Page:The Monist Volume 2.djvu/92

80. somewhere that, if we could put the soul of a man into the organism of an animal, say of a snake, it would cease to be a human soul and become the soul of a snake. Speech would be changed into a hissing, in accordance with the snake's organs for uttering sounds. And in the same way all the feelings, all the concepts, all the desires and inclinations—in short the whole psychical life would be that of a snake.

Thought is the soul of language. As there are no ghost-souls, so there are no ghost-thoughts. And the soul is not something distinct from the organism, it is the form of the organism. It happens in fairy-tales that the Prince is transformed into a frog, but if a fairy could transform a man into a frog, his soul would certainly also become a frog-soul. Language is the visible organism of the invisible thought, and as is language, exactly so is thought.

The problem how language has developed was first answered by the onomatopoetic theory, "the bow-wow theory" as Max Müller calls it. Language was conceived as an echo of nature, as a reflex action that takes place in a living and feeling being. Yet this theory had to be abandoned, because an historical investigation of language proved that words with very few exceptions were not imitations of external sounds. Yet the spirit of investigation was not daunted by this defeat, and the bow-wow theory reappeared in a modified form. Language was still considered as a reflex action; however, it was conceived to be a reflex which re-echoed the impressions of natural phenomena as they had affected man. This was the exclamation theory which seeks the origin of language in the "ohs and ahs," the sighs and shouts of a feeling mind. Prof. Max Müller calls this theory "the pooh-pooh theory." This theory had also to be discarded because it was in conflict with the actual facts of the evolution of language. Next Noiré and Prof. Max Müller came with their theory, called by Noiré "the synergastic theory," which conceives language as the expression of common work, also called by Noiré the Logos theory, the sympathetic theory, and the causality theory. Prof. Max Müller in order to forestall any deriders of this theory suggests calling it "the yo-he-ho theory," yo-he-ho being the sailors' song when engaged in some common work as hoisting or hauling.