170 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XVIII. No. 45^ 



Humboldt goes so far as to say : " Rather than assign to all lan- 

 guages a uniform and mechanical march that would lead them 

 step by step from the grossest beginnings to their highest perfec- 

 tion, I should embrace the opinion of those who ascribe the origin 

 of language to an immediate revelation of the Deity. They recog- 

 nize 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 ana- 

 chronism, and I therefore regret that so low a view should have 

 been taken of the subject lately in an English work of much cor- 

 rect and comprehervsive reflection and research respecting natural 

 science." This remark refers, of course, to the "Vestiges of 

 Creation" (see an article in the Edinburgh Review, July, 1845), 

 which was then producing the same commotion which 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 exter- 

 nal 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 connecting a subject with a predi- 

 cate, is the power of the mind, and of this the brute creation ex- 

 hibits no trace." 



You know how for a time, and chiefly owing to Darwin's pre- 

 dominating 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 communi- 

 cation 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 ; and we are fully justified, therefore, 

 in holding with Bunsen and Humboldt, as against Darwin and 

 Professor Romanes, that there is a specific difl'erence between the 

 human animal and all other animals, and that that difference con- 

 sists in language as the outward manifestation of what the Greeks 

 meant by Logos. 



Another question which occupies the attention of our leading 

 anthropologists is thB proper use to be made of the languages, 

 customs, laws, and religious ideas of so-called savages. Some, as 

 you know, look upon these modern savages as representing human 

 nature in its most primitive state, while others treat them as repre- 

 senting the lowest degeneracy into which human nature may sink. 

 Here, too, we have learned to distinguish. We know that certain 

 races have had a very slow development, and may, therefore, have 

 preserved some traces of those simple institutions which are sup- 

 posed 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 evolu- 

 tions than their more favored brethren. The whole of humanity 

 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 unfavorable influences, some human tribes have learned to feed 

 on human flesh, it does not follow that our first ancestors were 

 cannibals. And here, too, Bunsen's words have become so strik- 

 ingly true that I may be allowed to quote them: " The savage is 

 justly disclaimed as the prototype of natural, original man; for 

 linguistic inquiry shows that the languages of savages are degraded 

 and decaying fragments of nobler formations." 



I know well that in unreservedly adopting Bunsen's opinion on. 

 this point also I run counter to the teaching of such well-known 

 writers as Sir John Lubbock, Reclus, and others. It might be 

 •supposed that Mr. Herbert Spencer also looked upon savages as 

 representing the primitive state of mankind. But if he ever did 

 so, he certainly does so no longer, and there is nothing I admire 

 so much in Mr. Herbert Spencer as this simple love of truth, which, 

 makes him confess openly whenever he has seen occasion to change 

 his views. " What terms and what conceptions are truly primi- 

 tive," he writes, " would be easy if we had an account of truly 

 primitive men. But there are sundry reasons for suspecting that 

 existing men of the lowest type forming social groups of the sim- 

 plest kind do not exemplify men as they originally were. Proba- 

 bly most of them, if not all, had ancestors in a higher state " {Open 

 Court, No. 305, p. 2896). 



Most important also is a hint which Bunsen gives that the stu- 

 dents of language should follow the same method which has beerk 

 followed with so much success in geology; that they should begin 

 with studying the modern strata of speech, and then apply the 

 principles, discovered there, to the lower or less accessible strata. 

 It is true that the same suggestion had been made by Leibnitz but 

 many suggestions are made and are forgotten again, and the merit 

 of rediscovering an old truth is often as great as the discovery of a 

 new truth. This is what Bunsen said : " In order to arrive at the 

 law which we are endeavoring to find (the law of the development 

 of language) let us first assume, as geology does, that the same 

 principles which we see working in the (recent) development were 

 also at work at the very beginning, modified in degree and in form, 

 but essentially the same in kind." We know how fruitful this 

 suggestion has proved, and how much light an accurate study of 

 modern languages and of spoken dialects has thrown on some of 

 the darkest problems of the science of language. But fifty years 

 ago it was Sanscrit only, or Hebrew, or Chinese, that seemed to 

 deserve the attention of the students of comparative philology. 

 Still more important is Bunsen's next remark, that language be- 

 gins with the sentence, and that in the beginning each word was 

 a sentence in itself. This view also has found strong supporters 

 at a later time, — for instance, my friend Professor Sayce, — though 

 at the time we are speaking of it was hardly thought of. I must 

 here once more quote Bunsen's own words : ' ' The supreme law of 

 progress in all language shows itself to be the progress from the 

 substantial isolated word, as an undeveloped expression of a whole 

 sentence, towards such a construction of language as makes every 

 single word subservient to the general idea of a sentence, and 

 shapes, modifies, and dissolves it accordingly." And again: 

 " Every sound in language must originally have been significative 

 of something. The unity of sound (the syllable, pure or con- 

 sonantized) must therefore originally have corresponded to a unity 

 of conscious plastic thought, and every thought must have had a 

 real or substantial object of perception. . . . Every single word 

 impHes necessarily a complete proposition, consisting of subject, 

 predicate, and copula." 



This is a most pregnant remark. It shows as clearly as day- 

 light the enormous difference there is between the mere utterance 

 of the sound Pah and Mah, as a cry of pleasure or distress, and 

 the pronunciation of the same syllable as a sentence, when Pah 

 and 3Iah are meant for "This is Pah," "This is Mah;" or, after 

 a still more characteristic advance of the human intellect, " This 

 is a Pah," " This is a Mah," which is not very far from saying, 

 "This man belongs to the class or genus of fathers." 



Equally important is Bunsen's categorical statement that every- 

 thing in language must have been originally significant, that 

 everything formal must originally have been substantial. You 

 know what a bone of contention this has been of late between 

 what is called the old school and the new school of comparative 

 philology. The old school maintained that every word consisted 

 of a root and of certain derivative suffixes, prefixes, and infixes. 

 The modern school maintained that there existed neither roots by 

 themselves nor suffixes, prefixes, and infixes by themselves, and 

 that the theory of agglutination — of gluing suflSxes to roots — 

 was absurd. The old school looked upon these suffixes as origin- 

 ally independent and significative words; the modern school de- 

 clined to accept this view except in a few irrefragable instances. 



