Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/423

XI.] be tempted to raise against our whole construction of the course of linguistic history out of the evidences of composition, phonetic corruption, transfer of meaning, and the other processes of linguistic growth, which we find in all the material of human speech. The inquiry, namely, has sometimes been raised, whether it was not perfectly possible for the Creator to frame and communicate to mortals a primitive language filled with such apparent signs of previous development, as well as one which should have the aspect of a new creation. Of course, must be our reply; nothing is theoretically impossible to Omnipotence: but to suppose that it has pleased God to work thus is to make the most violent and inadmissible of assumptions, one which imputes to him a wholly degrading readiness to trifle with, even to deliberately mislead and deceive, the reason which he has implanted in his creatures. It is precisely of a piece with the suggestion once currently thrown out, when the revelations of geology were first beginning to be brought to light, that fossils and stratifications and such like facts proved nothing; since God, when he made the rocks, could just as well have made them in this form and with these contents as otherwise. With men who can seriously argue upon such assumptions it is simply impossible to discuss a historical question: all the influences of historical science are thrown away upon them; they are capable of believing that a tree which they have not themselves seen spring up from the seed was created whole in the state in which they find it, without gradual growth; or even that a house, a watch, a picture, were produced just as they are, by the immediate action of almighty power.

We may here fittingly follow out a little farther an analogy more than once suggested in our preceding discussions, and one which, though some may deem it homely and undignified, is genuine and truly illustrative, and therefore not wanting in instruction: it is the analogy between language and clothing and shelter, as alike results of men's needs and men's capacities. Man was not created, like the inferior races, with a frame able to bear all the vicissitudes of climate to which he should be subjected; nor yet with a