The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

I perceive my friends are uneasy—“Take care,” they say, “an Idée fixe is dangerous.”

But is it quite certain that an Idée fixe is always harmful? Have they never seen a man wandering in a forest without any fixed determination to quit it? Is it credible that our first parents had no fixed idea of discovering the import towards themselves, of the vast world in which they had been placed, knowing nothing of the reason of their position? Equally ignorant of the reason why the sun, the moon, fire, hurricanes, storms, thunder, rivers, mountains existed, always above and around them. The whole of nature itself required to be interrogated. In what way could this settled determination have harmed them? It is true that they are all dead, but determination did not kill them. And their Idée fixe must have been very tenacious and powerful for this thirst for knowledge to have descended with their blood into our own veins; their wish to gain information is reproduced in us; this is the legacy that our fathers have left us, and the singular feature of the legacy is that unlike others, of which the parts are subdivided and diminished, this in its entirety has passed down to each of the milliards and milliards of inheritors.

Must we then feel that we are destined to ask perpetually, and to receive no answer? That need not be. Many things that our ancestors could not fathom are clear to us; what was unknown to them is known to us. That which prevents us from following up this line of progress through these phases is that each reply brings forth anew fresh questions, and thus it will be to the end—if the end should ever arrive. This last question we do not put to ourselves, which is an indication that we are not careful to arrive at the answer. When I compare the present state of our knowledge, and of our condition of mind, to which I have given the epithets of torpor and inertia—and they are rightly given—to that which held sway in the dark ages when the earth rested on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise swam in the void, I must acknowledge that we now see things more truly.

But to start from the point of the sum of our acquired knowledge in this march of progress would be fatal to us; the ground we have won will only retain its solidity in proportion as we keep in sight the path we have trodden, with all its encountered and vanquished obstacles, and that will only be by pursuing the same path again in company with our ancestors.

Here my friends interpose—“That would be a vain task, you cannot picture humanity in its infancy, that is an impossibility.”

Doubtless, and since I am too practical to attempt the impossible, abstaining from every superhuman effort, and submitting my imagination to a strict discipline, I will again consult history, but not history as I know it, nor that history which is written in our days, polished, cautious, honestly critical, that which notes the old traces of humanity when they occur on the route mixed with events, and which treats the eternal truths as though they had no existence, and, truly, they do not belong to its dominion. I would study the other history, which at first was related, not written, because speech came before writing. I should try to collect information from the ancient literatures of the people concerning the manner in which our ancestors depicted divinity to themselves, especially with regard to dealings with mortals at the time when visits between the celestial inhabitants and those on earth were common.... We possess the Old Testament of the Hebrews, the sacred books of the Hindoos, and the mythology of the Aryan family; the mine is rich, so rich that I should have time to die a thousand times before I should have finished the task of searching in this mixed medley of historical remains, fantastic recitals, sublime thoughts, and flagrant falsehoods. Happily this work of digging in the past in quest of an idea is not the work of one man nor of one epoch, but that of many men and many epochs, and it never ceases.

Moreover, a short time ago no one imagined that documents very much more ancient than those I have just named, would have been discovered in hitherto unexplored regions of the physical and mental world. Two enterprising men, Darwin and Max Müller, visited and studied them. Darwin sought to explain what the origin of organic beings might have been, and in what way they passed through a series of evolutions, from one form to another of great dissimilarity. He who speaks of evolution implies researches into the beginnings of things; this was exactly what I needed. All the world knows Darwin’s name, even those who abstain from dealing with scientific problems; he has some ardent admirers who are not careful to define very accurately what it is they admire in him, and some furious adversaries, who, judging mainly by hearsay, have formed a conception of him which is either very superficial or very false.

The development of human reason has been one of the objects of Max Müller’s researches. This great thinker, who is at the same time the first philologist of our time, has sought in the science of Language for the origin of thinking man. Very few amongst the men of the world, who are nothing more than men of the world, know what the name of Max Müller represents, even the existence of a science of Language is unknown to them.

Even if Darwin and Max Müller have not been absolutely the first to strive to go back, the one to the origin of the organic world, the other to the dawn of human speech, no others have yet walked in this darkness so courageously and so perseveringly as these two men.

Not only have the journeys of exploration been much multiplied of late, but a principle of action has been extracted from beneath the scaffolding used in the building up of new theories; which is, “If you have an idea, and you wish to see whither it may lead, take it from its first commencement, and advance confidently.” This is what I am about to do.