origin of Song or Festal-speech. The god of song Wannemunne descended on the Domberg, on which stands a sacred wood, and there played and sang. All creatures were invited to listen, and they each learnt some fragment of the celestial sound; the listening wood learnt its rustling, the stream its roar; the wind caught and learnt to reecho the shrillest tones, and the birds the prelude of the song. The fish stuck up their heads as far as the eyes out of the water, but left their ears under water; they saw the movements of the god's mouth, and imitated them, but remained dumb. Man only grasped it all, and therefore his song pierces into the depths of the heart, and upwards to the dwellings of the gods.

The legends of savages, and their mythical attempts to express a dim philosophy of speech, are so extremely few that it is interesting to observe in them this tendency. The following legend of the Australian aborigines appears at first sight to be meaningless. They say that there was an old woman named Wururi, who went out at night and used to quench the fires with a great stick. When this old woman died the people tore her corpse to pieces. The Southern tribes coming up first ate her flesh, and immediately gained a very clear language. The Eastern and the Northern tribes, who came later, spoke less intelligible dialects. If Steinthal' be right in seeing in Wururi a personification of the damp Night-wind, then at the root of this legend also, lies the notion that the Imitation of Nature helped largely to furnish the material of speech.

1 Gesch. der Sprachwissenschaft, p. 9.

119

CHAPTER XI.

FROM IMITATIVE SOUNDS TO INTELLIGENT SPEECH.

Μεγάλη τούτων ἀρχὴ καὶ διδάσκαλος ἡ φύσις, ἡ ποιοῦσα μιμητικοὺς ἡμᾶς καὶ θετικοὺς τῶν ὀνομάτων, οἷς δηλοῦται τὰ πράγματα.

DION. HAL. De Comp. Verb. p. 94.

THE Intelligence plays but a very subordinate part, and finds no adequate expression,' in the Natural Sounds which tell of sensation and sensuous impression.

Reasonable speech begins when the mind has arrived at those immediate individual perceptions which we have called Intuitions, and which correspond to the German Anschauungen. These intuitions are expressed, in the parallel development of sound, by Roots.

The Representation is a development of the Intuition, by means of Abstraction; and in the same way the Word is a development of the Root by a formal limitation of the merely material meaning of the root into a determinate object of thought, which also externally assumes a determinate and limited Sound.

1 Throughout this brief section I generally follow Heyse, p. 88 sqq.,except where otherwise indicated; I do not however translate him, frequently preferring other forms of expression or arrangement of sentences, and frequently interweaving my own comments or illustrations.

2 'Every act of consciousness of which the immediate object is an individual thing, state, or act of mind, presented under the condition of distinct existence in space or time.' Mansel, Proleg. Log. p. 9, in Fleming, p. 272.

Just as the intuition (Anschauung) melts into the representation (Vorstellung) without acquiring any permanent fixity, so in actual speech the Root vanishes into the Word. It has no independent existence; but can only be separated into its elements by an analysis of Language in its finished state.

The production of the word is necessarily coincident with the production of the 'representation.' For in consequence of man's double nature, partly corporeal partly spiritual, he cannot firmly grasp a 'representation' otherwise than by means of the word which is its sensuous sign. The creative Spontaneity of the Intellect in the production of the 'representation' must express itself in a corresponding spontaneous effort of the physical organism. The representation must receive an objective form. In order to grasp and retain the representation in his own intellectual possession, man must necessarily likewise clothe it in a palpable form, for himself, and since his life is essentially social-for others also. In order to master an object and appropriate it to himself for his own mental purposes, he must give it an Ideal existence instead of its real one, and even this Ideal existence must have its sensuous form in order that it may be exhibited and expressed. He cannot be thoroughly conscious of the representation, as of something which he definitely possesses, without giving it some form of expression,' and the most perfect and natural form, as has been shown already, is furnished by Sound.

We have arrived then at that point in the Rise of

1 Similar reasoning may be found in Humboldt, Ueber d. Verschied. d. menschl. Sprachbaues, p. 68. See p. 51 of the Analysis of this work by M. Tonnellé.

Language at which man must develope those Natural Sounds which he possesses as a part of the animal creation, into meaning and appropriate words, so specialised as to become the signs of distinct conceptions. What we have yet to try and understand is the reason why particular sounds should have been attached to particular conceptions; or in other words we must try and discover whether there are any principles on which we can establish a natural, organic connection between words, regarded as sounds, and the meanings which we attach to them.

Now unless we take refuge in miracle or mysticism,unless we shield ourselves behind a plea of lazy ignorance, which simply means a refusal to enquire, or hide that very ignorance under the exploded jargon of a pseudo-metaphysical science by talking of occult causes, -we must admit that there must have been an original connection between sound and sense. 'The word,' as Steinthal observes, belongs not only to the speaker but to the hearer,' and 'comprehension and speech are only different effects of the same power of Language.' Now a root, or a word, could be practically neither root nor word if it were unintelligible to the hearer; it would be as meaningless as the babble of an idiot. How then could such a sound be intelligible? It is too late in the day to talk of the possibility of Convention being the origin of the meaning attached to sounds. Against such a theory alone applies with full force the celebrated dictum of Humboldt that man is man only by means of language, but that without language he never could have invented language.' Now as the connection be

1 Steinthal, Urspr. d. Sprache, p. 11. Humboldt, Ueber d. Verschied. p. 70. Heyse, p. 13. Becker, Organ d. Sprache, § 3.

tween sound and sense was not arbitrary, and was not miraculous, it must have had a definite reason. Any sound therefore which would at once express and convey even the simplest sensation, must necessarily be a spontaneous natural sound; i. e. it must be either imitative or interjectional. The living, feeling, observing Child of Nature, without deliberation, influenced only by sensation or the imitative instinct, produces a sound to represent his conceptions; and this sound, so originated, is instantly intelligible, by virtue of its natural force, to a fellow-man, similarly organised, standing on the same step of mental development, and surrounded. by precisely the same conditions, circumstances, and climatic influences. The nearer men stand to the natural life, the more they resemble one another.1 Individuality is evolved by dawning civilisation. The whole life of the savage in all its external indications, is the life rather of a species than of an individual, and consequently it is dominated over by certain natural necessities rather than by the freedom of the Intellect. Hence among uncultivated races, far more than among civilised races, the sound uttered by each individual would with extraordinary rapidity be accepted and understood as a sign by the entire nation. Thus there would be in the Origin of Language nothing either capricious or mystical, but the harmonious and perfect working of laws and instincts inseparable from the very nature of mankind; and it may confidently be asserted that if the explanation thus offered as to the original union between sound and sense be not correct, it is at any rate

It has been said that the members of savage tribes are, even in countenance, so exactly like each other that no passport system would be possible among them.