Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/422

400 twentieths, at the least, of the speech we speak is demonstrably in this sense our own work; why should the remaining twentieth be thought otherwise? It is but a childish philosophy which can see no other way to make out a divine agency in human language than by regarding that agency as specially and miraculously efficient in the first stage of formation of language. We may fairly compare it with the wisdom of the little girl who, on being asked who made her, replied; "God made me a little baby so high" (dropping her hand to within a foot of the floor) "and I grew the rest." The power which originates is not to be separated from that which maintains and develops: both are one, one in their essential nature, one in their general mode of action. We might as well claim that the letters of the alphabet, that the simple digits, must have been miraculously revealed, for elements out of which men should proceed to develop systems of writing and of mathematical notation, as that the rudiments of spoken speech, the primitive signs of mental conceptions, must have had such an origin.

In short, our recognition of language as an institution, as an instrumentality, as no integral system of natural and necessary representatives of thought, inseparable from thought or spontaneously generated by the mind, but, on the contrary, a body of conventional signs, deriving their value from the mutual understanding of one man with another; and, farther, our recognition of the history of this institution as being not a mere succession of changes wrought upon something which still remains the same in essential character, but a real development, effected by human forces, whose operations we can trace and understand—these take away the whole ground on which the doctrine of the divine origin of language, as formerly held, reposed. The origin of language is divine, in the same sense in which man's nature, with all its capacities and acquirements, physical and moral, is a divine creation; it is human, in that it is brought about through that nature, by human instrumentality.

It is hardly necessary to make any farther reference to an objection, already once alluded to, which some minds may