[27] Lucret. v. 1027-1089. The whole passage is one of remarkable beauty and ingenuity. Neither Epicurus nor Lucretius excluded altogether the innate element; v. Diog. Laert. x. 75, sq. Lucretius rightly regards language as no less natural than gesticulation, and so might have taught a lesson to Reid and Dugald Stewart. See Fleming’s Vocab. of Philosophy, s. v. Language. The whole theory is stated and ridiculed by Lactantius, Institt. Divv. vi. 10.
[28] He began
“In murmurs which his first endeavoring tongue
Caught infant-like from the far-foamèd sands.”
An extremely curious Esthonian legend (the only one which Grimm has discovered bearing any resemblance to the Babel-dispersion) seems to involve the same conception. God, seeing that population was too crowded, determined to disperse men, by giving to each nation a distinct tongue. Accordingly, he placed on the fire a caldron full of water, and made the different races successively approach, who appropriated respectively the various sounds of the hissing and singing water.—Grimm, p. 28. Others have compared with it the Mexican legend about the doves. See Winer, Biblisches Realwörterb. s. v. Sprache.
[29] Spenser’s Faërie Queen.
[30] For assertions of the conventional character of language, see Arist. περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, ii. 1. Plato, Crat. ad in. Harris, Hermes, iii. 1. Locke, iii. 1-8. Fénelon, Lettre sur les occupations de l’Acad. § 3. (These are quoted at length by Charma, p. 208.) Smith, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, ii. 364. Grimm, 39, 40. Lersch, passim.
[31] Renan, p. 78.
[32] See Wiseman, p. 54. This theory of the development of human language required the supposition of an indefinite period of human existence; but even if this be freely admitted, it is impossible to prove the first step by which unarticulated sounds, the merely passive echoes of blind instincts or outward phenomena, could develop into the expression of thought. See Bunsen, ii. 76. It would have been marvellous indeed, if man had by the mere possession of vocal cries, not differing from those of animals, been able to raise himself from the utterances of instinct and appetite to express the emotions of admiration, hope, and love. See Nodier, Notions, p. 14.
[33] Bunsen, ii. 130.