348 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



stage of our inquiry) concerning the application of the 

 general principle before us to the special case of conscience, 

 it appears to me there can be no question at all that this 

 general principle of " fundamental metaphor " reveals the fact 

 of an intellectual growth from what I have called the pre- 

 conceptual to the conceptual phase ; and, moreover, that it 

 proves such a growth to have been the universal characteristic 

 of human faculty in those pre-historic times of which language 

 preserves to us the only record.* 



There still remains one other department of philological 



* Perhaps the most interesting department of fundamental metaphor is that 

 wherein the metaphor is found by philological research to have reference, not to 

 any natural object, quality, &c., but to a pre-existing action or gesture as already 

 made by man himself for the purpose of conveying information, expressing his 

 emotions, &c. For fundamental metaphor of this kind obviously brings us within 

 seeing distance of the time when the audible signs of articulations were born of 

 the visible signs of gesture and grimace. In illustration of this branch of our 

 subject I will only quote one passage ; but the reader will at once perceive how 

 easy it would be to furnish many other instances from the etymology of words now 

 in habitual use. 



" The further a language has been developed from its primordial roots, which 

 have been twisted into forms no longer suggesting any reason for their original 

 selection, and the more the primitive significance of its words has disappeared, the 

 fewer points of contact can it retain with signs. The higher languages are more 

 precise because the consciousness of the derivation of most of their words is lost, 

 so that they have become counters, good for any sense agreed upon and for no other. 

 " It is, however, possible to ascertain the included gesture even in many English 

 words. The class represented by the word supercilious will occur to all readers, 

 but one or two examples may be given not so obvious and more immediately con- 

 nected with the gestures of our Indians. Imbecile, generally applied to the weakness 

 of old age, is derived from the Latin in, in the sense of on, and bacillum, a staff, 

 which at once recalls the Cheyenne sign for old man [previously mentioned]. So 

 time appears more nearly connected with reiVo), to stretch, when information is 

 given of the sign for long time, in the Speech of Kin Che-ess, in this paper, namely, 

 placing the thumbs and forefingers in such a position as if a small thread was held 

 between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, the hands first touching each other, 

 and then moving slowly from each other, as if stretching a piece of gum-elastic " 

 (Mallery, Sign- Language, drc, p. 350). This writer also says, with reference to the 

 uncivilized languages which he has specially studied, " In the languages of North 

 America, which have not become arbitrary, to the degree exhibited by those of civil- 

 ized man, the connection between the idea and the word is only less obvious than that 

 still unbroken connection between the idea and the sign, and they remain strongly 

 affected by the concepts of outline, form, place, position, and feature on which 



