THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 319 



my opponents. Not only, as already shown, have they been 

 misled by the verbal accident of certain languages with which 

 they happen to be familiar identifying the copula with the 

 verb " to be " (which itself, as we have also seen, has no 

 existence in many languages) ; but, as we now see, their 

 analysis is equally at fault where it deals with the subject and 

 predicate. Such a fully elaborated form of proposition as 

 " A negro is black," far from presenting "the simplest element 

 of thought," is the demonstrable outcome of an enormously 

 prolonged course of mental evolution ; and I do not know 

 a more melancholy instance of ingenuity misapplied than is 

 furnished by the arguments previously quoted from such 

 writers, who, ignoring all that we now know touching the 

 history of predication, seek to show that an act of predication 

 is at once " the simplest element of thought," and so hugely 

 elaborate a process as they endeavour to represent. The 

 futility of such an argument may be compared with that of 

 a morphologist who should be foolish enough to represent 

 that the Vertebrata can never have descended from the 

 Protozoa, and maintain his thesis by ignoring all the inter- 

 mediate animals which are known actually to exist. 



Take an instance from among the quotations previously 

 given. It will be remembered that the challenge which my 

 opponents have thrown down upon the grounds of logic and 

 psychology, is to produce the brute which " can furnish the 

 blank form of a judgment — the ' is ' in ' A is B.' " * 



Now, I cannot indeed produce a brute that is able to 

 supply such a form ; but I have done what is very much more 

 to the purpose : I have produced many nations of still 

 existing men, in multitudes that cannot be numbered, who 

 are as incapable as any brute of supplying the blank form 

 that is required. Where is the " is," in " Age-of-him Father- 

 of-thee " = " His-age-thy-father " = " Thy-father-is-old " ? 

 Or, in still more primitive stages of human utterance, how 

 shall we extract the blank form of predication from a 

 "sentence- word," where there is not only an absence of any 

 • Sec Chapter on Speech, p. 166. 



