184 MR STARK ON THE SUPPOSED PROGRESS OF HUMAN SOCIETY 



" who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the 

 societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which they 

 would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by utter- 

 ing certain sounds whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects 

 only which were most familiar to them, and which they had most frequently oc- 

 casion to mention, would have particular names assigned to them."* Dr SMITH 

 does not say, in direct terms, that such indeed was the state of our first parents ; 

 but if speech was not the gift to our race of the Great CREATOR, the situation he 

 supposes must have been theirs. 



According to Dr REIDJ and DUGALD STEWART, $ natural language preceded 

 the formation of artificial language, and artificial signs must have been the effect 

 of convention. The natural signs consist " in certain expressions of the counte- 

 nance, certain gestures of the body, and certain tones of the voice," of which the 

 pantomimes of the Roman stage furnished an example. This natural language 

 declined, according to the philosophical theory, in consequence of the use of 

 artificial signs. " As ideas multiply, the imperfections of natural language 

 are felt, and men find it necessary to invent artificial signs, of which the meaning 

 is fixed by mutual agreement." But this opinion as to the origin of language, 

 adopted or assented to rather in compliance with classical associations than his 

 own convictions, is modified by Mr STEWART in another passage, where he says, 

 that " When we consider what a vast and complicated fabric language is, it is 

 difficult for us to persuade ourselves that the unassisted faculties of the human 

 mind were equal to the invention." And it is remarked by Dr ADAM FERGUSON, 

 " that the speculative mind, in comparing the first and last steps of the progress, 

 feels the same sort of amazement with a traveller who, after rising insensibly to 

 the slope of a hill, comes to look from a precipice of an almost unfathomable 

 depth, to the summit of which he scarcely believes himself to have ascended 

 without supernatural aid." || I have further to remark, that although Mr STEW- 

 ART, in referring to the early periods of society, when, according to the universally 

 adopted theory of man's savage original, everything was to be learned ; and con- 

 sidering, in accordance with this theory, " by what steps our rude forefathers must 

 have proceeded in their attempts towards the formation of a language, and how 

 the parts of speech arose," prefaces his remarks with the observation, that he 

 does not mean to prejudge the question, " Whether language be, or be not, the 

 result of immediate revelation ?"^| and though he gives it as his opinion that the 



* A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, appended to the second volume of the Theory of Mo- 

 ral Sentiments, seventh edition, Lond. 1792, vol. ii. pp. 402, 404. 

 f Inquiry into the Human Mind, chap. iv. sect 2. 



{ Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, iii. 2, 3. Ibid. vol. iii. p. 25. 



|| An Essay on the History of Civil Society. By ADAM FERGUSON, LL.D. 

 \ Elements, iii. 26. 



