Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

We are now in a position to consider the exact psychological relation of sentence-words to denotative and receptually connotative words. It will be remembered that I have everywhere spoken of sentence-words as representing an even more primitive order of ideation than denotative words, and, a fortiori, than receptually connotative words. On the other hand, in earlier parts of this treatise I showed that both the last-mentioned kinds of words occur in children when they first begin to speak, and may even be traced so low down in the psychological scale as the talking birds. This apparent ambiguity, therefore, now requires to be cleared up. Can anything, it may be reasonably asked, in the shape of spoken language be more primitive than the very first words which are spoken by a child, or even by a parrot? But, if not, how can I agree with those philologists who conclude that there is an even still more primitive stage of conceptual evolution to be recognized in sentence-words?

Briefly, my answer to these questions is that in the young child and the talking bird denotative-words, connotative-words, and sentence-words are all equally primitive; or, if there is any priority to be assigned, that it must be assigned to the first-named. But the reason of this, I hold to be, is, that the child and the bird are both living in an already-developed medium of spoken language, and, therefore, as recently stated, have only to learn their denotative names by special association, while primitive man had himself to fashion his names out of the previously inarticulate materials of his own psychology. Now this, as we have also seen, he only could do by such associations of sounds and gestures as in the first instance must have conveyed meanings of a pre-conceptually predicative kind. In the absence of any sounds already given—and therefore already agreed upon—as denotative names, there could be no possibility of primitive man arbitrarily assigning such names; and thus there could have been no parallel to a young child who receptually acquires them. In order that he should assign names, primitive man must first have had occasion to make his pre-conceptual statements about the objects, qualities, &c., the names of which afterwards grew out of these statements, or sentence-words. Adam, indeed, gave names to animals; but Adam was already in possession of conceptual thought, and therefore in a psychological position to appreciate the importance of what he was about. But the “pre-Adamite man” who is now before us could not possibly have invented names for their own sakes, unless he were already capable of thinking about names as names, and, therefore, already in possession of that very conceptual thought which, as we have now so often seen, depends upon names for its origin. Even with all our own fully developed powers of conceptual thought, we cannot name an object when in the society of men with whose language we are totally unacquainted, without predicating something about that object by means of gestures or other signs. Therefore, without further discussion, it must be obvious—not only, as already shown, that there is here no exact parallel between ontogenesis and phylogenesis, and that we have thus a full explanation why sentence-words were of so much more importance to the infant man than they are to the infant child, but further and consequently—that the question whether sentence-words are more primitive than denotative words is not a question that is properly stated, unless it be also stated whether the question applies to the individual or to the race. As regards the individual of to-day, it cannot be said that there is any priority, historical or psychological, of sentence-words over denotative words, or even over receptually connotative words of a low order of extension. Nay, we have seen that the leading principles of grammatical form admit of being acquired by the child together with his acquisition of words of all kinds, and that even talking birds are able to distinguish between names as severally names of objects, qualities, states, or actions.

Thus we find that to almost any order of intelligence which is already surrounded by the medium of spoken language, the understanding—and, in the presence of any power of imitative utterance, the acquisition—of denotative names as signs or marks of corresponding objects, qualities, &c., is, if anything, a more primitive act than that of using a sentence-word; but that in the absence of such an already-existing medium, sentence-words are more primitive than denotative names. Nevertheless, it is of importance to note how low an order of receptual ideation is capable of learning a denotative name by special association, because this fact proves that as soon as mankind advanced to the stage where they first began to coin their sentence-words, they must already have been far above the psychological level required for the acquisition of denotative words, if only such words had previously been in existence. Consequently, we can well understand how such words would soon have begun to come into existence through the habitual employment of sentence-words in relation to particular objects, qualities, states, actions, &c.; by such special associations, sentence-words would readily degenerate into merely semiotic marks. How long or how short a time this genesis of relatively “empty words” out of the primordially “full words” may have occupied, it is now impossible to say; but the important thing for us to notice is, that during the whole of this time—whatever it may have been—the mind of primitive man was already far above the psychological level which is required for the apprehension of a denotative name.[264]

So much, then, for the first class of considerations which has been opened up by throwing upon the results of our psychological analysis the independent light of philological research. I will now pass on to a second class, which is even of more importance.

From the fact that sentence-words played so all-important a part in the origin of speech, and that in order to do so they essentially depended on the co-operation of gestures with which they were accompanied, so that in the resulting “complex of sound and gesture the sound had no meaning apart from the gesture;” from these now well-established facts, we may gain some additional light on a question previously considered—namely, the extent to which primitive words were “abstract” or “concrete,” “particular” or “general,” and, therefore, “receptual” or “conceptual.” According to Professor Max Müller, “the science of language has proved by irrefragable evidence that human thought, in the true sense of that word—that is, human language—did not proceed from the concrete to the abstract, but from the abstract to the concrete. Roots, the elements out of which all language has been constructed, are abstract, never concrete; and it is by predicating these abstract concepts of this or that, by localizing them here or there, in fact by applying the category of οὐϚία or substance, to the roots, that the first foundation of our language and our thought were laid.”[265]

Here, to begin with, there is an inherent contradiction. When it is said that the roots in question already presented abstract concepts, it becomes a contradiction to add that “the first foundations of language and thought were laid by applying the category of substance to the roots.” For, if these roots already presented abstract concepts, they already presented the distinctive feature of human “thought,” whose “foundations,” therefore, must have been “laid” somewhere further back in the history of mankind. But, besides this inherent contradiction, we have here an emphatic re-statement of the two radical errors which I previously mentioned, and which everywhere mar the philosophical value of Professor Max Müller’s work. The first is his tacit assumption that the roots of Aryan speech represent the original elements of articulate language. The second is that, upon the basis of this assumption, the science of language has proved, by irrefragable evidence, that human thought proceeded from the abstract to the concrete—or, in other words, that it sprang into being Minerva-like, already equipped with the divine inheritance of conceptual wisdom. Now, in entertaining this theory, Professor Max Müller is not only in direct conflict with all his philological brethren, but likewise, as we have previously seen, often compelled to be irreconcilably inconsistent with himself.[266] Moreover, as we have likewise seen, his assumption as to the aboriginal nature of Aryan roots, on which his transcendental doctrine rests, is intrinsically absurd, and thus does not really require the united voice of professed philologists for its condemnation. Therefore, what the science of language does prove “by irrefragable evidence” is, not that these roots of the Aryan branch of language are the aboriginal elements of human speech, or indices of the aboriginal condition of human ideation; but that, being the survivals of incalculably more primitive and immeasurably more remote phases of word-formation, they come before us as the already-matured products of conceptual thought—and, a fortiori, that on the basis of these roots alone the science of language has absolutely no evidence at all to furnish as touching the matter which Professor Max Müller here alludes to in such positive terms. In this connection there can be no possible escape from the tersely expressed conclusion previously quoted from Geiger, and unanimously entertained as an axiom by philologists in general:—“These roots are not the primitive roots: we have perhaps in no one single instance the first aboriginal articulate sound—just as little, of course, the aboriginal signification.”[267]

But the point which I now wish to bring forward is this. We have previously seen the source of these unfortunate utterances in Professor Max Müller’s philology appears to reside in certain prepossessions which he exhibits in the domain of psychology. For he adopts the assumption that there can be no order of words which do not, by the mere fact of their existence, imply concepts: he does not sufficiently recognize that there may be a power of bestowing names as signs, without the power of thinking these signs as names. Consequently, the distinction which, on grounds of comparative psychology, appears to me so obvious and so necessary—i.e. between names as merely denotative marks due to pre-conceptual association, and denominative judgments due to conceptual thought—has escaped his sufficient notice. Consequently, also, he has failed to distinguish between ideas as “general” and what I have called “generic;” or between an idea that is general because it is born of an intentional synthesis of the results of a previous analysis, and an idea that is generalized[268] because not yet differentiated by any intentional analysis, and therefore representing simply an absence of conceptual thought. My child on first beginning to speak had a generalized idea of similarity between all kinds of brightly shining objects, and therefore called them all by the one denotative name of “star.” The astronomer has a general idea answering to his denominative name of “star;” but this has been arrived at after a prolonged course of mental evolution, wherein conceptual analysis has been engaged in conceptual classification in many and various directions: it therefore represents the psychological antithesis of the generalized idea, which was due to the merely sensuous associations of pre-conceptual thought. Ideas, then, as general and as generic severally occupy the very antipodes of Mind.

All this we have previously seen. My object in here recurring to the matter is to show that much additional light may be thrown upon it by the philological doctrine of “sentence-words,” which Professor Max Müller, in common with other philologists, fully accepts.

Of all the writers on primitive modes of speech as represented by existing savages, no one is entitled to speak with so much authority as Bleek. Now, as a result of his prolonged and first-hand study of the subject, he is strongly of opinion that aboriginal words were expressive “not at all of an abstract or general character, but exclusively concrete or individual.” By this he means that primitive ideas were what I have called generic. For he says that had a word been formed from imitation of the sound of a cuckoo, for instance, it could not possibly have had its meaning limited to the name of that bird; but would have been extended so as to embrace “the whole situation so far as it came within the consciousness of the speaker.” That is to say, it would have become a generic name for the whole recept of bird, cry, flying, &c., &c., just as to our own children the word Ba=sheep, bleating, grazing, &c. Now, this process of comprising under one denotative term the hitherto undifferentiated perceptions of “a whole situation so far as it comes within the consciousness of the speaker,” is the very opposite of the process whereby a denominative term is brought to unify, by an act of “generalization,” the previously well-differentiated concepts between which some analogy is afterwards discovered. Therefore the absence of any parts of speech in primitive language is due to a generic order of ideation, whereas the unions of parts of speech in any languages which present them is due to the generalizing order of ideation. Or, as Bleek puts it while speaking of the comparatively undifferentiated condition of South African languages, “this differs entirely from the principle which prevails in modern English, where a word, without undergoing any change of form, may nevertheless belong to different parts of speech. For in English the parts of speech, though not always differing in sound, are always accurately distinguished in concept; while in the other case there was as yet no consciousness of any difference, inasmuch as neither form nor position had hitherto called attention to anything of the kind. For forms had not yet made their appearance, and determinate position [i.e. significance expressed by syntax], as, for example, in Chinese, could only arise in a language of highly advanced internal formation.”[269]