But we must not omit one or two positive arguments against this theory.
1. Had language been revealed, mankind at first would have been better situated than any of their posterity; and such a disposition is unlike the ordinary course of God’s just dealings.
2. So far from being “a pale image and feeble echo of splendours which have passed away from the scene of earth,” each human language bears in itself the most distinct traces of growth and progress—the marks of a regular development in accordance with definite laws—the successive traces of infancy, youth, maturity, and manhood. Though many existing languages, and even those of some savage nations are but “degraded and decaying fragments of nobler formations,” yet there are proofs as decisive that they rose to gradual perfection, as that they subsequently fell from perfection to decay.
3. If the spiritualist theory were true, it would be a most natural inference that the spiritual and abstract signification of roots is also the original one. But such an assumption (although it is made by Frederic Schlegel), “is contradicted by the history of every language of the world.”
4. It is equally improbable that God who revealed the primitive language, or man who received it, should have suffered it (divine, as on this supposition it must have been) to degenerate into barbarous and feeble jargons.
5. “The human faculties are competent to the formation of[46]language.” It is therefore totally unlike God’s methods, as observed in His works, to give directly what can be evolved mediately. For there is clearly no waste in the economy of Nature, no prodigality in the display of miracles. In the words of Grimm, “it seems contrary to the wisdom of God to impose the restraint of a created form on that which was destined to a free historic development.” At any rate, as a fact we can historically trace the development of language from a very small nucleus, and this being the case the supposition of any previous revealed language is a groundless and improbable hypothesis.[47]
Further arguments will appear as we proceed; but we must now point out the true meaning of the statement in Genesis, that “God brought all living creatures to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof.”[48] Now, merely remarking (by way of limitation) that the writer clearly supposed his own language to be that of Paradise, and that there is here no attempt to account for all[49] language, because he is speaking of a certain class of words only—we find in this narrative a profound verity clothed in a most beautiful and appropriate symbol: ‘We see man as the true nomenclator—man acting by his own peculiar faculties under the guide of the Deity. Philosophy[50] could find no more perfect figure to express her conclusions than this—God teaching man to speak as a father would a son.’ But to give this simple narrative a material explanation is to falsify at once both its letter and its spirit. On the other hand, “to say with the theologians that God had created language[51] as he had created man, and that language is not the act and work of man,” is to contradict not only reason but the Bible too. For be it observed, that the Bible distinctly confirms our arguments by saying, not that God named the animals, but that Adam named them, and that whatsoever he named every living creature that was the name thereof.
In short, language is “only divine in proportion to the divinity of our nature and our soul;” it is only a gift of God because the faculty naturally resulted from the physical and spiritual organism which God had created. This seems a more natural and philosophic supposition than the belief that even the embryonic germ of language was revealed. The exercise of the faculty in the original utterance of primitive words has ceased to be called into play because it has ceased to be required. We cannot now invent original words because there is no longer any necessity for doing so. In the same way—as is well known—a deaf mute when once instructed in an artificial language loses the quick instinctive power of creating intelligible natural signs.