Every one of these roots has a general or conceptual meaning, such as striking, pushing, rubbing, cutting, bearing, binding, measuring, building, moving, going, falling, and all the rest.
It often happens, however, that two or more roots have the same or nearly the same meaning, and this explains why, when we count the fundamental concepts expressed by our 800 roots in Sanskrit, we find that they amount to no more than 121.
I say again that in all this we are dealing with well ascertained facts.
The next step, however, leads us into the domain of theory. If we are asked, how these roots came into existence, we may decline to answer the question as outside the limits of science. A chemist would probably do the same, if he were asked how the chemical elements came into existence. In fact, the students of the Science of Language have always taken their stand here and have treated roots as ultimate facts.
I ought to mention, however, two theories which, though they have long been surrendered by students of the Science of Language still enjoy a certain popularity, and commend themselves to many people by their extreme simplicity and plausibility.
The first consists in ascribing the roots of all languages to a direct communication from God. It is impossible to refute such an opinion; all we can say is that such a communication, if we try to realise it in imagination, would imply such a crude anthropomorphism that one naturally shrinks from entering into details.
The second consists in looking upon roots as imitations of the sounds of nature or as interjections. Here all we can say is that the experiment has been tried again and again, and has failed. Every language contains a number of such words which are imitations of the sounds of nature or interjections. No one can doubt of the origin of bow wow, a dog, or of pooh-poohing, in the sense of rejecting. But the great stock of words, however, cannot be accounted for by this easy process, and no serious scholar would think of resuscitating what many years ago I described as the Bow-wow and Pooh-pooh theories.
But while the student of language seems to me to have a perfect right to treat the roots of language as ultimate facts, it is difficult for the philosopher not to look beyond. He cannot hope to do more than to suggest an hypothesis, but if his hypothesis accounts for the few facts he has to deal with, such an hypothesis is legitimate, though, no doubt, it is very far from being an established truth.
The hypothesis which I suggested on the origin of roots, was suggested to me by Professor Noiré's hypothesis as to the origin of concepts. My late friend, Professor Noiré, was one of those who discovered difficulties where no one else saw them. While most philosophers were satisfied with the fact that man possessed the power of forming, not only percepts, but concepts also, while no trace of conceptual thought was found in animals, Noiré subjected this power of forming concepts to a most minute psychological analysis, and thus was brought face to face with the question, what was, from a psychogenetic point of view, the real impulse to the formation of conceptual thought. Questions like this, which to most people, seem perfectly superfluous, often mark the real progress in the history of philosophy. Logicians see no difficulty in explaining how, either by addition or subtraction, positively or negatively, concepts are formed out of percepts. White, they say, is either what snow, milk, and marble share in common, or what remains if we drop from snow, milk, and marble all but their color. The psychologist who looks upon the human mind as the result of an evolution, whether in the individual or in the race, asks, not how, but why such concepts should have been formed. Now Professor Noiré showed, as I thought, with great sagacity, that the first inevitable concepts arose from man's consciousness of his own repeated acts; that nowhere in nature could we find a similar primitive and irresistible impulse to conceptual thought, but that if the beginning had once been made, there was no longer any difficulty in accounting for the further development of conceptual thought in all directions.
I call this no more than an hypothesis, or, if you like, a guess, and I do not see how in the regions in which we find ourselves, we can expect anything more than an hypothesis. But when one hypothesis, like that of Noiré's, harmonises with another hypothesis, that was formed quite independently, we cannot help seeing that the two lend each other powerful mutual support.