57 CHAPTER V. PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DISTINCT THOUGHT. Wenn ein unendlich Gefühl aufwogt in der Seele des Dichter's, O dann mag er ahnen von fern das Geheimniss der Sprache, GEIBEL. LANGUAGE may with more accuracy be called a Discovery or a Creation, than an Invention of the human race. Undoubtedly the idea of speech existed in the human intelligence as a part of our moral and mental constitution when man first appeared upon the surface of the earth. In this sense we may call language a divine gift, and may apply to it, with perfect truth, the passage of Tertullian: invenisse dicuntur necessaria ista vitæ, non instituisse; quod autem invenitur fuit, et quod fuit non ejus deputabitur qui invenit, sed ejus qui instituit. Erat enim antequam inveniretur.'1 But the germs may perish for want of development, and like the seeds in the diluvium, or grains of wheat in the hand of a mummy, may lie hidden for centuries before they meet with that combination of circumstances which is capable of quickening them into life. Yet we 1 Apolog. adv. Gentes, xi. do not agree with Lessing in supposing that if man discovered language by the exercise of his own endowments, i.e. if he merely evolved the speech-power which existed within him as an immanent faculty, long centuries would necessarily have been required for the purpose. The wants of primitive men, like the wants of infants, are few and simple,' and wholly sensuous. It is certain, by universal admission, that the ultimate roots of language are few in number; it is nearly certain that no language possesses more than a thousand, and that some have far fewer. These roots we regard as mere etymologic fictions; but if, with Max Müller, we suppose that they were ever used as words, there must, even on this theory, have been a period when men used but a few words; and consequently, since the notion of any revelation of these roots is expressly repudiated, there must have been a time, however short, in which man had no words, no articulate language at all, and in which significant gestures could have been his only way for communicating his thoughts. And this time, however short, must also be postulated even if, in defiance of Scripture, it be supposed that language was revealed, But why should it be held impossible that man once existed with nothing but the merest rudiments of speech? There are whole nations even now which, if the testimony of travellers is to be accepted, possess very 1 Prof. Max Müller traces back all language to 'roots,' and there he would stop, declaring the use of them to be an ultimate and inexplicable fact. Inexplicable indeed! yet the 'theory of roots,' 'phonetic types,' incapable of further analysis and, so far as appears, either wholly arbitrary, or else containing in themselves some mystic inherent fitness, is offered to us in the place of theories, so simple, so natural, and in part so demonstrable, as those which trace the rise and gradual growth of language out of onomatopoeia and interjection. little more. Nor, indeed, is it necessary to look to the remotest parts of the earth to find how very few are the words which are necessary to express the wants of man. Mr. D'Orsey mentions that some of his parishioners had not a vocabulary of more than 300 words; and although the assertion has been widely disputed, I should certainly be inclined to confirm it out of my own experience. I once listened for a long time together to the conversation of three peasants who were gathering apples among the boughs of an orchard, and as far as I could conjecture, the whole number of words they used did not exceed a hundred; the same word was made to serve a multitude of purposes,' and the same coarse expletives recurred with a horrible frequency in the place of every single part of speech, and with every variety of meaning which the meagre context was capable of supplying. Repeated observation has since then confirmed the impression. If this be so in Christian and highly-civilised England in the nineteenth century, what may not have been perhaps ten thousand years before the Saviour was born into the world? If, then, man once existed with only the germs of speech and of understanding, to what was their development due? The question admits of distinct answer, and that answer is full both of interest and value. The first men who ever lived must have learned for themselves those simplest lessons which have to be learnt afresh by every infant of their race. Confused, yet lovely, was the multitude of influences and appearances by which they were surrounded; how should they 1 Just as in Chinese the same root may be a noun, a verb, and some times also a particle. Heyse, § 134. thrid the all-but inextricable mazes of impressions so manifold? Over their heads the sun, and moon, and the infinite stars of heaven, rose and set in endless succession; the heavens outspread their illimitable splendour; woods waved, and waters rolled, and flowers exhaled their perfume, and fruits yielded their sweetness, and the hours of day and night and the four seasons of the year encircled them in their mystic dance. Had man been created unintelligent, and merely receptive, the waves of this vast tide of being must have broken over him in vain; and, in the absence of a living spirit, the world must have continued to seem unto all save the Highest Being a formless chaos-no better, for all its lustre and loveliness, than if the darkness had still brooded over the void abyss. But that soul, 'created in the image of God,' whose birth is recorded in the book of Genesis, bore no resemblance to the statue-man of Condillac's famous Traité des Sensations. Had it been so, the senses could only have produced a jarring multitude of heterogeneous impressions, and man would have continued to be that mere organised sensitive mass which Saint Lambert supposes him to be at the moment of his birth until 'Nature has created for him a soul!' For unless there had also been in man the intellectus ipse' of Leibnitz, unless there had been the intelligence, as well as the sensorium commune, even sensation would be impossible,2 seeing that in the complex act which we call sensation man opposes the internal action of his conscious individuality to the influence of external Without this apperception, there could be no causes. See a glorious passage of S. Chrysostom, Or. xii. 385, quoted by Lersch, i. 89; and Herbart, Lehrb. d. Psychol. p. 194. 2 Herbart, Psychol. p. 108. such thing as self-conscious sensation,' nor could mankind ever have arisen to any higher region than that of mere organic impressions. But although at first the intellect be but a passive and dormant faculty, it is there, and it is the sole clue wherewith we disentangle the myriad-ravelled intricacy of sensuous impressions. And thus the senses become the gateways of knowledge; and a man born without the capacity for external sensations would also be of necessity soulless and mindless, because, though not the single source of all our thoughts and faculties, the senses are yet the necessary condition of their development. Thus it is that the senses, during the earliest days of man's existence, act the part of nursing mothers2 to the soul, to which afterwards they become the powerful and obedient handmaids. They are the organs of communion between man and the outer world; they place him en rapport with it, uniting man to the Universe, and men to one another. Thus they baptize man as a member of the moral and physical cosmos, 1 See Vict. Cousin, Cours de Phil. iii. passim. 'Sensation,' says Morell, 'is not purely a passive state, but implies a certain amount of mental activity. It may be described on the psychological side as resulting directly from the attention which the mind gives to the affections of its own organism. Extreme enthusiasm, or powerful emotion of any kind, can make us altogether insensible to physical injury.' Hence, a soldier, during the battle, is often unconscious of his wounds, and a general of the roar of cannon going on around him. 'Numerous facts of a similar kind prove demonstrably, that a certain application and exercise of mind, on one side, is as necessary to the existence of sensation, as the occurrence of physical impulse on the other.'-Psychology, p. 107. In point of fact, some nations are as pre-eminent for the keenness of their senses as for the meanness of their intellect, which could not be the case if the senses created the intellect. |