536 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.-SUPPLEMENT. 



the works which preceded it. The most impor- 

 tant of them are: 



1. Die Welt als Eutwiehelung des Geistes, 1874. 



" The World as an Evolution of Spirit." 



2. Der monistische Gedanke, eine Concordanz der 



PhilosopMe Schopenhauer's, Darwin's, B. 

 Mayer's, und L. Geiger's, 1875. " Monistic 

 Thought : a Concordance of the Philoso- 

 phy of Schopenhauer, Darwin, E. Mayer, 

 and L. Geiger." 



3. Grundlegung einer zeitgemdssen PhilosopMe, 



1875. " Foundations of a new System of 

 Philosophy." 



4. Die Doppelnatur der Causalitat, 1875. " The 



Double Nature of Causality." 



5. Einleiiung und liegrundung einer monistwchen 



Erhenntnuslehre, 1877. "Introduction to 

 a Monistic Doctrine of Perception." 



These works, though written, or at least pub- 

 lished, within a short space of time, show a con- 

 stant advance toward a clearer perception of the 

 nature of language. Noire is not one of those 

 philosophers who sacrifice their delight in truth 

 to a stationary infallibility, He is one of the few 

 students who can still say, " I was wrong." With 

 regard to the origin of language, he has openly 

 retracted what he had written but a few years be- 

 fore. In his first book, " The World as an Evo- 

 lution of Spirit," he still looked upon language 

 as some sort of copy of the external world. 



" The first human sound," he wrote (page 255), 

 " which deserves the name of word, cannot have 

 differed from the warning calls of animals, except 

 by a higher degree of luminousness in the images 

 •which excited arid followed these calls. They ex- 

 cited the idea of approaching danger among fel- 

 low-animals. ... I assume that men were held 

 together by the ties of social life in herds or tribes 

 even before the beginning of the language. War 

 was then the natural state — war against animals of 

 another species, and against neighbors of the same 

 species. It is not unlikely that a peculiar sound or 

 watchword united the members of a single tribe, 

 so that they could collect by it those who were scat- 

 tered abroad and had lost their way, or encourage 

 each other while engaged in fight with other tribes. 

 Let us suppose that but once one member of a 

 tribe warned the other members by imitating the 

 watchword of a hostile tribe when he saw the en- 

 emy approaching, and we have in reality the origin 

 of the first human word, capable of doing what 

 words have to do, viz., to excite, as they were in- 

 tended to do, an idea in the mind of cognate and 

 homogeneous creatures." 



" I found afterward," Prof. Noire" continues, 1 

 " that Darwin, in his ' Descent of Man,' had start- 



1 " Ursprung der Sprache," p. 170. 



ed an hypothesis almost identical with my own. 

 After declaring that he could not doubt that lan- 

 guage owed its origin to the imitation and modi- 

 fication, aided by signs and gestures, of various 

 natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and 

 man's own instinctive cries, he says : > ' As mon- 

 keys certainly understand much that is said to them 

 by man, and as in a state of nature they utter sig- 

 nal-cries of danger to their fellows, it does not ap- 

 pear altogether incredible that some unusually wise 

 ape-like animal should have thought of imitating 

 the growl of a beast of prey, so as to iudicate to his 

 fellow-monkeys the nature of the expected danger; 

 but this would have been a first step in the forma- 

 tion of a language.' 



" The difference between my own hypothesis 

 and that of Darwin consists only in this, that I 

 after all see in the contents of the first sound of 

 language something more natural, more familiar, 

 more human, viz., the hostile neighbors, •while 

 Darwin makes the wild animal the first object 

 of a common cognition. With a little reflection, 

 however, it can be seen that such an attempt is 

 utterly impossible, for the objects of fear, and 

 trembling, and dismay, are even now the least ap- 

 propriate to enter into the pure, clear, and tran- 

 quil sphere of speech-thought (Adyo?), or to supply 

 the first germs of it. The same objection applies 

 of course to my own theory. 



" From whatever point of view we look at 

 them, these hypotheses can never stand against 

 serious criticism. A call of warning is a call of 

 terror, and terror communicates itself by sym- 

 pathy. But according to mine and Darwin's 

 theories, one more particularly gifted Homo pri- 

 migenius would have had to ruminate and reflect 

 thus : ' How can I make my fellows conscious 

 of the threatening danger \ ' and then, by some 

 kind of momentary inspiration, he would have 

 uttered the dreaded sound. Let us grant, what 

 I is impossible and utterly incredible, that he cal- 

 I culated on his being understood ; how could he 

 have been understood by others without there 

 being the same inspiration on their part answer- 

 ing to his own 2 And that is to be the beginning of 

 language ! The fierce howling of the wild animal, 

 the battle-shout of the enemy, are these to have 

 been the first genu, the centre of crystallization, 

 of that wonderful intellectual creation which, rest- 

 ing on the solid ground of human consciousness, 

 has become the mirror of the world, of earth and 

 heaven and all their marvels? Nothing is more 

 incredible, more unlikely. And as I recognize 

 the insufficiency of my own hypothesis, it was im- 

 possible that the whole philosophical significance 

 of the problem, and the crying misproportion be- 

 tween it and his own lightly -uttered guesses, could 

 long remain a secret to the serious and profound 

 mind of Darwin. He, too, in a clear and consid- 



i " Descent of Man," vol. i., p. 57. 



