GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 423 



other branches of language-growth the reverse order has 

 obtained. Eventually, however, " these primitive contrivances 

 for distinguishing between the predicate, the attribute, and 

 the genitive, when the three ideas had in course of ages been 

 evolved by the mind of the speaker, gradually gave way to 

 the later and more refined machinery of suffixes, auxiliaries, 

 and the like." * 



And so it is with all the other so-called "parts of speech," 

 in those languages which, in having passed beyond the 

 primitive stage, have developed parts of speech at all. 

 " These are the very broadest outlines of the process by which 

 conceptual roots were predicated, by which they came under 

 the sway of the categories — became substantives, adjectives, 

 adverbs, and verbs, or by whatever other names the results 

 thus obtained may be described. The minute details of this 

 process, and the marvellous results obtained by it, can be 

 studied in the grammar of every language or family of 

 languages." t Thus, philology is able to trace back, stage 

 by stage, the form of predication as it occurs in the most 

 highly developed, or inflective language, to that earliest 

 stage of language in general, which I have called the in- 

 dicative. 



Many other authorities having been quoted in support of 

 these general statements, and also for the purpose of tracing 

 the evolution of predicative utterance in more detail, I 

 proceeded to give illustrations of different phases of its 

 development in the still existing languages of savages ; and 

 thus proved that they, no less than primitive man, are unable 

 to "supply the blank form of a judgment," or to furnish what 

 my opponents regard as the criterion of human faculty. 

 Therefore, the only policy which can possibly remain for 

 these opponents to take up, is that of abandoning their 

 Aristotelian position : no longer to take their stand upon 

 the grounds of purely _/^rw<?/ predication as this happens to 

 have been developed in the Indo-European branch of lan- 

 guage ; but altogether upon those of material predication, or, 



• Sayce. t Max Miiller. 



28 



