We see that our ancestors were no savages, but agricultural nomads, that they laboured, made roads, possessed the art of weaving and sewing; they built towns, kept domestic animals, lived under a kingly government, and counted at least up to one hundred. We learn this not only from the words father, mother, son, daughter, heaven, earth, but also from house, town, king, dog, cow, hatchet, and many others, which are found to be the same in the German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit. They are the same because they all point to some more ancient language, the mother-tongue in use before the separation of the various Aryan tribes. From this period the other words also date, expressing all the degrees of relationship, even those by alliance, thus giving clear proof of the early organisation of family life.
At the same time a decimal system of numeration also existed, the numbers from one to a hundred, “in itself one of the most marvellous achievements of the human mind, produced from an abstract conception of quantity, regulated by a spirit of philosophical classification, and yet conceived, matured and finished before the soil of Europe was trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton. Such a system could only have been formed by a very small community, in which by the help of a tacit agreement, each number could only bear one signification. If we were suddenly obliged to invent new names for one, two and three we should quickly feel the great difficulty of the task; to supply new names for material objects would be comparatively easy, as these have different attributes which could be used in their designation; we could call the sea, the salt water; and the rain, the water of heaven; numbers are, however, such abstract conceptions that it would be foolish to attempt to find in them palpable attributes, and thus give expression to a merely quantitative idea.”[27]
Since the names of the Aryan numbers up to one hundred are the same, it proves that they date from a time when our ancestors lived under circumscribed conditions united by common ties. This is not so with the word thousand; the names for thousand differ in German and Slavonic, because they have their rise after the dispersion of the race. Sanscrit and Zend share the name for thousand, which proves the union of the ancestors of the Brahmans and Zoroastrians—after their exodus—by the ties of a common language.
In this way the facts of language—which are so simple that a child could seize them—enable us to travel from the known to the unknown, and prove our descent from the once small family of the Aryas.
Man in the abstract has been studied for long years. Max Müller contemplates this abstraction in the Aryan man; this has not previously been attempted. Certainly we Aryans of to-day differ greatly from our first parents, but not in toto; the ties which connect us have not been severed, and he it is—our Aryan ancestor—who will help us to understand how we are verily the children of our fathers.
CHAPTER III
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
It is possible to distinguish in ourselves four things: sensation, perception, conception, and the signs by means of which we designate objects, that is their names; these enable us to separate the one from the other. We must not imagine that these four exist as separate entities, “no words are possible without concepts, no concepts without percepts, no percepts without sensations.”[28]—Science of Thought, p. 2.
These four constituent elements of thought are merely four different phases in the growth of what we call our mind.
I employ these terms because they are in use in philosophical language; there are also many others constantly on the lips of philosophers, some of them newly coined. This is greatly to be regretted, as much of our confusion of thought arises from this superabundance of philosophical terms. If such words as impression, sensation, perception, intuition, presentation, conception, soul, reason, and many others could for a time be banished from our philosophical dictionaries, and some only readmitted after they had undergone a thorough purification and were made to return to their primitive signification, an immense service would have been rendered to mental science; as every writer defines them as he will, or uses them without definition; and he seems to imagine that because there are so many words, there must also be so many variations, “Because in the German language there are two words: verstand and vernunft, both originally expressing the same thing, the greatest efforts have been made to show that there is something to be called verstand, totally different from what is called vernunft; and as there is a vernunft by the side of a verstand in German, English philosophers have been most anxious to introduce the same distinction between understanding and reason into English”;[29] and “because we have a name for impression, and another for sensations, we are led to imagine that impressions do actually exist by the side of sensations. But what was originally meant by impression was not something beside sensation, but rather one side of sensation, namely, the passive side, which may be spoken of by itself, but which in every real sensation is inseparable from its active side.”[30]
All the various shades and developments of sensation were doubtless distinguished and named for some very useful purpose; but the inconvenience was great when the terms became too numerous. “We may safely enjoy the wealth of language accumulated by a long line of thinkers, if only we take care not to accept a coin for more or less than it is really worth. We must weigh our words as the ancients often weighed their coins, and not be deceived by their current value.”[31] When we have bravely resolved to throw away superfluous words, we need not imagine that we are the poorer, since we have only lost what we, in reality, never possessed. So powerful, however, is the action of words on thoughts, that as soon as we throw away a word, we feel ourselves to have been robbed of the thing itself; the sun rises just the same, though we say now that it does not rise. Those things which we call mind, intellect, reason, memory, in fact the soul, have no existence as such—that is apart from ourselves. This assertion may sound very terrible to those philosophers who imagine that the dignity of man consists in the possession of these and other powers; at last there arises a complete mythology, a philosophic polytheism, when these are spoken of as distinct possessions, independent powers, with limits not very sharply defined; and however orthodox that polytheism has become, it is never too late to protest against it. In making use of these terms it should be understood that they represent certain modes of action and phases of the Ego.