OF LANGUAGES. 



71 



reasoning, from those who are supposed to be deprived of it. 

 Man, as the representative of mankind, even to the detriment 

 of woman, generally takes upon himself the arrangement of 

 this vexed question. Where knowledge forsakes him, conceit 

 helps him. The complete classification into animates and 

 inanimates, and the division of the former into rationals and 

 irrationals is occasionally lost sight of, and its place is taken 

 by distributions which acknowledge either only rationals, 

 irrationals and inanimates, or which, ignoring any difference 

 between the latter two, distinguish simply between rational 

 and irrational beings. 



A closer observation devoted to the creatures around us, 

 soon discovers the diversity of sex which pervades the whole 

 creation. The existence of sex is no less a reality than 

 is the presence of life ; but if the former is accepted as the 

 starting-point of a methodical system, wherein to arrange 

 living beings, inanimate objects, and abstract ideas, it is soon 

 obliged to have recourse to imagination. The presence or 

 absence of life is moreover a prima facie fact, while the 

 existence of gender and its varieties are discerned in their 

 connections with and dependence upon life. This circum- 

 stance intimates that a classification issuing from life as 

 a reality, has a tendency, towards concreteness ; while a 

 division founded on a quality, in which life is the predominant 

 test, inclines towards abstractness. 



The admission of gender, the grammatical representative of 

 sex, as a standard of classification, is evidence of an imagina- 

 tive turn of thought. It requires the personification of 

 inanimate beings. Imagination endows them with artificial 

 life, assigning to them a gender, as if they were living creatures. 

 This is a necessary result, where languages as, e.g., the 

 Semitic group, recognize only two genders ; but it is not the 

 less a case in dialects which possess three distinct genders, as 

 the Aryan tongues do, and where inanimate objects are 

 regarded as male or female beings, according to the whim of 

 the speaker. 



