Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/101

 false than the idea that the social impulses are bound to be continually strengthened as society develops.

At the beginning of human society that certainly will be found true. The impulses, which in the animal world had already developed the social impulses, human society permits to remain in full strength; it adds further to that—co-operation in work. This co-operation itself must have made a new instrument of intercourse, of social understanding, necessary—language. The social animals could correspond with few means of mutual understanding, cries of persuasion, joy, fright, alarm, anger and sensational noises. Every individual is with them a whole, which can exist for itself alone. But sensational noises do not, however, suffice if there is to be common labour, or if different tasks are to be allotted, or different products divided. They do not suffice for individuals who are helpless without the help of other individuals. Division of labour is impossible without a language which describes not merely sensations, but also things and processes. It can only develop in the degree to which language is perfected, and this, for its part, brings with it the need for the former.

In language itself the description of activities, and especially the human, is the most primitive; that of things, the later. The verbs are older than the nouns, the former forming the roots from which these latter are derived.

Thus declares Lazarus Geiger:—

"When we ask ourselves why light and colour were not nameable objects in the first stage of language, but the painting of the colours, the answer lies in this: that man first described only his own actions or those of his kind; he noticed only what happened to himself or in the immediate and, to him, directly interesting neighbourhood, at a period when he had for such things as light and dark, shining objects, and lightning no sense and no power of conception. If we take as examples from the great number which we have already passed under review (in the book); they go back in their beginnings to an extremely limited circle of human