We conclude, then, that language is neither innate and organic; nor a mechanical invention; nor an external gift of revelation;—but a natural faculty swiftly developed by a powerful instinct, the result of intelligence[52] and human freedom which have no place in purely organic[53] functions. It was “the living product of the whole[54] inner man.” It was “not[55] a gift bestowed ready formed to man, but something coming from himself.” It is “essentially[56] human; it owes to our full liberty both its origin and its progress; it is our history, our heritage.” Objectively considered, it was the result of organism: subjectively, the product of intelligence. It was “a primitive intuition, impersonal and yet influenced by individual genius;” in a word, its character is “at once[57] objective and subjective, at once individual and general, at once free and necessary, at once human and divine.”
That such a conclusion,[58] however much it may seem to savour of a weak eclecticism by combining all former theories, is yet in profound accordance with all the ascertained facts of language we shall hope to prove in the following chapter.
[CHAPTER II.]
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF SPEECH.
“Speech is morning to the mind;
It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
Which else lie dark and buried in the soul.”
From abstract and à priori considerations, we have arrived at the conclusion that language was achieved or created by the human race, by the unconscious or spontaneous exercise of divinely implanted powers; that it was a faculty analogous to and closely implicated with that of thought, and, like thought, developing itself with[59] the aid of time. The idea of speech was innate, and the evolution of that idea may be traced in the growth and history of language. It is most important to have a clear conception of the fact that this development did not result from an atomistic[60] reunion of parts, but from the vitality derived from an inward principle. Language was formed by a process not of crystalline accretion but of germinal development. Every essential part of language existed as completely (although only implicitly) in the primitive germ, as the petals of a flower exist in the bud before the mingled influences of the sun and the air have caused it to unfold.
Our belief thus arrived at—viz., that language was an achievement of the human genius which God implanted in the primeval man, a development of the faculty with which he endowed our race—does not at all necessitate the belief in a period when man was unable to communicate with man. The exercise of the faculty may have been rapid in that young and noble nature to a degree which now we cannot even conceive. A few imitative roots, uttered under the guidance of a divine instinct, and aided by the play of intelligence in movement and feature, would with wonderful ease grow into a language sufficient for the needs of a nascent humanity, and the living germ would soon bud and bourgeon by the very law of its production. Even if we were compelled to believe that this language was at first of the scantiest character, we see in this supposition nothing more absurd than in the certainty that knowledge and science, philosophy and art, are the slow, gradual, and toilsome conquests of an ever progressive race. It is now well understood that even the use of the senses has to be learnt,—that it is only by practice that we are able to discriminate distances in the variously-coloured surface which is all that we really see. Why should it then be unnatural to suppose that speech also was at first only implicitly bestowed on us, and that it required time and experience to develop fully the implanted capacity?