Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/49

Rh fact that the one class of men has risen indefinitely in the scale of being, while the other exhibits no power whether of self-culture of imitation. These are facts which, like other physical facts, we cannot gainsay, although we may not be called on to determine the further question of the unity or plurality of the human race. The point with which we are more immediately concerned, is the light thrown by the history of words on the social and political history of the race, and on the consequences which followed the disruption or separation of tribes speaking dialects more or less closely akin.

It can never be too often repeated that the facts laid bare in the course of philological inquiry are as strictly historical as any which are recorded of the campaigns of Hannibal, Wellington, or Napoleon. The words possessed in common by different Aryan languages point to the fact that these now separated tribes once dwelt together as a single people, while a comparison of these common words with others peculiar to the several dialects furnishes evidence of the material condition of the yet undivided race. Thus, from the identity of words connected with peaceful occupations as contrasted with the varying terms for war and hunting, we may gather "that all the Aryan nations had led a long life of peace before they separated, and that their language acquired individuality and nationality as each colony started in search of new homes, new generations forming new terms connected with the warlike and adventurous life of their onward migrations." But these new terms were evolved from the common stock of verbal stems, and the readiness with which these roots lent themselves to new shades of meaning would not only render it easier to express thoughts already needing utterance, but would itself be a fruitful source of new ideas and notions. This process would be, in fact, a multiplication of living images and objects, for all names in the earliest stages of language were either masculine or feminine, "neuters being of later growth, and distinguishable chiefly in the nominative." Thus the forms of language would tend to keep up a condition of thought analogous to that of infants; and the conscious life of all natural objects, inferred at first from the consciousness of personality