Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/158

148 word shat, "river," as too much like it, and use the word nahr instead. Nor will they utter the word keitan, "thread," or "fringe," and even naal, "horse-shoe," and naal-band, "farrier," are forbidden words, because they approach to laan, "curse," and maloun, "accursed." It is curious to observe that a "disease of language" belonging to the same family has shown itself in English speaking countries and in modern times. In America especially, a number of very harmless words have been "tabooed" of late years, not for any offence of their own, but for having a resemblance in sound to words looked upon as indelicate, or even because slang has adopted them to express ideas ignored by a somewhat over-fastidious propriety. We in England are not wholly clear from this offence against good taste, but we have been fortunate in seeing it developed into its full ugliness abroad, and may hope that it is checked once for all among ourselves.

It may be said in concluding the subject of Images and Names, that the effect of an inability to separate, so clearly as we do, the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in the mind, shows itself very fully and clearly in the superstitious beliefs and practices of the untaught man, but its results are by no means confined to such matters. It is not too much to say that nothing short of a history of Philosophy and Religion would be required to follow them out. The accumulated experience of so many ages has indeed brought to us far clearer views in these matters than the savage has, though after all we soon come to the point where our knowledge stops, and the opinions which ordinary educated men hold, or at least act upon, as to the relation between ideas and things, may come in time to be superseded by others taken from a higher level. But between our clearness of separation of what is in the mind from what is out of it, and the mental confusion of the lowest savages of our own day, there is a vast interval. Moreover, as has just been said, the appearance even in the system of savage superstition, of things which seem to have outlived the recollection of their original meaning, may perhaps lead us back to a still earlier condition of the human mind. Especially we may see, in the superstitions connected