“It requires but the feeblest power of abstraction—a power even possessed by idiots—to use a name as the sign of a conception, e.g. to say ‘sun’;[283]—to say ‘sheen,’ as the description of a phenomenon common to all shining objects, is a higher effort, and to say ‘to shine’ as expressive of the state or act is higher still. Now, familiar as such efforts may be to us, there is ample proof that they could not have been so to the inventors of language, because they are not so, even now, to some nations of mankind after all their long millenniums of existence. Instances of this fact have been repeatedly adduced.”[284] Thus, for example, the Society Islanders have separate words for dog’s-tail, bird’s-tail, sheep’s-tail, &c., but no word for tail itself—i.e. tail in general.[285] The Mohicans have words to signify different kinds of cutting, but no verb “to cut;” and forms for “I love him,” “I love you,” &c., but no verb “to love;” while the Choctanis have names for different species of oak, but no word for the genus oak.[286] Again, the Australians have no word for tree, or even for bird, fish, &c.;[287] and the Eskimo, although he has verbs which signify to fish-seal, to fish-whale, &c., has not any verb “to fish.” “Ces langues,” Du Ponceau remarks, “généralisent rarement;” and he shows that they have not even any verb to imply “I will,” or “I wish,” although they have separate verbal forms for “I wish to eat meat,” “I wish to eat soup;” neither have they any general noun-substantive which means “a blow,” although they have a variety which severally mean blows with as many different kinds of instruments.[288] Similarly, Mr. Crawford tells us, “the Malay is very deficient in abstract words; and the usual train of ideas of the people who speak it does not lead them to make a frequent use even of the few they possess. With this poverty of the abstract is united a redundancy of the concrete,”—and he gives many instances of the same kind as those above rendered from other languages.[289] So, likewise, we are told, “the dialect of the Zulus is rich in nouns denoting different objects of the same genus, according to some variety of colour, or deficiency of members, or some other peculiarity,” such as “white-cow,” “red-cow,” “brown-cow;”[290] and the Sechuâna has no fewer than ten words all meaning “horned cattle.”[291] Cheroki presents thirteen different verbs to signify different kinds of washing, without any to indicate “washing” itself;[292] and Milligan says that the aborigines of Tasmania had “no words representing abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree, wattle-tree, &c., they had a name, but they had no equivalent for the expression of ‘a tree;’ neither could they express abstract qualities, such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round.”[293]
Lastly, to give only one other example, Dr. Latham states that a Kurd of the Zaza tribe, who furnished Dr. Sandwith with a list of native words, was not “able to conceive a hand or father, except so far as they were related to himself, or something else; and so essentially concrete rather than abstract were his notions, that he combined the pronoun with the substantive whenever he had a part of the human body or a degree of consanguinity to name,” saying sere-min, “my head,” and pie-min, “my father.”
Thus, as Professor Sayce remarks, after alluding to some of the above facts, “we may be sure that it was not “the ‘ideas of prime importance’ which primitive man struggled to represent, but those individual objects of which his senses were cognisant.”[294] And, without further multiplying testimony, we may now be prepared to accept from him the general statement that, “all over the world, indeed, wherever we come across a savage race, or an individual who has been unaffected by the civilization around him, we find this primitive inability to separate the particular from the universal by isolating the individual word, and extracting it, as it were, from the ideas habitually associated with it.”[295] Or, in my own phraseology, among all primitive races still existing, we meet with what must seem to my opponents a wholly unintelligible incapacity to evolve a concept from any number of recepts, notwithstanding that the latter may all be most nearly related together, and severally named by as many denotative signs: even with their numberless already-formed words for different kinds of trees, the aborigines of Tasmania could not designate “a tree.” Of course they must have had a recept of a tree, or a generic image formed out of innumerable perceptions of particular trees—so that, for instance, it would doubtless have surprised a Tasmanian could he have seen a tree (even though it were a new species for which he had no name) standing inverted with its roots in the air and its branches in the ground. In just the same way a dog is surprised when it first sees a man walking on his hands: the dog will bark at such an object because it conflicts with the generic image which has been automatically formed by numberless perceptions of individual men walking on their feet. But, in the absence of any name for trees in general, there is nothing to show that the savage has a concept answering to “tree,” any more than that the dog has a concept answering to “man.” Indeed, unless my opponents vacate the basis of Nominalism on which their opposition is founded, they must acknowledge that in the absence of any name for tree there can be no conception of tree.
So much, then, for what Archdeacon Farrar has called “the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction” in savages. Their various languages unite, in verbal testimony, to assure us that human thought does not “proceed from the abstract to the concrete;” but, on the contrary, that in the race, as in the individual, receptual ideation is the precursor of conceptual—denotation the antecedent of denomination, as in still earlier stages it was itself preceded by gesticulation. Such being the case with regard to names, it is no wonder, as we previously found, that low savages are so extraordinarily deficient in their forms of predication.
The palæontology of human thought, then, as recorded in language, incontestibly proves that the origin and progress of ideation in the race was psychologically identical with what we now observe in the individual. All the stages of ideation which we have seen to be characteristic of psychogenesis in a child, are thus revealed to us as having been characteristic of psychogenesis in mankind.
First there was the indicative stage. This is proved in two ways. On the one hand, all philologists will now agree with Geiger—“But, what says more than anything, language diminishes the further we look back, in such a way that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no existence at all.”[296] On the other hand, even if we tap the tree of language as high up in its stem as the pronominal roots of Sanskrit, what is the kind of ideational sap which flows therefrom? It is, as we have already seen, so strongly suggestive of gesture and grimace that even Professor Max Müller allows that in it we have “remnants of the earliest and almost pantomimic phase of language, in which language was hardly as yet what we mean by language, namely logos, a gathering, but only a pointing.”[297]
Secondly, we have clear evidence of sentence-words, as well as of what I have called the denotative phase, or the naming of simple recepts—whether only of actions, or, as we may safely assume, likewise also of objects and qualities; and whether arbitrarily, or, as seems virtually certain, in chief part by onomatopœia. Both these subordinate points, however—which are rendered more doubtful on account of the struggle for existence among words having proved favourable to denotative terms expressive of actions, and unfavourable to the survival of onomatopœia—are of comparatively little moment to us; the important fact is the one which is most clearly testified to by the philological record, namely, that the lowest strata of this record yield fossils of the lowest order of development: the “121 concepts,” appear to be, for the most part, denotations of simple recepts.
Thirdly, higher up in the stratified deposits, we meet with overwhelming evidence of the connotative extension of these denotative terms. Indeed, many of these terms have probably undergone a certain amount of connotative extension as the condition to their having survived as roots; and, therefore, in these lowest deposits it is difficult to be sure that an apparently denotative term is not really a term which has undergone the earlier stages of connotative extension. If such were the case, we can understand the loss of any onomatopoetic significance which it may originally have presented. But, however this may be, there is an endless mass of evidence to prove the subsequent and continuous growth of connotative extension throughout the whole range of philological time.
Lastly, as regards the predicative phase, we have seen that philology shows the same order and method to have been followed in the race as in the child. In the growing child, as we have seen, pre-conceptual predication is contemporary with—or occupies the same psychological level as—the connotative extension of denotative terms. Indeed, the very act of connotation is in itself an act of predication—if in the conceptual sphere, of conceptual predication (denomination); if in the pre-conceptual, of pre-conceptual. Again, in the psychogenesis of the child we noted how important a part is played in the development of pre-conceptual predication by the mere apposition of connotative terms—such apposition being rendered inevitable by the laws of association. If A is the connotative name for A, B the connotative name for B, when the young child sees that A and B occur together, the statement A B is rendered inevitable by “the logic of events;” and this statement is a pre-conceptual proposition. Now, in both these respects philology yields abundant parallels. The quotations which I have given conclusively prove that “every word must originally have been a sentence;” or, in my own terminology, a pre-conceptual proposition of precisely the same kind as that which is employed by a young child. If it be replied that the young child is without self-consciousness, while the primitive man was not without self-consciousness, this would merely be to beg the whole question on which we are engaged, and, moreover, to beg it in the teeth of every antecedent probability, as well as of every actual analogy, to which appeal can possibly be made. If it be true—and who will venture to doubt it?—that “language diminishes the further we look back, in such a way that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no existence at all,” will it be maintained that the man-like being who was then unable to communicate with his fellows by means of any words at all was gifted with self-consciousness? Should so absurd a statement be ventured, it would be fatal to the argument of my adversaries; for the statement would imply, either that concepts may exist without names, or that self-consciousness may exist without concepts. The truth of the matter is that philology has proved, in a singularly complete manner, the origin and gradual development in time, first of pre-conceptual communication, and next of the self-consciousness which supplied the basis of conceptual predication. No wonder, therefore, as Professor Max Müller somewhat naively observes, “it may be said that the first step in the formation of names and concepts is very imperfect. So it is.” Truly “to name the act of carrying by a root formed from sounds which accompany the act of carrying a heavy load, is a far more primitive act than to fix an attribute by a name” conceptually applied. So primitive, indeed, is nomination of this kind, that I defy any one to show wherein it differs psychologically from what I have called the denotation of a young child, or even of a talking bird.
And, having reduced the matter to this issue so far as the results of philology are concerned, I may fitly conclude by briefly indicating the principal point which appears to divide my opinions from those of the eminent philologist just alluded to—if not also from those of the majority of my psychological opponents. Briefly, the point is that on the other side an unwarrantable assumption is made—to wit, that conceptual thought is an antecedent condition, sine quâ non, to any and every act of bestowing a name; and, a fortiori, to any and every act of predication. This is the fundamental assumption, which, whether openly expressed or covertly implied, serves as the basis of the whole superstructure of my opponents’ argument. Now, I claim to have shown, by a complete inductive proof, that this assumption is not only unwarrantable in theory, but false in fact. There are names and names. Not every name that is bestowed betokens conceptual thought on the part of the namer. Alike from the case of the talking bird, of the young child, and of early man (so far as he has left any traces of his psychology in the structure of language), I have demonstrated that prior to the stage of denomination there are the stages of indication, denotation, and receptual connotation. These are the psychological stepping-stones across that “Rubicon of Mind,” which, owing to their neglect, has seemed to be impassable. The Concept (and, a fortiori, the Proposition) is not a structure of ideation which is presented to us without a developmental history. Although it has been uniformly assumed by all my opponents “that the simplest element of thought” can have had no such history, the assumption is, as I have said, directly contradicted by observable fact. Had the case been otherwise—had the concept really been without father and without mother, without beginning of days or end of life—then truly a case might have been shown for regarding it as an entity sui generis, destitute of kith or kin among all the other faculties of mind. But, as we have now so fully seen, no such unique exception to the otherwise uniform process of evolution can here be maintained: the phases of development which have gradually led up to conceptual thought admit of being as clearly traced as those which have led to any other product, whether of life or of mind.