Similarly Professor Whitney writes of some supposed "pithecoid"[117] men:
There is no difficulty in supposing them to have possessed forms of speech, more rudimentary and imperfect than ours.[118]
And so again Professor Romanes:[119]
Let us try to imagine a community considerably more intelligent than the existing anthropoid apes, although still considerably below the intellectual level of existing savages. It is certain that in such a community natural signs of voice, gesture, and grimace would be in vogue to a greater or less extent. As their numbers increased ... such signs would require to become more and more conventional, or acquire more and more the character of sentence-words.
Of course, as Mr. Mivart replies,[120] there is no difficulty in supposing anything we choose, or in seeing animals in imagination performing feats[{80}] which never yet have they been known to achieve in fact. But no amount of such suppositions or imaginations will furnish Science with the scantiest apology for a foothold, nor can the germs of language attributed to pithecoid communities or the sagest of their patriarchs, be considered as of any greater value than the speeches put into the mouths of the animals by Æsop or "Uncle Remus."
It is also to be noticed that in these accounts of the origin of language, the essential element of reason is always quietly smuggled in as a matter of course. Thus Mr. Darwin's wisest of the pithecoids was able to "think of" a device for the information of his fellows. There is not the smallest doubt that any creature which had got so far as that would find what he wanted. It is but the old case of the man who was sure he could have written Hamlet had he had a mind to do so. Like him, the ape might have made the invention, if he had a mind to make it;—only he had not got the mind. So too, Professor Romanes' missing links use tones and signs which acquire "more and more" the character of true speech: which could not be unless they contained some measure of that character already. But it is just the first step thus ignored which spans the gulf between man and brute.
There is another factor upon which, in conjunction with these suppositions, great stress is wont to be laid, namely that of time; it being apparently taken for granted that if only time enough be given anything whatever may come about. Thus Professor[{81}] Romanes tells us[121] that his imaginary Homo alalus, or speechless man, must probably have lived for an "inconceivably long time," before getting far enough on the road towards speech to give him such an advantage as enabled him to crush out his less accomplished congeners; and that even after this point was reached, another "inconceivable lapse of time" must have been required to turn him into Homo sapiens, or man as he actually is. Immense intervals, he further tells us, must have been consumed in the passage through various grades of mental evolution; "The epoch during which sentence-words prevailed was probably immense"; "It was not until æons of ages had elapsed that any pronouns arose."
Meanwhile, there is no scrap of evidence that as a matter of fact any thing of all this ever happened at all, and as Bunsen has observed no millions of years, even were millions available at discretion, could ever supply the want of the faculty without which nothing in the way of language could ever be accomplished.
(c) Free-will.—Here is another human faculty which Du Bois-Reymond declares never to have been accounted for by natural causation, and he greatly doubts whether it should not be classed among the problems that must be for ever insoluble.
Professor Haeckel, as we have seen, gets rid of all difficulties on this score by laying it down that "the freedom of the will is not an object for critical[{82}] scientific inquiry at all, for it is a pure dogma, based on an illusion, and has no real existence."