Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

Passing on from classification to phylogeny, we had to consider the question of genetic relationship between the three main orders, inter se, and also between the Polysynthetic type and the Agglutinating. The conflict of authoritative opinion upon this question was shown to have no bearing upon the subject-matter of this treatise, further than to emphasize the doctrine of the polyphylectic origin of language—the probability appearing to be that, regarded as types, both the isolating and the polysynthetic are equally archaic, or, at all events, that they have been of equally independent growth. In this connection I adduced the hypothesis of Dr. Hale, to the effect that the many apparently independent tongues which are spoken by different native tribes of the New World, may have been in large part due to the inventions of accidentally isolated children. The curious correlation between multiplicity of independent tongues and districts favourable to the life of unprotected children—in Africa as well as in America—seemed to support this hypothesis; while good evidence was given to show that children, if left much alone, do invent for themselves languages which have little or no resemblance to that of their parents.

Without recapitulating all that was said upon the phases and causes of linguistic evolution in its various lines of descent, it will be enough to remind the reader that in every case the result of philological inquiry is here the same—namely, to find that languages become simpler in their structure the further they are traced backwards, until we arrive at their so-called “roots.” These are sometimes represented as the mysterious first principles of language, or even as the aboriginal data whose origin is inexplicable. As a matter of fact, however, these roots are nothing more than the ultimate results of philological analysis: in no other sense than this can they be supposed “primary.” Seeing, then, that these roots represent the materials of language up to the place where the evolution of language no longer admits of being clearly traced, it is evident that their antecedents, whatever they may have been, necessarily lie beyond the reach of philological demonstration, as distinguished from philological inference. This, of course, is what an evolutionist knows antecedently must be the case somewhere in the course of any inquiry touching the process of evolution, wherever he may have occasion to trace it. For the further he is able to trace it, the nearer must he be coming to the place where the very material which he is investigating has taken its origin; and as it is this material itself which furnishes the evidences of evolution, when it has been traced back to its own origin, the inquiry reaches a vanishing point. Adopting the customary illustration of a tree, we might say that when a philologist has traced the development of the leaves from the twigs, the twigs from the branches, the branches from the stems, and the stems from the roots, he has given to the evolutionist all the evidence of evolution which in this particular line of inquiry is antecedently possible. The germ of ideation out of which the roots developed must obviously lie beyond the reach of the philologist as such; and if any light is to be thrown upon the nature of this germ, or if any evidence is to be yielded of the phases whereby the germ gave origin to the roots, this must be done by some other lines of inquiry finding similar germs giving rise to similar products elsewhere. In the present instance, the only place where we can look for such parallel processes of evolution is in the case of the growing child, which I have already considered.

Here, then, we are in the presence of exactly the same distinction with regard to the origin of Language, as we were at the beginning of this treatise with regard to the origin of Man. For we there saw that, while we have the most cogent historical proof of the principles of evolution having governed the progress of civilization, we have no such direct proof of the descent of man from a brutal ancestry. And here likewise we find that, so long as the light of philology is able to guide us, there can be no doubt that the principles of evolution have determined the gradual development of languages, in a manner strictly analogous to that in which they have determined the ever-increasing refinement and complexity of social organizations. Now, in the latter case we saw that such direct evidence of evolution from lower to higher levels of culture renders it well-nigh certain that the method must have extended backwards beyond the historical period; and hence that such direct evidence of evolution uniformly pervading the historical period in itself furnishes a strong primâ facie presumption that this period was itself reached by means of a similarly gradual development of human faculty. And thus, also, it is in the case of language. If philology is able to prove the fact of evolution in all known languages as far back as the primitive roots out of which they have severally grown, the presumption becomes exceedingly strong that these earliest and simplest elements, like their later and more complex products, were the result of a natural growth. Or, in the words already quoted from Geiger, we cannot forbear concluding that language must once have had no existence at all. Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish between demonstrated fact and speculative inference, however strong; and, therefore, I began by stating the stages of evolution through which languages are now known to have passed from the root-stage upwards. Having done this, I proceeded to consider the question touching the origin of these roots themselves.

First, as to their number, we found that the outside estimate, in the younger days of philological research, gave one thousand as a fair average of the roots which go to feed any living language; but that this estimate might now be safely reduced by three-fourths. Indeed, in his latest work, Professor Max Müller professes to have reduced the roots of Sanskrit to as low a number as 121, and thinks that even this is excessive. Regarding the character of roots, we saw that some philologists look upon them as the actual words which were used by the pre-historic speakers, who, therefore, “talked with one another in single syllables, indicative of ideas of prime importance, but wanting all designation of their relations.”[335] On the other hand, it is now the generally accepted belief, that “roots are the phonetic and significant types discovered by the analysis of the comparative philologist as common to a group of allied words,”[336]—or, as it were, composite phonograms of families of words long since extinct as individuals. We saw, however, that this difference of opinion among philologists does not affect the present inquiry, seeing that even the phonetic-type theory does not question that the unknown words out of the composition of which a root is now extracted must have been genetically allied with one another, and exhibited the closeness of their kinship by a close similarity of their sounds.

A much more important question for us is the character of these roots with respect to their significance. In this connection we found that they indicate what Professor Max Müller calls “general ideas,” or “concepts;” bear testimony to an already and, comparatively speaking, advanced stage of social culture; are all expressive either of actions or states; and betray no signs of imitative origin. Taking each of these characters separately, we found that although all the 121 roots of Sanskrit are expressive of general ideas, the order of generality is so low as for the most part to belong to that which I had previously called “lower concepts,” or “named recepts.” Next, that they all bear intrinsic testimony to their own comparatively recent origin, and, therefore, are “primitive” only in the sense of representing the last result of philological analysis: they certainly are very far from primitive in the sense of being aboriginal. Again, that they are all of the nature of verbs was shown to be easily explicable; and, lastly, the fact that none of them betray any imitative source is not to be wondered at, even on the supposition that onomatopœia entered largely into the composition of aboriginal speech. For, on the one hand, we saw that in the struggle for existence among aboriginal and early words, those only could have stood any chance of survival—i.e. of leaving progeny—which had attained to some degree of connotative extension, or “generality;” and, on the other hand, that in order to do this an onomatopoetic word must first have lost its onomatopoetic significance. A large body of evidence was adduced in support of the onomatopoetic theory, and certain objections which have been advanced against it were, I think, thoroughly controverted. Later on, however, we saw that the question as to the degree in which onomatopœia entered in to the construction of aboriginal speech is really a question of secondary interest to the evolutionist. Whether in the first instance words were all purely arbitrary, all imitative, or some arbitrary and some imitative,—in any case the course of their subsequent evolution would have been the same. By connotative extension in divergent lines, meanings would have been progressively multiplied in those lines through all the progeny of ever-multiplying terms—just in the same way as we find to be the case in “baby-talk,” and as philologists have amply proved to be the case with the growth of languages in general.

That speech from the first should have been concerned with the naming of generic ideas, or higher recepts, as well as with particular objects of sense, is what the evolutionist would antecedently expect. It must be remembered that the kind of classification with which recepts are concerned is that which lies nearest to the automatic groupings of sensuous perception: it depends on an absence of any power analytically to distinguish less perceptible points of difference among more conspicuous points of resemblance—or non-essential analogies among essential analogies with which they happen to be frequently associated in experience. On the other hand, the kind of classification with which concepts are concerned is that which lies furthest from the automatic groupings of sensuous perception: it depends on the power of analytically distinguishing between essentials and non-essentials among resemblances which occur associated together in experience. Classification there doubtless is in both cases; but in the one it is due to the obviousness of analogies, while in the other it is due to the mental dissociation of analogies as apparent and real. Or else, in the one case it is due to constancy of association in experience of the objects, attributes, actions, &c., classified; while in the other case it is due to a conscious disregard of such association.

Now, if we remember these things, we can no longer wonder that the palæontology of speech should prove early roots to have been expressive of “generic,” as distinguished from “general” ideas. The naming of actions and processes so habitual, or so immediately apparent to perception, as those to which the “121 concepts” tabulated by Professor Max Müller refer, does not betoken an order of ideation very much higher than the pre-conceptual, in virtue of which a young child is able to give expression to its higher receptual life, prior to the advent of self-consciousness. In view of these considerations, my only wonder is that the 121 root-words do not present better evidence of conceptual thought. This, however, only shows how comparatively small a part self-conscious reflection need play in the practical life of early man, even when so far removed from the really “primitive” condition of hitherto wordless man as was that of the pastoral people who have left this record of ideation in the roots of Aryan speech.

After having thus explained the absence of words significant of “particular ideas” among the roots of existing language, as well as the generic character of those which the struggle for existence has permitted to come down to us, we went on to consider sundry other corroborations of our previous analysis which are yielded by the science of philology. First we saw that this science has definitely proved two general facts with regard to the growth of predication—namely, that in all the still existing radical languages there is no distinction between noun, adjective, verb, or particle; and that the structure of all other languages shows this to have been the primitive condition of language-structure in general: “every noun and every verb was originally by itself a complete sentence,” consisting of a subject and predicate fused into one—or rather, let us say, not yet differentiated into the two, much less into the three parts which now go to constitute the fully evolved structure of a proposition. Now, this form of predication is “condensed” only because it is undeveloped; it is the undifferentiated protoplasm of predication, wherein the “parts of speech” as yet have no existence. And just as this, the earliest stage of predication, is distinctive of the pre-conceptual stage of ideation in a child, so it is of the pre-conceptual ideation of the race. Abundant evidence was therefore given of the gradual evolution of predicative utterance, pari passu with conceptual thought—evidence which is woven through the whole warp and woof of every language which is now spoken by man. In particular, we saw that pronouns were originally words indicative of space relations, and strongly suggestive of accompanying acts of pointing—“I” being equivalent to “this one,” “He” to “that one,” &c. Moreover, just as the young child begins by speaking of itself in the third person, so “Man regarded himself as an object before he learnt to regard himself as a subject,”[337] as is proved by the fact that “the objective cases of the personal as well as of the other pronouns, are always older than the subjective.”[338] Pronominal elements afterwards became affixed to nouns and verbs, when these began to be differentiated from one another; and thus various applications of a primitive and highly generalized noun or verb were rendered by means of these elements, which, as even Professor Max Müller allows, “must be considered as 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.” Similarly, Professor Sayce remarks of this stage in the evolution of predicative utterance—which, be it observed, is precisely analogous to that occupied by a young child whose highly generalized words require to be assisted by gestures—“It is certain that there was a time in the history of speech when articulate or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive man were made the significant representations of thought by the gestures with which they were accompanied: and this complex of sound and gesture—a complex in which, be it remembered, the sound had no meaning apart from the gesture—was the earliest sentence.” Thus it was that “grammar has grown out of gesture”—different parts of speech, with the subsequent commencements of declension, conjugation, &c., being all so many children of gesticulation: but when in subsequent ages the parent was devoured by this youthful progeny, they continued to pursue an independent growth in more or less divergent lines of linguistic development.