CONTENTS

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        6/ Speech and Reason.

        The words 'origin of species' were the charm with which Darwin stirred men's minds, and roused into a flame the glowing ashes of dormant curiosity about the question, whether things in general and organic beings in particular have existed from all times as now, or whether they came into existence as it were, historically, by virtue of natural causes, and if so, of which.
        This question, when transplanted into the realm of natural science and proposed for solution, with the help of the vast mass of materials furnished by accumulated observations, had the great recommendation of restoring philosophic thought and deductive method to the place of pure empiricism; though this had its justification in the vagaries of the philosophy of nature; and, indeed, as the exact method of sense-perception, must always form the indispensable and solid foundation of all natural science.
        The nature of a species consists, as the name already indicates, in what is special, i.e. peculiar to itself. The particular marks itself off from the general, it becomes more independent, more original; it gains in character, in individuality. Accordingly, the doctrine of development has for its object, in concert
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with historical enquiry, to trace back each particular appearance to its most nearly universal form; that is to say, in the case of living beings, to trace the species to its most general type, to pursue the stream of development backwards from the familiar and infinitely manifold data of the present to its earliest beginning, so far as may be possible to the ever limited power of human reason. And the final goal of its efforts will always be that moment, hid in the twilight of an immeasurable past, when our system, then a gigantic globe of vapour, broke from the deathlike slumber of universal oneness, and those first modifications accomplished themselves, out of which hereafter the Wille zum Leben wrestled its way to the joys and sorrows of mortal being in the person of countless individuals.
        In the midst of this vast process of development, which fills the imagination with awe-struck wonder, and which is accomplished so silently and tranquilly that our reason, aware of the closer causal connection which binds the being of one moment to the becoming of the next, is forced towards the view that all is happening by the fixed, inexorable laws of necessity,—in the midst of this we see one star dawn on the horizon, within which is concealed the sacred mystery of a new species, called to a higher measure of freedom, consciousness and perfection, and occupying a place apart from all the rest of nature, since in it are laid the foundations of the kingdom of conscious mind, of the life which is ordered by individual foresight and choice.
        This species is the human race; the dawning light which heralds its advent upon earth is reason. The contrast between this and the nearest analogues we can
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find for it among beings of any other kind is so strong that we are always ready to set the latter aside offhand as mere natural impulse or instinct, which leaves us only the wiser by a word, a word to which any meaning, possible or impossible, may be attached or not attached at discretion.
        Still, reason, or the mental life of man, constitutes a new specific distinction, without an exact parallel in any other part of nature, a differentiation which we must seek to derive from more general natural causes. No problem is at once so difficult and so well worthy of solution, except, perhaps, the kindred question regarding the first origin of organization and life.
        The great law of progressive individualisation and specialisation, by which alone the unceasing course of cosmic development is to be explained and elucidated, must supply the foundations also of the life and growth of reason.
        That whereby the functions of reason are accomplished, the inner organic tissue, the means whereby the whole of the material and spiritual universe is embraced, constructed and expressed, is afforded by those mysterious entities which have formed the object of study in every healthy system of philosophy up to the present day; sometimes they are called, in Platonic phrase, ideas, sometimes notions, but, for the most part, concepts or conceptions. They are the exclusive property of man—no other animal can ever participate in them; and it is, therefore, either crass misconception of the nature of the case, or simple misuse of language, when modern materialists speak of the 'thinking power of animals.'
        Concepts cannot be formed without the help of
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words. The sound, the word, is the body of the concept; language is thus the external side, the body of thought or reason. Thus it was that the one essential, which may, however, be considered from the two aspects, from without and from within, was designated by the Greeks by a single word, λόγος, which does not distinguish them, but includes them both.
        There are certain truths which, in the earlier stages of development, are taken for granted by primitive thought as given directly and certainly in consciousness, which, however, become lost in the age of reflection, in consequence of a peculiar one-sidedness , which has come to characterise the progress of thought, so that much mental effort has to be expended in rediscovering them. To this number must be reckoned the great and important truth that thought is accomplished by means of words alone, that thought is just as little possible without language as language without thought.
        I said that this truth was matter of direct consciousness to the childlike thought of primitive peoples. As a confirmation of this I may quote the graphic expression of the Polynesians, who, according to Farrar, describe thinking as 'talking in the stomach/ i.e. internally. But the divine Plato also had no other definition to put into the mouth of Sokrates.

"What do you mean by thinking?" asks Theaetetus. Sokrates: "I mean the conversation which the soul holds with herself in considering of anything. I speak of what I scarcely know; but the soul when thinking appears to me to be just talking—asking questions of herself and answering them, affirming and denying."'[1]

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        And how then does mankind come to lose this instinctive certainty? Because, in the first age of systematisation and reflection, men accustom themselves to speak of the idea or thought as something inward and spiritual with which the formal sound of the mere word is to be contrasted. And thus the error gained ground that thought was the prius, and had an independent existence in the human mind, before the existence of words as a token to express the process that was going on without them. 'The Philosophers,' says Hamann, 'have in all ages given truth a letter of divorce, in that they have put asunder those things which nature has joined together, and conversely.'
        'The conception of cause,' says Goethe, 'is the source of infinite error.' If we look closely we shall see that this sentence applies to all the fundamental errors in which the human mind has been entangled for ages, and from which it will seek in vain to escape so long as it does not recognise their deep metaphysical root. From Demokritus and Epikurus onwards materialists continue credulously to repeat that the body is the cause of mind; they are unable to understand, that causal relations cannot be established between things of altogether disparate quality any more than they can be affirmed of what is one and indivisible. And from Plato onwards, the idealists repeat that mind is the cause of bodies, so that they have no choice but to regard the world as a phantom, a creature of their own imagination, or else to bridge the chasm between mind and body by such tours de force as the concursus divinus, pre-established harmony and the like rash inventions. On the other hand, Spinoza's monism, Kant's criticism, and Schopenhauer's theory of will contain
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the key of the problem in their hidden depths, for these great thinkers made the metaphysical base or conditions of the knowledge of the world the object of their investigations.
        Whenever we start from one side of a thing and endeavor to deduce the other side of it causally from this, we land ourselves in hopeless contradictions: there is no escaping the vicious circle. The explanation of the most important, most truly human quality of mankind has not escaped this fate. The wheel of Ixion continues its giddy revolutions, bringing to the top in turn the words now 'Reason and therefore speech’ now again, 'Speech and therefore reason.' The truth that the two, ratio and oratio, are one and the same being, only conceived from different points of view, that one is the inner and spiritual, the other the outer and corporeal side of the monad, this truth) notwithstanding its distinct and convincing advocacy by the most illustrious thinkers of the last half century, has hardly begun, to take root in the minds of those who have chosen as their especial study to unriddle the great problem of the human mind, and a fortiori has had no influence on the thoughts of the general educated public.
        The most influential champion of this idea is Max Müller. As formerly Spinoza's great disciple, Goethe, formulated the fundamental monistic doctrine in the simple words, as indubitable as unambiguous: 'No mind without matter, no matter without mind,' so- Max Muller with equal clearness and confidence :[2]

'Without speech no reason, without reason no speech.
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It is curious to observe the unwillingness with which many philosophers admit this, and the attempts they make to escape from this conclusion, all owing to the very influence of language, which in most modern dialects has produced two words, one for language, the other for reason; thus leading the speaker to suppose that there is a substantial difference between the two, and not a mere formal difference.'

        Further on he comments upon some acute observations of Locke, who appears to have been the first, before Herder, to call attention to the inseparable connection between speech and thought, and accordingly insisted on the need of serious philological criticism, in the interests of reason itself, in order that the speaker and the listener may no longer be misled by phrases of which they do not understand the sense.[3]

"In all this there is no doubt great truth, yet, strictly speaking, it is as impossible to use words without thought, as to think without words. Even those who talk vaguely about religion, conscience, &c, have at least a vague notion of the meaning of the words they use; and if they ceased to connect any ideas, however incomplete and false, with the words they utter, they could no longer be said to speak, but only to make noises. The same applies if we invert our proposition. It is possible, without language, to see, to perceive, to stare at, to dream about things; but without words not even such simple ideas as white or black can for a moment be realised.'

        All want of clearness, all confusion, all the interminable debates as to whether thought and reason shall be ascribed to animals, to babies, and to untaught deaf-mutes, are merely verbal disputes, and proceed from the fact that the words used have not had associated with them the clear and definite matter of con-
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ception which belongs to them, but are employed in a general, vague and misty fashion.

'A child knows as certainly before it can speak the difference between sweet and bitter (i.e. that sweet is not bitter), as it knows afterwards (when it comes to speak) that wormwood and sugar-plums are not the same thing. A child receives the sensation of sweetness; it enjoys it, it recollects it, it desires it again: but it does not know what sweet is; it is absorbed in its sensations, its pleasures, its recollections; it cannot look at them from above,[4] it cannot reason on them, it cannot tell of them.'[5]

        Similarly Lazarus Geiger:

'It is easy to see that blood is red and milk white; but to abstract the redness of blood from the collective impression, to find the same notion again in a red berry, and, in spite of its other differences, to include under the same head the red berry and the red blood—or the white milk and the white snow—this is something altogether different. No animal does this, for this, and this only, is thinking.'[6]

        We thus arrive at the apparently paradoxical proposition: the so-called general conceptions are something special, something peculiarly and exclusively proper to the human reason; they embrace and comprehend the whole world, so far as this is within the scope of human powers of perception; they can, however, only become realised by means of their bodily equivalents, sensible sounds or words. Speech is not the garment, it is the body of reason. 'Without speech no reason, without reason no speech.’
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        After this it should not be difficult to perceive why all previous attempts to explain human reason and establish a satisfactory system of psychology and perception have proved abortive. The reason is that in all of them human reason was conceived as something absolute and irreducible, while its history and its past, which might have supplied the desired solution, were neglected, although a priceless instrument for the purpose lay ready to hand in comparative philology, which is nothing but the study of the history of this same reason itself. Take any animal away from its place in the chain of organic life, and its nature will remain for ever an insoluble problem; but viewed as a link in the progressive chain of development, we find its explanation in all that has gone before it.
        What is required, then, is to apply what Darwin has done for organisms to that department of organic life to which we give the name of human notions, rational concepts or words. We want, in fact, a new 'origin of species.' Every notion, every word which presents itself in the course of the development, is something new and special, a fresh step towards specialisation and individualisation, which can never be conceived by itself nor thought of as breaking forth out of nothing by some generatio cequivoca; but as a new element of reason, generated by unbroken filiation from earlier elements, it serves to exalt, to heighten, and enrich the inner mental force which we call reason; and at the same time as a principle of explanation, as a token and monument of the growth of this reason, it serves to raise for a moment the thick veil of mystery in which it is enveloped.
        Upon this track and thus retracing our steps to-
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wards the past, we arrive at more and more simple elements, corresponding to the elementary state of the reason, till at last by the light of philological research, in conjunction with deductive philosophic speculation, we approach boldly towards the narrowing circle within which as yet there is neither thought nor speech, and where therefore the cradle and origin of reason is to be found.
        Etymology, or the study of roots, a science founded and admirably Worked out by German diligence, may form the pride and joy of an age otherwise to all appearance estranged from such 'ideal pursuits; and it is this science which may claim to furnish, from its hidden stores, the richest and most startling information about our proper nature, our prehistoric past, and the paths by which the human mind has attained to its present vigor, enlightenment, and perfection.
        In language we possess, as it were, a magic mirror of the past of our race, and its external circumstances and vicissitudes. The science of language casts its rays into the primeval night from whence no other evidence can reach us. From this point of view she is a worthy sister of paleanthropology, the science of prehistoric man; for human thought attaches itself also to the dwellings, tools, arms and implements of human action, and where thought has left its vestiges, its voice is still heard by the keen and discerning senses of the investigator. But the words, the vestiges of language give clearer and more valuable information than any other relics, for they extend back to a time where even the threads of prehistoric research are broken off, when man was without tools, without fire, without any of
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those contrivances which we are now accustomed to regard as indispensable attributes of humanity.

'There is a peculiar charm,' says Max Müller,[7] 'in watching the various changes of form and meaning in words passing down from the Ganges or the Tiber into the great ocean of modern speech. In the eighth century B.C. the Latin dialect was confined to a small territory. It was but one dialect out of many that were spoken all over Italy. But it grew — it became the language of Rome and of the Romans, it absorbed all the other dialects of Italy, the Umbrian, the Oscan, the Etruscan, the Celtic, and became by conquest the language of Central Italy, of Southern and Northern Italy. From thence it spread to Gaul, to Spain, to Germany, to Dacia on the Danube. It became the language of law and government in the civilised portions of Northern Africa and Asia, and it was carried through the heralds of Christianity to the most distant parts of the globe. It supplanted in its victorious progress the ancient vernaculars of Gaul, Spain, and Portugal, and it struck deep roots in parts of Switzerland and Wallachia. When it came in contact with the more vigorous idioms of the Teutonic tribes, though it could not supplant or annihilate them, it left on their surface a thick layer of foreign words, and it thus supplied the greater portion in the dictionary of nearly all the civilised nations of the world. Words which were first used by Italian shepherds are now used by the statesmen of England, the poets of France, the philosophers of Germany; and the faint echo, of their pastoral conversation may be heard in the Senate of Washington, in the cathedral of Calcutta, and in the settlements of New Zealand.
        'We thus see how languages reflect the history of nations, and how, if properly analysed, almost every word will tell us of many vicissitudes through which it passed on its way from Central Asia to India or to Persia, to Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, to Russia, Gaul, Germany, the British Isles, America, New Zealand, nay, back again, in its world-encompassing migrations, to India and the Himalayan regions from which it started. Many a word has thus gone the round of
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the world, and it may go the same round again and again. For although words change in sound and meaning to such an extent that not a single letter remains the same, and that their meaning becomes the very opposite of what it originally was, yet it is important to observe, that since the beginning of the world no. new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements of nature. There is a constant change in language, a coming and going to words, but no man can ever invent an entirely new word. We speak to all intent and purpose substantially the same language as the earliest ancestors of our race, and guided by the hand of scientific etymology we may pass on from century to century through the darkest periods of the world's history, till the stream of language on which we ourselves are moving carries us back to those distant regions where we seem to feel the presence of our earliest forefathers, and to hear the voices of the earthborn sons of Man.'[8]

        But it is not the history of the outer world alone, nor, so to speak, the mere material conditions of human life in prehistoric ages which are mirrored for us in language and the strata so carefully distinguished and explored by our science. It is even more important to us as a record, a document revealing to us the emotions, the thought, and the feeling of a world long since mouldered into dust. And in this respect philology stands alone, and neither requires the help of any other science, nor can concede to any other the right to the work which is reserved for itself alone.
        The history of language, as I have already said, is the history of the growth of human reason. And from this point of view the science of language has not only afforded precious information respecting the past history of reason, but it will also, we may hope, de-
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liver us from the indescribable and vexatious blundering which verbal ambiguities, and confused thought issuing in the misuse of words, have brought upon the human race. To quote once more the words of Max Müller:

'He who would examine the influence which words, mere words, have exercised on the minds of men, might write a history of the world that zvould teach us more than any which we yet possess.[9]
        'I do not speak here of that downright abuse of language when writers, without maturing their thoughts and arranging them in proper order, pour out a stream of hard and misapplied terms which are mistaken by themselves, if not by others, for deep learning and height of speculation. This sanctuary of ignorance and vanity has been well-nigh destroyed; and scholars or thinkers who cannot say what they wish to say consecutively and intelligibly have little chance in these days, or at least in this country, of being considered as depositaries of mysterious wisdom. Si non vis intelligi debes negligi. I rather think of words which everybody uses, and which seem to us so clear that it looks like impertinence to challenge them. Yet, if we except the language of mathematics, it is extraordinary to observe how variable is the meaning of words, how it changes from century to century, nay, how it varies slightly in the mouth of almost every speaker. Such terms as Nature, Law, Freedom, Necessity, Body, Substance, Matter, Church, State, Revelation, Inspiration, Knowledge, Belief, are tossed about in the wars of words, as if everybody knew what they meant; and as if everybody used them exactly in the same sense; whereas most people, and particularly those who represent public opinion, pick up these complicated terms as children, beginning with the vaguest conceptions, adding to them from time to time, perhaps correcting, likewise at haphazard, some of their involuntary errors, but never taking stock, never either enquiring into the history of the terms which they handle
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so freely, or realising the fulness of their meaning according to the strict rules of logical definition. It has been frequently said that most controversies are about words. This is true; but it implies much more than it seems to imply. Verbal differences are not what they are sometimes supposed to be— merely formal, outward, slight, accidental differences, that might be removed by a simple explanation, or by a reference to "Johnson's Dictionary." They are differences arising from the more or less perfect, from the more or less full and correct, conception attached to words: it is the mind that is at fault, not the tongue merely.
        'Here' (continues our author, after showing by a number of well-chosen instances to what curious self-deceptions reason is exposed through her own creations) 'a large field is open to the student of language. It is his office to trace the original meaning of each word, to follow up its history, its changes of form and meaning in the schools of philosophy, or in the market-place and the senate. He ought to know how frequently different ideas are comprehended under one and the same term, and how frequently the same idea is expressed by different terms. ... A kistory of such terms as to know and to believe, Finite and Infinite, Real and Necessary, would do more than anything else to clear the philosophical atmosphere of our days.'[10]

        An historical criticism of language is alone able to furnish an empirical criticism of human reason. The fact that Max Miiller fully recognised the nature of the task he proposed to himself, justified him in the profound utterance which has hitherto been so little understood: 'All future philosophy will be a philosophy of language.'
        This great truth, ripened in the consciousness of the age, though first revealed in full to a single brain, and first proclaimed by a single eloquent voice with all the force of truth and conviction, still could not
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appear suddenly in the world like a creation out of nothing. It is not an uncommon thing for two kindred minds to give expression simultaneously to the same thought without knowing of each other's existence. The history of science contains more than one instance of this kind, from the controversy about priority between Newton and Leibnitz down to the interpretation of hieroglyphs, from the discovery of oxygen to the formula of the principle of the conservation of force, about which such a dust has been raised of late, though at last the credit of it has been rightly assigned to the modest and illustrious thinker, Robert Mayer. In the same way, independently of Max Miiller, the writer already quoted, Lazarus Geiger, has expressed with equal definiteness the essential point of future philosophy—'an empirical criticism of human reason through the criticism of language,' while the main outlines of the future edifice have been boldly traced in his thoughtful and profound works.
        But such a thought must have precursors as well; it flashes more or less distinctly across the works of all those who are striving after the common goal, till at last it breaks like a thunder cloud and clears the atmosphere of the fogs and vapors of secular error and prejudices. Among these precursors of Miiller and Geiger, the first place belongs to Theodor Waitz, whose writings unfortunately were little regarded and less esteemed during his lifetime, when all minds were under the spell of the Schelling-Hegelian phrasemongering, and all healthy thought was stifled. A few quotations will suffice to show that the idea of a history of the development of thought and reason had occurred to him.
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'In common with Kant' (he says), 'I can only conceive the task of philosophy as that of establishing a science which should explain the foundations of experience.
        'Neither criticism nor construction, nor any combined application of the two, will lead to the desired goal; nothing can do this but a history of the development of thought.
        'I have tried to found psychology upon unquestionable physiological facts, in order that it, and philosophy in general, might be made independent for the future of the wrangling of philosophical schools, which turns upon vague general notions as to which it is easy to dispute, because every one may attach a different meaning to them, until a preliminary history of development establishes the distinction between sound and unsuccessful attempts towards the formation of concepts. Speculation, which does not reach a ground of direct experience, is, and always will be, a subject of dispute.'[11]

        In his lectures on psychology Waitz expresses himself still more clearly; he lays down that, 'the function of psychology, in relation to other philosophic studies, is that of foundation, for the formation of our ideas has a collective history, upon which their substance is dependent. They become scientifically serviceable only when it appears that they are not merely individual or accidental products of an unconscious process, but the necessary results of development, the products of laws of universal application, i.e. of laws to which the cultivation of their inner life must be always and entirely subject.'
        Waitz was thus well aware of what was required; he was only uncertain as to the means by which the goal was to be attained. With inexhaustible zeal he turned first to physiology, then to comparative psycho-
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logy, and lastly to anthropology, as a contribution to which his epoch-making work, 'Die Anthropologie der Naturvolker' was compiled.
        But he passed unsuspectingly by the richest, clearest, most trustworthy source upon which the historian of the development of human reason can draw. The discovery of this source was reserved for Max Müller and L. Geiger.