Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

Now, if all this has been the case, it is obvious that aboriginal words can have referred only to matters of purely receptual significance—i.e. “to those physical acts and qualities which are directly apprehensible by the senses.” Accordingly, we find in all the earliest root-words, which the science of philology has unearthed, unquestionable and unquestioned evidence of “fundamental metaphor,” or of a conceptual extension of terms which were previously of no more than receptual significance. Indeed, as Professor Whitney says, “so pervading is it, that we never regard ourselves as having read the history of any intellectual or moral term till we have traced it back to its physical origin.” Without repeating all that I have so recently said upon this matter, it will be enough once more to insist on the general conclusions to which it led—namely, psychological analysis has already shown us the psychological priority of the recept; and now philological research most strikingly corroborates this analysis by actually finding the recept in the body of every concept.

Lastly, I took a brief survey of the languages now spoken by many widely separated races of savages, in order to show the extreme deficiency of conceptual ideation that is thus represented. In the result, we saw that what Archdeacon Farrar calls “the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction” is so surprising, that the most ardent evolutionist could not well have desired a more significant intermediary between the pre-conceptual intelligence of Homo alalus, and the conceptual thought of Homo sapiens.

Having thus concluded the Philology of our subject, I proceeded, in the last chapter, to consider the probable steps of the transition from receptual to conceptual ideation in the race.

First I dealt with a view which has been put forward on this matter by certain German philologists, to the effect that speech originated in wholly meaningless sounds, which in the first instance were due to merely physiological conditions. By repeated association with the circumstances under which they were uttered, these articulate sounds are supposed to have acquired, as it were automatically, a semiotic value. The answer to this hypothesis, however, evidently is, that it ignores the whole problem which stands to be solved—namely, the genesis of those powers of ideation which first put a soul of meaning into the previously insignificant sounds. That is to say, it begs the whole question which stands for solution, and, therefore, furnishes no explanation whatsoever of the difference which has arisen between man and brute. Nevertheless, the principles set forth in this the largest possible extension of the so-called interjectional theory, are, I believe, sound enough in themselves: it is only the premiss from which in this instance they start that is untrue. This premiss is that aboriginal man presented no rudiments of the sign-making faculty, and, therefore, that this faculty itself required to be created de novo by accidental associations of sounds with things. But we have seen, as a matter of fact, that this must have been very far from having been the case; and, therefore, while recognizing such elements of truth as the “purely physiological” hypothesis in question presents, I rejected it as in itself not even approaching a full explanation of the origin of speech.

Next I dealt with the hypothesis that was briefly sketched by Mr. Darwin. Premising, as Geiger points out, that the presumably superior sense of sight, by fastening attention upon the movements of the mouth in vocal sign-making, must have given our simian ancestry an advantage over other species of quadrumana in the matter of associating sounds with receptual ideas; we next endeavoured to imagine an anthropoid ape, social in habits, sagacious in mind, and accustomed to use its voice extensively as an organ of sign-making, after the manner of social quadrumana in general. Such an animal might well have distanced all others in the matter of making signs, and even proceeded far enough to use sounds in association with gestures, as “sentence-words”—i.e. as indicative of such highly generalized recepts as the presence of danger, &c.,—even if it did not go the length of making denotative sounds, after the manner of talking-birds. Moreover, as Mr. Darwin has pointed out, there is a strong probability that this simian ancestor of mankind was accustomed to use its voice in musical cadences, “as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day;” and this habit might have laid the basis for that semiotic interruption of vocal sounds in which consists the essence of articulation.

My own theory of the matter, however, is slightly different to this. For, while accepting all that goes to constitute the substance of Mr. Darwin’s suggestion, I think it is almost certain that the faculty of articulate sign-making was a product of much later evolution, so that the creature who first presented this faculty must have already been more human than “ape-like.” This Homo alalus stands before the mind’s eye as an almost brutal object, indeed; yet still, erect in attitude, shaping flints to serve as tools and weapons, living in tribes or societies, and able in no small degree to communicate the logic of his recepts by means of gesture-signs, facial expressions, and vocal tones. From such an origin, the subsequent evolution of sign-making faculty in the direction of articulate sounds would be an even more easy matter to imagine than it was under the previous hypothesis. Having traced the probable course of this evolution, as inferred by the aid of sundry analogies; and having dwelt upon the remarkable significance in this connection of the inarticulate sounds which still survive as so-called “clicks” in the lowly-formed languages of Africa; I went on to detail sundry considerations which seemed to render probable the prolonged existence of the imaginary being in question—traced the presumable phases of his subsequent evolution, and met the objection which might be raised on the score of Homo alalus being Homo postulatus.

In conclusion, however, I pointed out that whatever might be the truth as touching the time when the faculty of articulation arose, the course of mental evolution, after it did arise, must have been the same. Without again repeating the sketch which I gave of what this course must have been, it will be enough to say, in the most general terms, that I believe it began with sentence-words in association with gesture-signs; that these acted and reacted on one another to the higher elaboration of both; that denotative names, for the most part of onomatopoetic origin, rapidly underwent connotative extensions; that from being often and necessarily used in apposition, nascent predications arose; that these gave origin, in later times, to the grammatical distinctions between adjectives and genitive cases on the one hand, and predicative words on the other; that likewise gesture-signs were largely concerned in the origin of other grammatical forms, especially of pronominal elements, many of which afterwards went to constitute the material out of which the forms of declension and conjugation were developed; but that although pronouns were thus among the earliest words which were differentiated by mankind as separate parts of speech, it was not until late in the day that any pronouns were used especially indicative of the first person. The significance of this latter fact was shown to be highly important. We have already seen that the whole distinction between man and brute resides in the presence or absence of conceptual thought, which, in turn, is but an expression of the presence or absence of self-consciousness. Consequently, the whole of this treatise has been concerned with the question whether we have here to do with a distinction of kind or of degree—of origin or of development. In the case of the individual, there can be no doubt that it is a distinction of degree, or development; and I had previously shown that in this case the phase of development in question is marked by a change of phraseology—a discarding of objective terms for the adoption of subjective when the speaker has occasion to speak of self. And now I showed that in the fact here before us we have a precisely analogous proof: in exactly the same way as psychology marks for us “the transition in the individual,” philology marks for us “the transition in the race.”

In the foregoing résumé of the present instalment of my work I have aimed only at giving an outline sketch of the main features. And even these main features have been so much abbreviated that it is questionable whether more harm than good will not have been done to my argument by so imperfect a summary of it. Nevertheless, as a general result, I think that two things must now have been rendered apparent to every impartial mind. First, that the opponents of evolution have conspicuously failed to discharge their onus probandi, or to justify the allegation that the human mind constitutes a great and unique exception to the otherwise uniform law of evolution. Second, that not only is this allegation highly improbable a priori, and incapable of proof a posteriori, but that all the evidence that can possibly be held to bear upon the subject makes directly on the side of its disproof. The only semblance of an argument to be adduced in its favour rests upon the distinction between ideation as conceptual and non-conceptual. That such a distinction exists I freely admit; but that it is a distinction of kind I emphatically deny. For I have shown that the comparatively few writers who still continue to regard it as such, found their arguments on a psychological analysis which is of a demonstrably imperfect character; that no one of them has ever paid any attention at all to the actual process of psychogenesis as this occurs in a growing child; and that, with the exception of Professor Max Müller, the same has to be said with regard to their attitude towards the “witness of philology.” Touching the psychogenesis of a child, I have shown that there is unquestionable demonstration of a gradual and uninterrupted passage from the one order of ideation to the other; that so long as the child’s intelligence is moving only in the non-conceptual sphere, it is not distinguishable in any one feature of psychological import from the intelligence of the higher mammalia; that when it begins to assume the attributes of conceptual ideation, the process depends on the development of true self-consciousness out of the materials supplied by that form of pre-existing or receptual self-consciousness which the infant shares with the lower animals; that the condition to this advance in mental evolution is given by a perceptibly progressive development of those powers of denotative and connotative utterance which are found as far down in the psychological scale as the talking birds; that in the growing intelligence of a child we have thus as complete a history of “ontogeny,” in its relation to “phylogeny,” as that upon which the embryologist is accustomed to rely when he reads the morphological history of a species in the epitome which is furnished by the development of an individual; and, therefore, that those are without excuse who, elsewhere adopting the principles of evolution, have gratuitously ignored the direct evidence of psychological transmutation which is thus furnished by the life-history of every individual human being.