"No reason without speech;
        No speech without reason."
                Max Müller      

         "The Word is the thought incarnate."—Müller.

CONTENTS

1/  The Origin of Language.[1]

[1]                
        "The evolution of variety from unity," says Geiger, "seems to be the great fundamental law of all development of nature and of mind. This law, in language also, leads us back to a very insignificant germ, to a primitive sound, which expressed the sole and infinitely limited subject-matter that man first took notice of or beheld with interest, and out of which the whole wealth of language, nay—I am unhesitatingly convinced—of all languages, through untold millenniums, has been slowly unfolded."
        The great merit of L. Geiger—who was unfortunately too early lost to science—is that of having shown how human reason and language were originally contained in one and the same germ; that we cannot say that reason created language, but that the contrary is true, that reason was gradually matured and strengthened through the instrumentality of the representative signs of sensory perception; that, accordingly, the word was beyond question the element first in point of time, and that more universal, more correct, more clear, and more conscious ideas were first attained and formed through words, and after a long course of development led through words to the present state of mature rational thought.
[2]              
        The childish and anthropomorphic view, that God said to Adam, "This is a dog, This is an elephant," still held the minds of men captive in the eighteenth century, with the single difference, that the philosophers of that day put human reason in the place of God, and imagined that men by a kind of conventional agreement or pact had given names to things—in short, that they had invented language. As if an inventive act of this character did not demand a prodigious power of mind—a degree of intellect and wisdom that must have been infinitely greater than that at present possessed by the whole human race! It is a fundamental error of human thinking, that we are naturally predisposed to attribute conscious purpose, reflection, and knowledge, which now generally guide us in our daily affairs, universally to human acts, and that we attempt to explain the latter by the former. Ceres alone foresaw the stupendous results that were to follow the insignificant beginnings of agriculture. Copernicus did not think of the dangerous consequences that his new doctrine involved for Christianity. And the historical Luther,—if he were to return to-day to earth,—would break out in violent anger at the constantly extending emancipation of the human mind that has sprung from his original reformatory ideas, and at the progress of rational thought, subversive of all positive creed. The result of a course of development is frequently as different from its point of origination as the flowering plant from the seed out of which it has grown.
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        Herder’s Theory.

        The first to rise well above this anthropomorphic view was Herder, whose divinatory genius in so many other fields discerned truths that science only later demonstrated by the help of accumulations of material, and who, even where he erred, never failed to give forth the most pregnant suggestions. The fundamental idea of his prize-essay, Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (Upon the Origin of Language), is substantially this: "Man," says he, "gives proof of reflection, when, amid the hovering dream of images that flit before his senses, he collects himself into a moment of wakefulness, to dwell voluntarily upon some particular image, to survey it in a brighter and steadier light, and to abstract from it certain characteristics that establish that this is this object and no other." This he illustrates by the following example: "A man sees, for instance, a lamb. It passes, as an image, otherwise before his vision than it does before that of other animals. Whenever man is placed so that he must know a sheep, he is not disturbed by any instinct (as the wolf or the lion); the sheep stands before him exactly and entirely as represented by his senses. White, smooth, woolly. His thoughtfully operating mind seeks a characteristic mark. The sheep bleats. The characteristic is found. The inner sense is at work. The bleating—that which produced the strongest impression upon his mind, that which sprang forth and disengaged itself from all other qualities accessible to sight and touch—that remains in his mind. The sheep, let us say, returns. White, smooth, woolly. Our man looks, touches, meditates, again seeks a char-
[4]      
acteristic mark. The sheep bleats; and now he recognises it. He feels inwardly: "Thou art the Bleating. One!" he has humanly recognised it, for he has distinctly recognised it; that is, recognised it by, and called it by, a characteristic feature. By a characteristic, a mark! And what else is this than an inner mark-word, a verbal cue? He recognised the sheep by its bleating. This was the comprehended token by which the mind clearly hit upon an idea. What else is this than a word ? And what is all human language but a collection of such words."
        This theory Max Müller has called the Bow-wow theory, and rejected it.
        It cannot be denied that as an hypothesis of the origin of language there is a good deal of truth contained in Herder's statement of things. The most important points to be noted are, that it (1) explains how a visual image or percept is transformed into the phonetic word; and that (2) it makes the creation of language first appear as attached primarily to single characteristic marks.
        The weak points of the view lie in the facts (1) that Herder leaves the origin of the word as a result of the necessity of communication, entirely unnoticed: and it is surely to be assumed that impulse of feeling and the necessity of communication both potently influenced the origin of the first word; and (2) that the so-called onomatopoetic creation of language, that is, the designation of things by the sounds they make, has not yet been confirmed by any extant language. Single words, like cuckoo, and the like, prove nothing; and many names that appear to us as imitations can
[5]      
be traced back to other roots that show no imitational origin whatsoever. All the languages we know, on the contrary reveal an inner conceptual connection between words that denote some crying, sounding object, and primitive roots designating some human activity. Herder himself, at a later period, gave up his theory of imitations of sound, and again adopted that of the revelation of language. His work on the "Origin of Language," however, still remains the earliest really philosophical work on the subject, and may claim the merit of having pointed out the true road upon which an explanation is to be sought.

         The Interjectional Theory.

        Another attempt at explanation is that which seeks to derive language from interjections, and which Max Müller accordingly calls the Pooh-pooh theory. This also possesses a certain degree of probability, for account is taken herein of the necessity of giving vent to inner emotion by sounds and ejaculations, as also of the endeavor to communicate with others, and above all, of the example of animals, whose neighing, barking, roaring, crowing, and so forth, might seem to represent a prototype — an abortive effort to acquire phonetic speech. But in the investigation of known human languages this principle, unfortunately, does not find any kind of confirmation; no more so than does the attempt to regard the separate letters or sounds of a word as symbolical vehicles of its meaning — as the w in wind and wave, the I in fluo, light, love, and so forth. Serious philological science regards all such attempts as failures, or at best as ingenious diversions.
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         Max Müller’s Theory

        The theory propounded by Max Müller himself, which has been jocosely called the Ding-dong theory, is even less tenable. This distinguished scholar thinks, that in every being a peculiar typical sound was planted; that originally in man there existed a copious phonetic world—a real spring-time of speech—that tunefully responded to the impressions of reality. This is a true petitio principii, and explains nothing. For we are still compelled to ask how and when this world of sound passed into man, and how man came to apply it to things; and we should be obliged always to fall back to the stage at which the first sound came forth. And then we should be no farther ahead than before.
        Still it is quite easy to understand why so eminent a scholar as Max Müller should have hit upon this singular idea. He was probably led astray by his observation of children, to whom we usually turn when in search of information concerning anything primitively human. Now, it is true, daily experience teaches that there exists in children an impulse to speech, an incitation to language, and that they early strive to call objects by the names they have heard. And it has frequently been my experience that highly intelligent men, to whom I had propounded Geiger's theory of the priority of words to concepts, at once resorted to the following counter-argument: "But look at children. No sooner do they perceive things than they designate them by words of their own creation, which bear scarcely any similarity to those which have been taught them. What is that but an awakening of
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the instinct of speech?" This, it must be admitted, is true. But the genuine science of today is no longer satisfied with reasoning of this kind. It demands an explanation of the word; it demands an account of its origin.
        The speech-instinct of the child is the repetition of that long line of development which, we must assume, proceeded from the origin of language up to the present day. So long as the child does not feel this instinct, so long as it merely contemplates, touches, cries, asks for food, and so on, up to that time it represents the period of speechless humanity—the time at which human nature had not as yet separated from animal nature. And the fact, too, that the child even during this period, before it begins to form concepts, actually evinces an interest in objects, grasps at them, and throws them away, this fact might seem to.suggest that even speechless humanity handled certain working-tools of its own. But the language-instinct is a thing ingrafted in the child during a long succession of generations. Our scientific curiosity, however, asks for information concerning a time shrouded in the deepest darkness, when the "word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," when instinctive life first began to pass into the clear consciousness of speaking humanity.

         Geiger's Researches.

        To Geiger the further honor is due of having shown that the oldest root-words, at least as far back as they can be traced, express a human act, a human gesture; and he rightly observes that this act must probably have been that which was the most interesting to man,
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that of which he first had knowledge, which most strongly riveted his attention, and which sympathetically re-echoed in his breast. This fact is to be particularly noted. In our intercourse with our fellow-beings our countenance gradually assumes an expression like that of the human counterpart before us; tears and laughter are contagious; when we see a person in imminent danger of life, we ourselves anxiously go through the very movements which the person must make to escape from the danger he is in: the imitation of human actions is so natural to us that we immediately feel and reproduce the cheerful expression of joy, the convulsion and depression of pain, as well as scorn and menace. In view of this fact Geiger believes that the first cry of language must have been an aping reflex of the face of another, accompanied — from the fact that it was the result of emotion — by sound. (Here, of course, we should have had visual percept and speech-sound in one.) And he held that a sound of this kind, periodically repeated, must have recalled to mind a definite perception, sensation, or visual image, and that thus the first word, of whose content, of course, we can have no idea, might have originated.
        Be this as it may, it remains indisputable that everywhere in the designations of things we meet with human action as that which first rendered objects interesting. This human activity, is, of course, as yet entirely identical with animal activity. The Greek δέρω, to flay, counts among its descendants δέρμα, skin, δόρυ, wood, δρῦς, tree, and the English tree. Skin is that which is pulled off; wood "that which is
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stripped of bark; and so, tree. This same law, with wonderful consistency, appears also in a number of words that, judging them from their present meaning, scarcely seem to exhibit any connection whatsoever. Night, through the notion dark, black, is carried back to the Sanskrit root ang, Latin ungo, to dye, to smear; ground and terra to a root denoting to grind, to crumble; corn denotes something that has been husked; thunder (a word that certainly sounds onomatopoetic), according to Max Müller, must be referred to the Sanskrit root tan, to stretch, and is akin to tone or the sound peculiar to a stretched cord. In the same manner tener, tender, must be derived from thin, and the latter again from the fact of tension. Schreiben, γράφω, and scribere, as well as the English write and the German Riss, are identical with a root denoting ritzen, to scratch. From the root da, to bind, are derived words of the following meanings: yoke, gird, husband, twins, sister, house, and innumerable others. Language designates tools by words that correspond to the human acts which they promote; they are actively symbolised, so to speak. Scissors, hatchets, and saws are things that shear (Swedish skâra, sickle), hack, and saw. Everywhere, in all the formations of words with which we are familiar, the conceptual element is seen to prevail, but nowhere do we find direct imitation of the sounds of nature. The names of the majority of animals and plants designate the creatures and things to which they refer, by color; and almost in all languages we recognise as the most primitive roots, human and animal acts symbolised in the form of some characteristic gesture or posture; and even
[10]    
in historical times we find, that the development and growth of language follow exactly the same course. The abstract figure is traceable to a word that denotes to knead a soft clay. The beautiful German word Dichter (poet) suggests the primitive untutored bard, who was originally wont to dictate to a scribe the words of his own invention. And, moreover, if the imitation of the sounds of nature had originally been the principle according to which words were formed, it certainly would have occupied an extensive place in languages, and would have long remained perceptible and continued perhaps in active operation down to the present day.
        It is unmistakable that we have approached through this explanation considerably nearer to the dark depths from which the fountain of speech first bubbled. The further question, — elsewhere touched upon — as to whether man first possessed tools or speech, Geiger decides in favor of the latter; and he bases his argument upon the fact, that the names of tools and of the results they bring about, are expressed by roots that denote human physical acts; hence, that all words denoting grinding (mahlen), milling, and the like, were originally connected with mat, mar (mordeo), which meant to bruise, to crush with the fingers, and probably also to crush with the teeth. Sculpo to cut out with a chisel, is a collateral form of scalpo, which originally meant to scratch with the nails. The root ve, the basis of our weave, is traced back by Geiger, with a reference to vimen, with (willow), to the oldest practised art; namely, the twisting of branches into lodge-nests for primitive man, which afterwards led to weaving or plaiting, an art possessed by all savage tribes.
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        But I must confess that to my mind this last argument possesses very little weight. Man, it is true, did not have complicated, or even perfect, tools before the possession of speech,—perhaps not even mill-stones; but I am inclined to doubt, whether, notwithstanding this fact, he might not have designated crushing with stones and teeth interchangeably by the same root, as well as all scraping with the hands and a stone, which latter in this case would merely be a part of the hand.
        There is also something far-fetched in Geiger's hypothesis respecting the origin of the first word. His sympathetic aping reflection of a gesture with accompanying speech-sound, I must admit, seems a rather bold abstraction, in which Geiger manifestly wished to comprise the three factors met with in the oldest roots : (1) the phonetic word, (2) the visual percept, and (3) human posture or gesture as the expression of an act.

         Noiré's conception.

        Now I take it that man, who like the ape and other animals is a social being, very early acquired a power of communication, that is, a language of gesture or attitude. Nothing stands in the way of such an assumption, since we find this faculty very distinctly marked and extensively represented throughout the entire animal kingdom. Animals are trained to the expression of significant gestures, as birds are to song, which is at the same time the expression of an inner emotion and a kind of communication, being intended either to allure the female, or to entertain the brooding bird. It is therefore not at all impossible, that in the case of primeval men, living gregariously, gestures were developed with a definite conceptual content, es-
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tablished as such, and transmitted by training to after generations. We must, of course, conceive these gestures as a summons to some appointed act or task, as we find to be the case with ants, termites, bees, etc. It would suffice now for some vehement animated ges-ticulatory action of this kind to be accompanied in every instance by a peculiar sound — let us call to mind, for example, the many different sounds by which a dog accompanies his signs of joy, grief, submission, repentance, and impatience—and in consequence thereof this gesture could very well be recalled to mind by the sound; while, following the law of development, the former would gradually recede, and the latter ultimately attain absolute supremacy. As stated, this is highly possible, and it increases in probability when we take note of the fact that savage nations, ignorant persons, and people who do not perfectly understand a language, are always wont to emphasise their words by lively gesticulation.
        A possible origin of this kind ought to satisfy completely our inquisitiveness; agreeably to what Dugald Stewart, quoted by Max Müller, maintains:

         "In examining the history of mankind, as well as in examining the phenomena of the material world, when we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of Importance to be able to show how it may have been produced by natural causes. Thus, although it is impossible to determine with certainty what the steps were by which any particular language was formed, yet If we can show, from the known principles of human nature, how all its various parts might gradually have arisen, the mind is not only to a certain degree satisfied, but a check is given to that indolent philosophy which refers to a miracle whatever appearances, both in the natural and moral worlds, it is unable to explain."

        Any one who will survey the successive development of things as they start from the simplest ele-
[13]    
ments, and through continued combinations effected by the influence of the external world, early deviate so much from their origin that the- latter is scarcely longer recognisable, will surely admit that the most cutting sneer to be levelled at speculative philosophy, in its confidence of victory, would be to demand it to construct a camel a priori. But empiric historical science has also cause to be modest, notwithstanding that it follows the much surer road, constantly controlled by present events, of inference from that which now exists to what before existed; in which process it employs as basis the solid foundation of innumerable facts, upon which it constructs ever narrowing stages reaching up to an apex of unity, while the speculative method endeavors to rest its complete structure upon that apex.
        I shall try to show by an example, how abundantly also inductive science has cause to be satisfied w'ith the possibility of explanation. I shall suppose that after the lapse of a few thousand years literary tradition had suffered an interruption, and that the world was entirely left in the dark concerning the scientific researches of our present epoch. Electricity will, by that time, have become of tremendous importance, and have found, application in all departments of life. Let us suppose now that some historian starts the question (as the case is in our own time with the question of fire) of how and in what manner humanity at first obtained possession and knowledge of this wonderful natural agency. Does anybody really fancy that the historian by continuous and successive influences would ultimately light upon the fact that once
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upon a time a certain physicist had hung up frog's-legs by iron hooks upon copper rods? Certainly not. But a thousand possibilities will occur to him, and with these he will rest satisfied.
        I shall now, in addition to those above set forth, submit another hypothesis, which also conforms to experience as deduced from animal life, and the possibility of which will hardly be contested by any one.
        If we examine the phonetic utterances of the animal world, we shall find that their foundation is a variety of inner impulses, but that there is always present the endeavor to make these impulses intelligible to others. We find, principally, three kinds of sounds; viz.:
        1. Calls of Allurement, or Summons. These are an expression of emotion, accompanied by an obscure percept, and they aim at influencing the will and acts of a kindred being.
        2. War-Cries. Also the expression of emotion. They endeavor to arouse fear and dismay in an enemy.
        3. Calls of Warning. Only among social animals. Emotion co-operates. The percept prevails. Endeavor to work upon the will of others by arousing a similar percept.
        It is not difficult to discern in these three categories the subsoil of human speech. All three have this in common with one another, that they spring from the inner world of emotion, and strive in turn to awaken emotion — the first and third a kindred, and the second an opposite emotion. In the first there is present also either an obscure percept, as, for instance, that of a female, or a still clearer one, as when the hen
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calls her brood to newly discovered food. So, too, in the third, is the percept of impending danger, which bv the cry, is also excited in distant or dispersed companions.
        The first human sound that deserved the name of word, could not have differed from these animal sounds except by a higher degree of luminousness in the percepts or images which accompanied it and were awakened by it. Discipline must have helped to bring it about that such a sound — just as the notes of a bird — upon being often repeated, became a kind of representative sign, which, along with the sensation, also excited the faint image. Such sounds are interjections. But interjections are not adapted to the formation of language, because the emotional element still prevails in them to such an extent that clear and tranquil percepts cannot form, and, therefore, cannot originate from the same. On the other hand, we are able to imagine many possible ways in which a sound as yet involved in the animal stage of development could become the representative of a definite, independent percept.
        Should any one interpose, that for such a huge edifice my hypothesis assumes a much too narrow basis, let him call to mind the example I cited above, in which, from the twitching of a frog's leg, through continuous combinations and mental efforts, the mysterious, hardly dreamed of, domain of electricity was put within the reach of human knowledge and power. What we call chance has demonstrably played a principal part at the beginning of the most important and difficult advances of human civilisation. Such is the
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case with the acquisition of the agency of fire, which, like tools, language, and religion, constitutes a truly distinctive characteristic of man; how variously may we not imagine its origin to have been, and how many accidents may not have borne an active share in that origin! At all events, the task required human energy, and, as Geiger says, we have reason to admire the boldness that accomplished that feat, never before achieved, when man, for the first time, approached the dreaded flame and carried aloft over the earth the burning log of wood — an inspired act, without precedent in the animal world, and of immeasurable consequence to the development of human civilisation. And if we compare the oldest form of implement for the production of fire by friction — as it is still found among savage tribes, and even among civilised nations in certain religious practices — which was a simple piece of wood bored into a softer piece and set on fire by continuous twirling; when we compare such an implement with the holes that are found bored in the same way in stone axes, we are readily led to assume that accident was the origin of this acquisition, and that from this single thing and its further retention and application all the rest resulted.
        I assume that antecedently to the rise of language, men lived together in herds or tribes. War, at that time, was the universal natural state; war against animals of other species, as well as against neighboring tribes of the same species. It is not improbable that a peculiar sound or call united the members of each single tribe, so that by setting up their cry they could call together those who were distant, dispersed, or had
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lost their way, or could mutually encourage one another when engaged in battle with a neighboring tribe. Let us suppose now that once a member of one tribe had warned his companions of the approach of another tribe, by imitating the call or cry of the latter; we should have here the origin of the first human word, for this would be an instance where consciously and intentionally an idea had been excited in the minds of like and kindred creatures.
        We have thus, in the most natural manner, conducted into the province of the human word that which we found in. the animal state—namely, the call of allurement, the war-cry, and the call of warning.
        Geiger truly observes that "the thing of greatest interest to man has always been man," and seeks, accordingly, for the oldest designation of language in the expression of human acts. But I should be greatly surprised if man as man was not earlier manifest and noticeable than any of his single acts, even his most expressive pantomime or gesture. This latter is air ways an abstraction, and it.seems to me that, not its immediate perceptive knowledge of course, but its being comprehended and designated by a word, must have involved an enormous antecedent development. Man entire, on the other hand, is a perfectly concrete, known, and ever-recurring fact. Look at the animal world. Animals, aside from that which interests and affects their sensual, iife, wherein they are guided by instinct, first of all'.acquire intelligent knowledge of individuals of their own species, their friends and their foes, other animals, and men. The marmot knows his enemies, attacks the dog, assails man and tries to dis-
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able him. The dog knows his master: the dog of Ulysses recognised his master when no one else knew him.

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        I now ask the reader to accompany me in the following course of observation :
        In addition to the instincts of nutrition, movement, and the like, which find their immediate expression through the life of the senses, there are further present in young animals and men, born in them, certain obscure ideas or percepts, and among these ideas is found, because it is the most natural of all, the idea or percept of beings that are exactly like themselves. Just as the bird builts its nest, so does the infant know its mother, who from the beginning constitutes its entire world. It conceives, at the very outset, the entire external world as constituted like itself (Will Against Will).[2]
        The child cries, it gets angry, it has desires, it is
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amiable. Its most natural perceptual idea, therefore, is that of being like itself, the representation of a distinct personality, which, since it appears to it as a mother administering nutrition, love, and care, is indeed the most important and the most interesting of all things about it. The first word that a child learns is that which denotes its mother; that word bursts forth from its emotional life, from the impulse of its will, and is accompanied by an actual represented image.
        Are we not, accordingly, justified in the inference, that the primum cognitum was also the primum appellatum? That is, that the most natural, the most intelligible, and the most interesting percept, first and before all, was the cause of the first word.
        Among the philosophers who have given their attention to this subject, this view has been both rejected (Leibnitz) and accepted (Condillac, Locke, Adam Smith). Some maintain that the earliest words were proper names; others, that they were nouns appellative. Max Müller decides the question in this way. He assumes three stages: the first is where the object is designated after some quality or attribute (cavea, cave, from Sanskrit root ku, to hide), where, accordingly, a general idea is applied to a particular object and becomes its proper name, just as in the case in which a man first received the name of Great Head; secondly, that this proper name is thereupon transferred to all, or to many things like it; and, thirdly, that these names are thereby raised to the rank of appellatives or names of a genus.
        This solution suffers from the drawback that it is
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not a solution. When Max Müller says, "The first thing really known is the general," we are entitled to ask, How came man by the knowledge and the designation of this "general"? To be sure, at a time when men were already in the possession of a couple of hum dred words by which they designated acts, qualities, and characteristics, they may very naturally have applied such roots to the characterisation of things — called their river, for example, Ach (water) or Rhine (the flowing), their sea Saivs (the agitated), their lake Meer (originally: a soft, marshy mass). A name of this kind might then continue a proper name, or become an appellative. Even at the present day we may understand sea both as proper name and general concept, specialised by adjectives: as "the White Sea," "the Black Sea." Permutations of this kind have taken place at all times and are being continually employed even at the present day. The "Red one," the "Black one," in this sense, become proper names; Tartuffe and Eulenspiegel, in French, are names appellative. The magnet (derived from the city of Magnesia) has given the designation of "magnetic" to one of the most generally diffused forces, qualities — that is, attributes — of things.
        Of this problem I myself shall now attempt a solution, and, as I trust, with somewhat better success. By two examples I shall briefly illustrate the subject as conceived by the eminent men referred to:
        Adam Smith, Condillac, and Locke say: A child calls every man "papa," every young man "uncle" or "Charley," or something similar; hence proper names were the first names.
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        Leibnitz says: Children call every person man, and use most frequently such words as thing, plant, animal; hence general terms were the first words.
        But how easily this contradiction is dissipated when we take into consideration the fact that from the start there is presented to the child, on the one hand, only a limited number of words, and on the other, an equally limited number of sensory perceptions! Both these classes, now, are mixed up with one another; that is, with some one certain word the child associates a number of similar sensory percepts, which it confounds and interchanges, because as yet it does not know their differences. And the words which the child most frequently hears from its parents are either very special in character, denoting beings that it meets oftenest, as papa, uncle, and the like, or words of a very general significance; which stands to reason, since one cannot at once teach a child words like "forget-me-not," "rhinoceros," "shoe-maker," and so forth. Naturally, therefore, the child arranges all the facts of its experience under the head of words like those above cited, and since it soon learns to distinguish "papa" and "uncle" from all other beings, the general terms at the second stage of its development alone remain to it. But no inference can properly be drawn from facts of this kind, because we are not concerned here with words invented by the child itself, but with others that have been communicated to it from a higher stage of culture. The child's activity is at first one of generalisation; that is, of connecting phenomena that repeatedly occur, with some one word that stands at its disposal. Only later does it learn to classify and sub-
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divide correctly, as when it hears that "the Rhine is a river," "the Hudson is a river," "the Mississippi is a river."
        From observations of this sort but one thing can inferentially be established. Namely, this: that language at its origin designated by its first words those objects that were the most striking and the most interesting to man, and proceeded then, by the help of these words, to generalise—that is, to attach similar things to some single word. The marked importance of some object, which constantly occurred in some particular, isolated form, naturally must have led to the attribution of some particular name to that object, and proper names, accordingly, very probably belong to the oldest words of humanity.
        The science of language has proved that the roots from which the words of today have risen, originally denoted definite acts. But considering the endless flux of the meanings of words and of the contents of concepts, it is very difficult to assert that those meanings — which are the furthermost limits that science by retrogressive inference has reached — were their original primitive meanings; in other words, that the root da at its origin means to bind, ga to go, mar to grind. Even Geiger's ingenious hypothesis, that the first word originated from the imitation of a facial gesture accompanied by the simultaneous utterance of sound, is somewhat forced; for here we miss the element of communication, which even in the animal world was considerably developed, and from which, doubtless, also human speech sprung.
        The single and individual acts of man, as we have
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remarked, are also abstractions, the representation and connection of which by means of the word cannot be put at the beginning, for the cogent reason that in infant development we observe that the child fixes by words only that which is personal and thus of frequent recurrence, whereas flitting and transient acts and gestures only affect its sensory life, make the child cry or laugh, but do not produce calm reflection. We are much inclined, therefore, to assign such roots as "biting," "grinning," "rubbing," "smearing," and so forth, to the second stage of the evolution of language. We cannot regard them as the original starting-point of language.
        On the contrary, for reasons that have been partly alleged, we should rather assume that the names of individual men, the names by which they were called, and proper names, were the earliest words. This, moreover, explains a problem that has long occupied the attention of the most eminent thinkers; namely, how man, amidst the universal flight of phenomena and the concourse of the things of the external world, was able to fix and retain the particular, and, at once by the aid of the word, to raise it to the general concept. This is a faculty genuinely and purely human; one which we must endeavor to bring home to ourselves as distinctly as possible. We listen to the human words so naturally imitated by the parrot, or to a dog that barks at. us and manifestly tries to tell us something in his own language; and all this affords us great satisfaction, for we perceive in it, distinctly drawn, the line of demarcation between man and beast. But to hear an animal consciously utter even a single human word, would fill us with dismay.

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        As we have stated, the creation of language, the greatest miracle of which consists in the phenomenon that amidst the universal dissolution and flux of intuitions it isolates by the phonetic word a single percept, and by degrees condenses that percept into a mental image, as something subsisting-by itself,—this creation of language can only owe its existence to some natural and immediate contingency. It must originally have operated with regard to objects whose duration, stability, and isolation from other natural phenomena had been discovered and established beyond the shadow of a doubt; whose mental representation, as well by means of inner capacity of comprehension (innate representative power of things like us) as by the constant recurrence of the real object itself, became so clear, so fixed, and unequivocal, that it could be said that the representation of this object sprang forth with the word from the head of man, like Pallas, in full and complete panoply! But this object must have been our companion and homologue man, and hence the names by which men were called, their appellations, were the first words.[3]
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        But are we able to conceive of a way in which these proper names could have become actual general names, and general concepts thus begun their silent yet continuous operation? I do not believe that this can prove so difficult a task. It would suffice that a number of such sounds were given, arid that the images of the individuals thus denoted should be constantly called to mind by the utterance of the sound; in such a case, in time, some peculiar feature of some one of these objects might, at the utterance of the word, gradually become excited in the mind of the hearer and become attached to the word itself. I intentionally leave this exposition in its present vague and general form, because a person cannot be too cautious in speaking of that primeval time of transition from animality to humanity, and because every step forward must be made with the utmost circumspection. I merely recall to mind, that in the case even of people of the present day, baptismal names are during early childhood usually not employed as appellations or names by which children are called, but that some name is invented, suggestive of some striking peculiarity of the child, or often in imitation of some favorite sound uttered by the child itself. We might, accordingly, merely reverse the process we are considering, by supposing in a given individual the presence of some peculiar movement of the mouth, with a showing of the teeth, and to fancy this peculiarity also present in another person, and finally, to imagine that the
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name of the former (phonetically, perhaps, connected with the peculiarity in question) be transferred to the latter individual. In an hypothesis of this kind we should have the first beginning of the formation of the concept. "What a feeble beginning!" the reader will exclaim. But let him bear in mind how faint, upon the whole, are all beginnings in the organic world. It is an unquestionable result of modern linguistic research, that the names of most animals are derived from colors. The variety and heterogeneousness of colors were circumstances that very early interested man. Hence, may it not be legitimate to infer that the appellation of some certain man who was distinguished by a certain color, and thus necessarily brought to mind that color, was in the lapse of time conferred upon others who were conspicuous by reason of the same characteristic, and that by degrees it was transferred to animals, and finally became a generic name?
        We have spoken of the part that appellations and proper names'very probably played in the formation of language. I leave it to the reader to follow out the hypothesis I have advanced, and shall only compare my theory with those that other philosophers have propounded, to point out wherein it differs from theirs and wherein it may be justified in opposition to theirs.
        1) In Herder's otherwise ingenious theory the element that occasions and forcibly produces speech-utterance is entirely relegated to the background. We cannot see what could have induced man to imitate the bleating of the lamb, and to attach the concept of the lamb to that imitation. According to this theory,
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primitive man must have been a meditative philosopher, an embryonic scientist; but this he surely was not.
        The theory of proper names upheld by Condillac, Adam Smith, and the rest, bears throughout the stamp of the eighteenth century, which with its customary subjective bias attributed to primitive man the reflective powers and intelligent purpose of later eras. According to Adam Smith two savages are supposed to agree in denoting a pond, a tree, and a cave by a given peculiar sound, and later to have conferred these proper names upon other objects. But even a tacit agreement of this character, the very perception, in fact, of the pond or tree as independent things, required a capacity of thought that could be the result only of'centuries of employment of speech.
        Geiger's theory — incontestably the profoundest of all that have hitherto been advanced — is based on the fact of science that in all languages the object is never immediately translated into the word, but that a concept is in every case evolved from a concept, and sound from sound. "Even proper names," says Geiger, "were all originally words that had a meaning." As far back as the science of language leads us to the most primitive meanings of roots, from which all words have been formed, the roots denote some human act plainly exhibited in gesture or attitude.
        When we take into consideration the fact that language unquestionably originated in the necessity of communication (the parent of speech) it does not seem impossible that a sound summoning men to some works or other may have been the first word, as yet of
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very indefinite content, but which afterwards through various similar sounds became differentiated. But just the most important element of the soul of language is here lacking — that tranquillity which is so necessary for reflection and the incipient fixation of percepts. Cries of this kind are and will remain interjections, the essential office of which is to bring about an immediate effect without the help of any further representation, especially as they are enforced by perfectly significant gestures, which in themselves constitute a sufficient language.
        Proper names are, to be sure, words of a meaning. But if we recall to mind the particular occasions upon which at the present day we are led to designate a being by a name — to repeat, as it were, the primitive process of creation — we shall find that it is upon the occasion of the millions of cases in which we bestow a proper name upon a man or animal. The fact that among the thousands of proper names from certain plausible motives we should pick out just this or that name; that the Indian should call his offspring Sleeper, Runner, or Cat — this does not in the least detract from the importance of the fact. Thus, when for a long time we call a child by some endearing name, like Da-da, Ba-ba, or the like, we actually bestow upon the child a new name, suggested by some correspondent peculiarity. We have, therefore, thing and name, and not concept from concept. This point must not be underrated. It clearly speaks, in addition to the reasons previously adduced, in favor of the primitiveness of appellations, or names by which individuals were called. Once again let me repeat that the rep-
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resentation or percept of a congeneric being is the clearest of all perceptual representations: the calling bird possesses it as distinctly as it does the innate percept of its nest. The perception of limbs, of parts, or of acts, is an advanced abstraction. But the percept and recognition of congeneric man was so natural to the primeval human being that he applied it to everything, and believed that every force acting upon him emanated from a will like his own — just as a dog will bark at the wind because he believes that it blows intentionally against him. And the most natural, simplest, most innate, and, at the same time, the most interesting percept must have been earliest fixed by a sound, and have shaped itself into the first word.
        I revert again, in conclusion, to the hypothetical example before adduced, in which the war-cry of a tribe was supposed to become, among neighboring tribes, the designation of that tribe. If it is true, as it certainly must be, that the tribal community during the earliest periods of social life wholly absorbs and subordinates the individual so that he can scarcely as yet be conceived as individualised, the hypothesis which I advanced as the possible origin of speech obtains a certain degree of probability; and granting that at any time but a single representation became connected with the word, it follows that the hitherto dormant power of creation of language must have been thereby stimulated, and have begun its at first hidden and humble activity, until at last the day dawned when the original springlets broadened into a river, and the rivers into the boundless ocean of the human minds as evolved through language.
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        Let the reader but endeavor to recall to mind when and under what circumstances the most immediately and hardly controllable impulse to utter a sound arises, and he will be obliged to admit that it is at the moment of the highest exultation of happiness (the huzza of the mountaineers), or of deepest sorrow. This impulse is not granted to insociable beings. Beasts of prey have only decoy-calls and sounds that excite fear. Cold-blooded animals possess no utterance of the kind whatsoever. Hence the most primitive impulse to the utterance of sound originated first of all in the feeling of sympathy, and had the power, also, to awaken sympathy.
        But there is a fact of observation far more important still, to the effect that whenever a common feeling becomes very intense, particularly when a common sensation, or the consciousness and impulse of common action, takes possession of men, sound spontaneously and involuntarily awakes in the vibratory organs of our body and bursts irresistibly forth. Any one, who as a boy, has been caught with the enthusiasm of juvenile combat, or any one who on some important emergency has lent a helping hand to some urgent work, for example, to pull ashore a ship in distress — will at once understand the truth, of this remark. The howl of the baboon, in putting a pack.of dogs to flight, is the prototype of this impulse within the animal world.
        Sounds like these, accordingly, must have been established and developed with certain peculiarities during that pre-linguistic period when man still lived as' an associate member of a tribe or herd, and it is a
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perfectly consistent inference to assume that the diversities and contrasts of the separate tribes were attached and clung to these highly characteristic sounds.
        In this way I have accepted and fully utilised in my hypothesis all that is undoubtedly true in the theory propounded by Max Müller, which, we will remember, was, that a certain sound is peculiar to every being, and that the spontaneous utterance of this sound is the most immediate expression of its nature.
        What I regard as the chief excellence of my hypothesis is this: that it alone can explain how man, amidst the fleeting, ever-dissolving world of phenomena, acquired the faculty to isolate a thing, to retain it and to unite it with the word as a permanent perceptual existence, a faculty denied all animals, and which in the course of natural development has led to general concepts and to the origin of human reason.
        The first words were appellations of tribes or individual men; and their perceptual content comprised all that was known or observed of these tribes and men.
        Even at the present day these words of all words are the most significant. Let the reader only ask himself whether he knows of any word replete with greater significance than that representing a beloved being, or than words like: The Romans, Shakespeare, Beethoven.

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        But to close. In the statements above presented, I have endeavored, by the aid of the established results of modern linguistic research, to construct the lines by which a point is to be approximately deter-
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mined which otherwise must have remained inaccessible to research.
        The reader must not forget that I have merely sought, in my hypothesis, to disclose the possible origin of language. In this obscure province, of course, certainty can never be attained. In conclusion, there, fore I shall propound another hypothesis, which likewise comprehends the possible origin of speech, and which is likewise worthy of our attention.
        It is a peculiarity of the law of evolution, which will be found corroborated in the most various fields, that a number of co-operating forces or factors may produce a direction of development which is virtually amazing when it is discovered that the development makes directly in favor of some apparently wholly immaterial element, and is even guided by the latter. We are very apt to forget, herein, that the stronger forces balance one another, and that the significant factor — like the drop of water that causes the glass to run over — naturally gains a decided preponderance. I shall give a few examples.
        That Louis Napoleon, in the year 1849, could open the way to his subsequent political success was owing in great measure to the circumstance that the other national parties were engaged in violent quarrels; that no reconciliation or mediation seemed possible, and that partly weary of internal strife, and partly prompted by the notion that the "president" would prove a "mannequin" an "imbécille" the people at last accepted his dominancy. Such really is the rational explanation of the historical evolution of France for a period of more than twenty years. And from
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exactly similar causes — from the implacable hatred of Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Socialists — grew up the septennate of MacMahon. We thus see that from the co-operation of different forces there frequently results an intermediate phenomenon, which is entirely different, the individual traits therein not being recognisable.
        I shall further illustrate this point by a notable example borrowed from aesthetics. In Schiller's beautiful ballad "The Cranes of Ibicus" (Die Kraniche des Ibykus) the exclamation of the murderer: "Behold, Timotheus, the Cranes of Ibicus!" (Sieh da, sieh da, Timotheus, die Kraniche des Ibykus) has been misunderstood by most readers. Or, they will say that it is trivial, that the poet suddenly drops from his lofty style into the commonplace. This is a great mistake, a lack of sound aesthetic discernment. One thinks that the impressive chorus of the Eumenides ought to have been followed by a divine voice, crying: The murderer of Ibicus is Timotheus! Another maintains that the murderer, deeply affected, ought to have rushed into the midst of the arena, and exclaimed: I committed the deed! A third believes that the cranes ought to have pounced on the murderer and thus drawn upon him the revenge of the people. But the great poet skilfully avoided such lame methods, and chose an intermediate expedient that implies and includes the ones above suggested. For, in that the murderer at the appearance of the cranes utters his indiscreet cry, (1) the cranes have actually fulfilled their mission (we behold the stately, ominous flight of the silent accusers, amidst the stillness of the crowded
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amphitheatre) ; (2) the Eumenides also have revealed their power, because amid general consternation and awful silence the name of the murderer loudly resounded; (3) the murderers have really and truly, against their wish, impeached themselves.
        It would thus be well for our sesthetical critics, instead of attempting to shine by their own feeble light, ever and deferentially to seek instruction and enlightenment from the grand and inspired instincts of our great poets.
        But to revert to the subject of language. At its origin we had to assume two main factors; namely, visual representation, or the inner perceptual image that man wished to excite in his fellow-men, and the means to effect this excitement — gesture or pantomime. Under the impulse of the moment this gesture was at all times accompanied by an inarticulate sound. If the reader ever witnessed untutored deaf and dumb people trying to express their wants by means of gesture-language, he will thoroughly understand what I mean. Gesture, accordingly, is the main point; sound is only an accompanying subsidiary element.
        Now, this sound which with different gestures, took on peculiar modifications, by virtue of this very differentiation was able to attain a still more significant kind of independence.[4] And if we merely suppose
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two primitive roots, for example He, he, or Ge, ge, the call accompanied by the represented idea that the individual called is to come, and Haw, haw, denoting that he is to go—we already have an origin of language from which the same roots might evolve into others. In anticipation of the shallow irony of opposing critics, I shall baptise this theory of mine the Gee-haw theory, and ask whether even the calls of peasants to their horses are not also a kind of creation of language.
        This hypothesis gains a high degree of probability from the fact that as far as our knowledge reaches, the oldest roots were really the expression of human gestures.
        In this theory are also very distinctly represented all the impulses and motives which must be supposed to have operated in the first creation of language; namely, (1) the necessity of communication, (2) the
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sound emanating from common and concerted effort, (3) the gesture that originates from the perceptual image, and that naturally (4) is transformed into a gesture that tallies as closely as possible with this representation, and finally (5) the fixation of the connection between sound and perceptual image, which is effected through frequent reiteration.