ROOTS OF LANGUAGE. 28 1 



showTi that the great majority of these were employed 

 without conceptual significance. Therefore, if these labourers 

 had had to coin their own words, it is probable that, without 

 exception, their language would have been destitute of any 

 terms betokening more than a pre-conceptual order of idea- 

 tion. Neverthless, these men must have been capable, in 

 however undeveloped a degree, of truly conceptual ideation : 

 and this proves how unsafe it would be to argue from the 

 absence of distinctively conceptual terms to the poverty of 

 conceptual faculty among any people v/hose root-words may 

 have come down to us — although, no doubt, in such a case 

 we appear to be getting within a comparatively short distance 

 of the origin of this faculty. 



The point, however, now is that really aboriginal, and 

 therefore purely denotative names, must certainly have 

 been " generic " as well as " particular " : they must have 

 been the names of recepts as well as of percepts, of 

 actions as well as of objects and qualities. Moreover, it 

 is equally certain that among this aboriginal assemblage 

 of denotative names as particular and generic, only those 

 belonging to the latter class could have stood much chance of 

 surviving as roots. In other words, no aboriginal name could 

 have survived as a root until it had acquired some greater or 

 less degree of rcccptual and, therefore, of connotative value. 

 Hence the fact that the ultimate result of the philological 

 analysis of any language is that of reducing the language to a 

 certain small number of roots, and the fact that all these roots 

 are expressive of general and generic ideas, — these facts in 

 themselves yield no support whatever to the doctrine, either 

 that these roots were themselves the aboriginal elements of 

 language, or, a fortiori, that the aboriginal elements of lan- 

 guage were expressive of general ideas.* 



And this conclusion involves another of scared)- less 



* Professor Max Mliller says in one place, "The Science of Language, by 

 inquiring into the origin of general terms, has establishe<l two facts of the highest 

 importance, namely, lir»t, that ail terms were originally general ; and, secondly, 



