THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 32 1 



Quitting, then, all these old-world fallacies which were 

 based on an absence of information, we must accept the 

 analysis of predication as this has been supplied to us by 

 the advance of science. And this analysis has proved to 

 demonstration, that "the division of the sentence into two 

 parts, the subject and the predicate, is a mere accident ; 

 it is not known to the polysynthetic languages of America, 

 which herein reflect the condition of primeval speech. ... So 

 far as the act of thought is concerned, subject and predicate 

 are one and the same, and there are many languages in which 

 they are so treated." * Consequently, it appears to me that 

 the only position which remains for my opponents to adopt 

 is that of arguing in some such way as follows. 



Freely admitting, they may say, that the issue must be 

 thrown back from predication as it occurs in Greek to pre- 

 dication as it occurs in savage languages of low development, 

 still we are in the presence of predication all the same. And 

 even when you have driven us back to the most primitive 

 possible form of human speech, wherein as yet there are no 

 parts of speech, and predication therefore requires to be 

 conducted in a most inefficient manner, still most obviously 

 it is conducted, inasmuch as it is only for the purpose of 

 conducting it that speech can have ever come into existence 

 at all. 



Now, in order to meet this sole remaining position, I must 

 begin by reminding the reader of some of the points which 

 have already been established in previous chapters. 



simply analyzed them in order to discover how many kinds of predication they 

 contained, we ask how we ever came into possession of such words as horse, 7c<hite, 

 many, greater, here, now, I stand, I fear, I ati, I am cut. Anybody who is in 

 possession of such words can easily predicate, but we shall now have to show that 

 every word by itself was from the first a predication, and that it formed a complete 

 sentence by itself. To us, therefore, the real question is, how these primitive 

 sentences, which afterwards dwindled away into mere words, came into existence. 

 The true categories, in fact, are not those which are taught by grammar, but those 

 which produced grammar, and it is these categories which we now proceed to 

 examine" {Science of 77iought, p. 439). 



* Sayce, Introduction^ dfc, ii. 229. He adds, ** Had Aristotle been a Mexican} 

 his system of logic would have assumed a wholly different form." 



