1864. ] The Science of Language. 719 
To this we must demur that whilst the Afolic and Tonic, the High 
and Low German, the Gadhelic and Cymric were contemporaneous 
and concurrent, the Prakrit was a corruption and successor of the 
Sanskrit; that supposing the Ionian might be considered more po- 
lished and more effeminate than the Alolian, the Englishman, the 
Dutchman, and the Dane have never shown themselves inferior in 
courage (though they may have been in numbers) to the Prussian or 
the Austrian. With all respect for Grimm and for Professor Max 
Miller, we must dissent from a doctrine which is methodical enough 
to have issued from a French bureau, 
With one of the author’s conclusions, on which he lays much 
emphasis, we cannot bring ourselves to agree. He says: “ Without 
speech no reason, without reason no speech.” * And again: “ We can- 
not realize general conceptions, or, as they are called by philosophers, 
nominal essences, such as awimal, tree, man, without names; we cannot 
reason therefore without names or without language.” ¢ It may be 
that in our present condition as civilized beings, having a language 
on which to rely, we usually do not reason without language. It may 
be that children before they can speak do not reason, and it may be 
that the whole logical syllogism cannot be developed without the use 
of language. But are we in a condition to judge of those who had no 
language? Did not reason exist in the mind previously to the utter- 
ance of language? Do we not even see the glimmerings of reason 
existing in animals in whom we find no language? Professor Huxley 
declares that language is the only differentia of man perceptible by the 
senses ; but are we to deny to the whole brute creation that reason 
which has of late years been able to trace its own image reflected in 
that darkened glass which indifference and laziness have termed in- 
stinct? We might as well say, as many a so-called logician would 
say, that reasoning could not exist without a syllogism. This is per- 
fectly true in a certain sense. We cannot arrive at certain ends with- 
out a certain amount of machinery as a rule, but still we do not know 
whether we cannot arrive at those ends without the machinery if we 
have not the ordinary means at hand. AII reasoning must be capable 
of being put into the form of a syllogism, and therefore must be 
capable of being put into words, but we cannot put ourselves entirely 
into the position of those who have no words to use, and therefore we 
cannot tell whether they could not reason without words in such a 
form as we should be able afterwards to put into words. In one case 
the author gives an instance against himself. He says— 
“The history of religion is in one sense a history of language. Many 
of the ideas embodied in the language of the Gospel would have been in- 
comprehensible and inexpressible alike, if we imagine that by some 
miraculous agency they had been communicated to the primitive inhabit- 
ants of the earth. Even at the present moment, missionaries find that 
they have first to educate their savage pupils, that is to say, to rajse them 
to that level of language and thought which had been reached by Greeks, 
Romans, and Jews, at the beginning of our era, before the words and 
ideas of Christianity assume any reality to their minds, and before their 
* P65. + P. 435. 
a) (0) 
