Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/222

 brute creatures, as the means whereby he taught Adam their names. But whether this was so, also whether, if it was, any analogous method was taken in respect of the names of other objects, or of ideas, and internal feelings, is an inquiry, in which nothing that yet appears can afford satisfaction.

I suppose, also, that the language which Adam and Eve were possessed of in paradise, was very narrow, and confined in great measure to visible things; God himself condescending to appear in a visible, perhaps in a human shape, to them, in his revelations of himself. It might also be monosyllabic in great measure. They who suppose Adam to be capable of deep speculations, and to have exceeded all his posterity in the subtilty and extent of his intellectual faculties, and consequently in the number and variety of his words, and the ideas belonging to them, have no foundation for this opinion in scripture; nor do they seem to consider, that innocence, and pure unmixed happiness, may exist without any great degrees of knowledge; or that to set a value upon knowledge considered in itself, and exclusively of its tendency to carry us to God, is a most pernicious error, derived originally from Adam’s having eaten of the tree of knowledge.

After the fall, we may suppose, that Adam and Eve extended their language to new objects and ideas, and especially to those which were attended with pain; and this they might do sometimes by inventing new words, sometimes by giving new senses to old ones. However, their language would still continue narrow, because they had only one another to converse with, and could not extend their knowledge to any great variety of things; also because their foundation was narrow. For the growth and variations of a language somewhat resemble the increase of money at interest upon interest.

If to these reasons we add the long lives of the antediluvian patriarchs, the want of arts and sciences in the antediluvian world, and the want of leisure through the great labour and fatigue necessary to provide food, clothing, &c. we shall have reason to conjecture, that the whole antediluvian world would speak the same language with Adam, and that without any great additions or alterations. After a hundred or two hundred years, association would fix the language of each person, so that he could not well make many alterations; but he must speak the language of his forefathers till that time, because those to the sixth or seventh generation above him were still living; and consequently he would continue to speak the same language, i.e. the Adamic, with few variations, to the last. The narrowness of the languages of barbarous nations may add some light and evidence here.

If we suppose some kind of picture-writing to have been imparted to Adam by God, or to have been invented by him, or by any of his posterity, this might receive more alterations and improvements than language, from the successive generations