Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/66

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The race of Nimrod had their labour turned; For no production of the intellect Which is renewed at pleasure of mankind, Following the sky, was durable for aye. It is a natural thing that man should speak; But whether this or that way, nature leaves To your election, as it pleases you. Ere I descended on the infernal road, Upon earth, EL was called the Highest Good, From whom the enjoyment flows that me surrounds; And was called ELI after; as was meet: For mortal usages are like a leaf Upon a bough, which goes, and others come."

Since Dante's time, how many men of genius have set the whole power of their minds against the problem, and to how little purpose. Steinthal's masterly summary of these speculations in his 'Origin of Language' is quite melancholy reading. It may indeed be brought forward as evidence to prove something that matters far more to us than the early history of language, that it is of as little use to be a good reasoner when there are no facts to reason upon, as it is to be a good bricklayer when there are no bricks to build with.

At the root of the problem of the origin of language lies the question, why certain words were originally used to represent certain ideas, or mental conditions, or whatever we may call them. The word may have been used for the idea because it had an evident fitness to be used rather than another word, or because some association of ideas, which we cannot now trace, may have led to its choice. That the selection of words to express ideas was ever purely arbitrary, that is to say, such that it would have been consistent with its principle to exchange any two words as we may exchange algebraic symbols, or to shake up a number of words in a bag and re-distribute them at random among the ideas they represented, is a supposition opposed to such knowledge as we have of the formation of language. And not in language only, but in the study of the whole range of art and belief among mankind, the principle is continually coming more and more clearly into view, that man has not only a definite reason, but very commonly an assignable one, for everything that he does and believes.

In the only departments of language of whose origin we have