LANGUAGE AND MIND. 305 
gradually became human, while with language, the work 
of many years, reason made its appearance. 
As early as 1851, when the doctrine of Descent was 
still unheard of, Steinthal®™ says: “As language arises, 
mind originates.” Ten years after Darwin, Geiger 
writes: “Language created reason; before language, man 
was irrational.” Tohim, and to all who have abandoned 
the standpoint of mysticism, “man is a genus springing 
from an animal condition by means of the origin and 
unfolding of hisidiosyncrasy. And this conclusion is not, 
as orthodoxy and reaction are anxious to impress upon 
the multitude, borrowed from Darwinism, but deduced 
from linguistic inquiry in its own way, only by a scientific 
method, It need only be indicated that, as Geiger has 
historically proved in so many instances, “slow develop- 
ment, the emergence of contrast from imperceptible 
deviations, is the cause that the same word acquires 
various meanings ;” that the creation of language there- 
fore rests upon this process, and nowhere makes its ap- 
pearance suddenly and abruptly ; that the so-called laws 
of sound are habits of sound; that the special meaning 
which a sound has acquired in lapse of time is always the 
result of mere chance, or, in other words, of development. 
This deduction of linguistic inquiry most fully con- 
firms the result of natural inquiry. And any one who 
takes the trouble to follow the course of linguistic science 
will be convinced that its champions, except, perhaps, 
Bleek, Schleicher, and Friedrich Miiller, are labouring 
rather to discredit, than to acknowledge, the influence of 
the doctrine of Descent. All the higher is our estimate 
of it, and therewith the most powerful objection to the in- 
clusion of man in the great law of derivation is set aside, 
