[177] Wedgwood, Etymol. Dict., p. iii.
[178] Farrar, Origin of Language, p. 53.
[179] Science of Thought, p. 439.
[180] Science of Thought, p. 549.
[181] Science of Thought, pp. 551, 552.
[182] Ibid., pp. 551, 552.
[183] “The Aryan languages are the languages of a civilized race; the parent speech to which we may inductively trace them was spoken by men who stood on a relatively high level of culture” (Sayce, Introduction, &c., i. 56). “The primitive tribe which spoke the mother-tongue of the Indo-European family was not nomadic alone, but had settled habitations, even towns and fortified places, and addicted itself in part to the rearing of cattle, in part to the cultivation of the earth. It possessed our chief domesticated animals—the horse, the ox, the goat, and the swine, besides the dog: the bear and the wolf were foes that ravaged its flocks; the mouse and the fly were already domestic pests.... Barley, and perhaps also wheat, was raised for food, and converted into meal. Mead was prepared from honey, as a cheering and inebriating drink. The use of certain metals was known; whether iron was one of them admits of question. The art of weaving was practised; wool and hemp, and possibly flax, being the materials employed.... The weapons of offence and defence were those which are usual among primitive peoples, the sword, spear, bow, and shield. Boats were manufactured and moved by oars.... The art of numeration was learned, at least up to a hundred; there is no general Indo-European word for ‘thousand.’ Some of the stars were noticed and named; the moon was the chief measurer of time. The religion was polytheistic, a worship of the personified powers of nature” (Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, pp. 207, 208). For a more detailed account of this interesting people, see Poescher, Die Arier.
[184] “Unsere Wurzeln sind die Urwurzeln nicht; wir haben vielleicht, von keiner einzigen die erste, ursprüngliche Laut-form mehr vor uns, ebensowenig wohl die Urbedeutung” (Geiger, Ursprung der Sprache, s. 65). And this opinion, so far as I know, is adopted as an axiom by all other philologists.
[185] “It is impossible to bring down the epoch at which the Aryan tribes still lived in the same locality, and spoke practically the same language, to a date much later than the third millennium before the Christian era” (Sayce, Introduction, &c., ii., p. 320).
[186] This fact alone would be sufficient to dispose of what I cannot but consider, from any and every point of view, the transparent absurdity of the doctrine that “the formation of thought is the first and natural purpose of language, while its communication is accidental only” (Science of Thought, p. 40). Such a “purpose” would imply “thought” as already formed; and, therefore, the doctrine must suppose a purpose to precede the conditions of its own possibility.