And finds ‘I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.’”[69]
And this gives us at once the true explanation of the fact, that it is some time before a child learns to regard itself as a subject, and therefore, that it[70] objectises itself in all its language. It would say, not “I want an apple,” but “Charlie wants an apple;” not even “give me,”—so frequently as “give Charlie.” When Hamlet signs himself as ‘The machine that is to me Hamlet,’ he only shows, by an extreme instance, the remarkable difficulty that a man always has in mastering this very conception of individuality, which the Hindoo philosophy would seem to regard as a primitive intuition.
By these remarks we have greatly cleared the way for our explanation of the manner in which words originated;—an explanation[71] which is purely psychological, and which was first promulgated in this shape by M. Steinthal.
Man has the faculty of interpretation, or of using words for signs, as completely as he has the faculties of sight and hearing; and words are the means he employs for the exercise of the former faculty, just as the eye and the ear are employed as the organs of the latter.
The power of speech depends on the power of abstraction, i.e., of transforming intuitions into ideas.[72] Let us explain. At the sight of a horse galloping, or of a plain white with snow, the primitive man formed, at first, one undivided image; the motion and the horse, the field and the snow, were unseparated. But, by language, the act of running was distinguished from the creature that ran, and the colour separated from the thing coloured. Each of these two elements became fixed in an isolated word, and so the word dismembered the complete perception. But, from another point of view, the word is more extended than the presentation; e.g., the word “white” expresses not only an attribute of snow, but of all white objects; its meaning, then, is more abstract and indeterminate than that of “white snow.” Instead of only embracing an existence, or an object in an accidental state, a word represents the thing without its accidental characters, which are removed by abstraction, and indicates it under all the circumstances in which it may be placed.
The transformation, then, of intuitions into ideas, by the freedom and activity of the human intelligence, constitutes the essence of a word, although the speaker may be as unconscious of the process as he is of the organic mechanisms which give utterance to his thoughts.
I. ‘As for the conditions under which articulate language first appeared, M. Steinthal represents them as follows. At the origin of humanity the soul and the body were in such mutual dependence that all the emotions[73] of the soul had their echo in the body, principally in the organs of the respiration and the voice. This sympathy of soul and body, still found in the infant and the savage, was intimate and fruitful in the primitive man; each intuition awoke in him an accent or a sound.’ This was the first step; and in this fact lies the germ of truth contained in the doctrines of the analogists;[74] since there must have been some reason in the nature of things, why certain impressions or feelings were connected with certain sounds rather than with certain others. We may be totally unable to point out this connection in many cases, and even while recognising a natural relation between certain sounds of the human voice and certain material phenomena, we may deny the very possibility of such a relation between a spiritual phenomenon and its physical sign. And yet we feel a strong repugnance at allowing caprice or chance to have any considerable share in the origin of language. It can, at least, be fairly argued that there is nothing purely arbitrary in the work of the divine Demiurgus.
II. ‘Another law, which played a no less essential part in the creation of language, was the association[75] of ideas. In virtue of this law, the sound which accompanied an intuition, associated itself in the soul with the intuition itself, so closely that the sound and the intuition presented themselves to the consciousness as inseparable, and were equally inseparable in the recollection.’ This was the second step.
III. Finally, the word became a middle term of reminiscence, a tach between the external object and the inward impression. “The sound[76] became a word by forming a bond between the image obtained by the vision, and the image preserved in the memory; in other words, it acquired significance, and became an element of language. The image of the remembrance, and the image of the vision, are not wholly identical; e.g., I see a horse; no other horse that I have ever seen resembles it absolutely in colour, size, &c.: the general conception recalled by the word ‘horse’ involves only the abstracted[77] attributes common to all the animals of the same genus. It is this collection of common attributes that constitutes the significance of the sound.”