Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/70

60 adverbs and pronouns? so that in so great a diversity of tongues among all people and nations this seems to me the common language of all mankind?"—"Manus vero, sine quibus trunca esset actio ac debilis, vix dici potest, quot motus habeant, quum pæne ipsam verborum copiam persequantur; nam caeterae partes loquentem adjuvant, hæ, prope est ut dicam, ipsæ loquuntur. . . . . Non in demonstrandis locis ac personis adverbiorum atque pronominum obtinent vicem? ut in tanta per omnes gentes nationesque linguæ diversitate hic mihi omnium hominum communis sermo videatur."

Where a man stands is to him the centre of the universe, and he refers the position of any object to himself, as before or behind him, above or below him, and so on; or he makes his fore-finger issue, as it were, as a radius from this imaginary centre, and, pointing in any direction into space, says that the thing he points out is there. He defines the position of an object somewhat as it is done in Analytical Geometry, using either a radius vector, to which the demonstrative pronoun may partly be compared, or referring it to three axes, as, in front or behind, to the right or left, above or below. His body, however, not being a point, but a structure of considerable size, he often confuses his terms, as when he uses here for some spot only comparatively near him, instead of making it come towards the same imaginary centre whence there started. He can in thought shift his centre of coordinates and the position of his axes, and imagining himself in the place of another person, or even of an inanimate object, can describe the position of himself or anything else with respect to them. Movement and direction come before his mind as a real or imaginary going from one place to another, and such movement gives him the idea of time which the deaf-and-dumb man expresses by drawing a line with his finger along his arm from one point to another, and the speaker by a similar adaptation of prepositions or adverbs of place.

I do not wish to venture below the surface of this difficult subject,