The belief that language was innate led to the strange hallucination that if a child were entirely secluded from human contact, he would speak instinctively the primitive language of mankind. According to Herodotus, the experiment was actually made by Psammetichus, King of Egypt, who entrusted two new-born infants to a shepherd, with the injunction to let them suck a goat’s milk, and to speak no words in their presence, but to observe what word they would first utter. After two years the shepherd visited them, and they approached him, stretching[15] out their hands, and uttering the word βεκός. It was found that this vocable existed in the Phrygian language, and meant “bread;” whence it was sagely inferred that the Phrygians spoke the original language, and were the most ancient of people. There is in this story such a delicious naïveté, that one could hardly expect that it would have happened in any except very early ages. It can, however, be paralleled by the popular opinion which attributed the same experiment to James IV. and Frederic II.[16] in the Middle Ages. In the latter case the little unfortunates died for want of lullabies! Similarly, almost every nation has regarded its own language as the primitive one. One of the historians of St. Louis says that a deaf mute, miraculously healed at the king’s tomb, spoke, not in the language of Burgundy, where he was born, but in the language[17] of the capital. A similar belief seems to underlie the extreme anxiety and curiosity of savages to learn the name of any article hitherto unknown to them, as though the name had some absolute significance. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of that deep germ of truth which such fancies involve; but hints of it may be found in Holy[18] Scripture.
No doubt at first sight it appears that much might be said in favour of the innate and organic nature of language. Its beauty,[19] its diversity, its power, its diffusion over the whole surface of the globe, give it the supernatural air of a gift which man, so far from originating, can only ruin and destroy. We see that in favourable situations language, like vegetation, flourishes and blossoms, while elsewhere it fades and dies away as a plant loses its foliage when deprived of nourishment and light. It seems, too, to participate in that healing power of nature, which effaces rapidly all trace of wounds received. Like nature, it produces mighty results out of feeble resources—it is economical without avarice, and liberal without prodigality.
Again; do we not see that almost every living thing is endowed in infinite variety with the faculty of uttering sounds, and even of intercommunicating feelings?[20] The air is thrilled with the voice of birds, and some of them even possess a power of articulation, which among many nations is the distinctive[21] definition of man. Nay, fancy has attributed to animals a power of language in the age of gold—a power which under certain[22] circumstances they are supposed to be still allowed to exercise.
But this leads us to the true point of difference. The dog barks, as it barked[23] at the creation, and the crow of the cock is the same now as when it reached the ear of repentant Peter. The song of the nightingale, and the howl of the leopard, have continued as unchangeable as the concentric circles of the spider, and the waxen hexagon of the bee. The one as much as the other are the result of a blind though often perfect instinct. They are unalterable because they are innate, and the utterances of mankind would have been as unchangeable as those of animals, had they been in the same way the result not of liberty but of necessity. To the cries of animals we must compare, not man’s ever-varying language, but those instinctive sounds of weeping, sobbing, moaning—the changeless scream, sigh, or laughter—by which, since the creation, he has given relief or expression to his physical[24] sensations.
In point of fact—as a thousand experiments might have proved to Psammetichus—a new-born infant possesses the faculty of language, not actually, but only potentially. It is obvious that an Italian infant, picked up on the field of Solferino and carried to Paris, would not have spokenδυναμις Italian but French, and an English babe, carried off by the Caffirs, would find no difficulty in learning the rich language of Caffraria, with its five-and-twenty moods. For language is clearly learned by imitation. This is the intermediate link between the δύναμις and the ἔργον. When poor Kaspar Hauser tottered into the streets of Nuremberg, the only words he could say were, “I will be a soldier as my father was,” because those were the only words which he had heard in his miserable confinement. Doubtless, the Egyptian children pronounced the word βεκός, because it approached as nearly as possible to the bleating[25] of the goat by which they had been suckled.
Had there ever been an innate organic language, it is quite certain that it must have left some traces; for, as Dr. Latham observes, “language (as an instrument of criticism in ethnology) is the most permanent of the criteria of human relationships derivable from our moral constitution.” Talleyrand’s wicked witticism, that “language was given us to conceal our thoughts,” arose from the fact that it is used for that purpose on a thousand occasions. But although a man may “coin his face into smiles,” and utter a thousand honeyed words, his real sentiments will flash out sometimes in passionate gesture and rapid glance; and just in the same way, had there even been a language which was the organic expression of emotion, it is absolutely impossible that it should have wholly disappeared. That which is really implanted is for the most part unalterable.
2. Seeing, then, that positive experiment, as well as other considerations, disprove the inneity of language, other philosophers believed that it was simply conventional, and grew up gradually after a period of mutism. The Epicurean philosophy, deeply tainted with the error of man’s slow and toilsome development from a savage and almost bestial[26] condition, gave the problem the hardest of all material solutions. This school found in Lucretius its most splendid exponent, and the poet accounts for the appearance of speech as the gradual and instinctive endeavour to supply a want.[27] In short, words came because they were required, much in the same way that, according to the theory of Lamarck, organic peculiarities are the result of habit and instinct, so that the crane acquired a long neck and long legs by persevering attempts to fish. Lucretius compares language to the widely diverse sounds which animals emit to express different sensations, and, scornfully rejecting the theory of one Name-giver, asserts repeatedly that—
“Utilitas[27] expressit nomina rerum.”
It was generally believed by this school that man originally acquired the faculty of speech by an observation of the sounds of nature. The cries of animals, “the hollow murmuring wind and silver rain,” the sighing of the woods,