428 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



By repeated association with the circumstances under which 

 they were uttered, these articulate sounds are supposed to 

 have acquired, as it were automatically, a semiotic value. 

 The answer to this hypothesis, however, evidently is, that 

 it ignores the whole problem which stands to be solved — 

 namely, the genesis of those powers of ideation which first 

 put a soul of meaning into the previously insignificant sounds. 

 That is to say, it begs the whole question which stands for 

 solution, and, therefore, furnishes no explanation whatsoever 

 of the difference which has arisen between man and brute. 

 Nevertheless, the principles set forth in this the largest 

 possible extension of the so-called interjectional theory, are, 

 I believe, sound enough in themselves : it is only the premiss 

 from which in this instance they start that is untrue. This 

 premiss is that aboriginal man presented no rudiments of the 

 sign-making faculty, and, therefore, that this faculty itself 

 required to be created de novo by accidental associations of 

 sounds with things. But we have seen, as a matter of fact, 

 that this must have been very far from having been the case ; 

 and, therefore, while recognizing such elements of truth as 

 the "purely physiological" hypothesis in question presents, 

 I rejected it as in itself not even approaching a full explana- 

 tion of the origin of speech. 



Next I dealt with the hypothesis that was briefly sketched 

 by Mr. Darwin. Premising, as Geiger points out, that the 

 presumably superior sense of sight, by fastening attention 

 upon the movements of the mouth in vocal sign-making, 

 must have given our simian ancestry an advantage over 

 other species of quadrumana in the matter of associating 

 sounds with receptual ideas ; we next endeavoured to imagine 

 an anthropoid ape, social in habits, sagacious in mind, and 

 accustomed to use its voice extensively as an organ of sign- 

 making, after the manner of social quadrumana in general. 

 Such an animal might well have distanced all others in the 

 matter of making signs, and even proceeded far enough to 

 use sounds in association with gestures, as " sentence-words " 

 — i.e. as indicative of such highly generalized recepts as the 



