Man's Place in Nature 205 



cestry what may be called a set of primary im- 

 pulses, which he immediately proceeded to raise 

 to a higher power by virtue of his peculiarly in- 

 creased cerebral complexity. What we mean 

 may be illustrated by considering the case of 

 language. 



It seems certain that not a few animals have 

 definite words, expressive of particular emotional 

 states or with particular significance of some sort. 

 Even the chick has some half-dozen words and 

 the dog perhaps more, both excelling in vocabu- 

 lary the infant who has no language but a cry. 

 But no animal is known to have the power of ex- 

 pressing a judgment, however simple, which is the 

 essence of language. It may be, as John Oliver 

 Hobbes says, that "a dog can put more soul into a 

 look than a kind friend can talk in an hour," but 

 we have no warrant for supposing that the dog's 

 sympathy, even when expressed in a welcoming 

 bark, has any general idea behind it. 



Now, while we cannot doubt that Man has in- 

 herited his brains and the centre of speech and his 

 vocal cords from simpler non-human ancestors, 

 we cannot say that his language was directly 

 evolved from their speech. What was evolved 

 was the Man, with a more complex cerebral struc- 

 ture; and language is a human product. The po- 

 tentiality of it, the raw materials of it, were pre- 

 human, but so far as we know, language is solely 



