2g6 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



in alien ihren Theilen als Ganzes und demnach organisch 

 entstanden." * 



This highly general and most important fact is usually 

 stated as it was, I believe, first stated by the anthropologist 

 Waitz, namely, that " the unit of language is not the word, 

 but the sentence;"! and, therefore, that historically the 

 sentence preceded the word. Or, otherwise and less ambigu- 

 ously expressed, every word was originally itself a proposition, 

 in the sense that of and by itself it conveyed a statement. Of 

 course the more that a single word thus assumed the func- 

 tions now discharged by several words when built into a 

 proposition, the more generalized — that is to say, the less 

 defined — must have been its meaning. The sentence or 

 proposition as we now have it represents what may be termed 

 a psychological division of labour as devolving upon its 

 component parts : subject- words, attributive-words, qualifying- 

 words indicative of time, place, agent, instrument, and so forth, 

 are now all so many different organs of language, which are 

 set apart for the performance of as many different functions of 

 language. The life of language under this its fully evolved 

 form is, therefore, much more complex, and capable of much 

 more refined operations, than it was while still in the wholly 

 undifferentiated condition which we have now to contemplate. 



In order to gain a clear conception of this protoplasmic 

 condition of language, we had better first take an example 

 of it as it is presented to our actual observation in the child 

 which is just beginning to speak. For instance, as Professor 

 Max Miiller points out, "if a child says 'Up,' that up is, to 

 his mind, noun, verb, adjective, all in one. If an English 

 child says ' Ta,' that ta is both noun (thanks), and a verb (I 

 thank you). Nay, even if a child learns to speak grammatically, 

 it does not yet think grammatically ; it seems, in speaking, 

 to wear the garments of its parents, though it has not yet 

 grown into them." % 



♦ Schelling, Einl. in die Philos. d. Mythologie, s. 51. 



t Anthropologie der Aaturvolker, i., 272. See also, F. Miiller, Grundriss dif 

 Sprachwissenshqfty I. i. 49. 



X Science 0/ Language, ii. 91, 92. 



