September 3, 1891] 



NATURE 



429 



How, indeed, could reason spring out ot a state which is 

 destitute of reason ? How can speech, the expression of thought, 

 develop itself, in a year, or in millions of years, out of inarti- 

 culate sounds, which express feelings of pleasure, pain, and 

 appetite ? " 



He then appeals to Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom he truly 

 calls the greatest and most acute anatomist of almost all 

 human speech. Humboldt goes so far as to say : — " Rather than 

 issign to all language a uniform and mechanical march that 

 would lead them step by step from the grossest beginnings to 

 their highest perfection, I should embrace the opinion of those 

 who ascribe the origin of language to an immediate revela- 

 tion of the Deity. They recognize at least that divine spark 

 which shines through all idioms, even the most imperfect and 

 the least cultivated." 



Bunsen then sums up by saying : " To reproduce Monboddo's 

 theory in our days, after Kant and his followers, is a sorry ana- 

 chronism, and I therefore regret that so low a view should have 

 been taken of the subject lately in an English work of much 

 correct and comprehensive reflection and research respecting | 

 natural science." This remark refers, of course, to the "Ves- 

 tiges of Creation " (see an article in the Edinburgh Review, July, 

 1845), which was then producing the same commotion which 

 Darwin's " Origin of Species " produced in 1859. 



Bunsen was by no means unaware that in the vocal expression 

 of feelings, whether of joy or pain, and in the imitation cf ex- 

 ternal sounds, animals are on a level with man. " I believe 

 with Kant," he says, "that the formation of ideas or notions, 

 embodied in words, presupposes the action of the senses and 

 impressions made by outward objects on the mind. But," he 

 adds, " what enables us to see the genus in the individual, the 

 whole in the many, and to form a word by connecting a subject 

 with a predicate, is the power of the mind, and of this the brute 

 creation exhibits no trace." 



You know how for a time, and chiefly owing to Darwin's pre- 

 dominating influence, every conceivable effort was made to 

 reduce the distance which language places between man and 

 beast, and to treat language as a vanishing line in the mental 

 evolution of animal and man. It required some courage at times 

 to stand up against the authority of Darwin, but at present 

 all serious thinkers agree, I believe, with Bunsen, that no 

 animal has developed what we mean by rational language, as 

 distinct from mere utterances of pleasure or pain, from imitation 

 of sounds and from communication by means of various signs, a 

 subject that has lately been treated with great fullness by my 

 learned friend Prof. Romanes in his " Mental Evolution of 

 Man." Still, if all true science is based on facts, the fact 

 remains that no animal has ever formed what we mean by 

 a language ; and we are fully justified, therefore, in holding 

 with Bunsen and Humboldt, as against Darwin and Prof. 

 Romanes, that there is a specific difference between the human 

 animal and all other animals, and that that difference consists in 

 language as the outward manifestation of what the Greeks meant 

 by Logos. 



Another question which occupies the attention of our leading 

 anthropologists is the proper use to be made of the languages, 

 customs, laws, and religious ideas of so-called savages. Some, 

 as you know, look upon these modern savages as representing 

 human nature in its most primitive state, while others treat them 

 as representing the lowest degeneracy into which human nature 

 may sink. Here, too, we have learnt to distinguish. We know 

 that certain races have had a very slow development, and may, 

 therefore, have preserved some traces of those simple institutions 

 which are supposed to be characteristic of primitive life. But 

 we also know that other races have degenerated and are degenerat- 

 ing even now. If we hold that the human race forms but one 

 species, we cannnot, of course, admit that the ancestors even of 

 the most savage tribes, say of the Australians, came into the 

 world one day later than the ancestors of the Greeks, or that 

 they passed through few er evolutions than their more favoured 

 brethren. The whole of humanity would be of exactly the 

 same age. But we know its history from a time only when it 

 had probably passed already through many ups and downs. To 

 suppose, therefore, that the modern savage is the nearest 

 approach to primitive man would be against all the rules of 

 reasoning. Because in some countries, and under stress of 

 unfavourable influences, some human tribes have learnt to feed 

 on human flesh, it does not follow that our first ancestors were 

 cannibals. And here, too, Bunsen's words have become so 

 strikingly true that I may be allowed to quote them: "The 



savage is justly disclaimed as the prototype of natural, original 

 man ; for linguistic inquiry shows that the languages of savages 

 are degraded and decaying fragments of nobler formations." 



I know well that in unreservedly adopting Bunsen's opinion 

 on this point also I run counter to the teaching of such well- 

 known writers as Sir John Lubbock, Reclus, and others. It 

 might be supposed that Mr. Herbert Spencer also looked upon 

 savages as representing the primitive state of mankind. But if 

 he ever did so, he certainly does so no longer, and there is 

 nothing I admire so much in Mr. Herbert Spencer as this simple 

 love of truth, which makes him confess openly whenever he has 

 seen occasion to change his views. " What terms and what 

 conceptions are truly primitive," he writes, "would be easy if 

 we had an account of truly primitive men. But there are sundry 

 reasons for suspecting that existing men of the lowest type form- 

 ing social groups of the simplest kind do not exemplify men as 

 they originally were. Probably most of them, if not all, had 

 ancestors in a higher state" {Open Court, No. 205, p. 2896). 



Most important also is a hint which Bunsen gives that the 

 students of language should follow the same method which has 

 been followed with so much success in geology ; that they should 

 begin with studying the modern strata of speech, and then apply 

 the principles, discovered there, to the lower or less accessible 

 strata. It is true that the same suggestion had been made by 

 Leibniz, but many suggestions are made and are forgotten again, 

 and the merit of rediscovering an old truth is often as great as 

 the discovery of a new truth. This is what Bunsen said : "In 

 order to arrive at the law which we are ecdeavouring to find 

 (the law of the development of language) let us first assume, as 

 geology does, that the same principles which we see working in 

 the (recent) development were also at work at the very beginning, 

 modified in degree and in form, but essentially the same in kind." 

 "We know how fruitful this suggestion has proved, and how 

 much light an accurate study of modern languages and of spoken 

 dialects .has thrown on some of the darkest problems of the 

 science of language. But fifty years ago it was Sanskrit only, 

 or Hebrew, or Chinese, that seemed to deserve the attention 

 of the students of comparative philology. Still more important 

 is Bunsen's next remark, that language begins with the sentence, 

 and that in the beginning each word was a sentence in itself. 

 This view also has found strong supporters at a later time — for 

 instance, my friend Prof. Sayce— though at the time we are 

 speaking of it was hardly thought of. 1 must here once more 

 quote Bunsen's own words : " The supreme law of progress in 

 all language shows itself to be the progress from the substantial 

 isolated word, as an undeveloped expression of a whole sentence, 

 towards such a construction of language as makes every single 

 word subservient to the general idea of a sentence, and shapes, 

 modifies, and dissolves it accordingly." 



And again : " Every sound in language must originally have 

 been significative of something. The unity of sound (the 

 syllable, pure or consonantised) must therefore originally have 

 corresponded to a unity of conscious plastic thought, and every 

 thought must have had a real or substantial object of percep- 

 tion. . . . Every single word implies necessarily a complete 

 proposition, consisting of subject, predicate, and copula," 



This is a most pregnant remark. It shows as clearly as day- 

 light the enormous difference there is between the mere utterance 

 of the sound Pah and Mali, as a cry of pleasure or distress, and 

 the pronunciation of the same syllable as a sentence, when Pah 

 and Mah are meant for "This is Pah," "This is Mah" ; or, 

 after a still more characteristic advance of the human intellect, 

 " This is a Pah," "This is a Mah," which is not very far from 

 saying, " This man belongs to the class or genus of fathers." 



Equally important is Bunsen's categorical statement that 

 everything in language must have been originally significant, 

 that everything formal must originally have been substantial. 

 You know what a bone of contention this has been of late 

 between what is called the old school and the new school of 

 comparative philology. The old school maintained that every 

 word consisted of a root and of certain derivative suffixes, pre- 

 fixes, and infixes. The modern school maintained that there 

 existed neither roots by themselves nor suffixes, prefixes, and 

 infixes by themselves, and that the theory of agglutination — 

 of gluing suffixes to roots — was absurd. The old school looked 

 upon these suffixes as originally independent and significative 

 words ; the modern school declined to accept this view except 

 in a few irrefragable instances. I think the more accurate 

 reasoners are coming back to the opinion held by the old school, 

 that all formal elements of language were originally substantial, 



NO. I 1 40, VOL. 44] 



