CHAPTER VIIIBETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING
The habit which I have contracted of living in the society of our ancestors of prehistoric times, would, it might be thought, naturally cause me to notice the dissimilarities between us and them rather than the likenesses; this often happens, but not always. Our fathers, for instance, did not know the thousandth part of our vocabulary, which is very copious; this would seem to indicate that our knowledge has considerably increased in the course of thirty or forty centuries. Words of deep import are familiar to us; who amongst us does not know and use such as these—Law, Necessity, Liberty, Spirit, Matter, Conscience, Belief, Nature, Providence, Revelation, Inspiration, the Soul, Religion, Infinite, Immortality, and many others, which are either of recent origin, or have become new because their meaning has changed? Here the difference between our fathers and ourselves springs into sight.
But the points of resemblance are still more striking.
Long before our present era, certain philosophers asserted that their world was full of gods, we may say with equal truth that God fills our world; His name is in every mouth, and our little children know it well. Moreover the complete identity between certain mental acts of our fathers and our own is easily recognised. Our fathers were satisfied not to enquire concerning the nature of their gods, they knew their names, and that sufficed. We too have become accustomed to hear God’s name repeated frequently, without always questioning ourselves as to itsmeaning, and in what way He has made the earth His habitation.
To talk of what we do not grasp must be essentially human, since we find the practice in two social conditions, separated from each other by thousands of years.
It is incredible to what a point we of the nineteenth century carry our lack of enquiry. If one day we were to count on our fingers the number of interesting subjects we had allowed to pass by us without any interrogations concerning them, fifty hands would not suffice us for the tale; our ignorance would then become apparent. Should we feel humiliated? In all probability no, for before arriving at this much to be desired consummation, we should have been carried away by many thoughts in no way bearing on the subject, and the one thought which would come prominently to the front and hinder us from passing our conduct in review would be, “I see no necessity to apply myself to them.” In fact, nothing is easier and nothing so reposeful to our mind as acquiescence in the popular opinion, which we allow to guide us in our estimation of words and phrases; as so frequently happens with ourselves (by “ourselves” I mean that very considerable portion of society which separates the working classes from the savants and philosophers).
“All things are full of the gods,” was said by the heathen in former days; and in fact divinities abounded; this was not surprising. “God has chosen to Himself a people and spread His name over the whole earth, and to make His will to be known,” as we say now. Thus we know that God is, and that His commandments must be kept.
To consider words as ideas is not wise. Why do we not imitate the savages who when they hear an organ for the first time have a great desire to open it in order to see what is inside; and we who are civilised play with much light-hearted readiness on the gigantic instrument of language without seeking to know the value of the soundswe draw from it; and the names of beings and objects which should exercise the most powerful influence to which moral things can be subjected, are treated as mere sounds.
Have we asked ourselves the meaning of the word God? Many must answer no to this question. This is not well, in spite of the fact that those who have asked it in this form have not always succeeded in obtaining an answer; no one has formed a complete conception of God, since neither sense nor reason is equal to the task. Plato, although named “Divine” by the ancient philosophers and by Christian theologians, did not like to speak ofThe Gods, but replacing the plural by the singular used the word “Divine,” but he did not explain what he understood by this word. Plato certainly mentions the Creator of the Universe, the Father of humanity, but—“he does not tell His name, for he knew it not; he does not tell His colour, for he said it not; he does not tell His size, for he touched it not.”[51]Xenophanes, who lived 300 years before Plato, said, “There is one God, the greatest amongst gods and men; neither in form nor in thought like unto mortals.”[52]
The Greek philosophers protested against all attempts to apply a name which should be adequate to the Supreme Being; since all the words chosen failed to grasp His essence, and only designated certain sides and points of view, predicting of Him whatever was most beautiful in nature. For this reason early Christian writers who were Greeks rather than Jews, who had studied in the schools of Plato and Aristotle, spoke of God in the same abstract language, the same negative terms; they said, “We cannot call Him Light, since Light is His creation; we cannot call Him Spirit, since the Spirit is His breath; nor Wisdom, since Wisdom emanates from Him; nor Force, since Force is the manifestation of His Power.”
Thus instead of saying what God is, the philosophers, heathen as well as Christian, prefer to say what He is not. But in that case what idea could man form of a Being whom the wisest amongst them could not represent or describe? Do we understand the nature of this Supreme Being better by using the name so well known of Providence? Again no; since we have introduced several meanings into this word which are inconsistent the one with the other. Amongst them there might well be some that are erroneous, which would thus lead us to rest our hopes on false foundations.
This mist, hiding from us the meaning of words and obscuring our ideas, is partly owing to a fault committed by the ancients themselves.
When our ancestors communed with their divinities, they did not ask themselves what the names they pronounced really meant; in invoking Varuna, Helios, Athene, Prithvi, and the others, they were satisfied, at least for the time being, since names possess a strange calming property; this unquestioning acquiescence has been bequeathed to us. We are neither more enquiring, more exact, nor more pedantic than the greater part of our ancestors; we speak of angels, for instance, without seeking to fathom their nature, much in the same way as we might mention lords and dukes without troubling ourselves to reflect that the one means “bread-giver” and the other “dux,” or one capable of being a leader of men.
In speaking of the soul, the immortality of the soul, and of religion, we use words which have become common property, and it is not necessary to analyse them in order to feel sure that they represent things which are very real; still we do not strive to understand what these things really are. Thus it happens that words whose meaning is unknown to us or escapes us, are generally those of which we make daily use; we keep to the impression received of them in our childhood, oraccepted by current opinion, or with which sentiment invests them, but this is unsatisfactory; we should feel ashamed of not possessing more accurate knowledge than this of geography or arithmetic. On the other hand, there are scientific terms which seem to us so technical that we willingly abandon their use to experts, and yet their meaning can be readily and definitely grasped.
What meaning, for instance, has the wordinfinitefor us, even if taken in its most simple acceptation; thisinfinitetowards which our thoughts travel when we raise our eyes to the skies? Astronomers say to us, “Look at something greater than the greatest possible greatness, that is the infinitely great.” They then quote figures, but these figures of infinite greatness elude our imagination, we repeat them mechanically and only out of respect to the high scientific authority who guarantees the accuracy of the calculations or the value of the appreciation.
A small object, apparently of the size of a homeopathic globule, moves in space, it contains our continents and our oceans, this globule moves in company with other globules of the same nature.
Astronomers speak to us of the millions of miles separating us from the sun, yet this distance dwindles down to nothing as compared with the nearest star, which, we are told, lies twenty millions of millions of miles from our earth. Another stupendous thought is that a ray of light traverses space at the rate of 187,000 miles in a second, and yet it requires three years to reach us.
But this is only a small matter.
More than one thousand millions of such stars have been discovered by our telescopes, and there may be millions of millions of suns within our siderial system which are as yet beyond the reach of our best telescopes; even that siderial system need not be regarded as single within the universe, thousands of millions of similarsystems may be recognised in the galaxy or milky way.[53]
Now let us turn our eyes to the infinitely little. One drop of water taken from the ocean contains atoms so small that a grain of the finest dust would seem colossal by the side of them; chemists are now able to ascertain the relative positions of atoms so minute that millions of them can stand upon a needle’s point.
All this we gather from science when—working together with the telescope—it investigates space; and this may still be little compared to what we might see through glasses, which should magnify objects some millions of times more than our best instruments.
The infinite in space has engaged the attention of many thinkers; I will quote from two only, as this infinite, which they studied from different points of view, yet suggests thoughts somewhat alike. Kepler, the discoverer of the laws on which our planetary system is based, said, “My highest wish is to findwithinthe God whom I have found everywherewithout.” Kant, the philosopher, to whom the Divine in nature and the Divine in man appeared as transcendent and beyond our cognisance, and who refused to listen to any theological argument tending to prove the existence of God, yet says, “Two things fill me with new and ever growing admiration and awe: the starry firmament above me, and the moral law within me; neither of them is hidden in darkness, I see them both before me, and I connect them directly with the consciousness of my own existence.”[54]
These are very abstract thoughts; and it is pertinent to notice that the most solemn religious terms, and the most striking expressions of admiration, and poetical phrases of love, have their source in verbal roots, indicative of acts and conditions palpable to the senses.
But I am approaching too closely to matters of high import. I am drawn by the wordInfinite. Aristotle said truly, “the Infinite attracts.” He was thinking of that other infinite, which is not the one intended by astronomers; but for myself the infinite in nature captivates me so powerfully that I find it difficult to touch earth again. Let us walk in beaten paths; let us endeavour to grasp the meaning of the more simple words learnt mechanically at school, such as those denoting abstraction as well as nouns, and terms both general and particular; and let us see to what phase of thought and speech these grammatical exercises will carry us.
Each palpable object is known to us according as it affects our senses, that is to say, by its properties; all impalpable objects cannot be known otherwise than by their qualities; but nothing exists in nature, whether palpable or impalpable, that has only one property or one quality, each object has several; an object as it exists in reality is concrete, and has a concrete name. If we wished to consider only one of its attributes, we should have to take that apart and isolate it, in order to fix our thoughts exclusively on that; “we must drop that of which the attributes are attributes.”[55]We see white snow, white chalk, white milk, we have the sensation of the white colour; but to take whiteness apart from the snow, the chalk, and the milk, is an operation which requires an instrument, a means, this we possess in a word, viz., the wordwhite. Without that word we should have the sensation of whiteness, but not the idea; it is the wordwhite, whilst separating the white colour from the snow, the chalk, and the milk, that gives us the abstract idea as well as the abstract term whiteness. This mental act is calledabstraction: and it is by this process of abstractionthat we really arrive at the true knowledge of anything, apart from the sensation of it only.
Here is another example of abstraction. Let us suppose that two persons are in one room, and that there are in the room two windows, two doors, two tables and two chairs. Let us try to obliterate in our mind the persons, the windows, the doors, the tables and the chairs; nothing now remains but the abstractiontwo. Nowtwo, as such, apart from objects, does not exist in nature; still it is a conception we can retain in our mind, and this abstract idea can be incorporated in the abstract wordtwo.
These two examples of abstraction tell us but little of what is meant by it; and although they teach us little of the part abstraction plays in our mental life, they are correct from a logical point of view, and clearly demonstrate the impossibility of retaining a thought apart from the word expressing it, since evidently the representation oftwoand ofwhitenesscould not have been made if the words had been lacking.
The faculty of abstraction has no doubt taken time to develop in man, and the absence of abstract words and consequently of abstract ideas was complete in primitive man as it now is in our very young children. The faculties of brutes can by no means attain to abstraction. One reason, amongst others, why we have no ground to think brutes have abstract general ideas is that they do not speak, that they have no use of the words without which it is impossible to carry out the operation which I have just described, and to cause a conception to arise from a sensation.
When, in our early days, our parents gave us instruction on the three divisions of natural history, and explained to us of what they consisted, we did not suspect that a period of immense length had elapsed before man succeeded in thus skilfully classifying the vast mass of names in themanner which struck us as so natural and inevitable. Many thousands of objects were before us, each one entitled to bear an expressive name; and in proportion as our knowledge of things increased was science called upon to furnish new terms; their name became legion and memory failed to retain them. It therefore became a necessity to classify the objects of a common nature under one name; hence the evolution of the terms animal, vegetable and mineral, which relieved us from the burden of enumerating all the objects composing genus and species; then in speaking of them to others we use the generic term, which at the same time presents the image to our own minds. Thus when we wish to denote men having the same nationality as ourselves we employ the collective term compatriot; in the same way the word furniture includes all that serves to furnish our rooms. By the help of this ingenious combination we relieve our memories of a mass of encumbering words, we economise our time and our powers, and simplify the machinery of our thoughts.
This is evidently an advantage. But now a difficulty presents itself. When employing these general terms, such as vegetable, animal, the human race, we are speaking of things of which we are ignorant, and are therefore for us as if they had no existence. We cannot have a complete knowledge of vegetables since that word comprehends all plants and trees on the earth; neither of animals, since “animal” includes not only all beasts lacking reason but also man who is endowed with it. We are equally ignorant of the human race, since it is composed of all human creatures, past, present and to come. It is evident that we only know individual persons and things, such as this fir tree or that oak, this horse, this cow, Paul or James, and we know them because we are in a position to distinguish them by naming them, or indicating them.
How is it that philosophers of the mental calibre possessed by Locke, Hume and Berkeley—whose minds follow so closely the progress of the perception of general ideas—did not question how it was that terms which were applicable to these ideas could equally well be applied to particular things? What was the origin of the wordmanthat it could be as suitable for Paul or James as for many men, in fact the whole human race? This is a fact about which philosophers do not appear to have troubled themselves, and which the science of language alone can explain.
In the time of our primitive ancestors human knowledge was evolved gradually from what was confused and vague, before arriving at what was deemed settled and distinct. Man’s vocabulary was small, substantives were rare; that which we now understand by garden, courtyard, field, habitation, was merged into one and the same conception, and would be expressed by one vocable, of which the modern equivalent is enclosure; the wordserpentdesignated all creatures that crawled, the wordfruitimplied all that could be eaten, the wordmanall who could think; each name was a general term expressive of a general idea.
We may remember that the Sanscrit wordsar, to run, which was at first used for rivers in general, became a particular name; a demonstrative element joined to the verb, changing it intosarit, run here, sufficed at once to turn it into an intelligible phrase, and the name of a particular river. In order to form the wordman-u-s, man, the constructors of language combined the rootman, measurer, thinker, in its secondary formman-u, with the suffixs, which gives the meaning think-here. This was at first not of general application, but as it could be repeated any number of times and referred each time to different persons, who could each be named thinker-here, it became a general term. We thus see that the namemanuswas from the beginning something more than a mere conventional sign applied to a particular person as are all proper names. It was a predicative name, that is applicable to all possessing the same attributes, viz., of being able to think, and capable of the same act, that of thinking.
This discovery was followed by another not less unexpected. When examining the oldest word for name, which in Sanscrit isnâman, in Greekonoma, in Latinnomen, we find that it dates from a time when the Sanscrit, Greek and Latin languages were all one; consequently the Englishnameand the GermanNameare not as we supposed, words invented by the ancient Saxons, but they already existed before the separation of Teutonic idioms from their elder brothers.
After some further steps our contemporary philologists discovered the sources whence proceeded this Sanscritnâman; it is formed of the rootnâ, originallygnâ, to know, joined to a suffix which generally expresses an instrument, a means;nâmanis the representative ofgnâman, which we recognise in the Latincognomen, the consonantgbeing dropped as innatus, son, which was formerlygnatus. This wordnamehad at first a much more extended meaning than that of a simple arbitrary sign applied “to what we call a thing.” The constructors of the word were aware of a fact of which consciousness was afterwards lost, and which the learned ignored during all the supervening centuries—viz., that all names, far from being mere conventional signs used to distinguish one thing from another, were meant to express what it was possible to know of a thing; and that a name thus places us in a position really to be cognisant of a thing. A natural insight taught the early framers of our language a truth only acquired by us after interminable researches, such as Hegel expresses when saying, “We think in words,” and which we find again in this somewhattautological expression “nominibus noscimus” = “tel nom, telle notion.”
The fact that names, which are signs not of things, but of particular concepts, are all derived from general ideas, is one of the most fruitful discoveries of the science of language; since it not only expresses the truth which has been stated below, that language and the capability of forming general ideas separate man from the animals, but also a second truth that these two phenomena are two sides of the same truth. This explains the reason why the science of language rejects equally the interjectional theory and the mimetic, but accepts the final elements of language, those roots which all contain concepts.
The name man, which we all apply to ourselves, is a title of nobility to which none other can compare. It is the direct issue ofman, which in its turn came frommâ, to measure, this gavemâs, moon, to the Sanscrit language. The word man contains in itself the kernel of subtle thought; if we connect the word with the celestial body that helps us to measure our time, we do not therefore necessarily invest the moon with a living and thinking personality; it is sufficient to consider that if our ancestors conceived of it as measuring the nights and days, they had in themselves the capabilities with which they invested the words they created.
We must also notice that the creators of this name having connected it with the loftiest thing of which they could conceive—thought—did not stop there; the sight of what was lowest—the dust—inspired them with another name,homo= earth-born; this Latin word having the same source ashumus= the soil. Our fathers also gave themselves a third name, which wasbrotosin Greek,mortalisin Latin, andmarta—the dying—in Sanscrit; they could hardly have applied the word mortal to themselves if they had not at the same time believed in other beings who did not die.
And this strange fact has come to pass, that on our planet there existed in former days men—simple mortals as they were—who manipulated thought, incorporating it with language, the only domain in which it can exist; then these marvellous men so entirely eclipsed themselves, and passed out of our ken, that their posterity do not recognise them under their modest garb of anonymity; for their work though still living through thousands of centuries, is so unrecognised that men ask themselves, “Why is it not possible to think apart from words?”
Thus we acknowledge the profound wisdom of the conceptions of our ancestors; but their understanding worked unequally, on certain points it was very advanced, but on others behindhand.
In following the march of human intellect in the past, we are struck by the slowness with which thought and speech co-operated. As long as our ancestors had no occasion to speak of the action of covering a surface with a liquid or soft substance, they did not possess the wordvar= to cover; “the name of colour in Sanscrit isvarna, clearly derived from this word; and not till the art of painting, in its most primitive form, was discovered and named, could there have been a name for colour.” For some time they continued to view various objects differently coloured without distinguishing the tints; it is well known that the distinction of colours is of late date; our ancestors gazed on the blue sky, or the green trees, as in a dream, without recognising blue or green, as long as they lacked words to define the two colours, and some time elapsed before they particularised the colours by giving each its proper title.
We speak of the seven colours of the rainbow, because the intermediate tints elude us; the ancients acted much in the same way, Xenophanes speaks of the rainbow as a cloud of purple, red, and yellow; Aristotle also speaks of the tri-coloured rainbow, red, yellow, and green; andDemocritus seems only to have mentioned black, white and yellow.
Does this indicate that our senses have gradually become more acute and accurate? No, no one has asserted that the sensitiveness of the organs of sense was less thousands of years ago than it is now; the sensation has not changed, but “we see in this evolution of consciousness of colour how perception goes hand in hand with the evolution of language, and how, by a very slow process, every definite concept is developed out of an infinitude of indistinct perceptions.”[56]
The names of colours have not been applied arbitrarily, any more than the names given to divinities. Blue, for instance, owes its origin to the visible results of violence, or of an accident; the science of etymology shows us that the Old Norse words, blár, blá, blatt, which now mean blue, meant originally the livid colour of a bruise. Grimm traces these words back to the Gothicbliggvan, to strike; and he quotes as an analogous case the Latincæsius—a bluish grey, fromcædere, to cut. If the assertion that blue and green are rarely mentioned until a late date be correct, it would follow that they had been worked out of an infinity of colours before they took their place definitely as the colour of the sky and the colour of the trees and grass.
As we trace etymology to its source, we see how man’s perception was confused at first. From the Sanscrit rootghar, which has many different meanings, such as to heat, to melt, to drip, to burn, to shine, come not only many words—heat, oven, warmth, and brightness, but also the names of many bright colours, all varying between yellow, green, red, and white. But the most striking example is afforded by the Sanscrit wordak-tu. Here we have the first instance of the uncertainty in the meaning of the names of colours which pervades all languages, and whichcan be terminated at last by scientific definition only. This word has two opposite meanings—a light tinge or ray of light, and also a dark tinge, and night; this same word in Greek,ak-tis, means a ray of light. Thus, whilst ideas are not definitely named, even the most simple, such as those of white and black, are not realised; philosophers have long known this, but the learned in physical science seem only recently to have drawn attention to the fact. Virchow was the first to make the following assertion: “Only after their perceptions have become fixed by language, are the senses brought to a conscious possession and a real understanding of them.”[57]
Surgeons have explained that the faculty of sight proceeds from the movement of an unknown medium, which in the case of light has been called ether, this strikes the retina, and is conveyed to the brain by the optic nerve; “but what relation there is between the effect, namely, our sensation of red, and the cause, namely, the 500 millions of millions of vibrations of ether in one second, neither philosophy nor physical science has yet been able to explain.”[58]
We are able to picture to ourselves the difficulties which assailed man in his efforts to express his impressions in primitive times, since we find ourselves at times struggling with the same difficulties, and there are occasions when we struggle in vain, we do not conquer the difficulty.
Sensations which are subjective and personal are of all others the most difficult to define, since we lack words to express what is from its nature purely personal; and yet we have frequently occasion to mention them, how can we best express ourselves? As the required word does not seem forthcoming we have recourse to metaphor, andalmost unconsciously we use terms borrowed from external phenomena connected with the sense of hearing, of smelling, and of tasting, and which for the most part are acts or conditions in the domain of the sense of sight. Our old acquaintances the roots, whose meanings are to cut, to pinch, to bite, to burn, to hit, to sting, to soften, having formed the base of the adjectives sharp, sweet, keen, burning, we use these to describe certain sensations. We do not know how better to particularise a physical pain than by comparing it to something that tears, cuts or stings. But if certain physical ills, certain colour perceptions, certain impressions of sharpness, sweetness and heat experienced when tasting various foods find metaphorical expression in external acts, there still remains a whole category of simple ideas for which no words can be found. There are certain sensations of taste which cannot be expressed in words. Yesterday I ate a pear, to-day I have eaten a peach; I am quite capable of distinguishing the special flavour of each, but finding nothing in the world of facts with which to compare them, I am without words to apply to them, and it would be as impossible for me to convey an idea of the flavour to any one who had never eaten a pear or a peach as to make any person understand if I spoke in a language which was unknown to him.
Since all words that succeed in expressing our sensations are drawn from external phenomena, we are in a position to know the origin and historic past of these words. But I cannot thus easily foresee even the near future of some of these words. The sound of the clarionet and that of the hautbois, the whistling of the wind, the whisper of the waves, the yellow of the straw and that of the lemon, the green of the emerald and the blue of the sky, all characterise objects belonging to the material world; but if these words: clarionet and hautbois, wind and waves, straw and lemon, emerald and sky, which aloneenable us to define clearly to our minds certain sounds and certain colours were lacking in our vocabulary, I do not know how a musician could have composed a symphony, or an artist painted his picture, although the creation of both works of art proceeds equally from personal inspiration invisible to the eye.
The tie that binds thought to speech has been alternately acknowledged and forgotten; if Plato believed that the origin of language was the imitation of the voices of nature (an error which weighed heavily on humanity during the space of two thousand years), he also knew that words are indispensable to man for the very formation of thought. Abelard was more explicit on this point, he said: “Language is generated by the intellect, and generates intellect.” Hobbes understood so well that language was meant first of all for ourselves, and afterwards only for others, that he calls words, as meant for ourselves,notæ, and distinguishes them fromsigna, the same words as used for the sake of communication, and he added: “If there were only one man in the world he would requirenotæ.”[59]The close connection between thought and speech cannot be more clearly or concisely expressed.
This discovery makes its way slowly in the world, because certain philosophers who have been rendered immobile by tradition, darken counsel by their speculations. Some of the Polynesians would seem to have a far truer insight into the nature of thought and language than these philosophers to whom I have made allusion; they call thinking “speaking in the stomach,” which means of course to speak inaudibly, and it is this absolutely inarticulate speech which is so often mistaken for thought without words; because the fact is ignored thatnotionandnameare two words for one thing. “It is certain,” they say, “that a thought may be conceived in the mind,but is formulated at a later period; for instance, if you have to write a letter of no great importance, and which affects you little, take your pen, and before the idea appears to you completely clothed, your hand has passed over the paper, and you proceed to read your ideas in the words you see before you.” This is an illusion. We can no doubt distinguish the written word from the word-concept, but the former could not exist without the latter. I defy our opponents to think of the most ordinary and familiar object, such as a dog for instance, without saying to themselves the word dog. They would explain that the remembrance only of a special dog, or of its bark would suffice to call up the image of the dog in their minds; they do not see that the likeness of a dog, or the remembrance of its bark is equivalent to the word dog, and that they cannot possibly become conscious to themselves of what they appear to be thinking, without having the word in reserve in some part of themselves, either “in the stomach,” as some savages say, or, as is more gracefully expressed by the Italians,in petto.
Descartes was a learned Christian, who pondered for some time over the questions whether the human mind could be certain of anything without being supernaturally enlightened; he resolved to prove it; and to this end he imagined that he, Descartes, was certain of nothing—doubted of all—even mathematical conclusions; he then reflected on this position, and after a time the idea occurred to him that as he was capable of reflection it proved without a doubt that he, Descartes, existed, and that consequently it was no longer possible to have doubts of his own identity.
The portrait of this philosopher as depicted on the cover of his works, represents him reclining in a chair thinking—thinking—thinking—and exclaiming, “Cogito ergo sum.”
Those persons amongst us who are not specially interestedin any system of philosophy are certainly in the majority; all know that such systems exist, and that they are noted, but from the want of reflection, however little, some persons look upon them as having sprung fully equipped, and in their present form, from the brains of their founders. But it would be incorrect, simply on the evidence of a frontispiece, to consider these philosophical processes as thus instantaneous. The systems of philosophy, even those of small value, require much time for their elaboration, and ripen slowly, and are never free from opposition. They establish close links between the living thinkers of to-day, and those who are no longer on earth. The philosophers of the Middle Ages consulted those of antiquity, the thinkers of to-day strove to be in agreement with those alike of the Middle Ages and of antiquity, and there arise from this intercommunion of knowledge, groups of ideas of which some are borrowed and some original, some true and some false; these are dependent on the intellectual lucidity and vigour of the latest arrivals in the arena. Many problems are thus threshed out before our eyes. Not long ago three philosophers were in dispute and Noiré records the arguments; the discussion turned on the question of priority of thought or speech.
They agreed on the fundamental point, all three said there could be no reason without language, nor language without reason. But as they penetrated more deeply into the question, they perceived divergencies; although the conception and the word be inseparable, yet there may be a moment of time—infinitely little, doubtless—between the arrival of the one and of the other, as with twins.
According to Schopenhauer conceptions were the first in the field, and their immediate duty consisted in creating words; since the mind could not deal with ideas at will, could neither evoke them, grasp them, nor reject them, whilst no signs were attached to them.
To this Geiger objected. How could ideas be producedwhilst no signs existed with which to represent them? Words came first, and thought, rendered possible by the development of language, followed; “language has created reason; before language, man was without reason.”[60]
Max Müller replied to both. How could there be a sign when there was nothing to represent? Conceptions and words, inseparable from the beginning, were produced on the same day; the day when man’s history begins; before that what was a fugitive impression and a vocal sound void of sense, became a conception. Max Müller adds: “If Geiger had said that with every new word there is more reason, or that every progress of reason is marked by a new word, he would have been right, for the growth of reason and language may be said to be coral-like, each shell is the product of life, and becomes in turn the support of new life.”[61]
The most important results obtained during the Middle Ages on these subjects find their representations in this discussion carried on by the three learned contemporaries. Max Müller’s point of view is one which reconciles the two diverse opinions.
Men still find themselves under the magic influence of the past after some thousands of years; the first words which our ancestors used in the midst of their ordinary occupations have not ceased to appear in our daily conversations, in our philosophical writings, and in the reports of scientific proceedings; it is impossible to speak of our family or social relations, of our affections, our ordinary obligations, our most sacred duties, our observance of laws, without having recourse to words and expressions, which represent the acts of linking ortying, those early activities of our ancestors. The chemist speaks of theaffinityof the substances with which he is working; the poet and the devout believer when giving free scope to their highestaspirations do not find truer or loftier terms thanlinks,chains,ties, for that which connects them with the Giver of all pure, sublime thoughts.
As it is possible in the present day to speak ofdelvinginto a question (creuser) and ofrackingour brains (creuser) when we puzzle over a conundrum; oflinkingone idea to another; ofpolishingour manners by the help of art and letters; of seeking tosoftenthe heart of God by offerings (as if He were a mercenary Judge), of linking ourselves with others the better to accomplish a good work, of uniting in freeing ourselves from an undesirable opponent; it follows that our ancestors as they emerged from their condition of muteness found it necessary todig(creuser) cabins for themselves, topolishstones, to weave and plait branches together, and to soften tough roots for their nourishment. The same words repeat themselves from time immemorial.
But how comes it that these words, which have remained the same outwardly, have so completely changed their meaning as exactly to adapt themselves to modern usage? We have been deceived by appearances. These words have not changed their meaning, but at first they were applied to tangible objects and visible acts, those which were the most necessary and the most usual in daily life at that time; and now these words are applied to intangible things, and invisible acts, the most necessary and usual in our present mental life.
Nor is this which follows less curious. This adaptation of the old words to modern usages could only have been accomplished on one condition, that we should forget many things, and be utterly oblivious to the original destination of these words; that we should put from before our eyes all images of caves, branches, stones and tough roots; and this condition we have fulfilled absolutely; the forgetfulness has been complete; no one suspects the source of these expressions; only a small number of men knows it,but these men are thoroughly aware that they are making use of the true primitive forms of the human language.
A difficulty to be avoided still remains. It might be said that, as it is the result of concerted action undertaken from a community of interest, that these images have become fixed in the memory, and that if the ideas and representations exercised so potent a spell on us, that we were compelled to use the words which can be traced back to the first period of language, does it not follow that we absolutely resemble each other, and that consequently we must renounce the idea of attributing the least individuality to ourselves? This is a great mistake. Each one of us gives to these representations of ideas that form towards which he is impelled by his own nature, his education, his environment. A man who has some knowledge of astronomy will look at the star-lit sky with quite another eye to that of the poet, who knows nothing of the subject but is struck with its inexpressible splendour. A landscape painter would see in a tree details of beauty which would quite escape one who admired it, but had never sought to draw it; a clever architect with one glance at a newly-built house could assign it a place either with the failures or with those houses which were a success, and this glance would sufficiently account for the murmured exclamation, “How gladly would I live in it!”