to the ancient Hebrews. The living oracles intrusted to their charge spoke much of the nature of God, and revealed to the world that which, of himself, man could but dimly and most partially discover or understand— his relation to his Creator, the scheme of the divine government, and the means appointed for the purification and deliverance of the soul. The high majesty and grandeur of this revelation, its sacred origin and unspeakable importance, must not blind us to the fact that there are other1 revelations also, which unveil to us in all their marvellous magnificence the works of God, and which yet were never accorded to Psalmist, or Priest, or Prophet, but to those great benefactors of their race who from time to time have been inspired to devote lives of ardent and devout study to the observation of the laws which God has imposed on His created Universe. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the blessings which science, by thus deciphering the divine records of Creation, has conferred upon mankind; yet her lessons have never been whispered by angel or lawgiver, but, if we may borrow a poet's simile, they have been unclenched by sheer labour from the granite hand of nature; they have ever been not immediate but mediate; not revealed to the idle, but discovered by the patient; not direct from God, but granted indirectly through the use of appointed means. Men have attained to them, not by gliding down the lazy stream of dogmatic inference, but by

Springing from crystal step to crystal step

1 'Deus naturâ cognoscendus, dein doctrinâ recognoscendus.'-Ter'Duo sunt quæ in cognitionem Dei ducant, Creatio et Scriptura.'

tullian.

Aug.

of that bright ascent which leads to the serene heights of knowledge. And because all those scattered rays of beauty and loveliness which we behold spread up and down all the world over, are only the emanations of that inexhaustible light which is above, they have climbed up always by those sunbeams to the Eternal Father of Light.' God never lavishes gratuitously that which man can earn by faithful industry: this is an axiom which may be confidently claimed, a truth which may be broadly asserted, of every discovery which was possible to the intelligence of man.

That language is such a discovery-that it is possible for man to have arrived at speech from a condition originally mute, merely by using the faculties which God had implanted-has been proved repeatedly, and will, we hope, be further illustrated in the following pages. Even those who cling with tenacity to a belief in the revelation of language are compelled to admit the possibility of its invention. How, indeed, can this be denied when it has been a matter of constant observation that deaf and dumb children, before they have been taught, can and do elaborate for themselves an intelligible language of natural and conventional signs? If, then, the invention of a voiceless language, addressed to the eye instead of the ear,- a language so much more cumbrous and difficult than articulate speech, and one in which the learner can receive little or no assistance from the multitudinous echoes of external nature,-be thus easily within the range of human capabilities so unusually limited, we must conclude that a spoken language of which man

1 Chastel, De la Raison, pp. 283, 295. Dug. Stewart, Phil. of the Mind, iii. 1. Comp. Horne Tooke, Divers. of Purley, i. 2.

must at once have perceived the analogon among the living creatures with which he was surrounded, and which required for its ample commencement no achievement more difficult than the acceptance of sounds as the signs either of sounds or of the things which the sounds naturally recall, was one which man, by the aid of the divine instincts within him, would spontaneously and easily invent, with nature as his beneficent instructress, and all the world before him as the school wherein to learn. We may therefore conclude, as Dante' did five centuries ago,

That man speaks

Is Nature's prompting, whether thus or thus
She leaves to you as ye do most affect it;

Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem,' said William of Occam; frustra fit per plura quod fieri potest per pauciora.' It is astonishing how much spurious philosophy and spurious theology is cut away by this razor of the Nominalists. Those theologians who, by the liberal intrusion of unrecorded and purely imaginary miracles into every lacuna of their air-built theories, do their best to render science impossible, have earned thereby the merited suspicion of scientific men. Nevertheless, all but the most obstinate and the most prejudiced even of theologians ought to admit that if man could have invented language, we may safely conclude that he did; for the wasteful prodigality of direct interposition and miraculous power which plays the chief part in the idle and anti-scriptural exegesis of many churchmen finds no place in the divine economy of God's dealings displayed to us either in nature, in

1 Carey's Dante, Parad. xxvi. 128.

2 Zobel, Urspr. d. Sprache, ad f.

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history, or in the inspired Word itself. This single consideration ought to be sufficient for any mind philosophically trained; but as too many engines cannot be employed against the invincible bastions of prejudice, let us proceed to further and yet more conclusive arguments. I have stated elsewhere the positive reasons which are adequate to disprove the revelation of language. The whole character of human speech, its indirect and imperfect methods, its distant metaphoric approximations, its traceable growth and decay, the recorded stages of historic development and decadence through which it passes, and the psychological and phonetic laws which rule these organic changes, furnish us at once with a decisive criterion of its human origin. An invention which, in spite of all its power and beauty, is essentially imperfect, could not have come direct from God. The single fact that the spiritual and abstract signification of roots is never the original one, but always arises from some incomplete and often wholly erroneous application or metaphor, is of itself adequate to confirm an à priori probability. The vast multitude of human languages-certainly not fewer than 750 in number-differing from each other in words, in structure, and in sound, points inevitably, as we shall see hereafter to the same conclusion.

Speech, moreover, is the correlative of the understanding. It can express nothing which has not been

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1 Origin of Lang., pp. 23-29.

2 The number is very uncertain. Pott reckons about a thousand, Die Ungleichheit d. Menschl. Rassen. 230-244. Adrian Balbi reckons 860, Atlas Ethnogr. Dissert. Prélim. lxxv. sqq. Crawfurd, Ethnol. Trans. i. 335, 1863.

3 Heyse, Syst. d. Sprachwissenschaft, p. 51. We do not deny to language a certain maieutic power which enables us to bring our con

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developed by intelligence and thought. It can have no existence independent of, or separate from our conception of things. It may be unable to keep pace with the advancing power of abstraction, but it never can by any possibility anticipate or outstrip it. A language without corresponding conceptions would be a babble of unintelligible sounds; for words,' says Bacon, 'are but the image of matter; and, except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.' If then a language were dictated, or in any other manner directly revealed to the earliest men, the comprehension of ideas must necessarily have been inspired with the signs which expressed them; in other words, the fullgrown understanding must have been created together with the language, since the only difference between the imitative vocal faculty of children and some animals consists in the fact that with animals the sound in most instances remains a sound, while the understanding of man teaches him the conceptions pari passu with the sounds, so that the sounds become signs. But to assert in this sense the creation of the human understanding, is, after the manner of certain ignorant divines, to force upon us as an article of faith, that which is nothing more than

ceptions into clearer light, by reducing them into shape, and by enabling us to reason respecting them; but when Hamann calls speech the 'Deipara unserer Vernunft,' it is easy to see that the expression can with at least equal truth be reversed.

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1 Advancement of Learning, p. 100; compare the dictum of the Buddhist philosopher: Le nom et la forme ont pour cause l'intelligence; et l'intelligence a pour cause le nom et la forme.'-Burnouf, Le Lotus de la bonne Foi, p. 550. Wie der Mensch eine Einheit von Geist und Leib, so ist das Wort die Einheit von Begriff und Laut.'-Becker, Organism d. Sprache, § 1, 2, 4. Hermann, Das Problem d. Sprache, p. 1.

2 Maine de Biran, Orig. de Lang. Œuvres inéd. iii. 239.