io6 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



Mr. Romanes tells us, further on in his book,* that 

 "within the four corners of human experience a self- 



for thought-words, and I believe that other persons do the same. 

 A slight movement of a finger, or the incipient closure of an eyelid, 

 may give expression to a meaning which could only be thought in 

 words by a much slower process. 



" It is the more remarkable that Prof. Max Miiller should deny 

 the existence of reason, since he unequivocally affirms, in rather 

 lofty language, the existence of truth. Yet surely the existence of 

 truth, in and by itself, is inconceivable. What can truth be, save a 

 conformity between thought and things? I affirm, indeed, the 

 certain existence of truth, but I also affirm that of reason, as exist- 

 ing anteriorly to language — whether of voice or gesture. What is 

 the teaching of experience? Do men invent new concepts to suit 

 previously coined words, or new words to give expression to freshly 

 thought-out concepts ? The often referred to jabber of Hottentots 

 is not to the point. No sounds or gestures which do not express 

 concepts would be admitted by either Prof. Max Miiller or myself 

 to be 'language.' 



"The Professor speaks of the 'alarmingly small* number of 

 primitive concepts ; but who is to be thereby alarmed ? Not men 

 who occupy a similar standpoint to mine. I fully agree with 

 Prof. Max Miiller in saying, ' After the genesis of the first concept, 

 everything else becomes intelligible.' 



"We come now to the supreme question of the origin of language. 

 As to this the Professor observes, ' 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 con- 

 sciousness of something manifold, yet necessarily realized as one. 

 . . . The results of our acts become the first objects of our concep- 

 tual thought.' The truth of these statements I venture to question, 

 and after noting the dogmatic nature of the assertion, ' Nothing but 

 this could^ etc., I must object to the statement of fact as regards 

 human beings now. I do not beheve that the infant's first ob- 

 ject of thought is 'the results of its own acts.' In the first place, 



* P- 397. 



