REASON AND DIVERS TONGUES. 235 



voluntary actions' (Sweet, Words, Logic, and Gram- 

 mar)y 



But this implies no defect of intelligence on the part 

 of primitive man, who probably was far wiser in this 

 matter than are many moderns. In ultimate analysis, 

 all the phenomena of nature are to be recognized as 

 really voluntary, being the result either of Divine voli- 

 tion or the permitted free-will of creatures. That the 

 modes of expressing such a clear early intuition were 

 defective, so as to have led to misinterpretation, is likely 

 enough. To fancy, however, that primitive man, in 

 attributing " volition " to fire, must have had a merely 

 absurd meaning, such as ours would be were we to 

 attribute volition to fire, may well be a mistaken fancy, 

 seeing later differentiations of thought and expression 

 had not yet taken place. In another note Mr. Romanes 

 further says,* "There is an immense body of purely 

 philological evidence to show that verbs are really 

 a much later product of linguistic growth than either 

 nouns or pronouns." But he, following Archdeacon 

 Farrar, represents it as being " the correct view, that 

 at first * roots ' stood for any and every part of speech, 

 just as the monosyllabic expressions of children do." 

 But if this was the case, such roots did practically 

 include verbs. A very young child is conscious in 

 acting and when being acted on, but predicates by mono- 

 syllables. 



Concerning Prof. Max Miiller's view that speech 

 from its earliest origin must have been expressive of 

 general ideas or concepts, Mr. Romanes remarks,t 

 * p. 275. t p. 276. 



