280 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



Again, if we look to the still closer analogy furnished by 

 savages, we meet with a still further corroboration of this 

 view. For instance, Professor Sayce remarks that in "all 

 savage and barbarous dialects, while individual objects of 

 sense have a super-abundance of names, general terms are 

 correspondingly rare." And he gives a number of remarkable 

 illustrations.* 



In view of these considerations, my only wonder is that 

 these 120 root-words do not present better evidence of con- 

 ceptual thought. I have already given my reasons for refus- 

 ing to suppose that we have here to do with the " original " 

 framers of spoken language ; and looking to the compara- 

 tively high level of culture which the people in question must 

 have reached, it seems remarkable that the root-words of 

 theil" language should only in so few instances have risen 

 above the level of prc-conceptual utterance.f This, however, 

 only shows how comparatively small a part self-conscious 

 reflection need play in the practical life of uncultured man : 

 it does not show that the people in question were remarkably 

 deficient in this distinctively human faculty. Archdeacon 

 Farrar tells us that he has observed the whole conversational 

 vocabulary of certain English labourers not to exceed a 

 hundred words, and probably further observation would have 



Ubergang vom Abstrakten zum Konkreten zu finden geglaubt, weil dieselbe 

 thatsachlich zuniichst umfassendere, dann individuellere Vorstellungen bezeichnet 

 und erst zuletzt wieder die Namen individueller Objekte zu Gemeinnamen stempelt. 

 Aber was am Anfang dieser Reihe liegt ist etwas ganz anderes als was den Schluss 

 derselben bildet : Gemeinnamen sind wirkliche Zeichen fiir Allgemeinvorstellungen 

 und Begriffe. Jene ersten Vorstellungen, welche das Bewusstsein bildet und die 

 Sprache ausdriickt, sind nicht yi//^d'w«« vorstellungen sondern umfassende Vor- 

 stellungen. Beides ist wesentlich aus einander zu halten " ( Vorlesungen, dr^c, ii. 

 382). The passage then proceeds to discuss the psychology of the subject. 



♦ Introduction, dfc, ii. 5, 6. 



t And even as regards this minority (such as "to be," "to think," "to do," 

 &c.), we must remember an important consideration on which Geiger bestows a 

 number of excellent pages. Briefly put, this consideration is that the offspring of 

 words are everywhere proved to have progressively changed their meanings by 

 successive steps and in divergent lines : applying this general law to the case 

 of roots, it follows that the oldest meaning which philology is able to trace as 

 expressed by a root, need not be anywhere near the meaning which attached 

 to its remoter parents : the latter may have been much less conceptual. 



