THE WITXESS OF PHILOLOGY. 33/ 



all by the one denotative name of "star." The astronomer 

 has a general idea answering to his denominative name of 

 " star ; " but this has been arrived at after a prolonged course 

 of mental evolution, wherein conceptual analysis has been 

 engaged in conceptual classification in many and various 

 directions : it therefore represents the psychological antithesis 

 of the generalized idea, which was due to the merely sensu- 

 ous associations of pre-conceptual thought. Ideas, then, as 

 general and as generic severally occupy the very antipodes 

 of Mind. 



All this we have previously seen. My object in here 

 recurring to the matter is to show that much additional light 

 may be thrown upon it by the philological doctrine of 

 "sentence-words," which Professor Max Miiller, in common 

 with other philologists, fully accepts. 



Of all the writers on primitive modes of speech as repre- 

 sented by existing savages, no one is entitled to speak with 

 so much authority as Bleek. Now, as a result of his pro- 

 longed and first-hand study of the subject, he is strongly 

 of opinion that aboriginal words were expressive "not at all 

 of an abstract or general character, but exclusively concrete 

 or individual." By this he means that primitive ideas were 

 what I have called generic. For he says that had a word 

 been formed from imitation of the sound of a cuckoo, for 

 instance, it could not possibly have had its meaning limited 

 to the name of that bird ; but would have been extended so 

 as to embrace " the whole situation so far as it came within 

 the consciousness of the speaker." That is to say, it would 

 have become a generic name for the whole recept of bird, cry, 

 flying, &c., &c., just as to our own children the word 

 i9<i: = sheep, bleating, grazing, &c. Now, this process of com- 

 prising under one denotative term the hitherto undifferentiated 

 perceptions of " a whole situation so far as it comes within 

 the consciousness of the speaker," is the very opposite of the 

 process whereby a denominative term is brought to unify, by 

 an act of "generalization," the previously well-diffcrcntiatcd 

 concepts V)ctwcen which sc^me analogy is afterwards tliscovercd. 



Z 



