Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/420

398 take us no farther. The question as to what were the actual first utterances, and how they were produced, must be decided, if at all, in another way—by general considerations and analogies, by inferences from the facts of human nature and the facts of language, taken together, and from their relations to one another. It falls within the province rather of linguistic philosophy, as a branch of anthropology, than of the historical science of language. But the subject is one of such interest, and for the proper discussion of which our historical investigations so directly prepare the way, that we cannot refrain from taking it up. It may be that we shall find no sharp-cut and dogmatic answer to our inquiries respecting it, but we may hope at least so to narrow down the field of uncertainty and conjecture as to leave the problem virtually solved.

We may fairly claim, in the first place, that the subject has been very greatly simplified, stripped of no small part of its difficulty and mystery, by what has already been proved as to the history of speech. Did we find no traces of a primitive condition of language different from its later manifestations, did it appear to us as from the very beginning a completely developed apparatus, of complicated structure, with distinct signs for objects, qualities, activities, and abstract conceptions, with its mechanism for the due expression of relations, and with a rich vocabulary—then might we well shrink back in despair from the attempt to explain its origin, and confess that only a miracle could have produced it, that only a superhuman agency could have placed it in human possession. But we have seen that the final perfection of the noblest languages has been the result of a slow and gradual development, under the impulse of tendencies, and through the instrumentality of processes, which are even yet active in every living tongue; that all this wealth has grown by long accumulation out of an original poverty; and that the actual germs of language were a scanty list of formless roots, representing a few of the most obvious sensible acts and phenomena appearing in ourselves, our fellow-creatures, and the nature by which we are surrounded. We have now left us only the comparatively easy task of satisfying