GENERAL SUMMARY AXD CONCLUDING REMARKS. 433 



clearly or constantly to recognize that the roots of Aryan 

 speech are demonstrably very far from primitive in the 

 sense of being aboriginal : third, a want of discrimination 

 between ideas as general and generic, or synthetic and 

 unanalytical : fourth, the gratuitous and demonstrably false 

 assumption that in order to name a mind must first conceive. 

 Of these several grounds from which his dissent appears to 

 spring, the last is perhaps the most important, seeing that 

 it is the one upon which he most expressly rears his 

 objections. But if I have proved anything, I have proved 

 that there is a power of affixing verbal or other signs as 

 marks of merely receptual associations, and that this power 

 is invariably antecedent to the origin of conceptual utterance 

 in the only case where this origin admits of being directly 

 observed — i.e., in the psychogenesis of a child. Again, in 

 the case of pre-historic man, so far as the palaeontology of 

 speech furnishes evidence upon the subject, this makes 

 altogether in favour of the view that in the race, as in the 

 individual, denotation preceded denomination, as antecedent 

 and consequent. Nay, I doubt whether ]\Iax IMiJllcr him- 

 self would disagree with Gciger where the latter tersely says, 

 in a passage hitherto unquoted, "Why is it that the further 

 we trace words backwards the less meaning do they pre- 

 sent ? I know not of any other answer to be given than that 

 the further they go back the less conceptuality do they 

 betoken." * Nor can he refuse to admit, with the same 



or, if it varies, it varies within definite limits only? (pp. 212-215). • • • If the germ 

 of a man never develops into an ape, nor the germ of an ape into a man, why 

 should the full-grown ape have developed into a man ? (p. 117). . . . Let us now 

 see whai Darwin himself has to say in support of his opinion that man does not 

 date from the same period which marks the beginning of organic life on earth — 

 that he has not an ancestor of his own, like the other great families of living beings, 

 but that he had to wait till the mammals had reached a high degree of development, 

 and that he then stepped into the world as the young or as the child of an ape" 

 (p. 160), &c., &c. So far as can be gathered from these, and other statements to 

 the same effect, it does not appear that Professor Max Miiller can ever have quite 

 understood the theory of evolution, even in its application to plants and animals. 

 For these are not criticisms upon that tlieory : they are failures to appreciate in 

 what it is that the theory itself consists. 

 • Ursp'tmg dcr Sprache, s. 84. 



