784 BEPOKT — 1891. 



He then appeals to Wilheltn von Humboldt, wliom he truly calls the gi-eatest and 

 most acute anatomist of almost all human speech. Humholdt goes so far as to 

 say, ' Rather than assign to all language a uniform and mechanical march that 

 would lead them step by step from the grossest beginnings to their highest 

 perfection, I should embrace the opinion of those who ascribe the origin of language 

 TO an immediate revelation of the Deity. They recognise at least that divine 

 spark which shines through all idioms, even the most imperfect and the least 

 cultivated.' 



Bunsen then sums up by saying : ' To reproduce Monboddo's theory in our 

 days, after Kant and his followers, is a sorry anachronism, and I therefore regret 

 that so low a view should have been taken of the subject lately in an English 

 work of much correct and comprehensive reflection and research respecting natural 

 science.' This remark refers, of course, to the 'Vestiges of Creation,' ' which 

 was then producing the same commotion that Darwin's * Origin of Species ' 

 produced in 1859. 



Bunsen was by no means unaware that in the vocal expression of feelings, 

 whether of joy or pain, and in the imitation of external sounds, animals are on a 

 level with man. * I believe with Kant,' he says, ' that the formation of ideas or 

 notions, embodied in words, presupposes the action of the senses and impressions 

 made by outward objects on the mind.' ' But,' he adds, ' what enables us to see 

 the genus in the individual, the whole in the many, and to form a word by con- 

 necting a subject with a predicate, is the power of the mind, and of this the brute 

 creation exhibits no trace.' 



You know how for a time, and chiefly owing to Darwin's predominating influence, 

 every conceivable effort was made to reduce the distance which language places 

 between man and beast, and to treat language as a vanishing line in the mental 

 evolution of animal and man. It required some courage at times to stand up against 

 the authority of Darwin, but at present all serious thinkers agree, I believe, with 

 Bunsen, that no animal has developed what we mean by rational language, as 

 distinct from mere utterances of pleasure or pain, from imitation of sounds and 

 from communication by means of various signs, a subject that has lately been 

 treated with great fulness by my learned friend Professor Romanes in his ' Mental 

 Evolution of Man,' Still, if all true science is based on facts, the fact remains 

 that no animal has ever formed what we mean by a language. There must be a 

 reason for that, and that reason is reason in its true sense, as the power of forming 

 general concepts, of naming and judging. We are fully justified, therefore, in 

 holding with Bunsen and Humboldt, as against Darwin and Professor Romanes, 

 that there m a specific difference between the human animal and all other animals, 

 and that that difference consists in language as the outward manifestation of what 

 the Greeks meant by Logos. 



Another question which occupies the attention of our leading anthropologists 

 is the proper use to be made of the languages, customs, laws, and religious ideas of 

 so-called savpges. Some, as you know, look upon these modern savages as repre- 

 senting human nature in its most primitive state, while others treat them iis repre- 

 senting the lowest degeneracy into which human nature may sink. Here, too, we 

 have learnt to distinguish. We know that certain races have had a very slow 

 development, and may, therefore, have preserved some traces of those simple insti- 

 tutions which are supposed to be characteristic of primitive life. But we also 

 know that other races have degenerated and are degenerating even now. If we 

 hold that the human race forms but one species, we cannot, of course, admit that 

 the ancestors even of the most savage tribes, say of the Australians, came into the 

 world one day later than the ancestors of the Greeks, or that they passed through 

 fewer evolutions than their more favoured brethren. The whole of humanitj' would 

 be of exactly the same age. But we know its history from a time only when it 

 had probably passed already through many ups and downs. To suppose, therefore, 

 that the modern savage is the nearest approach to primitive man would be against 

 all the rules of reasoning. Because in some countries, and under stress of unfavour- 

 able influences, some human tribes have learnt to feed on human flesh, it does not 

 ' See an article in the Edinlurgh Eeviejc, July 1845. 



