Darwin's views on Language 521 
battle cries, the rescue of a ship running on shore (a situation not 
likely to occur very early in the history of man), and others. Like 
Max Miiller he holds that language is the utterance and the organ 
of thought for mankind, the one characteristic which separates man 
from the brute. “In common action the word was first produced; 
for long it was inseparably connected with action; through long- 
continued connexion it gradually became the firm, intelligible symbol 
of action, and then in its development indicated also things of the 
external world in so far as the action affected them and finally the 
sound began to enter into a connexion with them also1.” In so far 
as this theory recognises language as a social institution it is un- 
doubtedly correct. Darwin some years before Noiré had pointed 
to the same social origin of language in the fourth chapter of his 
work on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 
“Naturalists have remarked, I believe with truth, that social animals, 
from habitually using their vocal organs as a means of intercommuni- 
cation, use them on other occasions much more freely than other 
animals....The principle, also, of association, which is so widely 
extended in its power, has likewise played its part. Hence it allows 
that the voice, from having been employed as a serviceable aid under 
certain conditions, inducing pleasure, pain, rage, etc., is commonly 
used whenever the same sensations or emotions are excited, under 
quite different conditions, or in a lesser degree?.” 
Darwin’s own views on language which are set forth most fully in 
The Descent of Man’ are characterised by great modesty and caution. 
He did not profess to be a philologist and the facts are naturally 
taken from the best known works of the day (1871). In the notes 
added to the second edition he remarks on Max Mitller’s denial of 
thought without words, “what a strange definition must here be given 
to the word thought‘!” He naturally finds the origin of language 
in “the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the 
voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries aided by signs 
and gestures®,...As the voice was used more and more, the vocal 
organs would have been strengthened and perfected through the 
principle of the inherited effects of use ; and this would have reacted 
on the power of speech®”” On man’s own instinctive cries, he has 
more to say in The Expression of the Emotions’. These remarks 
have been utilised by Prof. Jespersen of Copenhagen in propounding 
an ingenious theory of his own to the effect that speech develops out 
of singing®. 
1 op. cit. p. 339. 2 The Expression of the Emotions, p. 84 (Popular Edition, 1904). 
3 p. 131 ff. (Popular Edition, 1906). 4 op. cit. p. 135, footnote 63. 
5 op. cit, p. 182. 6 op. cit, p. 183. 
7 p. 93 (Popular Edition, 1904) and elsewhere. 
8 Progress in Language, p. 361, London, 1894. 
