Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

For instance, we have abundant evidence to prove that, even after articulate language had gained a firm footing, there was no distinction between the nominative and genitive cases of substantives, nor between these and adjectives, nor even between any words as subject-words and predicate-words. All these three grammatical relations required to be expressed in the same way, namely, by a mere apposition of the generalized terms themselves. In course of time, however, these three grammatical differentiations were effected by conventional changes of position between the words apposed, in some cases the form of predication being A B, and that of attribution or possession B A, while in other branches of language-growth the reverse order has obtained. Eventually, however, “these primitive contrivances for distinguishing between the predicate, the attribute, and the genitive, when the three ideas had in course of ages been evolved by the mind of the speaker, gradually gave way to the later and more refined machinery of suffixes, auxiliaries, and the like.”[339]

And so it is with all the other so-called “parts of speech,” in those languages which, in having passed beyond the primitive stage, have developed parts of speech at all. “These are the very broadest outlines of the process by which conceptual roots were predicated, by which they came under the sway of the categories—became substantives, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, or by whatever other names the results thus obtained may be described. The minute details of this process, and the marvellous results obtained by it, can be studied in the grammar of every language or family of languages.”[340] Thus, philology is able to trace back, stage by stage, the form of predication as it occurs in the most highly developed, or inflective language, to that earliest stage of language in general, which I have called the indicative.

Many other authorities having been quoted in support of these general statements, and also for the purpose of tracing the evolution of predicative utterance in more detail, I proceeded to give illustrations of different phases of its development in the still existing languages of savages; and thus proved that they, no less than primitive man, are unable to “supply the blank form of a judgment,” or to furnish what my opponents regard as the criterion of human faculty. Therefore, the only policy which can possibly remain for these opponents to take up, is that of abandoning their Aristotelian position: no longer to take their stand upon the grounds of purely formal predication as this happens to have been developed in the Indo-European branch of language; but altogether upon those of material predication, or, as I may say, upon the meaning or substance of a judgment, as distinguished from its grammar or accidents.

In other words, it may possibly still be argued that, although the issue is now thrown back from the “blank form” of predication on which my opponents have hitherto relied, to the hard fact of predication itself, this hard fact still remains. Even though I have shown that in the absence of any parts of speech predication requires to be conducted in a most inefficient manner; still, it may be said, predication is conducted, and must be conducted—for assuredly it is only in order to conduct it that speech can ever have existed at all.

Now, I showed that if my opponents do not adopt this change of position, their argument is at an end. For I proved that, after all the foregoing evidence, there is no longer any possibility of question touching the continuity of growth between the predicative germ in a sentence-word, and the fully evolved structure of a formal proposition. But, on the other hand, I next showed that this change of position, even if it were made, could be of no avail. For, if the term “predication” be thus extended to a “sentence-word,” it thereby becomes deprived of that distinctive meaning upon which alone the whole argument of my adversaries is reared: it is conceded that no distinction obtains between speaking and pointing: the predicative phase of language has been identified with the indicative: man and brute are acknowledged to be “brothers.” That is to say, if it be maintained that the indicative signs of the infant child or the primitive man are predicative, no shadow of a reason can be assigned for withholding this designation from the indicative signs of the lower animals. On the other hand, if this term be denied to both, its application to the case of spoken language in its fully evolved form must be understood to signify but a difference of phase or degree, seeing that the one order of sign-making has been now so completely proved to be but the genetic and improved descendant of the other. In short, the truth obviously is that we have a proved continuity of development between all stages of the sign-making faculty; and, therefore, that any attempt to draw between one and another of them a distinction of kind has been shown to be impossible.

The conclusions thus reached at the close of Chapter XIV. with regard to the philology of predication were greatly strengthened by additional facts which were immediately adduced in the next Chapter with regard to the philology of conception. Here the object was to throw the independent light of philology upon a point which had already been considered as a matter of psychology, namely, the passage of receptual denotation into conceptual denomination. This is a point which had previously been considered only with reference to the individual: it had now to be considered with reference to the race.

First it was shown that, owing to the young child being surrounded by an already constructed grammar of predicative forms, the earlier phases in the evolution of speech are greatly foreshortened in the ontogeny of mankind, as compared with what the study of language shows them to have been in the phylogeny. Gesture-signs are rapidly starved out when a child of to-day first begins to speak, and so to learn the use of grammatical forms. But early man was under the necessity of elaborating his grammar out of his gesture-signs—and this at the same time as he was also coining his sentence-words. Therefore, while the acquisition of names and forms of speech by infantile man must have depended in chief part upon gestures and grimace, this acquisition by the infantile child is actively inimical to both.

Next we saw that the philological doctrine of “sentence-words” threw considerable additional light on my psychological distinction between ideas as general and generic. For a sentence-word is the expression of an idea hitherto generalized, that is to say undifferentiated. Such an idea, as we now know, stands at the antipodes of thought from one which is due to what is called a generalization—that is to say, a conceptual synthesis of the results of a previous analysis. And the doctrine of sentence-words recognizes an immense historical interval (corresponding with the immense psychological interval) between the generic and the general orders of ideation.

Again, we saw that in all essential particulars the semiotic construction of this the most primitive mode of articulate communication which has been preserved in the archæology of spoken language, bears a precise resemblance to that which occurs in the natural language of gesture. As we saw, “gesture-language has no grammar properly so called;” and we traced in considerable detail the analogies—so singularly numerous and exact—between the forms of sentences as now revealed in gesture and as they first emerged in the early days of speech. In other words, the earliest record that speech is able to yield as to the nature of its own origin, clearly reveals to us this origin as emerging from the yet more primitive language of tone and gesture. For this is the only available explanation of their close family resemblance in the matter of syntax.

Furthermore, we have seen that in gesture language, as in the forms of primitive speech now preserved in roots, the purposes of predication are largely furthered by the mere apposition of denotative terms. A generalized term of this kind (which as yet is neither noun, adjective, nor verb), when brought into apposition with another of the same kind, serves to convey an idea of relationship between them, or to state something of the one by means of the other. Yet apposition of this kind need betoken no truly conceptual thought. As we have already seen, the laws of merely sensuous association are sufficient to insure that when the objects, qualities, or events, which the terms severally denote, happen to occur together in Nature, they must be thus brought into corresponding apposition by the mind: it is the logic of events which inevitably guides such pre-conceptual utterance into a statement of the truth that is perceived: the truth is received into the mind, not conceived by it. And it is obvious how repeated statements of truth thus delivered in receptual ideation, lead onwards to conceptual ideation, or to statements of truth as true.