intimates; but you I know well; and, let me tell you, your judges have shown their impartiality towards you; none of the vices which degrade us—your superiors—have been laid to your account. You are called neither gourmand, thief, idler, nor hypocrite; but you lack the qualities that might have been yours had you possessed the faculty of combination. They say that you create nothing because you fail to see what purpose tools may serve; and you are ignorant of the fact that A. being given, B. must follow—such is combination. Still, on looking closely, it is possible to discover amongst us—your superiors—those who are stupid—or awkward—who take small advantage of all the means put within their reach to recede from a false position, to recover from the effects of a wrong step, or, what is still more important, remedy their ignorance. Yes, there are many such, and these also lack the faculty of combination.

Your judges also assert that from the want on your part of being able to attach one idea to another, you do not think of your master when he is absent from you. What ingratitude! But I wonder whether those friends, who profess so much pleasure in my company, think of me when I am absent; perhaps no more than you do.

Let me continue my enquiries for a few minutes. We will suppose that we two are in my study. I am occupied with a book, and am not thinking of you at all. You are stretched at my feet with your nose between your paws, watching a fly near you. I make a sudden movement, you look at me, and at the same moment wag your tail.... Am I to suppose that you wag it to hide your dislike to me? The noble quality which I and all your superiors possess is lacking in you; you have no speech for thought in which to tell me your love for me; but if you could speak, that is, were like one of ourselves, would you be as truthful as you are now, being only a dog that has nothing but his tail with which to make his master understand his feelings towards him? Schopenhauer ... but you know nothing of Schopenhauer, if you could speak I should teach you to read, and then you would know him. Schopenhauer is a great and learned philosopher, who says, “How much this movement of the tail surpasses in sincerity many other assurances of friendship and devotion.”[37]

This is a long digression on Darwin’s idea that man and animals lead parallel lives, but that the one progresses quickly, the other slowly. I think I have shown that it is not a question of rapidity or tardiness of progress, but rather whether both travellers are equally well equipped with the means of passing the Rubicon.

CHAPTER V
PRIMITIVE HUMANITY

Some courage is required to attack the subject of comparative philology as treated by certain learned authors; they are bold enough to seek to transport themselves to an age of such remote antiquity that history is silent on the subject, but in which a nascent humanity endeavoured to find expression for its sensations in a language which probably had no name.

When my attention was first attracted to the work of this school, so long as my mind was content to skim over the surface of an unknown world, so immeasurably distant from us, and whilst flitting too rapidly over it to be able to distinguish any of its features, it presented itself to me as a creation of my heated imagination. Since then I have lived in that world of wonders, and I then grasped the fact that it was quite possible for this world to have been a reality. But to journey thither, even to live in this strange country, the only path to which is by induction, in company with Max Müller and Noiré, who, apparently, are its inhabitants, from the ease with which they move in it, is a totally different matter from explaining the methods of getting there, or describing the sojourn. I should have to draw information from various sources, and the scientific and hypothetical data connected therewith would require sorting and rearranging to make them assimilate more easily; these would present difficulties not readily surmounted.

How could a reasonable and speaking being come forth from that which had no reason and no language?

The earliest traditions are silent on the manner of man’s acquisition of his first ideas and his first words. But because a problem has not been solved, that is no reason for the assertion that it is insoluble, unless a refutation is at once demonstrable, as in the squaring of the circle. “If every one had abstained from striving to penetrate hidden things, no sciences would exist,” Noiré remarked. Newton might have said: “The facts that a stone falls and the planets move are known by actual experience, why search out the laws which produce these phenomena?” And the theory of gravitation would have been lacking. Lyell might have said: “We see that the crust of the earth is composed of several strata, why reckon the time required for their formation?” And there would have been no science of geology. Liebig might have said: “We see that clover grows and cattle prosper, why should the relation of cause and effect concern us?” And there would have been no organic chemistry. Adam Smith might have said: “We know by experience that valuable objects can be exchanged, and that their prices fluctuate, why should we study the cause of rise and fall?” And this chapter would have been missing from political economy.

No road presents itself to me by which to arrive in the midst of primitive humanity; of necessity, therefore, I have recourse to analogy, which, under the circumstances, is not the worst expedient.

When the Romans first encountered Germans, they were chiefly struck by the great stature, the blue eyes, and the light hair of this inimical race. Tacitus, in alluding to this fact, says that each German exactly resembled his fellow. Although we are familiar with the external appearance of various nations, yet if we found ourselves in the presence of a large number of negroes we should experience an analogous sensation, only by degrees should we distinguish one from the other. In an intensified degree primitive man must have had similar experiences when, first finding himself in a world of which he knew nothing, and of which he understood nothing, the consciousness of what he saw around him was making itself apparent. These early races learnt the meaning of the details of surrounding nature but slowly; their eyes followed the brilliant circle as it moved from one quarter of the heavens to the other; they noticed the fire which came whence they knew not; they heard the crash of thunder, reproduced by the echoes in the mountains synchronising with the devastations caused by the storm. If one man alone had witnessed these terrifying effects in nature, his reason would have tottered from fear; the stones and the herbs of the field could not share his agitation; the death of a man from terror would leave them unmoved. Happily man was not alone, all those around him shared his agitation, and the terror manifested itself on each by signs which each would understand instinctively. This period of semi-consciousness before the full awakening might have been a prolonged one, but physical sensations and necessities multiplied themselves, and were very various and imperative; action was indispensable if privations were to be avoided; and instinct came to their aid. The need of guarding themselves from the burning rays of the sun caused them to provide shelters by interlacing branches of trees; to protect themselves from cold they took the skins of wild beasts to throw over their shoulders; where natural caverns were insufficient for their wants they made themselves refuges in the sides of the mountains; they were forced to light and maintain fires; sharpen stones either for tools or for weapons of defence; the wants of one were the wants of all, and all gave themselves to the task of satisfying them. It is so evident that primitive activity must have been co-operative, that it outrages common sense to picture each man labouring by himself for himself alone. The mental phenomenon known as intention, was the common property of all; the mutual sympathy played the part of the electric current of our laboratories, and the inarticulate sounds escaping involuntarily from the lips of each worker, served as a means of communication.

In order the better to understand the function of the voice in the education of primitive man, let us look around us and listen. Whenever our senses are excited, and our muscles hard at work, we feel a kind of relief in uttering sounds which in themselves have no meaning. “They are a relief rather than an effort, a moderation or modulation of the quickened breath in its escape through the mouth.”[38]

When men work together, on account of the nature of the task requiring united effort, they are naturally inclined to accompany their occupations with certain more or less rhythmical utterances, which react beneficially on the inward disturbance caused by muscular effort. When a body of men march, row, or wield hammers, they do not keep silence; formerly soldiers sang as they marched to battle; our modern civilisation only caused the substitution of fife and drums for the songs; and our soldiers do not readily abandon these measured accompaniments, which make them less susceptible of fatigue. When savage races dance they make the air resound with measured cadences; our peasants sing while joining in the country dances; the custom of singing during work is more marked amongst those who belong to the races which are less under the influence of civilisation, and are more entirely absorbed by their manual occupation, and with whom personal preoccupation has small hold.

These inarticulate sounds which Noiré has named clamor concomitans and Max Müller clamor significans, uttered by primitive men when working in concert, and always inseparable from acts, could be differentiated in accordance with the acts performed; and at a period when actual speech did not yet exist, they would always have this practical value, they would awaken the remembrance of acts performed in the past, and be repeated in the present, they would thus be instantly understood by all, and readily retained by the memory. But what was there to determine the application of certain sounds to certain occupations? This has not been made clear. Plato, Socrates, and others, have considered that the origin of language might be traced to the imitation of the sounds of nature, and have sought for a resemblance between these sounds and certain letters of the alphabet, but even were it possible here and there to discover a faint analogy, our efforts would only end in contradictions. There seems to be neither necessity nor absolute freedom in the choice of the sounds expressive of these acts, but rather the result of some accident, or of causes of which we are ignorant. In any case these sounds were merely the materials of which language was built.

It will be easily understood that nothing would penetrate more deeply into man’s consciousness, or produce mutual understanding more readily, than acts undertaken and accomplished with the same end in view by a number of men united in a common impulse. During the digging of the caves, the weaving of the nets, the thrashing of the grain, the workers would follow with their eyes the gradual transformation perceptible in these activities, and the sounds which they emitted, or the half-formed words issuing from their lips would be modified or softened at each development in the work; these developments becoming more and more distinct, more and more impressed with their own special characteristic. The idea of individuality must have been very clouded, very confused amongst primitive man; that which one saw the other saw after the same manner; they designed each object in creating it; in this way the world became as a book to them, this book, the result of their combined labour, they learnt to read fluently by means of these sounds and words which increased as they varied. Thus work—man’s good genius—is proved to be the source of what is truly human, viz., reason and language.

Here I will note a curious fact and one which is historical. At a period when writing was unknown in India, the Brahmans had already established the rules of poetical metre, which were originally connected with dancing and music. These rules had been preserved in the Veda. The various Sanscrit names for metre are a witness of the union of corporal and phonetic movements. The root of Khandas, metre, is the same as the Latin scandere in the sense of stepping; vritta, metre, from vrit, verto—to turn, meant originally the last three or four steps of a dancing movement, the turn, the versus, which determined the whole character of dance or of the metre. Trishtubh, the name of a common metre in the Veda, meant three-step, because its turn—its vritta or versus—consisted of three steps, ∪ - -. Thus the innate necessity that man feels of linking the play of the vocal chords to the movement of hands or feet, had been controlled by fixed laws, twenty-four centuries ago, by the Hindoo grammarians; and the most recent theories of modern writers on the subject attest the excellence of these laws. The assertion that it is natural to peasants not to keep silence when working is of very ancient date, but Noiré was the first to deduce scientific data from the fact.

The study of Sanscrit has shown us that two thousand years ago it occurred to Hindoo grammarians to investigate the origin of the words of their language, when they discovered that all words could be reduced to roots, and that these roots all expressed various forms of activity; that they were therefore verbs, and that the number of these roots was very restricted. Our present philologists have continued this work and are not only able to acknowledge the accuracy of the Brahmanic discovery, but also to certify that the grammatical analysis of the Hindoos, put forth 500 years before our era, has never been surpassed. It is important to remember that roots are the fundamental elements which permeate the whole organism of the language. Hebrew has been reduced by Renan and other Hebraists to about 500 roots; the work has still to be done for the whole Semitic family. The same process has been carried out with regard to the Aryan languages; we find the number of roots in Sanscrit reduced to about 800; of Gothic about 600; rather more than 400 in the Teutonic family, and 600 in the Slavic. The Ural-Altaic languages have also undergone a partial analysis of the same kind, and the result at present corresponds to that obtained by the examination of the other families. After eliminating the tertiary and secondary roots from the Sanscrit the residuum is 600 or 500, and we arrive at the fact that this entire language, and, in a great measure, all the Aryan languages, can be traced back to an extremely small number of roots.

As the Hindoo grammarians asserted that all roots contain the representation of various forms of activity, it behoved our philologists to investigate this and discover their meaning. Professor Noiré thought that the consciousness that men had of their own acts must have formed the origin of the primitive concepts of the human mind, and found expression in signs or words. Max Müller shows us[39] that all the Sanscrit roots express a concept or consciousness of the repeated acts, the acts with which man in his infancy would be most familiar. But it must be noted that the concepts or signs are not of single acts, but the realisation of repeated acts; to dig was not to put a spade into the ground once, it is the action of digging continuously; to sharpen was not to pass one flint over another once, it was the continual action of sharpening. The consciousness of accomplishing these repeated acts as if one act, became the first germ of conceptual thought. During this initial phase of thought, when the first consciousness of his own repeated acts awoke in man and assumed a conceptual character, will, act and knowledge were as yet one and undivided, and the whole of his conscious knowledge was subjective, exclusively concerned with his own voluntary act. We possess the genealogy of a large number of Aryan roots, and we find on examination that the activity which formed their basis was at the beginning always a creative activity, since it called into life conceptions which up to that time had not existed.

Nothing is more interesting than researches into the origin of the growth of human thought, when carried out not according to the systems of certain philologists of our day, but historically, after the fashion of the Indian trapper, who notes on the sand every imprint of the footsteps of him whom he pursues.

For the present I will content myself by bringing forward in illustration three primary roots. Vê (Vâ), which is, to weave; Mar, to crush; and Khan, to dig. Vê (Vâ), Mar, and Khan are thus verbs.

When we now picture the four acts of weaving, spinning, sewing, and knitting, they appear so to differ the one from the other, that it seems impossible to consider them other than four distinct acts, and difficult to believe that there is one common origin to all. These four processes, however, all had their germ in the one primitive act of interlacing the boughs of trees to form a hedge or roof. This root Vê (Vâ) had an immense number of offshoots; from the acts of interlacing and platting came the conception of binding, in Latin vieo, to twist, to divide; in German, winden, wickeln; the Latin words vitis, a vine; vimen, osier, a twig; viburnum, a climbing plant; the Slavic word vetla, willow; the Sanscrit vetra, reed, rush; the German word for rush, binse, is connected with binden, to join, and the secondary meaning of ties of relationship and alliance: again, in the Old High-German, nothbendig, or nothwendigkeit, bound, straitened, and the Gothic naudibandi, tie, chain. All these words, whether in the Roman, German, or Slavonic dialects, have retained the root Vê (Vâ), so that it is impossible not to recognise the trunk of which these are the branches. Thus a large number of apparently dissimilar images became entangled the one with the other, and in proportion as we approach their starting-point do we find them discarding their own special signification, and becoming absorbed in the single conception of weaving and platting.

The root mar, to grind, has also the meaning of to crush, to powder, to rub down, etc., and whether we look at the Latin, Greek, Celtic, German, or Slav, the words representing the verb to mill, and the name mill come thence; the transition from milling to fighting is natural; thus Homer used the word mar-na-mai, I fight, I pound. Mar produced in Latin the words mordeo, I bite; morior (originally, to decay), I die; mortuus, dead; mors, death; morbus, illness; in Greek, marasmos, decay; rendered in German by sich aufreiben, to become exhausted. In Sanscrit we must remember that the consonants r and l are cognate and interchangeable; thus, mar = mal; and that ar in Sanscrit is shortened, and the vowel modified and pronounced ri, mar = mri; that ar may be pronounced ra, and al, la; mar = mra and mal = mla: thus in Sanscrit we find mrita, dead; mritya, death, and mriye, I die. One of the earliest names for man was marta, the dying; the equivalent in Greek for the Sanscrit mra and mla is mbro, mblo; and after dropping the m becomes bro and blo; brotos, mortal. Having chosen this name for himself, man gave the opposite name to the gods; he called them Ambrotoi, without decay, immortal; and their food ambrosia, immortality. An offshoot of mar is mard and mrg; thence mradati, rubbing down, pulverising, grind to powder; mrid is in Sanscrit the word for dust, and afterwards was used for soil in general or earth; mrid, to weaken, to soften, to melt; thus, fluid mass. This idea in English takes the form malt, grain soaked and softened; then the Greek meldo, and the Gothic mulda, soft ground or morass, and that which is softened by use or the action of time. The Latin sordes and sordidus are connected herewith, as the same root may be found in smarna, Gothic, and the Greek mélas and moros, black, and in murus, brown-black; in the Russian smola, wax and resin. “Colour was conceived originally as the result of the act of covering or extending a fluid over a surface; it was not till the art of painting, in its most primitive form, was discovered and named, that there could have been a name for colour.”[40] The name of colour in Sanscrit is varna, from var, to cover. The idea conveyed by the words, to smooth, to flatter, to soften, to mollify, to melt a hard substance, to polish a rough surface by constant rubbing, led to the same terms being used for expressing the softening influence which man exercised on man, by looks, gestures, words or prayers, and these expressions were especially used by men in their relations to the gods, when they strove to propitiate them by supplications and sacrifices: thus the prayer which we now translate by “Be gracious unto us, O God,” meant originally, “Melt to us; be softened, ye gods.”

Language grew and made offshoots, but without confusion; disorder had no place in the progress of thought (still less chance), which was simple and rational. This was not the development of the conscious effort towards some goal. At this period there was no such thing as reflection properly so called; for instance, man did not ponder how best to express a feeling of fear, since fear, like so many other impressions, received vague expression before the concept of fear acquired shape; but our ancestors had a root to express shaking (in Sanscrit kap, kamp, to shake): they used it to describe fear, which manifested itself in the trembling of voice or limbs. Thus, “I shake” might mean, “I shake a tree,” or “I am shaken,” “I am shaken by him” (by my horse), but also “I am trembling”; from it we have in Greek karnos, smoke, not what shakes, or is shaken, but what is in a shaking state, that which moves; kup, which is probably a modification of kamp, means to shake inwardly, to be angry.

Some learned writers have felt disconcerted when after tracing words to their source, they have found nothing but roots with general meanings, such as to go, to move, to run, to do; however, it is by means of these vague, pale conceptions that language has obtained the material for an entire language. The Aryan root ar signified originally to go, to send, to advance, to proceed, going regularly, to stir. Applied to the stirring of the soil, it took the meaning of ploughing; in Latin ar-are, in Greek ar-oun, in Irish ar, in Lithuanian ar-ti, in Russian ora-ti; this root, from its meaning of advancing regularly, was the name of the plough; one derivative was applied to the cattle fit for ploughing, and also to the labourer. Ar was also used for the ploughing of the sea, or rowing, and was found in the words rower and rudder. The Latin word ævum, originally from i, to go, became the name of time, age; and its derivative æviternus, æturnus was made to express eternity. It was by a poetical fiat that the Greek probata, which originally meant no more than things walking forward, became in time the name of cattle. In French, the word meuble means literally anything that is movable, but it became the name of chairs, tables, wardrobes, etc. In this way we see the power of language, which, out of a few simple elements, has created names sufficient to express the infinite aspects of nature.

The ramifications of the Aryan root Dâ give a good idea of the process. Thus Dâ = to give, is in the Sanscrit dădāmi, I give; in Latin, do; in Old Slavonic, da-mi; in Lithuanian, du-mi; in French, donner and pardonner; in Latin, trado, to give over; in Italian, tradire; in French, trahir, trahison; in Latin again, reddo, to give back; in French, rendre and rente. Side by side with the root Dâ, there is another root also Dâ, exactly the same in all outward appearance; it consists of D + Â, but is totally distinct from the former. While from the former we have in Sanscrit, dâ-tram, a gift, we have from the latter dâ´-tram, a sickle. The meaning of the second root is to cut, to carve; the difference is shown by the accent remaining on the radical syllable in dâ´-tram, i.e., the cutting (active); whilst it leaves the radical syllable in dâ-trám, i.e., what is given (passive).

The history of these roots dâ affords an opportunity of noticing a curious resemblance between natural history and philology, two sciences which otherwise are totally different, but alike in one idea which enters into the inwardness of both. Darwin admitted four or five progenitors in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so that the primary elements of all living organisms are the simple cells. In the same way philologists have discovered that there remain in the end certain simple elements of human speech—the primordial roots—which have sufficed to provide the innumerable multitude of words used by the human race. A principle neglected by a great number of evolutionists is that if two origins, whether the roots of language or living cells, have at their starting-point an absolutely similar appearance, and afterwards diverge, it is because at their origin they bore in themselves the germs destined to produce this divergence. Darwin says that two organic cells, which in the embryonic stage may perfectly resemble each other, in growing, gradually develop, the one into an inferior animal, the other into a superior animal, never varying the process; the reason of which fact is that the cells, although not distinguishable the one from the other, differ in the rudiments or principle of life: in the same way philologists say that when two roots have the same sound, but produce families of perfectly distinct words, it is because the germs in each differ. We learn from this that the sound of the words is a matter of indifference at the commencement of a language; no one has succeeded, or will succeed, in making the sound alone the vehicle of a conception.

To Locke belongs the merit of having first clearly asserted that roots, the true irreducible elements of language, which furnish words for the most abstract and sublime conceptions, had at the beginning only a material or sensuous meaning, and this fact, on which idealists and materialists are agreed, is confirmed by comparative philologists. All primitive roots express directly only those acts and those conditions which come under the domain of the senses; all express the consciousness of repeated acts familiar to the members of a society in its infancy, such as pounding, striking, weaving, tying, burning, rubbing, moving, cutting, sharpening, softening. By means of generalisation and specialisation, the roots have acquired the most abstract terms of our advanced society; thus the root to burn developed into the thought of to love, and also to be ashamed; to dig, came to mean to search for, to enquire; the root which means to gather, expressed in primitive logic what we now call observation of facts; the connection of major and minor, or even syllogism. This is without doubt, and it is as certain that the words rake and pinchers came from the verbs to rake and to pinch.

To make the assertion of Locke the more striking, Noiré adds: “When the representative words springing from one root are found side by side, it is always the more ancient of the two which expresses the more material act. The verbs to tear and to cut are the offshoots of a single root; but the passage from the concept of tearing to that of cutting would be slowly effected; the act of tearing was immediate with man, cutting was a mediate act, and of later date, since it could not be done whilst the instrument was lacking.”

I shall now bridge over the distance between the primordial roots, and the organised language as we possess it, in order to show how our ancestors succeeded in forming real phrases, that is to say, intelligible propositions; this will show us the continuous thread which connects our present language with primitive speech.

We can show that both dictionary and grammar are made up of predicative roots and demonstrative elements. By the help of the first we make affirmations concerning things, derived from our knowledge of another object or of many, either in combination under one name, or taking each separately. With the demonstrative element we point to any object in space or time, by using such words as this, that, then, here, there; near, far, above, below, and others of the same kind, whose existence may be explained as a survival of the gesticulating phase in which objects were neither conceived nor described but pointed out; from this we are not to infer that gestures—even accompanied by sounds—gave birth to speech, since they rather excluded it. In their primitive form and intention, these demonstrative elements are addressed to the senses rather than to the intellect. They have in themselves no meaning, and to be of service they must be attached to words that have. The history of the root Khan, to dig, will explain my thought. When our Aryan ancestors had learnt to say Khan, and they wanted to distinguish between those who were digging and the instruments used in digging, between the object of the digging and the time and place of the work, it is possible that these demonstrative suffixes, combined with predicative roots, formed bases, such as Khan-ana, Khan-i, Khan-a, Khan-itra, and still others, which were intended probably for digging-here, digging-now, dig-we, dig-you. By means of these combinations, which varied in their application according to the customs of different villages and families, the speaker sought to distinguish between the subject acting and the object acted upon; and when this difficulty was surmounted, a great step had been taken, the passage from perception to conception was accomplished, and this passage no philosopher prior to Noiré had made clear. “We must always bear in mind that we are speaking here of times, so far beyond the reach of history, and of intellectual processes so widely removed from our own, that none would venture to speak dogmatically on what was actually passing in the minds of the early framers of language when they first uttered these words.”[41] All we can do is to hazard an explanation, and accept it in as far as it seems reasonable; and in the interest of science, we must carefully guard ourselves from asserting that our theory is the only true one. It is easy to conceive that after centuries of constant use certain derivatives should have become unalterably attached to certain meanings, and others should have also retained their special meanings. But what we do not know, is how the sounds destined to become demonstrative elements or personal pronouns were restricted to the terms required for such words, as—here, there, those, he, I, that, etc. There were cases in which a verb in the infinitive would develop into a phrase without any additions being made to it; it would suffice, for instance, if a man uttered the word Khan in a commanding voice—as we should say “work”—for his fellow-labourers to understand that they were to begin to dig. Thus the imperative could be considered a complete sentence with as much justice as Veni-Vedi-Vici would be termed independent and complete sentences. “The shortest sentence of all is, no doubt, the imperative, and it is in the imperative that almost to the present day roots retain their simplest form.”[42]

Our intellects in the present day are developed by the discourses we hear, the books we read, the reflections suggested by our experiences of life; our vocabularies become enriched as our knowledge increases and embraces a greater number of subjects; and if we retrace the path taking us to our ancestors who could not count beyond four sometimes, we should find words and ideas becoming fewer and conspicuous by their absence. It does not therefore follow that because we use language that we made it. It is not our invention; to us every language is traditional. “The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us. The work of making language belongs to a period in the history of mankind beyond the reach of the ordinary historian, and of which we in our advanced state of mental development can hardly form a clear conception.” Yet that time must have been a fact not less possible of verification than that geological period when “the earth was absorbed in producing the carboniferous vegetation which still supplies us with the means of warmth, light, and life, accumulating during enormous periods of time small deposits of organic matter forming the strata of the globe on which we live. In the same manner the human mind formed that linguistic vegetation, the produce of which still supplies the stores of our grammars and dictionaries”; and after a close examination of these primordial roots whence our language has sprung, we find that it does not consist in a conglomeration of words, the result of an agreement amongst a certain number of men, or the result of chance, but expresses human activity by means of verbs, the living and vivifying portion of speech by the side of which the remainder may almost be considered as dead matter.

The question of the birth of the substantive, without being deliberately posed as a problem, occupied the minds of the Grecian philosophers, and was involved in their researches concerning the relation of an object to the name it bears, of the unknown cause by which a certain name designates a certain object and no other. Whilst the Greeks speculated on the subject after a tentative manner, building up theories which later observations were not long in upsetting, the Hindoos were also engaged in efforts to solve the problem by the help of a more reliable process—the historical.

The early grammarians, having found that words came from roots expressing general concepts, and that these concepts represented some sort of activity, made this fact the basis of their studies; profound thinkers as they were they discovered that man at first could not give a name to a tree, an animal, a star, a river, nor to any other object without discovering first some special quality that seemed at the time most characteristic of the object to be named. Sanscrit has a root As, having amongst other meanings sharpness, quickness; from the same root came words for needle, point, sharpness of sight, quickness of thought; this root is found in the Sanscrit name for a horse, which is asva, runner or racer, one who leaves space quickly behind him. Many other names might have been given to the horse besides the one here mentioned, but all must recall some characteristic trait of this animal; that name, the quick, could also have been given to other animals, but having been repeatedly applied to one, it became unfit for other purposes, and the horse retains undisputed possession. The Sanscrit aksha, eye, comes from the same root as, which also meant to point, to pierce. Another name for eye in Sanscrit is netram, leader, from nî, to lead.

Noiré has just put forth an ingenious theory, that the first substantives would not be miller, digger, weaver, carpenter; but flour, cave, pit, mat, hedge, club, arrow, boat, because these were what had been thought and willed, whilst the agents, of no account from that point of view, remained in the shade, forgotten, and it is possible that for some time no names were given to them.

“When we have once seen that thought in its true sense is always conceptual, taking a verbal form, and that every word is derived from a conceptual root, we shall be ready for the assertion that words being conceptual can never stand for a single percept.”—Max Müller.

Locke first insisted that names are not the signs of things themselves, but always the signs of our concepts of them. This remark received small attention at first, and remained little appreciated until such time as the discoveries of our contemporaries, with no preconcerted unanimity, confirmed its value. Max Müller explains Locke’s words in the following manner: “Each time that we use a general name, if we say dog, tree, chair, we have not these objects before our eyes, only our concepts of them; there can be nothing in the world of sense corresponding even to such simple words as dog, tree, chair. We can never expect to see a dog, a tree, a chair. Dog means every kind of dog from the greyhound to the spaniel; tree, every kind of tree from the oak to the cherry; chair, every kind of chair from the royal throne to the artisan’s stool. We may see a spaniel or a Newfoundland dog; we may see a fir or an apple tree; we may see such and such a chair. People often imagine that they can form a general image of a dog by leaving out what is peculiar to every individual dog.”[43]

This general idea we have in our mind of which we can talk, but our eyes cannot see it as they could a real object. Nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary can ever be heard, or seen, or felt. “We can even have names for things which never existed, such as gnomes; also for things which exist no more, or which exist not yet, such as the grapes of the last harvest, and those of the next. The mere fact that I call a thing past or future ought to be sufficient to show that it is my concept of which I am speaking, and not the thing as independent of me.”[44]

Berkeley showed that it is simply impossible for any human being to make to himself a general image of a triangle, for such an image would have to be at the same time right-angled, obtuse-angled, acute-angled, and other kinds also; such an object does not exist; whereas it is perfectly possible to have an image of any single triangle; to name some characteristic features common to all triangles, and thus to form a name and at the same time a concept of a triangle.[45] This mental process which Berkeley described so well as applied to modern concepts we can adopt with regard to all, even the most primitive. Man, in entering a forest, discovered in the trees something that was interesting to him. For practical purposes trees were particularly interesting to the primitive framers of language, because they could be split in two, three, or four pieces, cut, shaped according to the size of the piece into blocks, planks, boats, and shafts; any object for which the necessity had made itself felt. Hence, from a root dar, to tear, our Aryan ancestors called trees dru, or dâru, literally what can be torn, or split, or cut; from the same root the Greeks called the skin of an animal dérma, because it was torn off, and a sack dóros (in Sanscrit driti), because it was made of leather, and a spear dóry, because it came from a tree, and was cut and shaped and planed.

Such words being once given would produce many offshoots; the Celts of Gaul and of Ireland called their priests Druids, literally the men of oak-groves. The Greeks called the spirits of the forest trees Dryades; and the Hindoos called a man of wood, or a man with a wooden, or, as we say, flinty heart, dâruna, cruel.

The immense number of intelligible roots gave birth to many new images, these roots crossed and recrossed, for the concepts of to go, to give, to move, to make, would be the foundations of others, in some ways differing; one idea or thought in its flight would meet others perhaps of a conflicting nature, thoughts and words would equally undergo incessant modifications, which fact explains why in these earlier stages of language the members of a community soon ceased to understand each other if separated but for a short period of time.

Ovid, in speaking of the chaos at the beginning of the world, makes a picture which would equally well describe the birth of language. “Matter was in an unformed mass ... the sky, the earth, the sea had all one aspect; there where was the earth, was also the sea, and the sky was there also.”

The extraordinary destinies of the roots I have named constitutes a short chapter only, in the birth and development of tongues; but short as it is, it suffices to give us an idea of the elastic nature of these roots, their faculty of extension, and the part they play in the economy of language, and in the administration of the affairs of the human mind.

Every mental phenomenon has its history, which can only be discovered by tracing it to its source; and as speech has undergone many phases, of which the earlier must have been very different from those now in existence, it is pardonable in the greatest philosophers of antiquity not to have known the intricacies of the human mind, which this changeable speech could alone interpret. The ancients knew their own times, but were ignorant of the preceding ones, in the same way they knew their own language only, and of this language only its contemporary form; and in the case of a word whose meaning was lost or of a foreign word, they sought its origin in an idiom with which they were familiar; in other words, not where it could be found.

For a long time man only knew one kind of being, his own; and possessed one language only, that which expressed his own acts and his own states; the primitive men were sufficiently advanced to say: “let us dig,” “grind,” “they weave”; but if, at the beginning, concepts and speech arose from the consciousness of their own activity, how was the advance made when men desired to speak of the external objects of the world which they saw around them, and were conscious of not having made, and which consequently remained outside the sphere of their wills and of their experience? It is clear that these outward objects to be grasped and named, must have their part in the human activities for which names had already been found. When he saw the lightning tearing a hole in the field, or splitting the trunk of a tree, man could no longer say, “We have dug this hole, you have split the tree.” It was no longer someone, but something that had dug and struck. Nothing seems more simple to us than after saying “I dig” to say also “it digs,” and yet it was a passing to a new world of thought, from the conscious feeling of our own activity to the intuition of the activity of an outward object; this mental act, though inevitable, was by no means an easy one; men realised that the world around was a reflex of themselves, the only light was the light from within. If men could measure, so could the moon; hence he was called the measurer of the sky, from the root Mâ, to measure; the moon was called Mâs, that which measures, its actual name in Sanscrit; in Latin, mensis; in Greek, mêné; English, moon; German, Monat; in Russian, miésets. Men who ran called themselves runners; also the rivers they named sar, running; and to designate the position of the river they added the suffix it, sar-it; literally, running here. Thus sarit is river in Sanscrit; Mâs and sarit thus become complete, intelligible sentences. What we call lightning was originally, tearing, digging, bursting, sparkling; what we call storm and tempest were, grinding, smashing, bursting, blowing; if man could smash, so could the thunderbolt, hence it was called the smasher; and tempest and storm and thunderbolt may have been, smashing, grinding, hurling; and with the addition of the suffix, smashing here, now, there, then.

We have seen that the attribute which was the peculiar characteristic of an object supplied its name, but as most objects possessed more than one attribute, more than one designation were given to it; thus several names were used for river besides sarit, each representing one of its aspects; when flowing in a straight line it was called sîrâ, arrow, plough, plougher; if it seemed to nourish the fields it was mâtar, mother; if it separated or protected one country from another, it became sindhu, the defender, from sidh or sedhati, to keep off; if it became a torrent it received the name of nadi, noisy. In all these forms the river is considered as acting, and is named by roots expressing action; it nourishes, it traces a furrow, it guards, it roars as a wild beast roars. The sun has many attributes; he is brilliant, the warmer, the generator, the scorcher, he is vivifying, overpowering, his many qualities giving him fifty different names, all synonyms of the sun. The earth also had many, it was known by twenty-one names, amongst others it was urvî, wide; jurithvî, broad; mahî, great; but each characteristic trait of the earth could also be found in other objects, thus urivî also meant a river; sky and dawn were called prithvî; and mahî (great, strong) is used for cow and speech. Hence earth, river, sky, dawn, cow, and speech would become homonyms.

These names are of clearly defined objects, all recognisable by the senses; this fact entitles us to apply the following definition to this primitive stage of language; the conscious expression of impressions perceived by the senses.

But there is another class of words differing somewhat from those we have named, such words, as day, night, spring, winter, dawn and twilight; these lack the individuality and tangibleness of the others; and when we say “day approaches, night comes,” we attribute acts to things which are not agents, we affirm propositions, which, logically analysed, have no properly defined subjects. Semi-tangible names, such as sky, earth, belong to the same category. When we say “the earth nourishes man,” we do not allude to any well defined portion of the soil, we take the earth as a whole; and the sky is not only the small portion of the horizon grasped by our eyes, our imagination conceives objects not within the ken of our senses, but inasmuch as we look upon the earth or sky as a whole, see in it a power or an ideal, we make of it, involuntarily, an individuality. Now these words had certain terminations affixed to them indicating what we call gender, and became masculine or feminine, the neuter gender at that time did not enter into the language, until thought becoming more lucid perceived it in nature. What was the result? That it was impossible to speak of morning or night, of spring or winter, of dawn or twilight, of sky and earth, without clothing them not only with active and individual characteristics, but with personal and sexual attributes; hence all the objects of discourse as used by the founders of language became necessarily so many actors, as men and women act; and thought, when once launched in this direction, being irresistibly attracted by the tendency towards analogy and metaphor, overspread the whole world of human experience with this method of representation. What is called animism, anthropomorphism, and personification, have therefore their source in this inevitable dynamic stage, as Max Müller calls it, of thought and language, in which the psychological necessity of representing the external objects as resembling themselves operated on our ancestors. This necessity might have been named subjectivism had it not received more specific terms such as animism, which consists in conceiving of inanimate objects as animate; anthropomorphism, conceiving objects as men, and personification, conceiving objects as persons. As soon as this new mental act was performed, a new world was called into existence, a world of names, or as we now call it, the world of myths.

“So long as the real identity of thought and language had not been grasped, so long as people imagined that language is one thing and thought another, it was but natural that they should fail to see the real meaning of treating mythology, if not as a disease, at all events as an inevitable affection of language. If the active verb was merely a grammatical, and not at the same time a psychological, nay, an historical fact, it might seem absurd to identify the active meaning of our roots with the active meaning ascribed to the phenomena of nature. But let it be once perceived that language and thought are one and indivisible, and nothing will seem more natural than that what, as the grammarian tells us, happened in language, should, as the psychologist tells us, have likewise happened in thought.”[46]

The men who spoke in this manner of the external phenomena understood perfectly that they themselves, who struck, who measured, who ran, who rose up, who lay down, were not to be confounded with the thunder, the moon, the river, and the sun; those scholars who studied thought as apart from language, rather allowed themselves selves to be misled by the phraseology of the time, and considered it a proof that our Aryan ancestors looked upon their physical surroundings as human beings, endowed with the appropriate organs and acts. Not only had the early Aryans perfectly understood that they were not identical with themselves, but they were far more struck by the differences between them than by any imaginary similarities. The confirmation of this theory is preserved for us in the Veda. “The torrent is roaring—not a bull,” i.e. like a bull; instead of saying as we do, “firm as a rock,” the poets of the Veda would say “firm—not a rock.” “The mountains were not to be thrown down, but they were not warriors,” “The fire was eating up the forest, yet it was not a lion.”

The men of that time used few words; all thoughts that went beyond the narrow horizon of their daily and practical lives had to be expressed by the transference of a name from the object to which it properly belongs to other well known objects. It was the birth of metaphor; it was metaphor that enabled the inner consciousness to project itself into the outer chaos of the world of objects; which it recreated with personal images; and the fact that each natural phenomenon bore many names, and that these same names were used for many other different objects furnished germs of metaphor. Metaphor was to language what rain and sunshine are to the harvest, it multiplies each grain a hundred and a thousand fold; and metaphor in multiplying language disperses it in every direction; without it no language would have progressed beyond the simplest rudiments.

We must be careful not to confuse the radical metaphor with the poetical which we use daily, and which is very different from the former. If we open any book of poetry at whatever page, we shall find inanimate and mute objects described as speaking, rejoicing, praising their Creator; there is no portion of nature however insentient, however incapable of thought, in which we do not infuse our own sentiments, our own ideas. This mode of expression is especially a poet’s prerogative, and that it does not strike us as incongruous is owing to the fact that poetry appeals to the generality of men, and is more natural to them than prose, and that this outpouring of our heart towards nature costs us less effort than to speak of it in the abstract. It requires cold reflection to describe lightning as an electrical discharge, and rain as condensed vapour; in this case it is no longer the transference of the characteristic of a known object to one still unknown, but that of a known object to another equally well known; the poet who transfers the word tear to the dew has already clear names and concepts both for tear and dew; the poetical metaphor is thus a voluntary creative act of our mind, and as such takes no part in the formation of the human mind.

The world was astonished some few years ago by a declaration made by students of the science of language that the 250,000 words comprehended in the English Dictionary now being published at Oxford all proceeded from about 800 roots; and it has now been found possible to reduce this number. In any case 500 to 800 Sanscrit roots, on account of their great fertility, sufficed our Aryan ancestors for all the many words occurring in Sanscrit literature, and suffice also for us who have 245,000 living animals and 95,000 fossil specimens to name; also 100,000 living and 2500 fossil plants, without speaking of crystals, metals and minerals. Another surprising discovery is that every thought that has ever passed through a human brain can be expressed in 121 radical concepts, of which I give a list. It is taken from Max Müller’s Science of Thought, p. 404. Each single word of every phrase that we use has its origin in one of the 800 roots, and not a thought but proceeds from the 121 fundamental concepts. This is as accepted a fact as that all that is visible on the earth and in the vault of heaven is composed of about 60 elementary substances.

The 121 Original Concepts.

1. Dig.
2. Plait, weave, sew, bind.
3. Crush, pound, destroy, waste, rub, smoothe.
4. Sharpen.
5. Smear, colour, knead, harden.
6. Scratch.
7. Bite, eat.
8. Divide, share, eat.
9. Cut.
10. Gather, observe.
11. Stretch, spread.
12. Mix.
13. Scatter, strew.
14. Sprinkle, drip, wet.
15a. Shake, tremble, quiver, flicker.
15b. Shake mentally, be angry, abashed, fearful, etc.
16. Throw down, fall.
17. Fall to pieces.
18. Shoot, throw at.
19. Pierce, split.
20. Join, fight, check.
21. Tear.
22. Break, smash.
23. Measure.
24. Blow.
25. Kindle.
26. Milk, yield.
27. Pour, flow, rush.
28. Separate, free, leave, lack.
29. Glean.
30. Choose.
31. Cook, roast, boil.
32. Clean.
33. Wash.
34. Bend, bow.
35. Turn, roll.
36. Press, fix.
37. Squeeze.
38. Drive, thrust.
39. Push, stir, live.
40. Burst, gush, laugh, beam.
41. Dress.
42. Adorn.
43. Strip, remove.
44. Steal.
45. Check.
46. Fill, thrive, swell, grow strong.
47. Cross.
48. Sweeten.
49. Shorten.
50. Thin, suffer.
51. Fat, stick, love.
52. Lick.
53. Suck, nourish.
54. Drink, swell.
55. Swallow, sip.
56. Vomit.
57. Chew, eat.
58. Open, extend.
59. Reach, strive, rule, have.
60. Conquer, take by violence, struggle.
61. Perform, succeed.
62. Attack, hurt.
63. Hide, dive.
64. Cover, embrace.
65. Bear, carry.
66. Can, be strong.
67. Show.
68. Touch.
69. Strike.
70. Ask.
71. Watch, observe.
72. Lead.
73. Set.
74. Hold, wield.
75. Give, yield.
76. Couch.
77. Thirst, dry.
78. Hunger.
79. Yawn.
80. Spue.
81. Fly.
82. Sleep.
83. Bristle, dare.
84. Be angry, harsh.
85. Breathe.
86. Speak.
87. See.
88. Hear.
89. Smell, sniff.
90. Sweat.
91. Seethe, boil.
92. Dance.
93. Leap.
94. Creep.
95. Stumble.
96. Stick.
97. Burn.
98. Dwell.
99. Stand.
100. Sink, lie, fail.
101. Swing.
102. Hang down, lean.
103. Rise up, grow.
104. Sit.
105. Toil.
106. Weary, waste, slacken.
107. Rejoice, please.
108. Desire, love.
109. Wake.
110. Fear.
111. Cool, refresh.
112. Stink.
113. Hate.
114. Know.
115. Think.
116. Shine.
117. Run.
118. Move, go.
119a. Noise, inarticulate.
119b. Noise, musical.
120. Do.
121. Be.

This classification of the roots is purely tentative. It has been difficult to ascertain what is most likely to have been the original meaning of some; there are certain words of which it is almost impossible to find the etymology. The order in which the concepts succeed each other is not very systematic. Max Müller tried to classify them more correctly by keeping the special acts, such as to dig, the general acts, such as to find, the special states, such as to cough, and the general states, such as to stand—together. But it was impossible to adhere strictly to such a plan, because there are roots which express both acts and states; while in many cases it is difficult to determine whether the special or general meaning predominates; thus there are the words to boil, to make boil, or to be boiling. Some of the roots have closely allied meanings, so that there are as many as fifteen connected with the concepts to burn, and to speak; and many more which can be traced to shine.

We experience feelings at once humbling and elevating when we consider that all we admire, all on which we pride ourselves, our thoughts, whether poetical, philosophical, religious, our whole literature, all our dictionaries, whether scientific or industrial; in fact, our whole intellectual life is built upon this small number of mother-ideas, of 121 concepts. We should feel neither humbled nor elevated; we are making use of the wisdom of our ancestors. It is our duty to transmit the legacy to our descendants which they gave us, but purged from alloy.

Three chief points are to be noted, when we are concerned with the progress of the intellect:—

1. The creative activity of humanity is the basis of all the roots of words.

2. The source of all abstract ideas lies in acts which are entirely material.

3. It has been satisfactorily proved that we speak the language derived from that spoken by our primitive ancestors. It was the custom of Nebuchadnezzar to have his name stamped on every brick that was used during his reign in erecting his colossal palaces. Those palaces fell to ruins, but from the ruins the ancient materials were carried away for building new cities; and on examining the bricks in the walls of the modern city of Bagdad, travellers have discovered on every one the clear traces of that royal signature. Our modern languages were built up with the materials taken from the ruins of the ancient languages, and every word that we pronounce displays the royal stamp impressed upon it by the founders. The formation of those derived languages, by means of the roots with their successive change of meaning, the construction of their grammatical forms, the continued changes amongst the different dialects, all indicate the presence of a germ in man tending from the first to make him a reasoning being.

CHAPTER VI
ANCIENT LANGUAGE

Language may be divided into three distinct periods, when taken as a whole.

The first is, when language, finding itself released from those restraints which enveloped it in its cradle, supplies those words which are most indispensable to man in connecting the one word with others, such as pronouns, prepositions, names of numbers, and of objects of daily use. This must have been the first stage of a language hardly yet agglutinate, free from trammels, with no sign of nationality, or individuality, but containing in itself all the chief features of the many forms belonging to the Turanian, Aryan and Semitic families; the explorer of philosophic antiquity does not penetrate beyond this first period.

The second phase is that in which two linguistic families passing out of the agglutinate stage, unattached as yet to grammatical forms, received once for all the stamp of the formation which we find amongst the popular and modern dialects belonging both to the Semitic and Aryan divisions, and to which they owe this family resemblance, which justifies their inclusion in one or other of these branches of language; on the one side the Teutonic, Celtic, Slav, Italic, Hellenic, Iranian and Indian; on the other Arabic, Armenian and Hebrew; the yet unformed elements of grammar were eventually introduced into these languages at the substitution of the amalgamate for the agglutinate. The Turanian or Ural-Altaic languages have an entirely different character; they preserved for some time—and one or two still retain—the agglutinate form which retards the development of the grammar, and hides the evidence of relationship to the languages between China and the Pyrenees, and between Cape Comorin and Lapland.

These two periods are followed by a third, generally known as the mythological; it is obscure, and is calculated to shake one’s faith in the regular and orderly progress of human reason. We find it to be a phase through which all peoples have passed; yet in using the word mythology our thoughts naturally turn to the mythology of Greece, the only one with which we were made acquainted in our school days, and also the only one with which those were familiar who had not given themselves over specially to the study of the beliefs of antiquity. In the schools this study ran side by side with history; from our earliest days we had been taught the complete polytheism of heathen divinities; our work as pupils was to know our lessons, the work of the masters was to see that we learnt them. Mythology, therefore, was to us only one chapter in that great work, entitled the compulsory course of studies—a chapter which apparently required no more elucidation than the gymnastic lesson.

Our masters represented the Greeks as a people endowed with a vivid imagination, who recounted in exalted pure language most fantastic stories; we read in these authors: “Eos has fled—Eos will return—Eos has returned—Eos wakens the sleepers—Eos lengthens the life of mortals—Eos rises from the sea—Eos is the daughter of the sky—Eos is followed by the sun—Eos is loved by the sun—Eos is killed by the sun,” and so on ad infinitum; and we were told, “These are myths.” As no explanation was given of the word myth, we were none the wiser.

If the movements of Eos are inexplicable, they are not without a certain picturesqueness. But what shall we say of the myth concerning Saturn, who, on account of a prediction that he would be killed by his children, swallowed them as soon as they were born, with the exception of Jupiter, who was saved by the substitution of a stone, which Saturn afterwards brought up with the children he had swallowed. Or again, what can be said of the feast offered to the gods by Tantalus to test their omniscience; he caused the members of the body of his son Pelops to be mixed with other meats; a shoulder was eaten before Jupiter discovered the deception; he ordered the remainder to be thrown into a copper from which Pelops emerged alive with one shoulder lacking, and one made of ivory was given to him. Can anything more grotesque be imagined? And our children are subjected to this regimen, and their memories charged with these fables, under the pretext that they will the better appreciate the chefs-d’œuvre of classical literature.

The enigmatical part of this period of language will be more evident if we examine the early traditional history which began at its close, and at which time a light appeared in Greece destined to flood the world with a splendour hitherto unknown; it was the epoch which produced Thales, Pythagoras and Heraclitus, who, in the midst of much ignorance, had thoughts of wonderful lucidity. A national literature was beginning, where we find indications of the germs of political societies; the creation of laws, and the development of morals. And we ask ourselves: Whence come these sages? Who were their masters? How could these glorious days of Greek civilisation have been preceded by several generations whose principal occupation seemed to consist in inventing and repeating to satiety absurd fables concerning gods, heroes, and other beings whom no human being had ever seen; which fables contravene the simplest principles of logic, morality and religion? The ancient sages themselves were harsh in their judgment of these revolting stories contained in Grecian mythology; Xenophanes, a contemporary of Pythagoras, considered Hesiod and Homer responsible for these superstitions, and blamed them for attributing to the gods all that was most reprehensible in man. Heraclitus was of opinion that Homer deserved to be banished from the public assemblies, and Plato wrote, “Mothers and nurses tell their children stories full of misstatements and immoralities which are gathered from the poets.”

Thus spoke philosophers 500 years before our era, because they knew that if the “gods commit anything that is evil they are no gods.”

“Taken by themselves and in their literal meaning, most of these ancient myths are absurd and irrational, and frequently opposed to the principles of thought, religion, and morality which guided the Greeks as soon as they appear to us in the twilight of traditional history.”[47]

Many explanations have been sought to account in a rational manner for these strange tales; writers have striven to discover what can have given rise to such ridiculous inventions; some have asserted that it was the intention of the authors of mythology to convey to the people a knowledge of certain facts of nature, and certain moral truths whilst clothing them in allegorical form, and by endowing the divinities with certain virtues which it would become men to imitate and acquire; and that the worship of these divinities was instituted that man might be more fully impressed, that the likeness of the virtues upheld might be more deeply engraved in the heart of the pious worshipper. Zeus, was mind; Athene, art; Hercules, energy and perseverance in labours of great difficulty; whilst the Homeric heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector represented physical activities. According to another theory the object with which the myths were composed was political, the laws of government were supposed to emanate from the gods; and whoso refused to recognise the excellence of the institutions of the country was held to be in revolt against the gods themselves. The philosopher Euhemerus was the author of a third theory, called the historical; he represented the mythological personages not as gods, but as kings, heroes, and philosophers, who, after their death, had received divine honours among their fellow men; in this system Eolus, the god of the winds, became a skilful mariner who could foretell atmospheric changes; Atlas, supporting the sky and earth on his wide shoulders, had been formerly a great astronomer; Jupiter, a ruler of Crete; Hercules, a knight-errant. Although these ancient writers interpreted the fables in so many different ways, they all agreed in denying that an atom of truth is found in these stories concerning the gods, and they insisted that no myth must be taken au pied de la lettre. At a later period it was thought that reminiscences of a barbaric age could be found in which the ancestors of the Greeks apparently occupied themselves by stealing, killing, deceiving, and eating their offspring. “Lactantius, St Augustine, and the first missionaries, in their attacks on the religious belief of the Greeks, and Romans availed themselves of these arguments of Euhemerus, and taunted them with worshipping gods that were no gods, but known and admitted to have been merely deified mortals.”[48] In later times the same theory was revived; certain theologians, rather lacking in penetration, looked to Greek mythology for traces of sacred personages, they imagined that they could recognise in Saturn and his three sons, Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the features of Noah and his sons, Ham, Japhet, and Shem; and in a recently published book the author suggests that when Hesiod describes the garden of the Hesperides, we have a tradition of the garden of Eden.

Thus from the moment when, for the first time, the ancient philosophers questioned “why?” from the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to our own practical and matter-of-fact century, mythology has not ceased to compel attention, and to furnish endless matter of conjecture. Learned writers have sought in physical sciences, history, and metaphysics, an explanation of this phenomenon; but in spite of this vast labour inspired by a love of science, and carried on for more than two thousand years, the secret of the sphinx of mythology remains undisclosed, and we still ask, “what is mythology?” Is it an invention of Homer and Hesiod? Or is it a phase in the development of the human mind, a deviation in the growth of reason?

The school of philology has a solution of its own to offer; will it be as futile as the others? After hearing it shall we still say the Sphinx is mute? This school takes upon itself to assert that the explanation of the mystery can only be found in the Science of Language. It is a fact that the history of language—which is the history of the human mind—enables us to answer the preceding questions categorically. Yes. Mythology was inevitable, an inherent part of language itself, to be considered, not as a simple external symbol, but as the only incorporation of thought possible. Mythology, in the widest acceptation of the term, is the shadow which language casts on thought; and the whole history of philosophy from Thales to Hegel has been one uninterrupted struggle with mythology, a constant protest between thought and language.

CHAPTER VII
MYTHS

In order to appreciate truly our neighbour’s impressions and points of view, we must constantly detach ourselves from our own special way of seeing and feeling; this habit of abstraction—which is most difficult to every one—is indispensable when we are endeavouring to understand the natures of persons who lived many thousands of years ago, and who thought and spoke in a totally different manner from ourselves.

In seeking to grasp the phraseology of myths we perceive that its chief elements consist in a repetition of phrases in which the acts of nature are used as embodiments of the idea, under the figures of day and night, dawn and twilight, the sun and the moon, the heavens and the earth, as they stand in relation to man.

When we in the present century speak of the last hours of the day, we use precise and exact terms; we say, “It is late; the sun is setting; the moon rises; it is night.” Our ancestors also had occasion to mention these same hours, but as they did not speak of the facts of nature without investing them with some of their own personality, they preferred to say, “Dawn flies before the sun.” “The sun loves—pursues—embraces the dawn.” “She dies in the arms of the sun.” They spoke of the sun growing old—decaying—dying. Besides these general terms our ancestors used special designations, which the nature of their language suggested; the hymns of the Rig-Veda supply instances. One of these modes of speech it would be difficult for me to render in French, but the English language has the impersonal verb which will illustrate my meaning, for all such atmospheric phenomena such as rain, thunder, the light of day; instead of it rains, it thunders, it shines, our ancestors said, he rains, he thunders, he shines, without knowing who was this he, who for us is the third person masculine; but, naturally for them, he meant the rainer, the thunderer, the lightener, or, in other words—the agent.

Mythology, taken in its entirety, is the outcome of myths which preceded it. If the original meaning of the Greek word Logos—as both word and thought—has revealed to us a forgotten truth; the original meaning of mythos is also indispensable for the study of mythology. This Greek term means simply word as opposed to deed, and hardly differed at first from Logos. Afterwards, however, a distinction was made between myth,—a fable, a story, and logos, a historical account. Thus a myth was at first a word. Almost all terms used in the first spontaneous stage of language had for their basis striking metaphors, whose signification may have been forgotten, and these terms having lost their original as well as poetical meaning, remained words only, current in familiar conversation.

I give the following myths as they have come down to us.

Endymion is the son of Zeus and Kalyke, but he is also the son of Æthlios, a king of Elis, who is himself called a son of Zeus; for, according to Greek customs, the reigning race of Elis derived its origin from the king of the gods. Endymion is one of the many names of the sun, but with special reference to the setting or dying sun; it is derived from a verb which originally meant to dive into; an expression such as “the sun dived” presupposes an earlier conception, that it dived into the sea. But the verb enduo is never used in classical Greek for setting, because the simple verb duo had become the technical term for sunset. Thus this myth of Endymion owes its origin to the use probably of enduo in some Greek dialect, though not the commonly received term for sunset. The original meaning of Endymion being once forgotten, what was told originally of the setting sun was now told of a name, which in order to have any meaning, had to be changed into a god or hero.

This handsome prince or shepherd, according to the different versions of the tale, went to Karia, where on Mount Latmos he had strange adventures; he slept in a cave to which the rays of the moon, Selene, penetrated, and in the ancient poetical and proverbial language of Elis it was said, “Selene loves and watches Endymion; Selene embraces Endymion and kisses him into sleep.” The name Selene is so transparent that the word moon pierces through it; we should have guessed that the moon was intended, even if tradition had only preserved her other name, Asterodia—“wanderer amongst the stars”; the names Hecate or Lucina do not force us to acknowledge their fitness, they present to our imagination a totally different figure (as they suggest opaqueness) from Selene. Learned writers at times still put forward the explanation with regard to mythology that it “was a past which was never a present,” but this myth of Endymion was “present” with the people of Elis at the period of its narration.

These and similar expressions were repeated long after their meaning had ceased to be understood; and as the human mind is generally as anxious for a reason as ready to invent one, the poets added to this story several details, and reasons why Endymion sank into eternal sleep after a life of but one day; and if allusions were made to these by a popular poet, it became a mythological fact, repeated and embellished by later poets.

The construction of such a name as Eos does not differ materially from that of any other name, but as all roots expressed at the first denote action, it follows that for all an agent must be found; the name of Eos in Sanscrit is Ushas, dawn, or “the bright one” from the root Vas, to shine; thus Eos meant originally “he or she shines.” But who was “he” or “she”? Thus the inevitable myth is evolved. For us the dawn is only the natural illumination of the sky, the brightness of the morning; our ancestors received a different impression by the break of day. After having coined a word meaning “he or she shines,” that is the light, or Eos, the Greeks continued to portray each step of Eos as she preceded the appearance of the sun on the celestial vault; “Eos is followed by the sun—is loved by the sun”; she is conceived as a bright and beautiful woman; if she appeared veiled in clouds, she would be considered as a veiled bride; thus the epithets and relationships showered on Eos become intelligible, she is the daughter of Hyperion, thus her father would be the high heaven, since hyper corresponds to the Latin super; she is the sister of Helios and Selene, the sun and the moon. As soon as a name such as Eos was first enunciated and used in daily conversation, it grew and gathered new materials round itself; all the names surrounding Eos in Greek and Aurora in Latin show us how inevitably what we call mythology springs up from the soil of language. Even such simple sentences as “Eos appears, disappears, or dies” are changed at once into myth, fable, and legend, and it soon becomes impossible to draw a line between what is simple language and what is myth.

We do not unfortunately always possess the original form of each legend as it first passed from mouth to mouth in the towns and country; thus our chief sources are the ancient chroniclers, who took mythology for history, and used only so much of it as answered their purpose, and these accounts do not reach us at first hand.

We find a legend in Greek mythology which has much exercised the learned; the nymph Daphne flies before Phœbus Apollo, her mother, the earth, moved by compassion, takes her to her bosom, and immediately a laurel appears and fills the abyss into which Daphne had vanished. The mythologists asked themselves what could be the meaning of this; the more phlegmatic amongst them considered that it had no special meaning at all, but was simply to be looked upon as a fable; why seek further for a hidden import? Why? Because people do not relate such stories concerning their gods and heroes without some good motive.

In the legend of Endymion the Greek language supplies all that is needed to make it intelligible, but there are many instances of the difficulty, or even the impossibility of explaining certain Greek names by the help of Greek only; since a name is not converted into a myth until its original meaning has become obscured in the language which gave it birth, though still perfectly comprehensible in another of the same family, it behoves the classical philologist to surrender all etymological researches of this nature to the comparative philologist, whose privilege it is to seek to discover the signification of a Greek word by confronting it with contemporary witnesses from the German, Celtic, or Sanscrit. In the Teutonic languages, for instance, day has several names which are derived from the root dah, to burn, to be hot; and this same root has also given rise to the Greek name for dawn. In Sanscrit it is called Ahana, from ahan or dahan, the root of which is ah; dah and dahan may have lost their initial d, or this letter may have been added to the root ah; these gains and losses are met with frequently.

The Sanscrit name Ahana, known before Greek and Sanscrit became separated, occurs but once in a hymn of the Rig-Veda; in India this mythological germ withered away, and even the name Ahana would not have survived, but for this single verse which saved it from oblivion; but it developed into a splendid growth in Greece, in the legend of Eos, which I have quoted.

In this hymn addressed to Ushas we read: “We have crossed the frontier of this darkness; Ahana shining forth gives light, lighting up all the world, awakening mortals to walk about—she received praise from every thinker.” Ahana rises from the head of Dyu, the forehead of the sky; she shows herself in the east, she advances and awakens the sleepers. In Sanscrit budh means to wake and to know, but light in Sanscrit has again a double meaning, and means knowledge, much more frequently and distinctly than light; this explains how Ahana, in awakening mortals, causes persons to know.

The stories of Daphne and of Ahana are closely allied, and the one explains the other. As long as we remain ignorant of the fact that at first Daphne and Aurora were one, this myth is inexplicable; but turn the name Ahana into Greek, and you have the Dawn in the features of a nymph loved by Apollo, and dying when the bright sun touched her with his rays.

But why, it may be asked, was Daphne supposed to have been changed into a laurel-tree? The dawn was called daphne, the burning; so was the laurel—as wood that burns easily, and whose flame throws a bright light—two different objects, but alike under one aspect, though two distinct acts. The root dah is found in daphne for laurel equally with Daphne, dawn, the synonymy of the two names producing the myth of Daphne. Although this legend first came to life on Greek soil, it would have been unintelligible without the help of the Veda, as the later Sanscrit supplied no key to it.

The Sanscrit root Ah is also the germ of the name of Athena, the termination of the name corresponding to Ahana; Athene is said to spring from the head of Zeus. This extraordinary birth, though post-Homeric, is no doubt of ancient date, since it repeats exactly the birth of Ahana. The Hellenists maintain that the Greeks were unconscious that the word Athene meant the dawn; doubtless few amongst them knew that Zeus originally meant the surface or forehead of the sky. It is also true that when the people of Athens worshipped Athene as their tutelary deity, she became something very different from the Indian Ushas; but if we notice carefully all the many and various ideas concerning this Greek goddess, we shall be led to the supposition that her cradle was no other than that of the dawn, namely, the east, the forehead of the sky, or Zeus. Neither in the Veda, nor in Homer, is there any mention of the mother of the dawn, although both mention her parents.

It is a curious fact that in the mythology of Italy, Minerva, who was identical with Athene, should from the beginning have assumed a name apparently expressive of the intellectual rather than the physical character of the Dawn-goddess. Minerva or Menerva is clearly connected with mens, the Greek menos, the Sanscrit manas, mind; mane in Latin is morning; manare is specially used of the rising sun; and matuta, another name of the same category, is the Dawn. The root man, which in all Aryan languages means thought, was at a very early time, like the Sanscrit budh, destined to express the revived consciousness of the whole of nature at the approach of the light of the morning. The equation Ahane = Athene is both phonetically and mythologically irreproachable, the correlative Minerva can also be explained mythologically.

To reject the explanations of these myths which Comparative Philology furnishes, it would be necessary to prove that Ahana and Eos do not mean the dawn, that Athene does not correspond with Ahana, and that Helios is not the sun.

Mythologists have sometimes failed to discover the primitive character of certain myths, because they have not looked beyond the Greek etymology. The word Erinnys, “hovering in the gloom,” corresponds exactly to the Sanscrit Saranyû = “break of day.” Poets sometimes speak of the Dawn as avenging the crimes committed in the dark; the myth of Erinnys denotes this same idea. Instead of our lifeless and abstract expression, “A crime is sure to be discovered,” the old proverbial and poetical saying amongst the Greeks and Hindoos was, Erinnys—Saranyû, “will bring misdeeds to light.” At first this phrase was free from all mythological taint, but it was afterwards transformed into a myth by the Greeks, as they were ignorant of the true signification of the name of Erinnys.

When the mythology of Greece fails to furnish an explanation of many of the Greek phrases, because it belongs to a later date than the classical period, the Veda may then be questioned, and will supply us with the information, by disclosing an ancient substratum of human thought, such as existed amongst the inhabitants of one of the most important regions of the world, India. It is with as much pleasure as assurance that we repeat to those learned scholars, who decline to open their eyes in order to see, or see only what they consider should be there, the Brahmanic saying, “It is not the fault of the post that the blind man passes it without noticing it.”

It seems astonishing that a people so richly endowed as the Greeks should have found pleasure in romancing so constantly concerning the sun and the moon, the day and the night, the dawn and the twilight; but the custom of repeating these mythological phrases, which much resembled each other, dated from an epoch before the Greeks, when nothing more powerfully attracted and fascinated the imagination of man than the aspect of nature’s forces, especially the return of the sun, bringing with it each morning light and heat and life. Repeated thus incessantly these phrases became idiomatic, and were retold long after the thread connecting them with the simple facts of nature was broken and lost to memory. At first some old grandmother would repeat them, partly understanding them in their true natural sense, and partly metaphorically; the sons of the old people would repeat them with a partial understanding; but the grandsons would relate them only for their peculiarities, or for the charm of their style and setting; and the great-grandchildren would hand them on at random, with no comprehension of their meaning. At a much later period when all these sayings, with no connection between them, had become traditional, the poets would embody them in verse, giving them their first form and permanence in a cycle of legends. They congratulated themselves on the treasure-trove, but marvelled that the Greeks should enclose these bald phrases of perpetual iteration in the casket of their literature. They might as well ask why the Greeks apparently sanctioned all the irregular verbs their language holds by retaining them in their grammar. Is it not a historical fact that cannot be denied that the whole Aryan peoples, without exception, have conserved as the heritage of their common origin not only the names of their divinities, their legends, and their folk-lore, but also remains of their primitive language. Here is a noteworthy statement. Comparative Philology has proved that there is nothing really irregular in a language, and that what was formerly considered so in declensions and conjugations is the stratum on which the edifice of each language raised itself progressively. This same apparent irregularity is found also in mythology, because it is itself only a sort of dialect or offshoot of language.

Since the raison d’être of myths, as such, is a forgetfulness of the original sense of the words, we cannot hope to be able to explain all the mythological recitals; no one has more clearly stated the difficulty, nor expressed it with greater modesty, than he who has laid the most lasting foundation of comparative mythology. Grimm says: “I shall indeed interpret all that I can, but I cannot interpret all that I should like.”[49]

In examining these archives, which, if only on account of their antiquity, are very superior to any other evidence for our purpose, we learn that identification differs from comparison. It is only possible to identify two or more divinities by seeing if one name applies equally to all, and by showing that this name denotes the essence of each; this result is obtained when, for instance, we note a general resemblance between a god or a hero of the Veda, and a god or hero of Hesiod, and discover that though their names may be phonetically dissimilar, yet that they have one source. Uranus, in the language of Hesiod, is used as a name for the sky—“a firm place for the blessed gods”; and the poet says that Uranus covers everything, and that when he brings the night he is stretched out, everywhere embracing the earth. This sounds like a reproduction of the name of Varuna, which is derived from a root Var, to cover (the Sanscrit term varutra, overcoat, would prove this if need be). The name Uranus in the Greek apparently retains something of its primitive meaning, which is not the case with the name of Zeus and Apollo. Varuna and Uranus evidently both express the same mythological concept, that of the covering, enclosing sky; this may even be one of the most ancient discoveries of comparative mythology. In the same way we prove that Ushas, Eos, Daphne, Ahana, and Athene were five names of the dawn, and that they can be traced back to a time before Greek and Sanscrit were separated. Thus, whilst one legend becomes differentiated from another by its own peculiar form and attributes, the name of its original prototype remains etymologically the same, though taking varying forms amongst the various peoples who use the legend; it is in this immutable name that the continuity of ideas lies, which nothing obliterates, and which traverses the centuries, and connects the mythologies of countries as totally distinct as India, Greece, and Ireland. But we must remember that all that is taken for etymology is not always so; the explanations which Homer gives of the names of the divinities only proves that at his time the original meaning had been forgotten. To us who now know the true principles of mythology, it is clear that it represents a prehistoric period of language, and the light it throws on the times that followed, has the same importance with regard to the study of the human mind, that geology and paleontology have for the knowledge of the earth.

Sometimes we come upon difficulties of another kind when we seek to translate the language of the poets into our modern forms of thought and speech. In consequence of the absence of merely auxiliary words in mythological language, each word, whether noun or verb, had its full original power, it was heavy and unwieldy, it said more than it ought to say. Here is an example: Nyx (night), the mother of Moros (fate), of Ker (destruction), of Thanatos (death), of Hypnos (sleep), and of the Oneïroi (dreams), and these,—her progeny, Night is said, by the poet, to have borne without a father. She has also other children: Momos (blame), Oizys (woe), the Hesperides, which are the evening stars, Nemesis (vengeance), Apate (fraud), Philotes (lust), Geras (old age), and Eris (strife). Now let us use our modern expressions. “The stars are seen as the night approaches,” “we sleep, we dream, we die,” “we run into danger during night,” “nightly revels lead to strife, angry discussions, and woe,” “many nights bring old age, and at last death,” “an evil deed concealed at first by the darkness of night will at last be revealed by the day,” “night herself will be revenged on the criminal”; and we have translated the language of Hesiod, a language to a great extent understood by the people to whom it was addressed many hundreds of years ago, and it is made comprehensible to us by the addition of some auxiliary words. This is hardly mythological language, but rather a poetical and proverbial kind of expression known to all poets whether modern or ancient, and frequently to be found in the language of common people when it becomes proverbial.

“In Greece the mortal element, inherent in all gods, was eliminated to a great extent by the conception of heroes. Whatever was too human in the ancient legends told of Zeus and Apollo was transferred to so-called half gods or heroes, who were represented as the sons or favourites of the gods. The two-fold character of Herakles as a god and as a hero is acknowledged even by Herodotus, and some of his epithets would have been sufficient to indicate his solar and originally divine character. But in order to make some of the legends told of the solar deity possible or conceivable, it was necessary to represent Herakles as a more human being, and to make him rise to the seat of the immortals only after he had endured toils and sufferings incompatible with the dignity of an Olympian god.”[50] The divinities of a second and third order, who were sometimes solicited for special favours, were perhaps placed in the same category as some provincial or local saints, who were considered more accessible and more pitiful in certain places, just as some physicians make a practice of curing those ills only of which they had made a speciality.

There were also abstract divinities, representing certain virtues in the eyes of the people, which were highly esteemed and useful to possess; each of these qualities which were conceived separately, and considered in the superlative degree, were from that time raised to the rank of a divine person, thus altars and temples were dedicated to Courage, Strength, and Piety; Fame was likewise thus honoured. “Great Fame is never lost though scattered abroad,” said Hesiod, “it is in itself a divinity.”

The language of mythology was in use at a late period. History tells us that the Greek town of Cyrene in Libya was founded about the thirty-seventh Olympiad, the ruling race came from Thessaly; the foundation of the colony was due to the oracle of Apollo at Pytho. This simple historical fact has been thus rendered, from the habit of not recounting events as they happened. “The heroic maid Cyrene, who lived in Thessaly, was loved by Apollo, and carried off to Libya.”

The question has been often asked, what can be the origin of the fables which are identical in character and form, whether we find them on Indian, Greek, Italian, Persian, Slavonic, Celtic, or Teutonic soil. Was there a period of temporary insanity, through which the human mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the south of India and in the north of Ireland? The necessity of solving this problem became more imperative when collections of these ancient traditions were brought from countries which formerly were almost unknown to us; incredible tales came from all parts, from amongst the Hottentots, the Patagonians, Zulus, Esquimaux, and Mongols; in all cases we were able to recognise the fables with which we were already so well acquainted, from having seen them in Aryan literature. When Max Müller first published his essays on the Greek myths, the mythologists acknowledged generally that it was very natural he should devote so much time to the explanation of the Greek legends, since these same stories had been universally found in all parts of the globe, from the one pole to the other; stories of men and women turned into trees, trees transformed into men, men behaving as animals, animals talking as if they were men, men swallowed by gods and brought up again whole, as were the children of Kronos; in all places the same adventures were told of the sun and moon, also swallowed, but the swallower not known. The Greek myths—so it was asserted by the learned who did not care to abandon the old paths—form only one page of that vast mythology created by the disordered imagination of nations in their infancy; the epidemic was general, and it is useless to seek for a definite or peculiar meaning in such and such a local myth.

Nevertheless, in presence of these striking likenesses, impartial and clear-sighted science recognised that there must be something in the human mind that of necessity tended to mythology, nay, that there must be some reason in all the unreason that goes by the name of myth. That “something” Max Müller discovered to be language, in its natural progress from roots to words, up to definite and special names. Mythology has now been acknowledged to be an inevitable phase in the growth of language and thought; a form of expression which changes non-personal beings into personal, and all relationships into actions; it is a mental phenomenon so peculiar that it would be difficult to avoid the admission that it emanated from a distinct stratum, it is metaphoric language and thought; and it is the duty of the geologist of language to establish the authenticity of this epoch of organic life in humanity, which is contemporaneous with the most ancient forms of language.

If Hegel compares the discovery of the common origin of Greek and Sanscrit to that of a new world, the same may be said with regard to the common origin of all the mythologies, for already the science of Comparative Mythology has risen to the same importance as Comparative Philology.

The supposition that grammatical gender of nouns must necessarily be the cause of personification, and produce myths which had no previous existence at the time when this denotation of sex did not yet exist, has been proved incorrect. But the following fact, which concerns language more than mythology, is not so evident at first sight, viz., that however the various languages may differ externally, and however they may lack gender, yet they have without exception what is analogous to it, and takes its place; this is a system of fundamental classification to which all equally submit, and which each language supplies; the result is that at the foundation of thought common to all humanity, certain forms are found answering the purpose of gender. Each myth and each legend was at first the intelligible expression of an intelligible thought, and as the thought contained in each recital must evidently be the same wherever there were men to repeat it, the science of Comparative Mythology seeks to place its hand on the expression which best renders this one and the selfsame thought, under different aspects.

What is commonly called Hindoo mythology is of little or no avail for comparative purposes, because nothing is systematically arranged. Names are used in one hymn of the Rig-Veda as appellatives, in another as names of gods. There are as yet no genealogies, and no recorded marriages between gods and goddesses. As the conception of the poet varied, so varied the nature of these gods; the myths are arranged with little order. Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece more clearly felt than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda with the full-grown, or already decaying myths on which the poetry of Homer is founded. The Veda is the real theogony of the Aryan races, while that of Hesiod is a copy only of the original image. The Hindoo Rishis differed much amongst themselves in their representation of things; some of them attributed the dispersion of clouds by a solar hero, to the will of some supreme or divine being; others considered the combatants to be the supreme beings themselves, who dispersed the clouds full of lightning and thunder, making the sky serene after the fight. These are the two distinct interpretations of the solar and atmospheric schools; the dualism in nature, which at a later period took the character of light and darkness, even of good and evil, was at the beginning the dualism of day and night, spring and winter, life and death, represented by the two great luminaries of the physical world.

The characteristic traits of the moon which made the deepest impression on our ancestors were its increase, and afterwards its gradual diminution, until its total disappearance. The eclipses, though filling the minds of the people with sudden fear at first, did not continue long to awaken dread or curiosity, as they were of rare occurrence and transitory; the moon, it was thought, was swallowed and afterwards disgorged by some hostile power; but the monthly increase and diminution required some other explanation. The Hindoos, in seeking to discover the abode of the gods and of their own ancestors, assigned the brilliant sky to the former, and where, therefore, should the Fathers live if not in the vast vault and in the moon? This was, in fact, the belief of the whole Aryan race. But the subject is complicated, since in an earlier period of lunar mythology, we find in the Vedic Pantheon a divinity of the name of Soma, which certain poets identify with the plant of that name, whose intoxicating juice played an important part in the sacrifices; there is no doubt a great obscurity with regard to these two rival powers, to which the same name had been given, and on which mythologists have found it difficult to enlighten us; but quite recently exponents of the Rig-Veda have discovered that Soma originally meant the moon itself, thus the Rishis allow it to be apparent in their hymns that there were at one time two Somas—the plant and its juice, and at an earlier period the other Soma, known only to the old Brahmans, which was the moon. A belief held by the Hindoos was that the moon supplied nourishment to the gods, which was the cause of the diminution; its increase was explained by the entrance into it of the souls of their ancestors; the gods swallowing these also as an integral portion of the moon.

All these ideas were of slow development, and of successive growth; no portion of mythology had a systematic elaboration.

I will add as a curious scientific fact, that lately botanists have sought in vain in Northern India and in Persia for a plant whose qualities correspond to those of the Soma as described in the Vedic hymns; they are more or less agreed that it must be akin to the Ephedra, but as this plant abounded in the whole country between Siberia and the Iberian Peninsula, there was no hope of discovering the locality of the Aryans by means of the habitat of the plant.

It has been often asserted that these stories of men and things that have been swallowed must have come from countries formerly inhabited by cannibals; learned writers, even Herbert Spencer—to quote one instance—consider, not without some appearance of reason, that Hindoos, Greeks, Romans and Germans could hardly have put forth similar stories of this kind had there been no foundation in fact. But the verbs to eat, to swallow, will admit of divers interpretations; we say of a man that it was impossible for him to swallow such an insult, or that he has consumed his fortune; and this mode of speech surprises no one; where we speak of an eclipse, the inhabitants of the shores of the Baltic say that the moon or sun is in the act of being eaten; in India instead of saying such an one has been flogged, it would be said, he has tasted the whip. A little reflection will convince us that if nations who had nothing in common but human nature, spoke of the night as covering, hiding, swallowing various beings, especially the sun and the day, it was not more unreasonable on their part than to say, as we do, that day and night follow each other, instead of expressing ourselves after a more scientific manner, and not less correctly, in saying that day and night are the successive effects of the rotation of the earth on its axis.

Having discovered that mythological phraseology was sometimes due to misconceptions of names, and that poetical fantasies had their share, philologists quoted an instance of the imagination being misled by a simple mistake; that of the name “Great Bear” being given to a certain group of stars. The Sanscrit root Ark signified to brighten, to praise, to glorify, to celebrate; man praised, glorified, celebrated the sun, moon and stars; for these purposes the word Ark was used. For all we know the substantive rik may really have conveyed all these meanings during the earliest period of the Aryan language; but if we look at the fully developed branches of that family of speech, we find that in this, its simplest form, rik has been divested of all meaning in the Rig-Veda except one; it only means a song of praise, a hymn, that gladdens the heart of man, and brightens the countenance of the gods. The other words, however, which rik might have expressed were not entirely given up, but the root was rendered more definite; thus arki and arkis were formed, these no longer meant hymns of praise, but light, ray. It is difficult to understand how Riksha, in the sense of bright, has become the name of “the bear”; might it not be on account of his brilliant tawny fur, or from his bright eyes? No one knows. Certain it is that in Sanscrit bears were called Riksha. But the word Riksha had also another meaning, as shown by a passage in the Rig-Veda 1, 24, 10. “These stars (riksha) fixed high above, which are seen by night; whither did they go by day?” The Commentator observed that the word riksha is not used in the sense of stars in general, but that according to tradition the name is only given to that particular constellation, which in later Sanscrit is called “the Seven Rishis,” or “the Seven Sages.” And thus it happened that when the dispersion took place, and the Aryans left their primitive home and settled in Europe, they ceased to use the plural form “Arktoi,” or many bears, and spoke of the group of seven stars as the Bear, the Great Bear, without knowing why these stars had originally received that name.

It did not escape the notice even of the less erudite that the gods of Greece and Rome and of other Aryan nations had a close connection with the most striking phenomena of nature; they also recognised the same origin amongst the divinities of the Semitic nations, as well as those of Egypt, Africa and America; this could, of course, be accounted for by the presence of the same primitive stratum of human thought, resembling those deeper geological layers, which only show themselves in a partial and fragmentary manner.

But none of these mythologists attached the least importance to the names of the divinities, and if they were told that they were nothing but names, it sounded almost like heresy to them, and they ignored the fact that one of the latest scientific discoveries was being submitted to them. Yet it is indubitable that the sun and the moon were in the places occupied by them at present before they were named; but not till they were named was there a Savitar, a Helios, a Selene or a Mene. If then it is the name which makes the gods in mythology, in enabling us to distinguish one from another, it follows that we must call the Science of Language to our aid in order to solve the problem of mythology, since that alone discloses the causes which have despoiled the names of their primitive meaning, and that alone shows how the germs of decrepitude, inherent in language, affect both the phonetic portion and also the signification of words, since words naturally react on thought and mould it.

CHAPTER VIII
BETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING

The habit which I have contracted of living in the society of our ancestors of prehistoric times, would, it might be thought, naturally cause me to notice the dissimilarities between us and them rather than the likenesses; this often happens, but not always. Our fathers, for instance, did not know the thousandth part of our vocabulary, which is very copious; this would seem to indicate that our knowledge has considerably increased in the course of thirty or forty centuries. Words of deep import are familiar to us; who amongst us does not know and use such as these—Law, Necessity, Liberty, Spirit, Matter, Conscience, Belief, Nature, Providence, Revelation, Inspiration, the Soul, Religion, Infinite, Immortality, and many others, which are either of recent origin, or have become new because their meaning has changed? Here the difference between our fathers and ourselves springs into sight.

But the points of resemblance are still more striking.

Long before our present era, certain philosophers asserted that their world was full of gods, we may say with equal truth that God fills our world; His name is in every mouth, and our little children know it well. Moreover the complete identity between certain mental acts of our fathers and our own is easily recognised. Our fathers were satisfied not to enquire concerning the nature of their gods, they knew their names, and that sufficed. We too have become accustomed to hear God’s name repeated frequently, without always questioning ourselves as to its meaning, and in what way He has made the earth His habitation.

To talk of what we do not grasp must be essentially human, since we find the practice in two social conditions, separated from each other by thousands of years.

It is incredible to what a point we of the nineteenth century carry our lack of enquiry. If one day we were to count on our fingers the number of interesting subjects we had allowed to pass by us without any interrogations concerning them, fifty hands would not suffice us for the tale; our ignorance would then become apparent. Should we feel humiliated? In all probability no, for before arriving at this much to be desired consummation, we should have been carried away by many thoughts in no way bearing on the subject, and the one thought which would come prominently to the front and hinder us from passing our conduct in review would be, “I see no necessity to apply myself to them.” In fact, nothing is easier and nothing so reposeful to our mind as acquiescence in the popular opinion, which we allow to guide us in our estimation of words and phrases; as so frequently happens with ourselves (by “ourselves” I mean that very considerable portion of society which separates the working classes from the savants and philosophers).

“All things are full of the gods,” was said by the heathen in former days; and in fact divinities abounded; this was not surprising. “God has chosen to Himself a people and spread His name over the whole earth, and to make His will to be known,” as we say now. Thus we know that God is, and that His commandments must be kept.

To consider words as ideas is not wise. Why do we not imitate the savages who when they hear an organ for the first time have a great desire to open it in order to see what is inside; and we who are civilised play with much light-hearted readiness on the gigantic instrument of language without seeking to know the value of the sounds we draw from it; and the names of beings and objects which should exercise the most powerful influence to which moral things can be subjected, are treated as mere sounds.

Have we asked ourselves the meaning of the word God? Many must answer no to this question. This is not well, in spite of the fact that those who have asked it in this form have not always succeeded in obtaining an answer; no one has formed a complete conception of God, since neither sense nor reason is equal to the task. Plato, although named “Divine” by the ancient philosophers and by Christian theologians, did not like to speak of The Gods, but replacing the plural by the singular used the word “Divine,” but he did not explain what he understood by this word. Plato certainly mentions the Creator of the Universe, the Father of humanity, but—“he does not tell His name, for he knew it not; he does not tell His colour, for he said it not; he does not tell His size, for he touched it not.”[51] Xenophanes, who lived 300 years before Plato, said, “There is one God, the greatest amongst gods and men; neither in form nor in thought like unto mortals.”[52]

The Greek philosophers protested against all attempts to apply a name which should be adequate to the Supreme Being; since all the words chosen failed to grasp His essence, and only designated certain sides and points of view, predicting of Him whatever was most beautiful in nature. For this reason early Christian writers who were Greeks rather than Jews, who had studied in the schools of Plato and Aristotle, spoke of God in the same abstract language, the same negative terms; they said, “We cannot call Him Light, since Light is His creation; we cannot call Him Spirit, since the Spirit is His breath; nor Wisdom, since Wisdom emanates from Him; nor Force, since Force is the manifestation of His Power.”

Thus instead of saying what God is, the philosophers, heathen as well as Christian, prefer to say what He is not. But in that case what idea could man form of a Being whom the wisest amongst them could not represent or describe? Do we understand the nature of this Supreme Being better by using the name so well known of Providence? Again no; since we have introduced several meanings into this word which are inconsistent the one with the other. Amongst them there might well be some that are erroneous, which would thus lead us to rest our hopes on false foundations.

This mist, hiding from us the meaning of words and obscuring our ideas, is partly owing to a fault committed by the ancients themselves.

When our ancestors communed with their divinities, they did not ask themselves what the names they pronounced really meant; in invoking Varuna, Helios, Athene, Prithvi, and the others, they were satisfied, at least for the time being, since names possess a strange calming property; this unquestioning acquiescence has been bequeathed to us. We are neither more enquiring, more exact, nor more pedantic than the greater part of our ancestors; we speak of angels, for instance, without seeking to fathom their nature, much in the same way as we might mention lords and dukes without troubling ourselves to reflect that the one means “bread-giver” and the other “dux,” or one capable of being a leader of men.

In speaking of the soul, the immortality of the soul, and of religion, we use words which have become common property, and it is not necessary to analyse them in order to feel sure that they represent things which are very real; still we do not strive to understand what these things really are. Thus it happens that words whose meaning is unknown to us or escapes us, are generally those of which we make daily use; we keep to the impression received of them in our childhood, or accepted by current opinion, or with which sentiment invests them, but this is unsatisfactory; we should feel ashamed of not possessing more accurate knowledge than this of geography or arithmetic. On the other hand, there are scientific terms which seem to us so technical that we willingly abandon their use to experts, and yet their meaning can be readily and definitely grasped.

What meaning, for instance, has the word infinite for us, even if taken in its most simple acceptation; this infinite towards which our thoughts travel when we raise our eyes to the skies? Astronomers say to us, “Look at something greater than the greatest possible greatness, that is the infinitely great.” They then quote figures, but these figures of infinite greatness elude our imagination, we repeat them mechanically and only out of respect to the high scientific authority who guarantees the accuracy of the calculations or the value of the appreciation.

A small object, apparently of the size of a homeopathic globule, moves in space, it contains our continents and our oceans, this globule moves in company with other globules of the same nature.

Astronomers speak to us of the millions of miles separating us from the sun, yet this distance dwindles down to nothing as compared with the nearest star, which, we are told, lies twenty millions of millions of miles from our earth. Another stupendous thought is that a ray of light traverses space at the rate of 187,000 miles in a second, and yet it requires three years to reach us.

But this is only a small matter.

More than one thousand millions of such stars have been discovered by our telescopes, and there may be millions of millions of suns within our siderial system which are as yet beyond the reach of our best telescopes; even that siderial system need not be regarded as single within the universe, thousands of millions of similar systems may be recognised in the galaxy or milky way.[53]

Now let us turn our eyes to the infinitely little. One drop of water taken from the ocean contains atoms so small that a grain of the finest dust would seem colossal by the side of them; chemists are now able to ascertain the relative positions of atoms so minute that millions of them can stand upon a needle’s point.

All this we gather from science when—working together with the telescope—it investigates space; and this may still be little compared to what we might see through glasses, which should magnify objects some millions of times more than our best instruments.

The infinite in space has engaged the attention of many thinkers; I will quote from two only, as this infinite, which they studied from different points of view, yet suggests thoughts somewhat alike. Kepler, the discoverer of the laws on which our planetary system is based, said, “My highest wish is to find within the God whom I have found everywhere without.” Kant, the philosopher, to whom the Divine in nature and the Divine in man appeared as transcendent and beyond our cognisance, and who refused to listen to any theological argument tending to prove the existence of God, yet says, “Two things fill me with new and ever growing admiration and awe: the starry firmament above me, and the moral law within me; neither of them is hidden in darkness, I see them both before me, and I connect them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.”[54]