We have already seen that even the most imitative of vocalists, the talking birds, will invent wholly arbitrary sounds as denotative names,[214] and it would be psychologically absurd to suppose that they are superior to what primitive man must have been in the matter of finding expedients for semiotic utterance. Again, the clicks of Hottentots and Bushmen, whatever we suppose their origin to have been, certainly cannot have had that origin in onomatopœia; and no less certainly, as Professor Sayce remarks, they still survive to show how the utterances of speechless man could be made to embody and convey ideas.[215] Lastly, on the general principle that the development of the individual furnishes information touching the development of the race, it is highly significant that the hitherto speechless child will spontaneously use arbitrary sounds (both articulate and otherwise) whereby to denotate habitual recepts. And even after it has begun to learn the use of actual words, arbitrary additions are frequently made to its vocabulary which defy any explanation at the hands of onomatopœia—not only, as in the cases above alluded to, where they are left to themselves, but even in cases where they are in the closest contact with language as spoken by their elders. I could quote many instances of this fact; but it will be enough to refer to one already given on page 144 (foot-note). When, however, these spontaneous efforts are not controlled by constant association with elders, but fostered by children of about the same age being left much together, the remarkable consequence previously alluded to arises—namely, a newly devised language which depends but in small part upon the principle of onomatopœia, and is therefore wholly unintelligible to all but its inventors.[216]
I have now briefly stated all the main facts and considerations which appear to me worth stating, both for and against the theory of onomatopœia. And, having done this, I wish in conclusion to make it clear that the matter is not one which seriously affects the theory of evolution. To the philologist, no doubt, the question as to how far the element of onomatopœia entered into the formation of aboriginal speech is a really important question, so that, as Geiger says, “Diess ist die gemeinsame Frage, und die antwort wird auf der einen Seite von einem inneren Zusammenhang zwischen je einem Laut und dem entsprechenden Begriffe, auf der andern aus Willkür und Uebereinkunft hergeleitet.”[217] But the question is one which the evolutionist may view with indifference. Whether words were all originally dependent on an inherent connection between every sound they made and the idea thereby expressed, or whether they were all due to arbitrary invention, in either case the evolutionist may see that they can equally well have come into existence as the natural products of a natural psychogenesis. And, a fortiori, as an evolutionist, he need not greatly concern himself with any further question as to the relative degrees in which imitation and invention may have entered into the composition of primitive speech.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY.
We are now in a position to consider certain matters which are of high importance in relation to the subject of the present work. In earlier chapters I have had occasion to show that the whole stress of the psychological distinction between man and brute must be laid—and, in point of fact, has been laid by all competent writers who are against me—on the distinctively human faculty of judgment. Moreover, I have shown that, by universal consent, this faculty is identical with that of predication. Any mind that is able, in the strict psychological signification of the term, to judge, is also able to predicate, and vice versâ. I claim, indeed, to have conclusively shown that certain writers have been curiously mistaken in their analysis of predication. These mistakes on their part, however, do not relieve me of the burden of explaining the rise of predication; and I have sought to discharge the burden by showing how the faculty must have been given in germ so soon as the denotative stage of sign-making passed into the connotative, and thus furnished the condition to bringing into contact, or apposition, the names of objects and the names of qualities or actions. The discussion of this important matter, however, has so far proceeded on grounds of psychological analysis alone. The point has now arrived when we may turn upon the subject the independent light of philological analysis. Whereas we have hitherto considered, on grounds of mental science only, what must have been the genesis of predication—supposing predication to have had a genesis,—we have next to ascertain whether our deduction admits of corroboration by any inductive evidence supplied by the science of language, as to what this genesis actually was.
And here I had better say at once that the results of philological science will be found to carry us back to an even more primitive state of matters than any which I have hitherto contemplated. For, so long as I was restricted to psychological analysis, I was obliged to follow my opponents where they take language as it now exists. In order to argue with them at all upon these grounds, it was necessary for me to consider what they had said on the philosophy of predication; and, in order to do this, it was further necessary that I should postpone for independent treatment those results of philological inquiry which they have everywhere ignored. But now we have come to the place where we can afford to abandon psychological analysis altogether, and take our stand upon the still surer ground of what I have already termed the palæontological record of mental evolution as this has actually been preserved in the stratified deposits of language. Now, when we do this, we shall find that hitherto we have not gone so far back in tracing the genesis of conceptual out of receptual ideation as in point of fact we are able to go on grounds of the most satisfactory evidence.
Up to this time, then, I have been meeting my opponents on their own assumptions, and one of these assumptions has been that language must always have existed as we now know it—at least to the extent of comprising words which admit of being built up into propositions to express the semiotic intention of the speaker. But this assumption is well known by philologists to be false. As a matter of fact, language did not begin with any of our later-day distinctions between nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and the rest: it began as the undifferentiated protoplasm of speech, out of which all these “parts of speech” had afterwards to be developed by a prolonged course of gradual evolution.” Die Sprache ist nicht stückweis order atomistisch; sie ist gleich in allen ihren Theilen als Ganzes und demnach organisch entstanden.”[218]
This highly general and most important fact is usually stated as it was, I believe, first stated by the anthropologist Waitz, namely, that “the unit of language is not the word, but the sentence;”[219] and, therefore, that historically the sentence preceded the word. Or, otherwise and less ambiguously expressed, every word was originally itself a proposition, in the sense that of and by itself it conveyed a statement. Of course the more that a single word thus assumed the functions now discharged by several words when built into a proposition, the more generalized—that is to say, the less defined—must have been its meaning. The sentence or proposition as we now have it represents what may be termed a psychological division of labour as devolving upon its component parts: subject-words, attributive-words, qualifying-words indicative of time, place, agent, instrument, and so forth, are now all so many different organs of language, which are set apart for the performance of as many different functions of language. The life of language under this its fully evolved form is, therefore, much more complex, and capable of much more refined operations, than it was while still in the wholly undifferentiated condition which we have now to contemplate.