Nov. II, 1880] 



NATURE 



the origin of language, which he had already broached in 

 his "Ursprung dcr Sprache," specially devoted to that 

 question. The essential peculiarity of the view here 

 advocated is contained in the following passage : — '• Lan- 

 guage is the Child of Will, of an active, not of a passive 

 state ; the roots of words contain the proper activity of 

 men, and receive their significance from the effects of this 

 activity in so far as it is phenomenal, i.e. visible. Human 

 thought arises from a double root, the subjective activity, 

 or the will, and the objective phenomenon which is acces- 

 sible to the senses.'' 



Language is further represented as " a product of 

 association and of the community of feeling which is 

 developed, intensified, and finally carried to perfection by 

 community of life" (p. Si). Great stress is laid on the 

 fact that human thought has a double root, the subject or 

 individual activity, and its effect in the action, whence it 

 follows that " the life of language stands in an indissoluble 

 relation to the development of human action" (p. S3). 

 The earliest meanings of verbal roots are all said to be 

 "referred to human action," such notions as to dig, 

 strike, scrape, scratch, tear, lying at the root of endless 

 derived and secondary concepts. 



Human thought is conceived as "an active process, a 

 self-conscious, self-confident activity, not as a crude 

 materialism imagines, the accidental play of unconscious 

 atoms" (p. 88). This active process is traced to common 

 action, and language itself becomes "the voice of the 

 community '' (p. S8). The essence of language consists in 

 the naming of things, while the power of forming a notion 

 of a thing, that is, of a group of phenomena grasped and 

 conceived as one, constitutes the essential diflerence 

 between man and the brute creation. At the same time 

 man can conceive of things only "because he has the 

 gift of speech, because he can give them a name " (p. go). 



The power of giving names flowed from the power of 

 using signs. " He used signs and thereby attained to 

 the power of using names also ; or, in other words, of 

 betokening again by a sound what he had noted before." 

 The transition from one process to the other, attributed 

 to the active will, is stated to be " the most important 

 part of the theory" (p. 92). 



Then the power of giving signs to things grows out of 

 the habit of modifying them for his own use. " Jilen dug 

 caves, plaited twigs, stripped the beasts of their skin, the 

 trees of their bark. Hence was developed the marvellous 

 hitherto unexplained gift of abstraction, and this in the 

 most natural way. Man learnt to conceive a thing as he 

 learnt to create things. His own creations were the first 

 things for him" (p. 92). So that language conceives 

 objects only "in so far as human action has touched, 

 modified, reconstructed them; in a word, in so far as they 

 have received form." Even such things as exist inde- 

 pendently of the human will, or lie beyond the sphere 

 of human action, are nevertheless brought within the 

 sphere of human speech. "They become objects of 

 human thought in the same way as the rest, that is to say, 

 they are named as they would be, if the human hand had 

 formed them" (p. 98). 



-Such is the line of argument pursued in the attempt to 

 build up a new theory of articulate speech, which is here 

 conceived by an evident disciple of Schopenhauer and 

 the Monistic school, as an emanation of the self-conscious 



human will, flowing from the power of forming abstract 

 ideas, and dealing primarily and exclusively with such 

 things only as are either the direct creation, or brought 

 under the direct control and modifying influence of man. 

 But this seems to be a complete perversion of the natural 

 sequence of events in the evolution of man and all his 

 faculties. Of these the very highest, next at all events to 

 the moral sense, consequently the latest to be developed, 

 was the conscious will. In the lowest savage tribes it is 

 still often so feeble as scarcely to be distinguished from 

 mere sensation and animal impulse. Yet the speech even 

 of the rudest tribes is almost invariably found to be of a 

 very intricate mechanism, subject to definite laws of 

 structure and harmony, possessed at times of a copious 

 vocabulary, embracing a variety of objects entirely beyond 

 the influence or control of man himself, objects whose 

 names cannot by the most violent straining be traced to 

 those of things created or modified by human action. It 

 is very easy to quote a few instances in support of such a 

 theory as this, especially from such highly imaginative 

 languages as those of the Aryan family, in which analogy 

 and metaphor have had such free play during a long 

 period of comparative culture. But hundreds of such ex- 

 amples would bring us no nearer than we were before to 

 the starting point, to the faculty of naming things and 

 actions, to the reason of certain sounds being selected 

 in preference to others wherewith to name them. 



The question still remains unanswered, whence came 

 the " limited store of sounds with which man accompanied 

 his action," and which are said to have in some mysterious 

 way "associated themselves with the objects produced or 

 modified by the action." The difficulty does not lie in 

 the derivation oi ca'linn or hole from a primitive root sku 

 or ku, but in tracing the origin of this root itself, and, in 

 general, of all roots, whether they have to do with human 

 action or not. For it is not for a moment to be supposed 

 that all the roots even of the Aryan family can be identi- 

 fied with the names of things subject to human influence. 

 Such are, for instance, as expressive of mere existence, 

 hence passive rather than active, id//, iiidli, to burn, whence 

 aWa, atS^p, cestus, /teat, &.C., words all applicable primarily 

 rather to the powers of nature than of man ; iid, iitid, to 

 flow, whence iSor, i/dian, undo, Goth, ■waio, luater. Sec, a 

 purely natural object named directly from a purely natural 

 conception ; svan, to resound, whence soniis, soiii.idj 

 svanilani, sonitus, all words expressi\e of natural noise, 

 and if Eichhofi" is right in connecting the Gothic sangws 

 and English .fc;/"- with this root, then these human actions 

 can be conceived only as secondary derivatives from the 

 primary idea of natural sound. This is the logical order 

 of sequence, but it is as subversive of the author's theory 

 as are many other Aryan roots which need not here be 

 quoted. Enough has been said to show that this theory^ 

 while leaving the real question of origin untouched, will 

 apply in any case to a part only of the original stock of 

 roots in the Aryan family. Nor, as stated, will it help us 

 in the least towards an explanation even of these. 



On the whole it is to be feared that our author leaves 

 the matter much where Max Miiller left it at the end of 

 his "Science of Language"; for the theory here advocated 

 assuredly does not answer the questions : How do mere 

 cries become phonetic types? How can sensations be 

 changed into concepts ? These questions can be answered 



