Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/802

 766 PHILOLOGY possess no language, no arts, no wealth, but would have to go to work to acquire them, by the same processes which began to win them for the first human beings. One advantage he would doubtless enjoy : the descendant of a cultivated race has an enhanced aptitude for the recep tion of cultivation ; he is more cultivable ; and this is an element that has to be allowed for in comparing present conditions with past, as influencing the rate of progress, but nothing more. In all other respects, it is man with the endowments which we now find him possessed of, but destitute of the gradually accumulated results of the exer cise of his faculties, whose progress we have to explain. And it is, as a matter of necessity, by studying recent observable modes of acquisition, and transferring them, with due allowance for different circumstances, to the more primitive periods, that the question of first acqui sition or origin is to be solved, for language as for tools, for arts, for family and social organization, and the rest. There is just as much, and just as little, reason for assuming miraculous interference and aid in one of these departments as in another. If men have been left to themselves to make and improve instruments, to form and perfect modes of social organization, by implanted powers directed by natural desires, and under the pressure of cir cumstances, then also to make and change the signs that constitute their speech. All expressions, as all instruments, are at present, and have been through the known past, made and changed by the men who use them ; the same will have been the case in the unknown or prehistoric past. And we command now enough of the history of language, with the processes of its life and growth, to determine with confidence its mode of origin within certain limits, as will appear below. Cause of It is beyond all question, in the first place, that the language- desire of communication was the only force directly im- uakmg. p e }ii n g men to the production of language. Man s social ity, his disposition to band together with his fellows, for lower and for higher purposes, for mutual help and for sympathy, is one of his most fundamental characteristics. To understand those about one and to be understood by them is now, and must have been from the very beginning, a prime necessity of human existence ; we cannot conceive of man, even in his most undeveloped state, as without the recognition of it. Communication is still the univers ally recognized office of speech, and to the immense majority of speakers the only one ; the common man knows no other, and can only with difficulty and imperfectly be brought to see that there is any other ; of the added dis tinctness and reach of mental action which the possession of such an instrumentality gives him, he is wholly uncon scious : and it is obvious that what the comparatively cultivated being of to-day can hardly be made to realize, can never have acted upon the first men as a motive to action. It may perhaps be made a question which of the two uses of speech, communication or the facilitation of thought, is the higher ; there can be no question, at any rate, that the former is the broader and the more funda mental. That the kind and degree of thinking which we do nowadays would be impossible without language-signs is true enough ; but so also it would be impossible without written signs. That there was a time when men had to do what mental work they could without the help of writ ing, as an art not yet devised, we have no difficulty in realizing, because the art is of comparatively recent device, and there are still communities enough that are working without it ; it is much harder to realize that there was a time when speaking also was an art not yet attained, and that men had to carry on their rude and rudimentary thinking without it. Writing too was devised for conscious purposes of communication only ; its esoteric uses, like those of speech, were at first unsuspected, and incapable of acting as an inducement ; they were not noticed until made experience of, and then only by those who look beneath the surface of things. There is no analogy closer and more instructive than this, between speech and writ ing. But analogies are abundant elsewhere in the history of human development. Everywhere it is the lower and more obvious inducements that are first effective, and that lead gradually to the possession of what serves and stimu lates higher wants. All the arts and industries have grown out of men s effort to get enough to eat and pro tection against cold and heat just as language, with all its uses, out of men s effort to communicate with their fellows. As a solitary man now would never form even the beginnings of speech, as one separated from society unlearns his speech by disuse and becomes virtually dumb, so early man, with all his powers, would never have acquired speech, save as to those powers was added sociality with the needs it brought. We might conceive of a solitary man as housing and dressing himself, devising rude tools, and thus lifting himself a step from wildness toward culti vation ; but we cannot conceive of him as ever learning to talk. Recognition of the impulse to communication as the efficient cause of language-making is an element of primary importance in the theory of the origin of language. No one who either leaves it out of account or denies it will, however ingenious and entertaining his speculations, cast any real light on the earliest history of speech. To inquire under what peculiar circumstances, in connexion with what mode of individual or combined action, a first outburst of oral expression may have taken place, is, on the other hand, quite futile. The needed circumstances were always present when human beings were in one another s society; there was an incessant drawing-on to attempts at mutual understanding which met with occasional, and then ever more frequent and complete success. There inheres in most reasoning upon this subject the rooted assumption, governing opinion even when not openly upheld or con sciously made, that conceptions have real natural names, and that in a state of nature these will somehow break forth and reveal themselves under favouring circumstances. The falsity of such a view is shown by our whole further discussion. The character of the motive force to speech determined Begi the character of the beginnings of speech. That was first llin o signified which was most capable of intelligible significa- ^ T tion, not that which was first in order of importance, as j u(r . judged by any standard which we can apply to it, or first in order of conceptional development. All attempts to determine the first spoken signs by asking what should have most impressed the mind of primitive man are and must be failures. It was the exigencies and possibilities of practical life, in conditions quite out of reach of our distinct conception, that prescribed the earliest signs of communication. So, by a true and instructive analogy, the beginnings of writing are rude depictions of visible objects; it is now thoroughly recognized that no alphabet, of whatever present character, can have originated in any other way ; everything else is gradually arrived at from that as, indeed, in the ingeniously shaping hands of man, from any central body of signs, though but of small extent, all else is attainable by processes of analogy and adaptation and transfer. Now what is it that is directly signifiable in the world about us 1 ? Evidently, the separate acts and qualities of sensible objects, and nothing else. In writing, or signification to the eye, the first element is the rude depiction of the outline of an object, or of that one of the sum of its characteristic qualities which the eye takes note of and the hand is capable of intelligibly reproducing ; from that the mind understands the whole