GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 42 1 



After having thus explained the absence of words 

 significant of "particular ideas" among the roots of existing 

 language, as well as the generic character of those which the 

 struggle for existence has permitted to come down to us, we 

 went on to consider sundry other corroborations of our 

 previous analysis which are yielded by the science of philology. 

 First we saw that this science has definitely proved two 

 general facts with regard to the growth of predication — 

 namely, that in all the still existing radical languages there 

 is no distinction between noun, adjective, verb, or particle ; 

 and that the structure of all other languages shows this to 

 have been the primitive condition of language-structure in 

 general : " every noun and every verb was originally by itself 

 a complete sentence," consisting of a subject and predicate 

 fused into one — or rather, let us say, not yet differentiated 

 into the t%vo^ much less into the three parts which now go to 

 constitute the fully evolved structure of a proposition. Now, 

 this form of predication is "condensed" only because it is 

 undeveloped ; it is the undifferentiated protoplasm of pre- 

 dication, wherein the " parts of speech " as yet have no exist- 

 ence. And just as this, the earliest stage of predication, is 

 distinctive of the pre-conceptual stage of ideation in a child, 

 so it is of the pre-conceptual ideation of the race. Abundant 

 evidence was therefore given of the gradual evolution of pre- 

 dicative utterance, pari passu with conceptual thought — 

 evidence which is woven through the whole warp and woof 

 of every language which is now spoken by man. In par- 

 ticular, we saw that pronouns were originally words indicative 

 of space relations, and strongly suggestive of accompany- 

 ing acts of pointing — "I" being equivalent to "this one," 

 "He" to "that one," &c. Moreover, just as the young child 

 begins by speaking of itself in the third person, so " Man 

 regarded himself as an object before he learnt to regard 

 himself as a subject,"* as is proved by the fact that "the 

 objective cases of the personal as well as of the other 

 pronouns, are always older than the subjective." f Pronominal 



• Farrar. t Garnett. 



