240 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



Opponents to answer — " Daily experience informs us, that men 

 who have not learned to articulate in their childhood, never 

 afterwards acquire the faculty of speech but by such helps as 

 savages cannot obtain ; and therefore, if speech were invented 

 at all, it must have been either by children who were inca- 

 pable of invention, or by men who were incapable of speech. A 

 thousand, nay, a million, of children could not think of invent- 

 ing a language. While the organs are pliable, there is not 

 understanding enough to frame the conception of a language ; 

 and by the time that there is understanding, the organs are 

 become too stiff for the task, and therefore, say the advocates 

 for the Divine origin of language, reason as well as history 

 intimates that mankind in all ages must have been speaking 

 animals — the young having constantly acquired this art by 

 imitating those who are older ; and we may warrantably con- 

 clude that our first parents received it by immediate inspira- 

 tion." * 



There remained, however, the alternative that language 

 might have been the result neither of Divine inspiration nor of 

 human invention ; but of natural growth. And although this 

 alternative was clearly perceived by some of the earlier philo- 

 logists, its full significance could not be appreciated before 

 the advent of the general theory of evolution.! Nevertheless, 

 it is here of interest to observe that the theory of evolution 



* Encyclopcedia Britannicat eighth edition, 1857, Art. "Language." 

 t Of course in classical times, when there was no theological presumption 

 against the theory of development, this alternative met with a fuller recognition ; 

 as, for example, by the Latin authors, Horace, Lucretius, and Cicero. Before 

 that time Greek philosophers had been much exercised by the question whether 

 speech was an intuitive endowment (analogists), or a product of human invention 

 (anomalists) ; and, earlier still, astonishing progress had been made by the 

 grammarians of India in a truly scientific analysis of language-growth. But in 

 the text I am speaking of modern times ; and here I think there can be no doubt 

 that till the middle of the present century the possibility of language having been 

 the result of a natural growth was not sufficiently recognized. Among those who 

 did recognize it, Herder, Monboddo, Sir W. Jones, Schlegel, Bopp, Humboldt, 

 Grimm, and Pott, are most deserving of mention. The same year that witnessed 

 the publication of the Origin of Species (1859), gave to science the first issue of 

 Steinthal's Zeitschrift fiir Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. From that 

 date onwards the theory of evolution in its application to philology has held 

 undivided sway. 



