The Origin of Thought and Speech

by M. Moncalm

Whilst the Theorists take the predicate of God, when applied even to a fetish, as requiring no explanation, the Historical School sees in it the result of a long continued evolution of thought. It was evident that the human soul was so constituted that it must tend naturally and inevitably towards the Unknown; it was also necessary that man should learn that he possessed a soul.

We recognise that we have one; but are we equally clear as to what it is?

We answer perhaps: “Yes, it is that part of us which is not the body which perishes—the soul is immortal.” It is well to be able to make such a reply, since it is true; our catechisms have sown the seed of which this is the result.

But since all human knowledge, whether abstract or practical, has the same beginning, through the senses, and that neither eye, ear, nor hand has to do with the soul, what can we know of it? Above all, what can we learn of its existence after death, the time when immortality has passed beyond the sphere of the experience of the senses? As man we recognise the spirit inhabiting the body, but with no form, such as it might receive after death; we can hardly clothe these ideas in words.

This belief in a soul, exactly like the belief in gods, and at last in One God, can only be understood as the outcome of constantly renewed observations and long meditations; the annals of language furnish material for this study, those ancient words, which, meaning originally something quite tangible and visible, came in time to mean that which is invisible and infinite.

The last breath of a dying person gave the first conception of the presence in man of a non-corporeal principle; it was recognised that this perceptible breath, at the moment of death, was an accident and transient. Language marks clearly the difference between the act of breathing or breath, and that which breathed, the invisible agent of this act—the living soul, the spirit. This agent received different names, in the different languages; the Greeks named it Psyche, saying that it was the breath which, at the hour of death, passed out through the bars of the teeth; amongst the Hindoos it was called Atman, and Anima amongst the Latins, two words which originally were understood by those using them as meaning something breathing. Cicero spoke of Anima, but he refrained from defining it, and frankly avowed that he did not know whether to call it breath or fire.

The word breath has been used figuratively to express the Power governing the world.[111] A poet in the Veda when speaking of the Supreme Being says, “It breathed without air.”

Although the word breath was most frequently used to denote the principle of life, another expression was employed at a much earlier period; in countries the most remote from each other, the words, the shadow of the dead, were used, in order to express the idea of something intangible yet closely related to the body. The influence of language on thought is so real and so much more powerful than the testimony of our senses, that those who named the soul a shadow, came at last to believe that corpses threw no shadow because it had left them.

It was then considered that the soul was not a homogeneous whole, but composed of parts of which some are ephemeral, destined to disappear with the body; these parts form what the Greek and Latin writers call the Ego, and the Hindoos Aham, what in French would be termed the moi—three words for one thing—an object of contingency, since it depends on circumstances—on the body, on age, and on sex.

All men have endeavoured to solve the riddle of human life; but the Hindoos, who especially excelled in researches dealing with the formation of words, that is to say, with the birth or development of ideas, whilst penetrating deeply into the mysteries of their soul, their Atman, arrived at an abstraction of this Atman, entirely freed from all earthly or physical particles, and this “vehicle of an abstraction” they considered to be incapable of perishing, since it had no connection with breath, it was the pure self, “freed from the fetters and conditions of the human Ego,” hidden in the Aham; not contingent on circumstances—the self-existent One.