THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 343 



touching the genesis of conceptual from pre-conceptual 

 ideation, admit of being strikingly corroborated through 

 another line of philological research. On antecedent grounds 

 the evolutionist would suppose that "the first language-signs 

 must have denoted those physical acts and qualities which 

 w^ere directly apprehensible by the senses ; both because 

 these alone are directly significable, and because it was only 

 they that untrained human beings had the power to deal with 

 or the occasion to use." * In other words, if, as we suppose, 

 language had its origin in merely denotative sign-making, 

 which gradually became more and more connotative and 

 thus gradually more and more predicative ; obviously the 

 original denotations must have referred only to objects (or 

 actions, states, and qualities) of merely receptual significance 

 — i.e. " those physical acts and qualities which are directly 

 apprehensible by the senses." And, no less obviously, the 

 connotative extension of such denotative names must, for an 

 enormously long period, have been confined to a pre- 

 conceptual cognizance of the most obvious analogies — i.e. 

 such analogies as would necessarily thrust themselves upon 

 the merely sensuous perception by the force of direct 

 association. 



Now, if this were the case, what would the evolutionist 

 expect to find in language as it now exists .■* Clearly, he 

 would expect to find more or less well-marked traces, in the 

 fundamental constitution of all languages, of what has been 

 called " fundamental metaphor " — by which is meant an 

 intellectual extension of terms that originally were of no 

 more than sensuous signification. And this is precisely what 

 we do find. " The whole history of language, down to our 



* Whitney, Encyclo. Brit.y loc. cil., p. 770. It is interesting to note that the 

 psychological importance of this principle was clearly enunciated by Locke : — "It 

 may lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we 

 remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas ; and 

 how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed 

 from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are trans- 

 ferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas tliat come out 

 under the cognizance of our senses" (Human Understanding, iii. i. 5). 



