4/4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES. [Julie 17, 



clearly see in what distinctively human language really consists. Let 

 us then suppose a man and a brute to be standing under an oak-tree 

 which begins to fall. The falling tree will produce similar effects 

 upon the senses of both man and brute ; both will instinctively fly 

 from the danger, and both may cry out from alarm, and both, by 

 their cries or gestures, may give rise to similar feelings of alarm in 

 other men or brutes. Such language, whether vocal or of gesture, 

 is emotional language only ; but the man may do what the brute 

 cannot do : he may emit the vocal sounds, " That oak is falling," and 

 these words are the expression and embodiment of three universal 

 abstract ideas : — 



1. The word "oak" is a conventional sign for the idea "oak," 

 and is a universal, abstract term applicable to every actual or possible 

 oak. It denotes no single subsisting thing, but a whole group of 

 things. 



2. The word "is" denotes the most important of all abstract 

 ideas — the idea of existence, or being. It is an idea (expressed in 

 every human tongue) which we must possess in order to perform 

 any intellectual act. It is an idea which, though not itself at first 

 adverted to, makes all other ideas intelligible to us, as light, though 

 itself unseen, renders everything else visible to us. 



3. The word " falling " is a term denoting an abstract quality, and 

 is evidently of very wide application, namely, to everything which 

 may fall. Yet the idea itself is one single idea. 



Thus all human language (apart from mere emotional manifes- 

 tations) necessarily implies and gives expression to a number of 

 abstract ideas. It is impossible for a savage to speak the simplest 

 sentence without having formed such ideas for himself. 



Is it then for a moment possible to suppose that any man 

 deliberately invented language? Vocal and gesture signs are essen- 

 tially conventional, and require comprehension on the part of those 

 addressed as well as on the part of those who use them. Analogous 

 considerations apply to the first beginnings of literature, art, science, 

 and politics, which could not therefore have been consciously and 

 deliberately invented. 



The evolutions of these lofty forms of human activity are those 

 cases of highest and most complex instinctive human actions before 

 referred to 1 , which can no more be due to "lapsed intelligence" 

 than they can be accounted for by mere compound reflex action. 

 To do more, however, than thus briefly to refer to these matters 

 would be to wander beyond the proper scope of this paper. Its 

 aim is but to call attention to the close correlation which exists 

 between the various orders of vital activity which have been now 

 referred to, and to throw out the suggestion that it is rather in 

 "Instinct" than in any other of these various forms of activity, that 

 the best and most apposite type of the whole group is to be found. 

 Such I believe to be the case, whether it may or may not be 

 expedient to devise some different generic term to denote the whole 

 group of such correlated activities. 



1 See ante, p. 466, 1 lie first Hue. 



