Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

A single illustration may serve to convey the force of this argument more fully than any abstract discussion of it. But I will introduce the illustration with an analogous case. The following well-established fact I quote from Geiger:—

“Man had language before he had tools.... On considering a word denoting an activity carried on with a tool, we shall invariably find that this was not its original meaning, but that it previously implied a similar activity requiring only the natural organs.... This fact of the activity with implements deriving its name from one more simple, ancient, and brute-like, is quite universal, and I do not know how otherwise to account for it but that the name is older than the activity with tools which it denotes at the present time—that, in fact, the word was already extant before men used any other organs but the native and natural ones.... The vestiges of his earliest conceptions still preserved in language proclaim it loudly and distinctly that man has developed from a state in which he had solely to rely on the aid of his organs—a state, therefore, in which he differed little in his habits from the brute creation, and with respect to the enjoyment of his existence, nay, to his preservation, depended almost entirely on whatever lucky chance presented to him.”[279]

Now, to this special illustration on the general principle of “fundamental metaphor” it will doubtless be said—Very interesting in itself; but, after all, it merely amounts to a philological proof that tools are younger than words; that men did not always possess tools; that tools were gradually invented; and that, when invented, they were named by a metaphorical application of words previously in use.—Well, if we are all agreed so far, I will proceed to adduce my illustration.

Judging from the now extensive literature which is opposed to evolutionary teaching in the case of man, I gather that the great majority of writers are quite as much impressed by the moral and religious aspects of human psychology as they are by the intellectual. Now, as already stated in the Preface, I reserve for a future volume a full consideration of these distinctively human faculties. In the present part of my work I am concerned exclusively with the question as to the origin of those powers of conceptual thought which, under any point of view, must be regarded as the necessary and antecedent condition to the possibility both of conscience and religion. Nevertheless, merely for the sake of supplying an illustration touching the point now before us, I may here forestall a little of what I shall hereafter have to present in detail touching the evidence that we have of the genesis of conscience. And this I will do by another quotation from the same philologist, seeing that he is an authority whom none of my opponents can afford to ignore.

“If we examine the words, those oldest pre-historic testimonies, we shall find that all moral notions contain something morally indifferent.” That is to say, they all contain what I have termed a “receptual core,” expressive of some simple physical process, or condition, the name of which has been afterwards transferred, by “fundamental metaphor,” to the moral “concept.” Omitting the illustrations, the passage continues as follows:—“But why have not the morally good and bad their own names in language? Why do we know them from something else that previously had its appellation? Evidently because language dates from a period when a moral judgment, a knowledge of good and evil, had not yet dawned in the human mind.”[280]

Now, at present I am not concerned with this conclusion, further than to remark that I do not see how it is to be obviated, if our previous agreement is to stand with regard to the precisely analogous case of the names of tools. That is to say, if any one allows that the philological evidence is sufficient to prove the priority of words to the tools which they designate, consistency must constrain him also to allow that the fundamental concepts of morality are of later origin than the names by which they have been baptized, and in virtue of which they must be regarded as having become concepts at all. These names—just like the names of tools—were all originally of nothing more than pre-conceptual significance, serving to denote such obvious physical states or activities as were immediately cognizable by the powers of sensuous perception and direct association. Then, as the moral sense began to dawn, and the utilitarian significance of conduct as ethical began to be appreciated, the principles of “fundamental metaphor” were applied to the naming of these newly found concepts—presumably at about the same time as these same principles were applied to the naming of newly found tools.

Now, this is only one illustration out of a practically infinite number of others which it would be easy to quote—seeing, indeed, as Whitney observes, that “we can hardly write a line without giving illustrations of this kind of linguistic growth.” And whatever may be thought (at this premature stage of our inquiry) concerning the application of the general principle before us to the special case of conscience, it appears to me there can be no question at all that this general principle of “fundamental metaphor” reveals the fact of an intellectual growth from what I have called the pre-conceptual to the conceptual phase; and, moreover, that it proves such a growth to have been the universal characteristic of human faculty in those pre-historic times of which language preserves to us the only record.[281]

There still remains one other department of philological inquiry to be considered, and its consideration will tend yet further and most forcibly to corroborate all the general conclusions already attained. Hitherto we have been engaged for the most part on what I have already called the palæontology of human thought as revealed, fossil-like, in the linguistic petrifactions of pre-historic man. But the science of comparative philology is not confined in its researches upon early forms of speech to the bygone remnants of a distant age. On the contrary, just like the science of comparative anatomy, it is furnished with still existing materials for study, which are of the nature of living organisms, and which present so many grades of evolution that the lowest members of the series bring us within easy distance of those aboriginal forms which can only be studied in the fossil state. Hitherto I have considered these lowest existing languages only with reference to their forms of predication. Here I desire to consider them with reference to the quality of ideation that they betoken.

In the next instalment of my work I shall have to treat of the psychology of savages, and then it will become apparent that there is no very precise relation to be constantly traced between grades of mental evolution in general, and of language-development in particular. Nevertheless there is a general relation: and therefore it is among the lowest savages that we meet with the lowest types of language-structure.[282] In the present connection I shall have to treat of these languages only in so far as they throw light upon the quality of ideation with which they are concerned, or so far as they are related to the general principles with which we have already been occupied. And, even as thus limited, I will endeavour to make my exposition as brief as possible.

I will begin by supplying a few quotations from the more competent authorities who have written upon the subject from a linguistic point of view.