The evolution of general ideas

by Th. Ribot

III.

The evolution of speech, starting from the protoplasmic state without organs or functions, and acquiring them little by little, proceeding progressively from indefinite to definite, from fluid to fixed state, can only be sketched in free outline. In details it falls within neither our subject nor our cognisance. But the successive points of this differentiation, which creates grammatical forms, and parts of discourse, are under an objective form the history of the development of intelligence, inasmuch as it abstracts, generalises, analyses, and tends towards an ever-growing precision. The completely developed languages—and we are speaking only of such—bear throughout the print of the unconscious labor that has fashioned them for centuries: they are a petrified psychology.

We must return to the roots or primitive terms, whatever may be their nature. Two distinct categories are generally admitted: pronominal or demonstrative roots, verbal or predicative roots.

The first form a small group that properly indicate rather the relative position of the speaker, than any concrete quality. They are equivalent to here, there, this, that, etc. They are few in number, and very simple in their phonetic relations: a vowel or vowel followed by a consonant. Many linguists refuse to admit them as roots, and think they have dropped from the second class by attenuation of meaning.[58] Possibly they are a survival of gesture language.

The second (verbal or predicative) is the only class that interests us. These have swarmed in abundance. They indicate qualities or actions; that is the important point. The first words denominated attributes or modes of being; they were adjectives, at least in the measure in which a fixed and rigid terminology can be applied to states in process of forming. Primitive man was everywhere struck with the qualities of things, ergo words were all originally appellative. They expressed one of the numerous characteristics of each object; they translated a spontaneous and natural abstraction: another proof of the precocious and indispensable nature of this operation. From its earliest developments intelligence has tended to simplify, to substitute the part for the whole. The unconscious choice of one attribute among many others depends on various causes; doubtless on its predominance, but above all on the interest it has for man. “A people,” remarks Renan, “have usually many words for what most interests them.” Thus, in Hebrew, we find 25 synonyms for the observance of the law; 14 for faith in God; 11 for rain, etc. In Arabic, the lion has 500 names, the serpent 200, money more than 80; the camel has 5,744, the sword 1,000 as befits a warrior race. The Lapp whose language is so poor, has more than 30 words to designate the reindeer, an animal indispensable to his life.[59] These so-called synonyms each denominate a particular aspect of things; they witness to the abundance of primitive abstractions.

This apparent wealth soon becomes an embarrassment and an encumbrance. Instead of 100 distinct terms, one generic substantive, plus one or two epithets, would suffice. But the substantive was not born of the deliberate desire to obviate this inconvenience. It is a specialisation, a limitation of the primitive meaning. Little by little the adjective lost its qualificative value, to become the name of one of the objects qualified. Thus in Sanskrit dêva (shining) finally signified the god; sourya (the dazzling) became the sun; akva (rapid) the name of a horse, etc. This metamorphosis of adjective into substantive by a specialisation of the general sense occurs even in our actual languages; as, e. g., when we say in French un brilliant (diamond); le volant (of a machine); un bon (of bread, counting-house, bank, etc.). What is only an accident now was originally a constant process.[60] Thus the substantive was derived from the primitive adjective; or rather, within the primitive organism, adjective-substantive, a division has been produced, and two grammatical functions constituted.

Many other remarks could be made on the determination of the substantive by inflexions, declensions, the mark of the gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); I shall confine myself to what concerns number, since we are proposing to consider numeration under all its aspects. Nothing appears more natural and clear-cut than the distinction between one and several; as soon as we exceed pure unity, the mother of numbers, plurality appears to us to be homogeneous in all its degrees. It has not been so from the beginning. This is proved by the existence of the dual in an enormous number of languages: Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Hottentot, Australian, etc. One, two, were counted with precision; the rest was vague. According to Sayce, the word “three” in Aryan language at first signified “what goes beyond.” It has been supposed that the dual was at first applied to the paired parts of the body: the eyes, the arms, the legs. Intellectual progress caused it to fall into disuse.

At the close of the period of first formation which we have been considering, the sentence was only a defaced organism reproduced by one of the following forms: (1) that; (2) that shining; (3) that sun, that shining.[61] The verb is still absent.

With it we enter on the period of secondary formation. It was long held to be an indisputable dogma that the verb is the word par excellence (verbum), the necessary and exclusive instrument of an affirmation. Yet there are many inferior idioms which dispense with it, and express affirmation by crude, roundabout processes, with no precision,—most frequently by a juxtaposition: snow white = the snow is white; drink me wine = I drink (or shall drink) wine, etc. Plenty of examples can be found in special works.

In fact, the Indo-European verb is, by origin, an adjective (or substantive) modified by a pronoun: Bharâmi = carrier-me, I carry. It is to be regretted that we cannot follow the details of this marvellous construction,—the result of unconscious and collective labor that has made of the verb a supple instrument, suited for all expressions, by the invention of moods, voices, and tenses. We may note that, as regards tenses, the distinction between the three parts of duration (which seems to us so simple) appears to have been established very slowly. Doubtless it can be asserted that it existed, actually, in the mind of primitive man, but that the imperfection of his verbal instrument failed in translating it. However this may be, it is a moot point whether the verb, at the outset, expressed past or present. It seems at first to have translated a vague conception of duration, of continuity in action; it was at first “durative,” a past which still continues, a past-present. The adjective notion contained in the verb, indefinitely as to time, only became precise by little and little. The distinction between the moments of duration did not occur by the same process in all languages, and in some, highly developed, otherwise like the Semitic languages, it remained very imperfect.[62]

The main point was to show how the adjective-substantive, modified by the adjunction of pronominal elements, constituted another linguistic organ, and losing its original mark little by little, became the verb with its multiple functions. The qualificatory character fundamental to it makes of it an instrument proper to express all degrees of abstraction and generalisation from the highest to the lowest, to run up the scale of lower, medium, and higher abstractions. Ex., to drink, eat, sleep, strike;—higher, to love, pray, instruct, etc.; higher still, to act, exist, etc. The supreme degree of abstraction, i. e., the moment at which the verb is most empty of all concrete sense, is found in the auxiliaries of the modern analytical languages. These, says Max Müller, occupy the same place among the verbs, as abstract nouns among the substantives. They date from a later epoch, and all had originally a more material and more expressive character. Our auxiliary verbs had to traverse a long series of vicissitudes, before they reached the desiccated, lifeless form that makes them so appropriate to the demands of our abstract prose. Habere, which is now employed in all Roman languages to express simply a past time, at first signified “to hold fast,” “to retain.”

The author continues, retracing the history of several other auxiliary verbs. Among them all there is one that merits particular mention on account of its divagations: this is the verb être, verb par excellence, verb substantive, unique; direct or understood expression of the existence that is everywhere present. The monopoly of affirmation, and even the privilege of an immaterial origin have been attributed to it.[63] In the first place, it is not met with under any form in certain languages which supplement its absence by divers processes. In the second, it is far from being primitive; it is derived, according to the idioms, from multiple and sufficiently discordant elements: to breathe, live, grow (Max Müller); to breathe, grow, remain, stand upright (stare) (Whitney).

Hitherto we have examined only the stable, solid parts of speech. There remain such as are purely transitive, translating a movement of thought, expressive of relation. Before we study these under their linguistic form, it is indispensable to take up the standpoint of pure psychology, and to know in the first place what is the nature of a relation. This can the less be avoided inasmuch as the question has scarcely been treated of, save by logicians, or after their fashion, and many very complete treatises of psychology do not bestow on it a single word.[64]

“A relation,” says Herbert Spencer, “is a state of consciousness which unites two other states of consciousness.” Although a relation is not always a link in the rigorous sense, this definition has the great advantage of presenting it as a reality, as a state existing by itself, not a zero, a naught of consciousness. It possesses intrinsic characters: (1) It is indecomposable. There are in consciousness greater and less states; the greater (e. g., a perception) are composite, hence accessible to analysis; they occupy an appreciable and measurable time. The lesser (relation) are naturally beyond analysis; rapid as lightning, they appear to be outside time. (2) It is dependent. Remove the two terms with which it is intercalated, and the relation vanishes; but it must be noted that the terms themselves presuppose relations; for, according to Spencer’s just remark, “There are neither states of consciousness without relations, nor relations without states of consciousness.” In fact: to feel or think a relation, is to feel or think a change.

But this psychical state may be studied otherwise than by internal observation, and the subsequent interpretation. It lends itself to an objective study, because it is incarnated in certain words. When I say, red and green, red or green, there are in either case, not two, but three states of consciousness; the sole difference is in the intermediate state which corresponds with an inclusion or an exclusion. So, too, all our prepositions and conjunctions (for, by, if, but, because) envelop a mental state, however attenuated. The study of languages teaches us that the expression of relations is produced in two ways, forming, as it were, two chronological layers.

The most ancient is that of the cases or declensions: a highly complex mechanism, varying in marked degree with the idioms, and consisting in appositions, suffixes, or modifications of the principal theme.

But these relations have only acquired their proper linguistic organ, specialised for this function, by means of prepositions and conjunctions. They are wanting in many languages; gesture being then substituted for them. The principal parts of the discourse are solitary, juxtaposed without links after the manner of the phrases used by children. Others, somewhat less poor, have only two conjunctions: and, but. In short, the terms on which devolved the expression of relations are of late formation, as it were, organs de luxe. In the analytical languages, prepositions and conjunctions are nouns or pronouns diverted from their primitive acceptation, which have acquired a value expressive of transition, condition, subordination, co-ordination, and the rest. The psychological notion common to the greater number, if not to all, is that of a movement. “All relations expressed by prepositions can be referred to repose, and to movement in space and time, i. e., to those with which the locative, accusative (movement of approximation) and ablative (movement of departure) correspond in declension.”[65] It may be admitted that this consciousness of movement, of change, which is no more, fundamentally, than the sense of different directions of thought, belongs less to the category of clear notions than to that of subconscious states, of tendencies, of actions, which explains why the terms of relation are wholly wanting, or rare, and only conquered their autonomy at a late period.

With these, the progressive work of differentiation is accomplished. Discourse has now its materials and its cement; it is capable of complex phrases wherein all is referred and subordinated to a principal state, contrary to those ruder essays which could only attain to simple phrases, denuded of connective apparatus.

We have rapidly sketched this labor of organogenesis, by which language has passed from the amorphous state to the progressive constitution of specialised terms and grammatical functions: an evolution wholly comparable with that which, in living bodies, starts from the fecundated ovule, to attain by division of labor among the higher species to a fixed adjustment of organs and functions. “Languages are natural organisms, which, without being independent of human volition, are born, grow, age, and die, according to determined laws.” (Schleicher.) They are in a state of continuous renovation, of acquisition, and of loss. In civilised languages, this incessant metamorphosis is partially checked by enforced instruction, by tradition, and respect for the great literary works. In savage idioms where these coercive measures are lacking, the transformation at times occurs with such rapidity that they become unrecognisable at the end of a few generations.

Spoken language, as a psycho-physiological mechanism, is regulated in its evolution by physiological and psychological laws.

Among the former (with which we are not concerned), the principal is the law of phonetic alteration, consisting in the displacement of an articulation in a determined direction. It is dependent on the vocal organ; thus, after the Germanic invasion, the Latin which this people spoke fell again under the power of physiological influences which modified it profoundly.

Among the latter, the principal is the law of analogy, the great artisan in the extension of languages. It is a law of economy, the basis of which is generalisation, the faculty of seizing on real or supposed resemblances. The word remains invariable, but the mind gives it different applications: it is a mask covering in turn several faces. It suffices to open a dictionary to see how ingenious and perilous is this unconscious labor. Such a word has only a few lines; it has no brilliant record. Such another fills pages; first we see it in its primitive sense; then—from analogy to analogy—from accident to accident—it departs from it more and more, and ends by having quite a contrary meaning.[66] Hence it has been said that “the object of a true etymology is to discover the laws that have regulated the evolution of thought.” Among primitive people, the process that entails such deviations from the primitive sense, is sometimes of striking absurdity; or at least appears to us as such by reason of the strange analogies that serve the extension of the word. Thus: certain Australian tribes gave the names of mussels (muyum), to books because they open and close like shell-fish; and many other no less singular facts could be cited. Much more might be said as to the rôle of analogy, but we must adhere to our subject.

In conclusion: it is to be regretted that linguistic psychology attracts so few people, and that many recent treatises on psychology, excellent on all other points, do not devote a single line to language. Yet this study, especially if comparative, from the lowest to the most subtle forms, would throw at least as much light on the mechanism of the intelligence as other highly accredited processes. Physiological psychology is much in vogue, since it is rightly concluded that if the facts of biology, normal and morbid, are being studied by naturalists and physicians, they are available to psychologists also, under another aspect. So too for languages: comparative philology has its own aim, psychology another, proper to it. It is incredible that any one who, with sufficient linguistic equipment, should devote himself to the task, would fail to find adequate return for his labors.

CHAPTER III.
INTERMEDIATE FORMS OF ABSTRACTION.

Having thus acquainted ourselves with this new factor—speech—which as an instrument of abstraction becomes steadily more and more important, we can take up our subject from the point at which we left it. In passing from the absence to the presence of the word, from the lower to the intermediate forms of abstraction, we must again insist on our principal aim: viz., to prove that abstraction and generalisation are functions of the completely evolved mind. They exist in embryo in perception, and in the image, and at their extreme limit involve suppression of all concrete representation. This conclusion will hardly be contradicted. The difficulty is to follow the evolution step by step, stage after stage, and to note the difference by objective marks.

For intermediate abstraction, this operation is very simple. It implies the use of words; it has passed the level of pre-linguistic abstraction and generalisation. We may go farther, and—always with the aid of words—establish two classes within the total category of mean abstraction:

1. The lower forms, bordering on generic images, whose objective mark is the feeble participation of the word: it can indeed be altogether foregone, and is only in the least degree an instrument of substitution.

2. The higher forms, approximating to the class of pure concepts, and having as their objective mark the fact that words are indispensable, since these have now become an instrument of substitution, though still accompanied by some sensory representation.

The legitimacy of this division can be justified only by a detailed comparison of the two classes.