CONTENTS

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        3/ The Origin of Reason.[1]

        If I were to tell a man who had never seen ice and was wondering what had happened to a lake in winter, "The water is frozen," this would be an explanation. This explanation contains two elements, viz.:
        (1) A sound, which certainly cannot contribute in the least to the explication of the matter.
        (2) A concept, which in its accurate acceptance likewise implies no more than the phenomenon itself, as present before us and as received by us.
        Why is this simple statement then accepted as satisfactory? Here is a difficult question, and it may not be answered without a consideration of the nature and origin of reason. Locke has dealt with the problem and deduced from it the uncertainty and mere seemingness of most human knowledge.
        The distinctive feature of my answer to the man is that the phenomenon is generalized by the concept "frozen" or, more correctly, included under a general definition.
        Concepts are generalizations, and it is these generalized concepts that constitute the substance of human knowledge.
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        When it is real cold, all living creatures feel it. But only the human being can say: "I am cold." A man can say this on a hot summer's day, he can think it, even when not affected by it. Why? Because he possesses general concepts.
        And how has he come to possess them? This is the most perplexing of the questions that touch humanity, for it touches the origin of reason, and reason is man.
        If I should say, "Man thinks because he speaks; he has general concepts because he has words," I know that nine-tenths of my readers would shake their heads and say: "No. Man speaks because he thinks." All great truths are known first as paradoxes, and a long time elapses before people become accustomed to them, before they leave the old way of thinking and accommodate themselves to the new. How long it was before men would distrust their eyes, and believe that it was the earth that revolved and not the sun!
        Words are the fixed points which define the limits of the concepts they have brought into existence. Without words there would be only fleeting, shadowy and disorderly impressions. An idea has never existed in man without its material counter part, the word. And yet I do not say that with every word as a sound there must be an accompanying idea. Parrots imitate our words, yet produce only sounds; to them they are sounds and nothing else, just as the words of an unknown tongue are mere sounds to us. The sound is
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dead, the word is alive and the life of a word is in the idea.
        The great problem is, how ideas are united with sounds and thus made alive. This question has engaged the attention of philosophers of all ages, while great acumen and imaginative talent have been exercised " in its solution. System upon system arose wherein fancy and imagination were given full scope, and I firmly believe there is no topic upon which so great a variety of opinions has been expressed and so many treatises written as upon the origin of language. It was intuitively felt that this was the point to place the lever, and that, if their efforts to move the rock which buried the secret would be successful, a fountain of everlasting and living truth would leap forth to clarify the province of human thought and human activity.
        Yet, to reach this point, the flights of fancy were first to be restrained. This was accomplished by comparative philology. Its cardinal and motive principle was: There is a methodical, a scientific line of investigation which will lead to this secret and its elucidation. Critical jthought and not dogmatic doctrine must guide us here, and careful investigations of empirical facts are to form the basis of all our conclusions. Whatever the ultimate result of our efforts may be, it is not permissible to determine it beforehand and employ it hypothetically, be its merits what they may. Modern science has materially modified the ideas of former times. The interest which, from the time of
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Plato to the eighteenth century, fettered philosophical thought to such topics as these, has been displaced by new interests of a totally different character. How radical these changes have been needs no better illustration than the fact that the Societe de Linguistique in Paris, ranking among its members the foremost philologists of France, declares in one of the best clauses of its constitution, "it will accept no manner of contribution relating to the origin of language or the construction of a universal tongue."[2]
        Thereafter imaginative works ceased to figure in this realm. This was necessary and beneficent if we consider what they had achieved. Yet philosophy, too, was banished from the province of philological investigation—a province in which philosophy is ordained to act a vital part—and this was unwise.
        For what else is philosophy than the discovering of comprehensive and general points of view in all sciences? It is not the empirical material gathered together; it is the wonderful power of thought that has raised Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton to the rank of heroes in Natural Science.
        With that interdict the question of the origin of language was banished from its natural and true sphere. The question was occasionally touched upon hy the physiological and evolutionary theories of Helmholtz, Darwin, Broca and Kussmaul, and at times was discussed in the empty phraseology of a degenerate pseudo-philosophy!
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        It would have been, in my estimation, more worthy of a philogical society that included the master-minds of science to have said: "Nd philosophy has the right to advance an opinion upon the origin of reason, the nature of thought—its highest problems—without having first recognized and taken cognizance of the results of comparative philology; for language is the body of thought and both came into being together." Instead of this, the society divorced philosophy from philology, and said: "Look about thee for another source of information on the origin of language; there is nothing known of it here and we shall not trouble ourselves further about subjects that lie beyond our jurisdiction." Thus disowned, philosophy asked: "At least tell me of the nature of human speech and wherein it differs from that of .animals, with which it is so commonly compared. I must have some principle to guide me in my speculative peregrinations." No information on that point either; that's not within our province. Thou shalt find what thou want'st in Brehm's Animal Life; he has drawn up the complete vocabulary of a singularly clever parrot. That will show thee how far the linguistic power of an animal goes." Thus the philologists said; and no less a considerable man than Friedrich Miiller takes compassionate leave in these words: "The difference between the language of man and that of brute creation is quantitative and not qualitative."
        This certainly simplifies the matter greatly, for it thus becomes a question of mere calculation. Brehm's
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"singularly clever" parrot, that Mezzofanti of brute creation, could use in the neighborhood of 150 words with intelligent discrimination; on the other hand, the total vocabulary of English miners in certain districts counts but 300. It is now plain how many words the parrot will have to learn to arrive at that stage of intelligence the English miner has attained and thus be able to verify his claim to universal suffrage. It would be a great step forward for all parrots, and they could at once politely request that the nonsensical prattlers of their human kindred should not be honored with their name.
        But levity aside. In order that the reader may profit by this discussion, I propose to specify an infallible criterion wihch will, in every case, enable him to avoid confusion when oracular wisdom speaks of the identity or analogy of human and animal speech.
        One hundred years ago (1781) a plain and simple man, Immanuel Kant, gave the world a commonplace looking book. It was printed on gray paper, was highly inaccurate and bore the strange title, Critique of Pure Reason. This book had manifold and important consequences, which cannot be enumerated here. One of them which is perhaps best known is that Berlin, after Hegel, derived from this book its name the "City of Pure Reason."
        We may read to-day in the aforesaid book (Johann Friedrich Hartknoch published it at Riga) all manner of strange and useful things, as, for example: That the whole business of the human reason is with repre-
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sentations (not with mere sensations), and that these representations, arranged, co-ordinated and moulded by concepts, become objects which are the only true content of all our rational thinking, and that our thought therefore assumes an objective character throughout. And it follows thence that if we deviate from the paths of empirical cognition, we shall lose ourselves in hallucinations, extravagances and in the mazes of a cognitive activity that has overstepped its true limits.
        Representations and objects then which are given by the senses, but are moulded and formed by reason and stamped by concepts! Now we may reveal to the reader the promised secret. It is this: Every word in human speech had, originally, reference to an object which was signified by a word, and words have, at the very start, first received meaning and intelligibility from those representations.
        Let us return to the example given at the start. "The water is frozen" and "I am freezing." Should the question be put to the reader how the concept and word "freezing" have arisen the chances are a thousand to one that he will launch into one of the current theories as to the origin of language and answer, "From a sensation, of course!" Freezing, shivering and chattering with the teeth was the original symptom. You can hear it plainly in the word freeze, frost, frigus, froid! What a chill runs over one when it is mentioned! It stands to reason that people should personify other things, such as plants and water, and say
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of them, they freeze, they are frozen. Is not man the "measure of all things" according to Protagoras, and does not man imprint his own being on every other existing thing?
        And yet, how so easy, natural and reasonable this all sounds, it is positively wrong. According to the revelations of Kant, it is not possible that the sensation of freezing has become a concept and a word otherwise than through the long and round-about way of representations of external objects and thus frozen (frigus, ῥῖγος, ῥιγέω) water must have found a lingual or (what is the same thing) a rational designation long before; and without such designation or an analogous form of concept the sensation could never have found expression or association whatever.
        This follows unavoidably from the doctrine of Kant. And strange! Comparative philology, without knowing or dreaming of Kant, has fully established this origin and natural growth of concepts after its own fashion and by its own empirical methods.
        Yet, instead of being converted by this great and marvelous coincidence to the belief of the great genius that had divined these results with prophetic glance, it still continues to reject the aid of philosophy, even in those depths where empiricism cannot penetrate, and places its sole dependence upon instruments that the hard and rocky soil defies. Far from following the path of science, it seems to have devoted itself to fumbling and groping about in regions of darkness, whence only the light of philosophy can be its guide
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and illuminate its path to further empiric investigation. Thus it is that comparative philology has yet to learn from Kant, if it will ever keep in view the true purpose of its mission, "the history of the human mind."