Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/446

424 familiar objects of primitive life. The source of their difficulty lies in the fact that they would confound the prima denominata, the things first named, with the prima cognita, the things first cognized, apprehended by the mind, either as individuals or as classes. In truth, however, the two are quite distinct. It is not to be doubted that concrete things are first recognized, distinguished, and classified, in the earliest synthetic operations of the intelligence; so are they also in the inferior intelligences of the lower animals; but these synthetic cognitions do not and cannot lead to language. Language begins with analysis, and the apprehension of characteristic qualities. Not what the mind first consciously contemplated, but what was most readily capable of being intelligibly signified, determined the earliest words. Now a concrete object, a complex existence, is just as much out of the immediate reach of the sign-making faculty as is a moral act or an intellectual relation. As, during the whole history of language, designations of the latter classes of ideas have been arrived at through the medium of names for physical acts and relations, so have appellations for the former been won by means of their perceived characteristics. No etymologist feels that he has traced out the history of any concrete appellation till he has carried it back to a word expressive of quality. We saw in the third lecture  that, when we would make a name for a thing, we have recourse always to its qualities; we take some general word designating one of its distinguishing properties, and limit it to signifying the thing itself (as when we derived board from broad, moon from measuring, smith from smoothing); or else we identify by some common property or properties, or connect by some other equivalent tie of association, the thing to be named with another thing already named, and call it by the latter's title (as in deriving Jupiter's moons from moon, Board of Trade from board, Smiths from smith). Let any one of us, even now, after all our long training in the expression of our conceptions, attempt to convey to another person his idea of some sensible thing, and he will inevitably find himself reviewing its distinctive qualities, and