Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/427



T is one of the highest achievements of modern science to have rescued Language from the domain of Language theology, and traced its continuous evolution by the natural faculties of man. History, however,

Language not a revelation nor an invention, but a natural growth.

reminds us that this line of study was foreshadowed by Epicurus and his school, and especially by Lucretius; who wholly denied that speech was either a special invention or a divine communication, and indicated the steps of its gradual birth in such instinctive expressions as the cries of animals and the unconscious gestures of infants. After nearly two thousand years of supernaturalism, we are brought back with new experience to this old trust in natural laws.

A prolonged depreciation of the human faculties had resulted in the last century in two extremes of theory on the subject. One of these was expressed in the phrase that speech was too amazing a product to have been wrought out by man's " unaided powers." The other proceeded from that reaction to excessive self-confidence, which, especially in France, felt itself raised up for the reconstruction of the world by immediate human forces; and this philosophy of patent machinery naturally enough referred language to the genius of some great inventor. Both the miracle and the mechanism are now set aside for good and sufficient reasons. On the one hand, that transition of inarticulate tongue-gestures into distinct words, in which language begins, no more needs a special inven