REASON AND DIVERS TONGUES. 241 



himself with what he calls "The Witness of Philology." * 

 Premising that his opponents place the psychological 

 distinction between man and brute in the faculty of 

 judgment possessed only by the former, he adds,*]- "I have 

 shown that, by universal consentX this faculty is identical 

 with predication." With good reason we may object 

 to this statement, since he has actually quoted § from 

 us, amongst his categories of language, " Sounds which 

 are rational but not articulate, ejaculations by which we 

 sometimes express assent to or dissent from given pro- 

 positions ; " also " Gestures which answer to rational 

 conceptions, and are therefore 'external' but not oral 

 manifestations of the verbum mentale." 



He also says || that he has been meeting his 

 " opponents on their own assumptions, and one of these 

 assumptions has been that language must always have 

 existed as we now know it — at least to the extent of 

 comprising words which admit of being built up into 

 propositions to express the semiotic intention of the 

 speaker." But certainly we have never made any 

 assumption of the kind. 



" As a matter of fact," our author dogmatically in- 

 forms us, " language did not begin with any of our 

 later-day distinctions between nouns, verbs, adjectives, 

 prepositions, and the rest : it began as the undifferenti- 

 ated protoplasm of speech, out of which all these ' parts 

 of speech' had afterwards to be developed by a pro- 

 longed course of gradual evolution." 



* Chapters xiv. and xv. f p. 294. 



I The italics are ours. 



§ p. 86. See also " On Truth," p. 235. || p. 295. 



R 



