354 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



of ideation in the race was psychologically identical with 

 what we now observe in the individual. All the stages of 

 ideation which we have seen to be characteristic of psycho- 

 genesis in a child, are thus revealed to us as having been 

 characteristic of psychogenesis in mankind. 



First there was the indicative stage. This is proved in 

 two ways. On the one hand, all philologists will now agree 

 with Geiger — " But, what says more than anything, language 

 diminishes the further we look back, in such a way that we 

 cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no existence 

 at all." * On the other hand, even if we tap the tree of 

 language as high up in its stem as the pronominal roots of 

 Sanskrit, what is the kind of ideational sap which flows 

 therefrom ? It is, as we have already seen, so strongly 

 suggestive of gesture and grimace that even Professor Max 

 Miiller allows that in it we have "remnants of the earliest 

 and almost pantomimic phase of language, in which language 

 was hardly as yet what we mean by language, namely logos, 

 a gathering, but only a pointing." f 



Secondly, we have clear evidence of sentence-words, as 

 well as of what I have called the denotative phase, or the 

 naming of simple recepts — whether only of actions, or, as we 

 may safely assume, likewise also of objects and qualities ; and 

 whether arbitrarily, or, as seems virtually certain, in chief part 

 by onomatopoeia. Both these subordinate points, however — 

 which are rendered more doubtful on account of the struggle 

 for existence among words having proved favourable to 

 denotative terms expressive of actions, and unfavourable to 

 the survival of onomatopoeia — are of comparatively little 

 moment to us ; the important fact is the one which is most 

 clearly testified to by the philological record, namely, that 

 the lowest strata of this record yield fossils of the lowest order 

 of development: the "121 concepts," appear to be, for the 

 most part, denotations of simple recepts. 



Thirdly, higher up in the stratified deposits, we meet with 



* A Lecture delivered at Frankfort , 1869. 

 t Science of Thought, p. 245. 



