But how then happens it, if man did not make it, and God did not give it him, that human speech is universal? With the organism of man the Creator implants the organs of speech. With the elemental and progressional life of man the Creator implants the germ of speech. In common with the element of progress and civilization, innate from the beginning, speech has developed by slow degrees through thousands of cycles and by various stages, marching steadily forward with the forward march of the intellect. Comparative philology, in common with all other sciences, accords to man a remote antiquity. Bunsen estimates that at least twenty thousand years are required for a language to pass from one rudimentary stage to another.
The mind receives impressions and the soul intuitions, and to throw them off in some form is an absolute necessity. Painful impressions tend to produce bodily contortions and dolorous sounds; pleasant impressions to illumine the features and to make musical the voice. And not only is this compressed emotion destined to find expression, but to impress itself upon others. Emotion is essentially sympathetic. Why certain objects are represented by certain sounds we can never know. Some think that between every word and the object or idea which it represents, there was in the first instance an intimate relationship. By degrees certain natural articulations became associated with certain ideas; then new names were suggested by some fancied analogy to objects already named. Everything else being equal, similar conditions and causations produce similar impressions and are expressed by similar sounds. Hence a certain uniformity between all human tongues; and a tendency in man to imitate the sounds in nature, the cries of animals, the melodies of winds and waters, accounts for the origin of many words.
From giving expression in some outward form to our inward emotion there is no escape. Let us now apply to the expression of feeling and emotion the same law of evolution which governs all social and intellectual phenomena, and from a language of exclamations, we have first the monosyllabic noun and verb, then auxilliaries—adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and pronouns—and finally inflections of parts of speech by which the finer shades of meaning may be expressed.
The spontaneous outbursts of feeling, or the metaphorical expressions of emotion, arising instinctively and acting almost simultaneously with the conception or impression made upon the mind, develop with time into settled forms of speech. Man speaks as birds fly or fishes swim. The Creator supplies the organs and implants the instinct. Speech, though intuitive, is more than intuition; for, as we have seen, speech is a social rather than an individual attribute. Darwin perceives in language not only a spontaneous generation, but a natural selection of grammatical forms; the best words, the clearest and shortest expressions, continually displacing the weaker. So words are made to fit occasions, and dropped as soon as better ones can be found.
Languages are not inherited, yet language is an inheritance. Language is not artificially invented, yet languages are but conventional agreements. Languages are not a concrete perfected gift of the Creator, yet the germ of language is ineradicably implanted in man, and was there implanted by none but man's Creator. This then is Language: it is an acquisition, but an acquisition from necessity; it is a gift, but, when given, an undeveloped germ; it is an artifice, in so far as it is developed by the application of individual agencies.
MYTHOLOGY.
Here, for a while, we will leave Language and turn to Mythology, the mythos 'fable' and logos 'speech' of the Grecians.
Under analysis mythology is open to broad yet significant interpretations. As made up of legendary accounts of places and personages, it is history; as relating to the genesis of the gods, the nature and adventures of divinities, it is religion; placed in the category of science, it is the science of fable; of philosophy, the philosophy of intuitive beliefs. A mass of fragmentary truth and fiction not open to rationalistic criticism; a system of tradition, genealogical and political, confounding the subjective with the objective; a partition wall of allegories, built of dead facts cemented with wild fancies—it looms ever between the immeasurable and the measurable past.
Thick black clouds, portentous of evil, hang threateningly over the savage during his entire life. Genii murmur in the flowing river, in the rustling branches are felt the breathings of the gods, goblins dance in vapory twilight, and demons howl in the darkness.
In the myths of wild, untutored man, is displayed that inherent desire to account for the origin of things, which, even at the present time, commands the profoundest attention of philosophy; and, as we look back upon the absurd conceptions of our savage ancestry with feelings akin to pity and disgust, so may the speculations of our own times appear to those who shall come after us. Those weird tales which to us are puerility or poetry, according as we please to regard them, were to their believers history, science, and religion. Yet this effort, which continues from the beginning to the end, is not valueless; in it is embodied the soul of human progress. Without mythology, the only door at once to the ideal and inner life of primitive peoples and to their heroic and historic past would be forever closed to us. Nothing so reflects their heart-secrets, exposes to our view their springs of action, shadows forth the sources of their hopes and fears, exhibits the models after which they moulded their lives.