314 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



unevolvcd : the sentence is an organism without organs, and 

 is generalized only in the sense that it is protoplasmic. In 

 view of these facts (which, be it observed, are furnished by 

 languages still existing, as well as by the philological record 

 of languages long since extinct) it is impossible to withhold 

 assent from the now universal doctrine of philologists — 

 "language diminishes the farther we look back in such a 

 way, that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have 

 had no existence at all." * 



From all the evidence which has now been presented 

 showing that aboriginally words were sentences, it follows 

 that aboriginally there can have been no distinction between 

 terms and propositions. Nevertheless, although this follows 

 deductively from the general truth in question, it is desirable 

 that we should study in more detail the special application of 

 the principle to the case of formal predication, seeing that, as 

 so often previously remarked, this is the place where my 

 opponents have taken their stand. The reader will remember 

 that I have already disposed of their assertions with regard to 

 the copula. It will now be my object to show that their 

 analysis is equally erroneous where it is concerned with both 

 the other elements of which a formal proposition consists. 

 Not having taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the 

 results of linguistic research, and therefore relying only on 

 what may be termed the accidents of language as these happen 

 to occur in the Aryan branch of the great language-tree, these 

 writers assume that a proposition must always and everywhere 

 have been thrown into the precisely finished form in which it 

 was analyzed by Aristotle. As a matter of fact, however, it 

 is now well known that such is not the case ; that the form of 

 predication as we have it in our European languages has been 

 the outcome of a prolonged course of evolution ; and that in 

 its most primitive stage, or in the earliest stage which happens 

 to have been preserved in the palaeontology of language, 

 predication can scarcely be said to have been differentiated 



* Geiger, Development of the Human Race, English trans., p. 22. 



