I02 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



strangely says (p. 84), " Since the time when the ancient 

 Greeks applied the same word to denote the faculty of 



concepts can be called primitive. The number of really primitive 

 concepts would be so alarmingly small that for the present it 

 seemed wiser to say nothing about it. But so far from being 

 ashamed of our modest beginnings, we ought really to glory rather 

 in having raised our small patrimony to the immense wealth now 

 hoarded in our dictionaries. 



" When we once know what our small original patrimony con- 

 sisted in, the question how we came in possession of it may seem 

 of less importance. Yet it is well to remember that the theory of 

 the origin of roots and concepts, as propounded by Noire, differs, 

 not in degree, but toto ccpIo from the old attempts to derive roots 

 from interjections and imitations of natural sounds. That a certain 

 number of words in every language has been derived from 

 interjections and imitations no one has ever denied. But such 

 words are not conceptual words, and they become possible only 

 after language had become possible — that is, after man had realized 

 his power of forming concepts. No one who has not himself 

 grappled with that problem can appreciate the complete change 

 that has come over it by the recognition of the fact that roots are 

 the phonetic expressions of the consciousness of our own acts. 

 Nothing but this, our consciousness of our own repeated acts, 

 could possibly have given us our first concepts. Nothing else 

 answers the necessary requirements of a concept, that it should be 

 the consciousness of something manifold, yet necessarily realized 

 as one. After the genesis of the first concept, everything else 

 becomes intelligible. The results of our acts become the first 

 objects of our conceptual thought ; and with conceptual thought, 

 language, which is nothing if not conceptual, begins. Roots are 

 afterwards localized, and made the signs of our objects by means 

 of local exponents, whether suffixes, prefixes, or infixes. What 

 has been scraped and shaped again and again becomes as it were 

 ' shape-her',' i e. a shaft ; what has been dug and hollowed out by 

 repeated blows becomes 'dig-her',' i.e. a hole. And from the 

 concept of a hole dug, or of an empty cave, there is an uninter- 

 rupted progress to the most abstract concepts, such as empty 

 space, or even nothing. No doubt, when we hear the sound of 

 cuckoo, we may by one jump arrive at the word * cuckoo.* This 

 may be called a word, but it is not a conceptual word, and we 

 deal with conceptual words only. Before we can get at a 



