CONTENTS

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        My Own Theory on the Origin of Language

        Although it is not the primary object of the present pages, the reader will perhaps not take it amiss if I venture to indicate briefly what is the solution of the problem suggested in my own work ⁽Der Ursprung der Sprachef I believe the best way of doing this will be to take the concluding words of the first series of Max Müller's 'Lectures on the Science of Language.' which contain the last results of his varied and profound investigation into what he so strikingly calls 'the body of human thought/ and which he recommended to the attention of philosophic students as a starting-point for further inferences.
        The reader will see from his own words how near he was to the real solution, and may indeed wonder how it was that he failed to force the last barrier which divided him from the mysterious birthplace of human thought, and to bring it into the full light of a satisfying and self-supporting explanation.
        As we have already seen, one of Max Müller's chief merits is the emphatic and consistent opposition and successful resistance which he offers to the ancient and inveterate error, that things as such naturally con-
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nect themselves in the human mind with sounds, which then, in some inexplicable way, turn into names, or audible tokens of the things.[1]
        This error is the harder to exterminate,[2] as it rests upon an immovable conviction that the objective world, the world of things, which we perceive with our external senses, supplies the primary and indispensable, because the most natural, material for human knowledge, and therefore also contributes chiefly to the formation of human language; that, accordingly, people talked about the bright sky before they talked about a bright intelligence, of breath before life, of blows before punishment, as the image must be known and
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named before the imagination. It is an undoubted truth, which philosophy and philology agree in admitting, that speech and language arrive far later at the point of designating mental qualities than sensible objects.[3] But it is one thing to maintain that these objects were the first material, the earliest objects of human thought and speech, and quite another thing to profess to answer the question how they first came to be known and named.
        Let us hear Max Müller himself speak now :[4]

'There is a petrified philosophy in language, and if we examine the most ancient word for name, we find it nâman in Sanskrit, nomen in Latin, namo in Gothic. This nâman stands for gnaman, and is derived from the root gna, to know, and meant originally that by which we know a thing.
        'And how do we know things ?
        'The first step towards the real knowledge, a step, which, however small in appearance, separates man for ever from all other animals, is the naming of a thing, or the making a thing knowable. All naming is classification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it only by means of our general ideas.
        'At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the very first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genesis of
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language. Analyse any word you like, and you will find that it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to which the name belongs.
        'What is the meaning of moon? The measurer.
        'What is the meaning of sun? The begetter.
        What is the meaning of earth? The ploughed.
        'If the serpent is called in Sanskrit sarpa, it is because it was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the word sarp. An ancient word for man was the Sanskrit marta, the Greek brotos, the Latin mortalis. Marta means "he who dies," and it is remarkable that where everything else was changing, fading, and dying, this should have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man.
        'There were many more names for man, as there were many names for all things in ancient languages. Any feature that struck the observing mind as peculiarly characteristic could be made to furnish a new name. In common Sanskrit dictionaries we find 5 words for hand, 11 for light, 15 for cloud, 20 for moon, 26 for snake, 33 for slaughter, 35 for fire, 37 for sun. The sun might be called the bright, the warm, the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf, the lion, the heavenly eye, the father of light and life. Hence that superabundance of synonyms in ancient dialects, and hence that struggle for life carried on among these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the less fertile words, and ended in the triumph of one word, as the recognised and proper name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this process of natural selection, or, as it would better be called, rational elimination, may still be watched, even in modern languages, that is to say, even in languages so old and stricken in years as English and French. What it was at the first burst of dialects, we can only gather from such isolated cases as when von Hammer counts 5,744 words all relating to the camel.
        'The fact that every word is originally a predicate—that names, though signs of individual conceptions, are all, without exception, derived from general ideas—is one of the most important discoveries in the science of language. It was known before that language is the distinguishing char-
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acteristic of man; it was known also that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes; but that these two were only different expressions of the same fact was not known till the theory of roots had been established as preferable to the theories both of Onomatopoeia and of Interjections. But though our modern philosophy did not know it, the ancient poets and framers of language must have known it.[5] For in Greek, language is logos, but logos means also reason, and alagon was chosen as the name, and the most proper name, for brute. No animal thinks and no animal speaks, except man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds, thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low, to speak is to think loud. The word is the thought incarnate.
        'Now, the last question of all in our science is this: How can sound express thought? How did roots become the signs of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of measuring expressed by ma, the idea of thinking by man? How did ga come to mean going; stha standing; sad, sitting; dd giving; mar dying; kar walking; fear-doing?
        The 400 or 500 roots which remain as the constituent elements in different families of language are hot mere interjections, nor are they mere imitations. They may be called phonetic types, and whatever explanation the psychologist or the metaphysician may propose, to the student of language these roots are simply ultimate facts.'

        Here follows the attempt quoted in the preceding chapter to account for the origin of roots in accordance with Heyse's method. But the author adds immediately, with wise insistence on the distinction between what has been scientifically established and what is still mere hypothesis:
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'There may be some value in speculations of this kind, but I should not like to endorse them, for we have no right to say that a vague analogy is an explanation of the problem of the origin of roots. If there is any truth in the results at which we have arrived after a careful and unprejudiced analysis of all the facts before us, all that we have a right to assert is that language begins with roots, and that these roots are neither more nor less than phonetic types or typical sounds. What lies beyond them is no longer, or if we speak historically, is not yet language, however interesting it may be for psychological researches. But whatever exists in real language is the upshot of these roots.
        'Words are various impressions taken from those phonetic moulds, or, if you like, varieties and modifications, perfectly intelligible in their structure, of those typical sounds, which, by means of unerring tests, have been discovered as the residuum of all human speech.'

        It was thus that Max Miiller spoke and wrote in 1860; eighteen years later he was able to say with truth:

'Those who have read the "Lectures on the Science of Language" will remember how strongly I opposed any attempt on the part of the students of language to go beyond roots, such as we actually find them as the result of the most careful phonetic analysis. It was thought at the time that my protests against all attempts to ignore or skip those roots, and to derive any word or any grammatical form straight from mere cries or from imitations of natural sounds, were too vehement. But I believe it is now generally admitted, even by some of my former opponents, that the slightest concession to what, not ironically, but simply descriptively, I called the bow-wow and pooh-pooh theories in the practical analysis of words would have been utter ruin to the character of the science of language.'[6]

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        He continues:

'But to show that a certain road, and the only safe road, leads us to a mountain wall, which from our side can never be scaled, is very different from saying that there is, or that there can be nothing behind that mountain wall. To judge from the manner in which some comparative philologists speak of roots, one would imagine that they were not only indiscemibilia, but Palladia fallen straight from the sky, utterly incomprehensible in their nature and origin[7]. It was in order to guard against such a view, that at the end of my Lectures I felt induced to add a few lines, just as a painter when he has finished a landscape dots in a. few lines in the background to show that there is a world beyond. The science of language, I felt, had done its work when it had reduced the vague problem of the origin of language to a more definite form, viz. What is the origin of roots? How much has been gained by that change of front, those will best be able to appreciate who have studied the history of the innumerable attempts at discovering the origin of language during the last century.
        'Beyond that point, however, where the student of language is able to lay the primary elements of language at the feet of philosophers, the science of language alone, apart from the science of thought, will not carry us. We must start afresh, and in a different direction; and it was in order to show to what quarter I looked for a solution of the last problem, the origin of roots, that I appealed to the fact that everything in nature when set in motion or struck, reacts, that it vibrates, and causes vibrations. This seemed to me the highest generalisation and at the same time the lowest
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beginning of what is meant by language. The two problems, how mere cries, whether interjectional or imitative, could develop into phonetic types, and how mere sensations could develop into rational concepts, I left untouched, trusting that philosophers by profession would quickly perceive how some of the darkest points of psychology might be illuminated by the electric light of the science of language, and fully convinced that they would eagerly avail themselves of the materials placed before them and ready for use to build up at last a sound and solid system of philosophy’.

        This appeal to the professed philosophers should have received, the candid reader might imagine, an immediate and hearty response. What a magnificent undertaking—worthy at once of its former development and useful and necessary to its future achievements—was here set before philosophy. How eagerly such an opportunity must be seized of rehabilitating herself in the eyes of the world, which for something like the last fifty years has looked upon all philosophy as simply a bore, a mass of indigestible quibbling, chaff by which no old birds are to be caught, only fit to stuff the empty heads of the professors with self-conceit and arrogance, and those of the students with nonsense and vain imaginations! Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Now is the time to prove your mettle! A philosophy that can solve such a problem as the present has given a pledge of substantial value and established an unassailable claim to universal respect. But what actually occurred? Max Mtiller will tell us:

'I confess I have often wondered at the apathy, particularly of the students of psychology, with regard to the complete revolution that has been worked before their eyes in the realm of language. They simply looked on as if it did not concern them. Why, if language were only the outward form
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of thought, is it not clear that no philosophy, wishing to gain an insight into the nature of thought and particularly into its origin, could dispense with a careful study of language? What would Hobbes or Locke have given for Bopp's 'Comparative Grammar' ? What should we say if biologists were to attempt to discover the nature and laws of organic life without ever looking at a living body? And where are we to find the living body of thought, if not in language? What are the two problems left unsettled at the end of the Science of Language:
        'How do mere cries become phonetic types? and
        'How can sensations be changed into concepts?
        'What are these two, if taken together, but the highest problem of all philosophy, viz.:
        'What is the origin of reason?'

        The position from which I started to attempt the solution of this problem may be stated, in accordance with the widest possible generalisations, in somewhat the following manner:
        1. Language is a product of association, and of the community of feeling which is developed, intensified, and finally carried to perfection by community of life.
        2. Language is a product of an active, not of a passive process; it is the child of will, not of sensation. In the place of. sensations, the mere sense-impressions, from which it is and always will be impossible to extract anything in the nature of rational concepts—i.e. permanent typical classifications of reason always capable of being summoned up anew by the appropriate word—in the place of these we must set the active will, or spontaneous activity, which is indeed commonly recognised as present in the phenomena of animal life, but which the Monistic philosophy affirms to be at the root of all phenomena without exception.
        3. From these two points we proceed to the fol-
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lowing conclusion: There is not only a sympathy of joy and a sympathy of sorrow expressing themselves in the specific human forms of laughter and tears, as well as in the impulses towards common movements, out of which dancing, singing, and music develop themselves later, but there is also a sympathy of the will, of activity directed outwards-which only becomes phenomenally apparent in its effects.
        4. This common sympathetic activity was originally accompanied by sounds, which, as in games and dances, broke out from the violent stress or excitement of the common action, and as they recurred with every repetition of the particular form of activity they became so intimately associated with it as to acquire the power of recalling the memory of the action. This is the origin of human thought, for it is the origin of phonetic types (roots).
        5. It follows of itself from the foregoing propositions that human thought has a double root :[8] first,
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the individual activity which, bound up with the man himself, is at his disposal always, to produce as much of the resolved effect as its development allows; and secondly, this effect itself, which becomes apparent, and as grasped in common by the sense of sight, lays the foundations for the possibility of a mutual understanding. It is only by means of this visible effect that the sounds acquire their meaning, and the more the effects, i.e the activities of the speech-constructing race, are specialised, the more significance will belong to their verbal roots.
        6. Hence it is that the life of language stands in an indissoluble relation to the development of human action. And it is by no means a casual coincidence that, at the very time when the magnificent science of comparative philology is pursuing the origin of human conceptions to the roots buried beneath the accumulations of thousands of years, the science of Anthropology should have applied itself with equal zeal to the primeval history of human industry, as it is to be traced by the rudest stone implements, the earliest evidences of the existence of what Franklin called the tool-making animal, and which we call the not merely gregarious, but cooperative animal. And there is an equally significant and instructive parallel to be drawn between the matter of the two sciences, for just as when we go back to primitive ages the tools become more and more imperfect and undeveloped, so that the rough-hewn stone is the germ at once of hatchet, wedge, knife, hammer, saw, &c, so among words, the farther we trace their history backwards, the less significance they possess, the more molluscous their structure becomes, and instead of being able to grasp a
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single precise meaning, the philologist finds as it were a jelly-like mass slipping through his hands.
        7. About this, however, there is no doubt: the earliest meanings of verbal roots referred to human action. Philology might have arrived at this conclusion without extraneous help, for the most familiar, known, and intelligible of objects must always have been the self-determined action of man. An impartial glance at any dictionary of roots will serve to verify this assertion. We do not find there Sun and Moon, Nose and Mouth, Thou and I, nor yet anything about shining, flashing, or burning—no thoughtful etymologist, even if he found them, would allow them to pass as primitive intuitions; such is the power of truth!— what we do find are words signifying to dig, strike, scrape, scratch, to tear, numerous roots denoting to rub, and starting from that conception, to smear, anoint, and colour, others again for plaiting and binding, and others again which mean to share, or to divide.
        If we consider for a moment seriously how thought, or in other words how language, could arrive at such a conception as that of shining, or flashing, we might imagine this to be one of the simplest and most natural intuitions. But this is not the case. Primitive man was dumb in the face of light, he could not name it, for the act of naming is not a mere outbreak of meaningless sound, it consists in assigning a known quality to the thing named. One of the two Sources of thought is wanting in this case, and it is only when the element of personal activity has been added that it becomes possible to attain to such a conception.[9] Accordingly
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we find in language that light and darkness, day and night, fire and sun, are only a colour, or rather something coloured, a conception at last intelligible to primitive man, who coloured, or painted, himself. To colour, however, goes back to smearing, or anointing, and these to rubbing, or grinding. How far we are still overshadowed by this line of primitive thought may be judged from the fact that even at the present day we speak of the colouring of the sky.
        8. But not by any means everything that we are in the habit of regarding as human activity will find an equivalent expression in the most primitive collection of verbal roots. A naive but highly unscientific theory of language, the direct descendant of the easy, rough and ready mode of explaining everything in vogue in the eighteenth century, which has numerous representatives even at the present day, supposes the
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development of language to have begun with such notions as 'papa' and 'mamma,' eating and drinking, and the like, from which origin the rest of language is to have grown. This hypothesis also may be completely refuted by the study of roots. Such conceptions as hunger and thirst make their way into language, and therefore into thought, by long and circuitous paths only. For how is eating conceived? As a division. The German Metzger (butcher) and Messer (knife) take us back to the root mat, to divide, mats in Gothic is food (meat), matjan, is to eat. The German Fleischer is the Latin carnifex,[10] the Greek Sairpos, that is to say, one who carves, or distributes portions, and to these words belong also δαίνυμαι, to feast, and δαίς, a meal. The Homeric verse:
        Μοίρας δασσάμενοι δαίνυντ’ ἐρικυδέα δαῖτα.—Od. γ 66. offers an interesting example of the specialisation of different words out of one original rational concept. If in this sentence we take δαιτυμόνες as a subject, the thought in its original form would run somewhat thus: 'The dividers divided the parts, and divided the glorious division :[11] that is to say, the guest divided the portions and feasted on the glorious banquet. Similarly, the Hebrew akal, to eat, and maakelet, sacrificial knife, are related, not by any means that the latter is regarded as an instrument for eating, but that both words point to an earlier meaning of akal, the dividing or portioning out of food.
        How is this to be explained? According to our
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theory, which, indeed, receives a remarkable confirmation irom the fact, for the simple reason that the object which received a name in the first instance was not individual eating and drinking; these are animal functions which are necessary to the preservation of life, and can be carried on without language; it was not till these actions were brought into the focus of common attention, just because they began a 'dividing' among the different members of the assembled community, that they were for the first time attended to, conceived, and named by the community, or, in other words, became the object of rational thought.
        In the same way it is easy to understand how the ideas of dividing and of pasturing flocks came to run into one another: e. g. in the Greek νέμω, in reference to which Jacob Grimm gives numerous examples of the connection between the ideas of taking and grazing :[12] how the peasant calls the fields of the community the Gemarkung, a fact which throws new light on the old German mark — wood, which should on no account be explained, as by J. Grimm and Weigand, as 'the dark,' but referred with mark, merken, &c, to a word of (boundary-) marking: how the Gothic faihu, cattle, Sanskrit paçu (pecu, pecu-nia), originally meant the cattle that was tied up (from paç, pâça, bond); or, as Geiger has it, 'possession/ the same transition appearing in the Hebrew miqneh, the Gothic skatts (treasure) —Slav, skot (cattle), cattle itself-capitale.
        All this proves afresh the perversity of the view which traces language to the imitation of natural noises, since, in the earliest utterances of the human tongue, instead of meeting with bellowing bulls and
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rustling woods, we find rather what we are accustomed to call abstractions, but which are, in fact, nothing but the impress of human thought.
        9. Human thought, human thinking, is an active process, a self-conscious, self-confident activity, not as a crude materialism imagines, the accidental play of unconscious atoms. Common action is the source to which we have traced it, the foundation upon which it has rested ever since the first entrance of mankind into the kingdom of reason. During the hundreds of thousands of years which the human race must have passed through before reaching its present height of development, the union between the two has only become closer and more intimate. Language is the voice of the community. Even now the highest achievement possible is to order, direct, and apply the forces of individuals to a common end, in united, organised activity, that is to say, in work—for work is nothing but organised activity, whence it is that idlers excite the scorn of the community—whereby also the countless wonders of industry have become possible, and all the changes of the earth's surface which turn it into a lordly residence for man. It is, indeed, a marvellous reflection that all these results depend upon a feeble breathing, a spoken sound: that is to say, upon a slight vibration of the air!
        The space allotted here only allows me to give a brief and meagre sketch of the arguments on which I have based the solution of the problem as stated by Max Müller; if, however, I have been successful in doing so, I shall have shown:
        How rational concepts could and must arise by natural means;
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        How they could unite with sounds, which, though originally only utterances of an instinctive impulse, thereby acquire significance, and so become transformed into phonetical types, or roots;
        And it will not be permissible to evade the concluding question: How the world of things, which we always assume to have its appropriate qualities characterised and denoted in language, was brought into the illuminated space of rational thought, or, what comes to the same thing, into the storehouse of linguistic expression ? My theory must stand or fall with the answer to this question: if it is not borne out by the. facts of the case, it is irretrievably condemned, if, however, it is in harmony with them, it receives a conspicuous confirmation which approaches to the highest degree of human certainty attainable.
        But in order to answer this question aright, there is another belonging more properly to the domain of metaphysics which should be - dealt with first; the question namely: What is a thing ? Not to weary the reader with a prolonged metaphysical discussion, it will be enough to quote the definition given by Albert Lange in his meritorious ‘History of Materialism:' 'We give the name of thing to a group of phenomena, which, making abstraction of remoter relations and internal changes, we grasp and conceive as one.’[13]
        It follows undoubtedly from this definition that things have no existence for animals; for even the most extreme Darwinian will hardly venture to maintain animals to be capable of this.
        To men a tree is a single being or thing which
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grows from the root upwards and has a trunk and branches; but this is just what it can never be even to the most highly endowed ape that climbs about its stem and has accustomed dwellings and places of refuge under the well-known leafy roof. It is beyond the limits of possibility that any monkey tribe should ever endeavour to take up a tree by the roots and plant it in another spot. And if we find accounts in modern books of natural history of agricultural ants who sow their seeds and wait patiently till they come up, the mildest expression for such vagaries of the imagination is scientific lunacy.
        How then does it come to pass that there are things for men?
        Simply because he has the gift of speech, because he can give them a name. And I will add, that this, his highest faculty, is also the source of his most fatal errors, since he imagines whenever he finds a word that a real being or thing must exist to be designated by it. As Lazarus Geiger well observes:

'We see, in fact, words and thoughts wrestling together, and the latter hardly escape bondage;[14] nay, we see from the earliest known time to the present day how the nature of beings has been made the object of inquiry when the beings themselves had no other reality than that lent them by the intuitions of the remote past which associated them with these magic sounds.’[15]

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        Naming a thing is not the same as designating or denoting it. I can describe something quite unknown to me, e.g. a place, in such a way that I could recognise it again; but naming is always significant, the attributing of an already known quality, an act of generalisation, of classification.
        Naming also serves the purpose of indicating objects which are recognised in thought; the only essential is that the differ entice of'the thing should be already known objectively, in order that the name may be applied to them, that it may be classed by their help, or as Kant expresses it, that the thing may be recognised in the notion, i.e. the word. (Kant divides perception into sensation, reproduction in the imagination, and recognition in the idea.)
        We have, however, no right to assume that man, in his primitive state, was already possessed of this wonderful intellectual faculty, this power of rational thought that rules us now with supreme sway and forms our truest nature, while by its help we grasp all the objects around us, conceive, explore, and at the same time indicate and name them. Such a course would be too easy,; or indeed rather a mere petitio principii, an explanation by means of that which itself stands in most need of explanation.
        No; man did not call names for the sake of naming, or use signs for the sake of signifying; but he used signs, and thereby attained to the power of using names also; or, in other words, of betokening again by a sound what he had noted before. How the latter step was taken has been pointed out above, and is indeed the most important part of my theory.
        And how and why, we must inquire next, did men
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come to use signs for things? Simply because they modified them for the purposes of their own life by their own action, by their associated efforts. Men dug caves, plaited twigs, stripped the beasts of their skin, the trees of their bark. Hence was developed the marvellous hitherto unexplained gift of abstraction, and this in the most natural way. Man learnt to conceive a thing as he learnt to create things. These things became possessed, for him, of an independent existence in his consciousness by means of the word associated with them. The period of spiritual creation began; the light glimmered feebly and inconspicuously at first which now illumines earth and heaven with its rays— the divine light of reason.
        I will quote, in elucidation of what has been said above, a passage from my book 'On the origin of Language':

'The thing which derives its fixity from language is an object of human action, and the first germ of the newly created world of abstraction must always He in the associated labour expended in changing or modifying surrounding natures. A den or cave is already an abstract idea, for it may be large or small, excavated in stone or sand, situated in one place or another; it may have been met with twice or thrice, and still it is always a thing of the same kind, and with the same word corresponding to it. When such a change in the external world has been effected, and has entered and been made at home in human consciousness never more to disappear,[16] the first step is herewith hewn, by the joint toil of rea
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son and speech, in the hard rock, where a second and then others must follow, till seons hence the lofty summit is reached, and reason enthroned on high sees all the world beneath as the theatre where her might and glory is displayed, and ventures forth upon new flights through the unexplored realms of heaven not even here without a clue, any more than at the hour of her birth, afforded by her own—but now purely ideal—constructions.'[17]

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        And now I may say that my theory certainly tallies remarkably with and is confirmed by the fact that things are brought within the horizon of the human reason, or first grow into things, in proportion as they suffer the effects of human action and have names assigned to them accordingly. This law applies invariably to the oldest substantives, which, as we have seen, all belong necessarily to the objective world. Things were, so to speak, ticketed by the human action that spent itself upon them, and drew an ever increasing number of them within its range, and modified them in accordance with human requirements. The things thus marked out receive their names forthwith from the action of which they are made the object.
        Thus a tree is characterised in primitive language as wood upon which some work has been spent, as something split, or barked, or to be burnt. Grain is that which we crush, pound, or grind; ground, and terra, take their names from grinding, crumbling; and the sea (meer, mare, mor,) in like manner cannot disown its relationship with moor, morass, a mass of the consistence of liquid mud. An animal is meat, spoil of the chase, or something flayed. The root for flay, or strip off, denotes at the same time either skin, fur, or flesh, for both are the work of human action and characterise a produced or phenomenal result. Thus again the scales of fishes are named from the idea of shelling; the shell of a fruit from that of cracking and shelling (skar, skal), after which the word came, by way of a drinking bowl (Trinkschale), to signify a human skull, because skulls as well as shells were used for drinking vessels.
        Geiger, who was familiar with this law of the
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development of meanings, though he did not succeed in deducing the necessary conclusions from it, has summed up his statement in a single sentence, which I transcribe, with notable modifications derived from my own theory:

'The process of naming advances from the common actions which exclusively interest the language-making race, and which are the one chief root of thought, to those things which are affected by human action, either in the way of generation or transformation, which is the second root. A multitude of implements are named genetically; the tree is traced, from the first moment of its treatment by human hands, through all the stages of its successive transformations to beams, boards, and tables. Passing steadily through every form, language reaches each one when, and only when, it is brought directly into passive relation with the special ever-stimulating subject of the linguistic faculty, the action of men.’[18]

        The fact that Geiger did not draw the last and most important of conclusions on this subject leads him often to express surprise at the discovery of startling instances which are perfectly in accordance with the above law, but can only be certainly and adequately explained by my theory. Thus he says:

'Wood, the name of which in ὕλη and materia has come to furnish the substratum of every idea of matter in general, was the prevailing material in primitive times, and is derived from shaving, e.g. in ξύλον; and shaft, δόρυ likewise named by the ancients from the fundamental notion of breaking off or stripping (δείρω), came to designate wood as a material. An especially important point about this word is its wide diffusion throughout all the branches of the Indo-germanic stock
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of languages. (Hollun-der, tree[19]). Two reasons may be given why the notion of wood should be reached through that of stripping off the bark rather than from that of felling the tree; both have probably had a share in the result. In the first place the notion of wood is undoubtedly earlier than the possession of tools for felling trees; and in the second place, the phenomenal principle of naming holds good here, for the wood is the flesh of the tree which becomes visible when the bark is torn or flayed off. But it is in the highest degree remarkable that the tree takes its name from its wood, and thus borrows its designation as living wood from a mode of human activity.’ [20]

        The reader who accepts my theory will see nothing wonderful in this, nor be surprised at the analogous transition of ideas in wood and tree.
        He says elsewhere:

'In almost all cases we observe that the words for body are taken from the dead body, or corpse. Σῶμα as, indeed, had been observed by Aristarchos, is used by Homer for the dead body only. Whence this eccentricity of language to start from the notion of the corpse in order to name the human body itself?[21]

        I must confess that this seems to me so far from strange that I should be surprised rather if the case were otherwise. The rational perception of man starts from the objective world, and he ended by giving to his own body the name first applied to the disjointed limbs of animals or human beings. We speak now of our own flesh, skin, bones, &c, without thinking of the source of these conceptions, and yet the most cursory
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reflection will show that they could have no other natural origin than this. For the same reason we find most members of the human body conceived by language as joints, and accordingly etymologies like that given by Bopp for the 'doing organ' are impossible; kara, the hand, as Geiger justly observes, cannot be derived from kar, to make. Nor can Bauch (stomach) be the scientific œso-phag-us, its relations are rather with Bug, Eng. bow, bowels.
        These few examples will suffice to show that my theory is in complete accordance with the facts of etymology; that language does not—as would follow from the interjectional theory—conceive objects in so far as they excite pleasure or disgust, even less, as the mimetic theory imagined, in as far as they are howling and roaring; nor yet, at least not in its earliest creations, in so far as they are active, but simply in so far as human action has touched, modified, reconstructed them; in a word, in so far as they have received form. This is one of the most important and fruitful conclusions of comparative philology, and it agrees with this that even such things as are removed by nature from the reach of human influence nevertheless become objects of human thought in the same way as the rest, that is to say, they are named as they would be if the human hand had formed them.
        Thus Teich (ditch, to dig), locus, Lache and Loch, like the Celtic loch, all attach themselves to the fundamental notion of that which is dug; from the root ku or sku we have both the German Hohle, hole and hollow, as well as the Greek κοῖλος and the Latin cesium, i. e. the vault of heaven; similarly we still speak of the highest point of a mountain, though this point (Spitse)
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is only what has been pointed, made into a point; so again the ideas of weaving, plaiting, and binding are applied not only to the mechanical acts of man, but to anything offering an analogous appearance, e.g. Ranke, Winde, Schilf (runners, bindweed and sedge). Thus face comes from fades, originally the make or shape of a thing, an expression repeated in modern languages, feature being evidently a mere corruption of factum, the make; thus the significant word figure is directly related to jingo and figulus, and points to a derivation from the potter's art; so, also, forma, if we compare it with Sk. gharma (pot), and formaceus (clayey). Thus we find that man could not designate his own form, nay, not even that dearest and most familiar object, the human countenance, except by associating it with an action of his own, and conceiving it as a product of the same.
        This power of conceiving the world of things according to their forms, this division of the interchanging appearances of the outer world by sharp and definite outlines—-a faculty which has been so developed that the scientific eye now discerns qualities of things which are still invisible to the material eye reinforced by the most powerful instruments-—this power is the distinguishing human gift of intuition. It is wanting, except in a rudimentary degree, to animals, and in man himself is one of the fruits of language, and the creative, formative activity so closely connected therewith. The reader will easily realise how this is if he recalls the differences that exist between different kinds of human vision, between the way in which the products of his art appear to the eye of the master who is wont to create them himself
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whether he be locksmith, mechanic, builder, or sculptor, and to that of the uninstructed layman.
        Form is a general factor in all things; every progressive step towards the perfecting of human order and activity manifests itself thus. Nothing else touches the reason so closely as this, which is the mode of filling space, and appeals to the most intellectual of the senses, that of sight. For thought is the sight of the mind, and language, as I have said elsewhere, is woven of light and tones. Unceasing, unbroken progress in the formation of things is the fundamental rule of development ; and even more unceasing, more unbroken, less obvious but not less certain progress is of the essence of language.
        I have sketched in its most general traits the earliest period in the growth and development of language.. There was a time when man, or, at least, the thought of man, knew neither man nor wife nor child, neither sun nor moon, no beast, no tree, no I nor thou, no here nor there, but instead a limited store of sounds with which he accompanied his action, and which associated themselves with the objects produced or modified by the action. This is the period of the objective creation of language.
        A vast revolution must have been effected in the mental life of ,man when he began to lift his eyes, hitherto fixed upon the ground, upwards to the eternal stars, to the heavens standing fast for ever while he himself grew and withered and passed away, to the rosy dawn ushering in another day and chasing away the horrors of the night, to the clouds, chased by the storms, who after long languishing drought—
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        'gnädig ernst den langerflehten Regen
        Mit Donnerstimmen und mit Windesbrausen
        In wilden Strömen auf die Erde schütten.'

        Such a revolution must have been effected—not necessarily on a sudden and without preparation, but slowly and gradually like every other development; the forces of nature must have been sympathetically felt and conceived by the kindling fancy as animated active beings, while objects passed imperceptibly into subjects, and language and thought assumed the char_T acter they wear to-day, which seems to us so natural that we delude ourselves it must have been the same always.
        This period coincides with the origin of religion, which, as Geiger says, has exercised an incredible and almost boundless influence upon the development of human sentiment and feeling. The rise of mythology is a necessary and highly important stage in the development of language, that is to 'say, of the intellectual life of humanity. Linguistically, it may be described as the period in which subjects began to mark themselves off from the indefiniteness of the thought-process, and began to form themselves into independent existences. Otfried Müller foresaw the truth of this:

'The mythological mode of expression, (he says) which turns everything into persons, and every relation into an act, is something so unique that we are forced to assume for its growth a special period in the civilisation of nations.'[22]

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        And at this point I must stop, for here the master has begun to speak,[23] from whom we have to learn, and for the present only to learn.