CHAPTER VPRIMITIVE HUMANITY
Some courage is required to attack the subject of comparative philology as treated by certain learned authors; they are bold enough to seek to transport themselves to an age of such remote antiquity that history is silent on the subject, but in which a nascent humanity endeavoured to find expression for its sensations in a language which probably had no name.
When my attention was first attracted to the work of this school, so long as my mind was content to skim over the surface of an unknown world, so immeasurably distant from us, and whilst flitting too rapidly over it to be able to distinguish any of its features, it presented itself to me as a creation of my heated imagination. Since then I have lived in that world of wonders, and I then grasped the fact that it was quite possible for this world to have been a reality. But to journey thither, even to live in this strange country, the only path to which is by induction, in company with Max Müller and Noiré, who, apparently, are its inhabitants, from the ease with which they move in it, is a totally different matter from explaining the methods of getting there, or describing the sojourn. I should have to draw information from various sources, and the scientific and hypothetical data connected therewith would require sorting and rearranging to make them assimilate more easily; these would present difficulties not readily surmounted.
How could a reasonable and speaking being come forth from that which had no reason and no language?
The earliest traditions are silent on the manner of man’s acquisition of his first ideas and his first words. But because a problem has not been solved, that is no reason for the assertion that it is insoluble, unless a refutation is at once demonstrable, as in the squaring of the circle. “If every one had abstained from striving to penetrate hidden things, no sciences would exist,” Noiré remarked. Newton might have said: “The facts that a stone falls and the planets move are known by actual experience, why search out the laws which produce these phenomena?” And the theory of gravitation would have been lacking. Lyell might have said: “We see that the crust of the earth is composed of several strata, why reckon the time required for their formation?” And there would have been no science of geology. Liebig might have said: “We see that clover grows and cattle prosper, why should the relation of cause and effect concern us?” And there would have been no organic chemistry. Adam Smith might have said: “We know by experience that valuable objects can be exchanged, and that their prices fluctuate, why should we study the cause of rise and fall?” And this chapter would have been missing from political economy.
No road presents itself to me by which to arrive in the midst of primitive humanity; of necessity, therefore, I have recourse to analogy, which, under the circumstances, is not the worst expedient.
When the Romans first encountered Germans, they were chiefly struck by the great stature, the blue eyes, and the light hair of this inimical race. Tacitus, in alluding to this fact, says that each German exactly resembled his fellow. Although we are familiar with the external appearance of various nations, yet if we found ourselves in the presence of a large number of negroes we should experience an analogous sensation, only by degrees should we distinguish one from the other. In anintensified degree primitive man must have had similar experiences when, first finding himself in a world of which he knew nothing, and of which he understood nothing, the consciousness of what he saw around him was making itself apparent. These early races learnt the meaning of the details of surrounding nature but slowly; their eyes followed the brilliant circle as it moved from one quarter of the heavens to the other; they noticed the fire which came whence they knew not; they heard the crash of thunder, reproduced by the echoes in the mountains synchronising with the devastations caused by the storm. If one man alone had witnessed these terrifying effects in nature, his reason would have tottered from fear; the stones and the herbs of the field could not share his agitation; the death of a man from terror would leave them unmoved. Happily man was not alone, all those around him shared his agitation, and the terror manifested itself on each by signs which each would understand instinctively. This period of semi-consciousness before the full awakening might have been a prolonged one, but physical sensations and necessities multiplied themselves, and were very various and imperative; action was indispensable if privations were to be avoided; and instinct came to their aid. The need of guarding themselves from the burning rays of the sun caused them to provide shelters by interlacing branches of trees; to protect themselves from cold they took the skins of wild beasts to throw over their shoulders; where natural caverns were insufficient for their wants they made themselves refuges in the sides of the mountains; they were forced to light and maintain fires; sharpen stones either for tools or for weapons of defence; the wants of one were the wants of all, and all gave themselves to the task of satisfying them. It is so evident that primitive activity must have been co-operative, that it outrages common sense to picture each man labouring by himself for himselfalone. The mental phenomenon known asintention, was the common property of all; the mutual sympathy played the part of the electric current of our laboratories, and the inarticulate sounds escaping involuntarily from the lips of each worker, served as a means of communication.
In order the better to understand the function of the voice in the education of primitive man, let us look around us and listen. Whenever our senses are excited, and our muscles hard at work, we feel a kind of relief in uttering sounds which in themselves have no meaning. “They are a relief rather than an effort, a moderation or modulation of the quickened breath in its escape through the mouth.”[38]
When men work together, on account of the nature of the task requiring united effort, they are naturally inclined to accompany their occupations with certain more or less rhythmical utterances, which react beneficially on the inward disturbance caused by muscular effort. When a body of men march, row, or wield hammers, they do not keep silence; formerly soldiers sang as they marched to battle; our modern civilisation only caused the substitution of fife and drums for the songs; and our soldiers do not readily abandon these measured accompaniments, which make them less susceptible of fatigue. When savage races dance they make the air resound with measured cadences; our peasants sing while joining in the country dances; the custom of singing during work is more marked amongst those who belong to the races which are less under the influence of civilisation, and are more entirely absorbed by their manual occupation, and with whom personal preoccupation has small hold.
These inarticulate sounds which Noiré has namedclamor concomitansand Max Müllerclamor significans, uttered by primitive men when working in concert, andalways inseparable from acts, could be differentiated in accordance with the acts performed; and at a period when actual speech did not yet exist, they would always have this practical value, they would awaken the remembrance of acts performed in the past, and be repeated in the present, they would thus be instantly understood by all, and readily retained by the memory. But what was there to determine the application of certain sounds to certain occupations? This has not been made clear. Plato, Socrates, and others, have considered that the origin of language might be traced to the imitation of the sounds of nature, and have sought for a resemblance between these sounds and certain letters of the alphabet, but even were it possible here and there to discover a faint analogy, our efforts would only end in contradictions. There seems to be neither necessity nor absolute freedom in the choice of the sounds expressive of these acts, but rather the result of some accident, or of causes of which we are ignorant. In any case these sounds were merely the materials of which language was built.
It will be easily understood that nothing would penetrate more deeply into man’s consciousness, or produce mutual understanding more readily, than acts undertaken and accomplished with the same end in view by a number of men united in a common impulse. During the digging of the caves, the weaving of the nets, the thrashing of the grain, the workers would follow with their eyes the gradual transformation perceptible in these activities, and the sounds which they emitted, or the half-formed words issuing from their lips would be modified or softened at each development in the work; these developments becoming more and more distinct, more and more impressed with their own special characteristic. The idea of individuality must have been very clouded, very confused amongst primitive man; that which one saw the other saw after the same manner; they designed eachobject in creating it; in this way the world became as a book to them, this book, the result of their combined labour, they learnt to read fluently by means of these sounds and words which increased as they varied. Thus work—man’s good genius—is proved to be the source of what is truly human, viz., reason and language.
Here I will note a curious fact and one which is historical. At a period when writing was unknown in India, the Brahmans had already established the rules of poetical metre, which were originally connected with dancing and music. These rules had been preserved in the Veda. The various Sanscrit names for metre are a witness of the union of corporal and phonetic movements. The root ofKhandas, metre, is the same as the Latinscanderein the sense of stepping;vritta, metre, fromvrit, verto—to turn, meant originally the last three or four steps of a dancing movement, the turn, theversus, which determined the whole character of dance or of the metre.Trishtubh, the name of a common metre in the Veda, meant three-step, because its turn—itsvrittaorversus—consisted of three steps, ∪ - -. Thus the innate necessity that man feels of linking the play of the vocal chords to the movement of hands or feet, had been controlled by fixed laws, twenty-four centuries ago, by the Hindoo grammarians; and the most recent theories of modern writers on the subject attest the excellence of these laws. The assertion that it is natural to peasants not to keep silence when working is of very ancient date, but Noiré was the first to deduce scientific data from the fact.
The study of Sanscrit has shown us that two thousand years ago it occurred to Hindoo grammarians to investigate the origin of the words of their language, when they discovered that all words could be reduced to roots, and that these roots all expressed various forms of activity; that they were therefore verbs, and that the number of these roots was very restricted. Our present philologistshave continued this work and are not only able to acknowledge the accuracy of the Brahmanic discovery, but also to certify that the grammatical analysis of the Hindoos, put forth 500 years before our era, has never been surpassed. It is important to remember that roots are the fundamental elements which permeate the whole organism of the language. Hebrew has been reduced by Renan and other Hebraists to about 500 roots; the work has still to be done for the whole Semitic family. The same process has been carried out with regard to the Aryan languages; we find the number of roots in Sanscrit reduced to about 800; of Gothic about 600; rather more than 400 in the Teutonic family, and 600 in the Slavic. The Ural-Altaic languages have also undergone a partial analysis of the same kind, and the result at present corresponds to that obtained by the examination of the other families. After eliminating the tertiary and secondary roots from the Sanscrit the residuum is 600 or 500, and we arrive at the fact that this entire language, and, in a great measure, all the Aryan languages, can be traced back to an extremely small number of roots.
As the Hindoo grammarians asserted that all roots contain the representation of various forms of activity, it behoved our philologists to investigate this and discover their meaning. Professor Noiré thought that the consciousness that men had of their own acts must have formed the origin of the primitive concepts of the human mind, and found expression in signs or words. Max Müller shows us[39]that all the Sanscrit roots express a concept or consciousness of the repeated acts, the acts with which man in his infancy would be most familiar. But it must be noted that the concepts or signs are not of single acts, but the realisation of repeated acts; to dig was not to put a spade into the ground once, it is the action of digging continuously; to sharpen was not to pass oneflint over another once, it was the continual action of sharpening. The consciousness of accomplishing these repeated acts as if one act, became the first germ of conceptual thought. During this initial phase of thought, when the first consciousness of his own repeated acts awoke in man and assumed a conceptual character, will, act and knowledge were as yet one and undivided, and the whole of his conscious knowledge was subjective, exclusively concerned with his own voluntary act. We possess the genealogy of a large number of Aryan roots, and we find on examination that the activity which formed their basis was at the beginning always a creative activity, since it called into life conceptions which up to that time had not existed.
Nothing is more interesting than researches into the origin of the growth of human thought, when carried out not according to the systems of certain philologists of our day, but historically, after the fashion of the Indian trapper, who notes on the sand every imprint of the footsteps of him whom he pursues.
For the present I will content myself by bringing forward in illustration three primary roots.Vê(Vâ), which is, to weave;Mar, to crush; andKhan, to dig.Vê(Vâ),Mar, andKhanare thus verbs.
When we now picture the four acts of weaving, spinning, sewing, and knitting, they appear so to differ the one from the other, that it seems impossible to consider them other than four distinct acts, and difficult to believe that there is one common origin to all. These four processes, however, all had their germ in the one primitive act of interlacing the boughs of trees to form a hedge or roof. This rootVê(Vâ) had an immense number of offshoots; from the acts of interlacing and platting came the conception of binding, in Latinvieo, to twist, to divide; in German,winden,wickeln; the Latin wordsvitis, a vine;vimen, osier, a twig;viburnum, a climbing plant; the Slavic wordvetla, willow; the Sanscritvetra, reed, rush; the German word for rush,binse, is connected withbinden, to join, and the secondary meaning of ties of relationship and alliance: again, in the Old High-German,nothbendig, ornothwendigkeit, bound, straitened, and the Gothicnaudibandi, tie, chain. All these words, whether in the Roman, German, or Slavonic dialects, have retained the rootVê(Vâ), so that it is impossible not to recognise the trunk of which these are the branches. Thus a large number of apparently dissimilar images became entangled the one with the other, and in proportion as we approach their starting-point do we find them discarding their own special signification, and becoming absorbed in the single conception of weaving and platting.
The rootmar, to grind, has also the meaning of to crush, to powder, to rub down, etc., and whether we look at the Latin, Greek, Celtic, German, or Slav, the words representing the verbto mill, and the namemillcome thence; the transition frommillingtofightingis natural; thus Homer used the wordmar-na-mai, I fight, I pound.Marproduced in Latin the wordsmordeo, I bite;morior(originally, to decay), I die;mortuus, dead;mors, death;morbus, illness; in Greek,marasmos, decay; rendered in German bysich aufreiben, to become exhausted. In Sanscrit we must remember that the consonantsrandlare cognate and interchangeable; thus,mar=mal; and thatarin Sanscrit is shortened, and the vowel modified and pronouncedri,mar=mri; thatarmay be pronouncedra, andal,la;mar=mraandmal=mla: thus in Sanscrit we findmrita, dead;mritya, death, andmriye, I die. One of the earliest names for man wasmarta, the dying; the equivalent in Greek for the Sanscritmraandmlaismbro,mblo; and after dropping thembecomesbroandblo;brotos, mortal. Having chosen this name for himself, man gave the opposite name to the gods; he called themAmbrotoi, without decay,immortal; and their foodambrosia, immortality. An offshoot ofmarismardandmrg; thencemradati, rubbing down, pulverising, grind to powder;mridis in Sanscrit the word for dust, and afterwards was used for soil in general or earth;mrid, to weaken, to soften, to melt; thus, fluid mass. This idea in English takes the formmalt, grain soaked and softened; then the Greekmeldo, and the Gothicmulda, soft ground or morass, and that which is softened by use or the action of time. The Latinsordesandsordidusare connected herewith, as the same root may be found insmarna, Gothic, and the Greekmélasandmoros, black, and inmurus, brown-black; in the Russiansmola, wax and resin. “Colour was conceived originally as the result of the act of covering or extending a fluid over a surface; it was not till the art of painting, in its most primitive form, was discovered and named, that there could have been a name for colour.”[40]The name of colour in Sanscrit isvarna, fromvar, to cover. The idea conveyed by the words, to smooth, to flatter, to soften, to mollify, to melt a hard substance, to polish a rough surface by constant rubbing, led to the same terms being used for expressing the softening influence which man exercised on man, by looks, gestures, words or prayers, and these expressions were especially used by men in their relations to the gods, when they strove to propitiate them by supplications and sacrifices: thus the prayer which we now translate by “Be gracious unto us, O God,” meant originally, “Melt to us; be softened, ye gods.”
Language grew and made offshoots, but without confusion; disorder had no place in the progress of thought (still less chance), which was simple and rational. This was not the development of the conscious effort towards some goal. At this period there was no such thing as reflection properly so called; for instance, man did notponder how best to express a feeling of fear, since fear, like so many other impressions, received vague expression before the concept of fear acquired shape; but our ancestors had a root to express shaking (in Sanscritkap,kamp, to shake): they used it to describe fear, which manifested itself in the trembling of voice or limbs. Thus, “I shake” might mean, “I shake a tree,” or “I am shaken,” “I am shaken by him” (by my horse), but also “I am trembling”; from it we have in Greekkarnos, smoke, not what shakes, or is shaken, but what is in a shaking state, that which moves;kup, which is probably a modification ofkamp, means to shake inwardly, to be angry.
Some learned writers have felt disconcerted when after tracing words to their source, they have found nothing but roots with general meanings, such as to go, to move, to run, to do; however, it is by means of these vague, pale conceptions that language has obtained the material for an entire language. The Aryan rootarsignified originally to go, to send, to advance, to proceed, going regularly, to stir. Applied to the stirring of the soil, it took the meaning of ploughing; in Latinar-are, in Greekar-oun, in Irishar, in Lithuanianar-ti, in Russianora-ti; this root, from its meaning of advancing regularly, was the name of the plough; one derivative was applied to the cattle fit for ploughing, and also to the labourer.Arwas also used for the ploughing of the sea, or rowing, and was found in the words rower and rudder. The Latin wordævum, originally fromi, to go, became the name of time, age; and its derivativeæviternus,æturnuswas made to express eternity. It was by a poetical fiat that the Greekprobata, which originally meant no more than things walking forward, became in time the name of cattle. In French, the wordmeublemeans literally anything that is movable, but it became the name of chairs, tables, wardrobes, etc. In this way we see the power of language, which, out of a few simple elements, has creatednames sufficient to express the infinite aspects of nature.
The ramifications of the Aryan rootDâgive a good idea of the process. ThusDâ= to give, is in the Sanscritdădāmi, I give; in Latin,do; in Old Slavonic,da-mi; in Lithuanian,du-mi; in French,donnerandpardonner; in Latin,trado, to give over; in Italian,tradire; in French,trahir,trahison; in Latin again,reddo, to give back; in French,rendreandrente. Side by side with the rootDâ, there is another root alsoDâ, exactly the same in all outward appearance; it consists ofD+Â, but is totally distinct from the former. While from the former we have in Sanscrit,dâ-tram, a gift, we have from the latterdâ´-tram, a sickle. The meaning of the second root is to cut, to carve; the difference is shown by the accent remaining on the radical syllable indâ´-tram,i.e., the cutting (active); whilst it leaves the radical syllable indâ-trám,i.e., what is given (passive).
The history of these rootsdâaffords an opportunity of noticing a curious resemblance between natural history and philology, two sciences which otherwise are totally different, but alike in one idea which enters into the inwardness of both. Darwin admitted four or five progenitors in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so that the primary elements of all living organisms are the simple cells. In the same way philologists have discovered that there remain in the end certain simple elements of human speech—the primordial roots—which have sufficed to provide the innumerable multitude of words used by the human race. A principle neglected by a great number of evolutionists is that if two origins, whether the roots of language or living cells, have at their starting-point an absolutely similar appearance, and afterwards diverge, it is because at their origin they bore in themselves the germs destined to produce this divergence. Darwin says that two organic cells, which in the embryonic stage may perfectlyresemble each other, in growing, gradually develop, the one into an inferior animal, the other into a superior animal, never varying the process; the reason of which fact is that the cells, although not distinguishable the one from the other, differ in the rudiments or principle of life: in the same way philologists say that when two roots have the same sound, but produce families of perfectly distinct words, it is because the germs in each differ. We learn from this that the sound of the words is a matter of indifference at the commencement of a language; no one has succeeded, or will succeed, in making the sound alone the vehicle of a conception.
To Locke belongs the merit of having first clearly asserted that roots, the true irreducible elements of language, which furnish words for the most abstract and sublime conceptions, had at the beginning only a material or sensuous meaning, and this fact, on which idealists and materialists are agreed, is confirmed by comparative philologists. All primitive roots express directly only those acts and those conditions which come under the domain of the senses; all express the consciousness of repeated acts familiar to the members of a society in its infancy, such as pounding, striking, weaving, tying, burning, rubbing, moving, cutting, sharpening, softening. By means of generalisation and specialisation, the roots have acquired the most abstract terms of our advanced society; thus the root to burn developed into the thought of to love, and also to be ashamed; to dig, came to mean to search for, to enquire; the root which means to gather, expressed in primitive logic what we now call observation of facts; the connection of major and minor, or even syllogism. This is without doubt, and it is as certain that the words rake and pinchers came from the verbs to rake and to pinch.
To make the assertion of Locke the more striking, Noiré adds: “When the representative words springing from one root are found side by side, it is always themore ancient of the two which expresses the more material act. The verbs to tear and to cut are the offshoots of a single root; but the passage from the concept of tearing to that of cutting would be slowly effected; the act of tearing was immediate with man, cutting was a mediate act, and of later date, since it could not be done whilst the instrument was lacking.”
I shall now bridge over the distance between the primordial roots, and the organised language as we possess it, in order to show how our ancestors succeeded in forming real phrases, that is to say, intelligible propositions; this will show us the continuous thread which connects our present language with primitive speech.
We can show that both dictionary and grammar are made up of predicative roots and demonstrative elements. By the help of the first we make affirmations concerning things, derived from our knowledge of another object or of many, either in combination under one name, or taking each separately. With the demonstrative element we point to any object in space or time, by using such words as this, that, then, here, there; near, far, above, below, and others of the same kind, whose existence may be explained as a survival of the gesticulating phase in which objects were neither conceived nor described but pointed out; from this we are not to infer that gestures—even accompanied by sounds—gave birth to speech, since they rather excluded it. In their primitive form and intention, these demonstrative elements are addressed to the senses rather than to the intellect. They have in themselves no meaning, and to be of service they must be attached to words that have. The history of the rootKhan, to dig, will explain my thought. When our Aryan ancestors had learnt to sayKhan, and they wanted to distinguish between those who were digging and the instruments used in digging, between the object of the digging and the time and place of the work, it is possible that these demonstrative suffixes,combined with predicative roots, formed bases, such asKhan-ana,Khan-i,Khan-a,Khan-itra, and still others, which were intended probably for digging-here, digging-now, dig-we, dig-you. By means of these combinations, which varied in their application according to the customs of different villages and families, the speaker sought to distinguish between the subject acting and the object acted upon; and when this difficulty was surmounted, a great step had been taken, the passage from perception to conception was accomplished, and this passage no philosopher prior to Noiré had made clear. “We must always bear in mind that we are speaking here of times, so far beyond the reach of history, and of intellectual processes so widely removed from our own, that none would venture to speak dogmatically on what was actually passing in the minds of the early framers of language when they first uttered these words.”[41]All we can do is to hazard an explanation, and accept it in as far as it seems reasonable; and in the interest of science, we must carefully guard ourselves from asserting that our theory is the only true one. It is easy to conceive that after centuries of constant use certain derivatives should have become unalterably attached to certain meanings, and others should have also retained their special meanings. But what we do not know, is how the sounds destined to become demonstrative elements or personal pronouns were restricted to the terms required for such words, as—here, there, those, he, I, that, etc. There were cases in which a verb in the infinitive would develop into a phrase without any additions being made to it; it would suffice, for instance, if a man uttered the wordKhanin a commanding voice—as we should say “work”—for his fellow-labourers to understand that they were to begin to dig. Thus the imperative could be considered a complete sentence with as much justice as Veni-Vedi-Vici wouldbe termed independent and complete sentences. “The shortest sentence of all is, no doubt, the imperative, and it is in the imperative that almost to the present day roots retain their simplest form.”[42]
Our intellects in the present day are developed by the discourses we hear, the books we read, the reflections suggested by our experiences of life; our vocabularies become enriched as our knowledge increases and embraces a greater number of subjects; and if we retrace the path taking us to our ancestors who could not count beyond four sometimes, we should find words and ideas becoming fewer and conspicuous by their absence. It does not therefore follow that because we use language that we made it. It is not our invention; to us every language is traditional. “The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us. The work of making language belongs to a period in the history of mankind beyond the reach of the ordinary historian, and of which we in our advanced state of mental development can hardly form a clear conception.” Yet that time must have been a fact not less possible of verification than that geological period when “the earth was absorbed in producing the carboniferous vegetation which still supplies us with the means of warmth, light, and life, accumulating during enormous periods of time small deposits of organic matter forming the strata of the globe on which we live. In the same manner the human mind formed that linguistic vegetation, the produce of which still supplies the stores of our grammars and dictionaries”; and after a close examination of these primordial roots whence our language has sprung, we find that it does not consist in a conglomeration of words, the result of an agreement amongst a certain number of men, or the result of chance, but expresses human activity by means of verbs, the livingand vivifying portion of speech by the side of which the remainder may almost be considered as dead matter.
The question of the birth of the substantive, without being deliberately posed as a problem, occupied the minds of the Grecian philosophers, and was involved in their researches concerning the relation of an object to the name it bears, of the unknown cause by which a certain name designates a certain object and no other. Whilst the Greeks speculated on the subject after a tentative manner, building up theories which later observations were not long in upsetting, the Hindoos were also engaged in efforts to solve the problem by the help of a more reliable process—the historical.
The early grammarians, having found that words came from roots expressing general concepts, and that these concepts represented some sort of activity, made this fact the basis of their studies; profound thinkers as they were they discovered that man at first could not give a name to a tree, an animal, a star, a river, nor to any other object without discovering first some special quality that seemed at the time most characteristic of the object to be named. Sanscrit has a rootAs, having amongst other meanings sharpness, quickness; from the same root came words for needle, point, sharpness of sight, quickness of thought; this root is found in the Sanscrit name for a horse, which isasva, runner or racer, one who leaves space quickly behind him. Many other names might have been given to the horse besides the one here mentioned, but all must recall some characteristic trait of this animal; that name,the quick, could also have been given to other animals, but having been repeatedly applied to one, it became unfit for other purposes, and the horse retains undisputed possession. The Sanscritaksha, eye, comes from the same root as, which also meant to point, to pierce. Another name for eye in Sanscrit isnetram, leader, fromnî, to lead.
Noiré has just put forth an ingenious theory, that the first substantives would not be miller, digger, weaver, carpenter; but flour, cave, pit, mat, hedge, club, arrow, boat, because these were what had been thought and willed, whilst the agents, of no account from that point of view, remained in the shade, forgotten, and it is possible that for some time no names were given to them.
“When we have once seen that thought in its true sense is always conceptual, taking a verbal form, and that every word is derived from a conceptual root, we shall be ready for the assertion that words being conceptual can never stand for a single percept.”—Max Müller.
Locke first insisted that names are not the signs of things themselves, but always the signs of our concepts of them. This remark received small attention at first, and remained little appreciated until such time as the discoveries of our contemporaries, with no preconcerted unanimity, confirmed its value. Max Müller explains Locke’s words in the following manner: “Each time that we use a general name, if we say dog, tree, chair, we have not these objects before our eyes, only our concepts of them; there can be nothing in the world of sense corresponding even to such simple words as dog, tree, chair. We can never expect to see a dog, a tree, a chair. Dog means every kind of dog from the greyhound to the spaniel; tree, every kind of tree from the oak to the cherry; chair, every kind of chair from the royal throne to the artisan’s stool. We may see a spaniel or a Newfoundland dog; we may see a fir or an apple tree; we may see such and such a chair. People often imagine that they can form a general image of a dog by leaving out what is peculiar to every individual dog.”[43]
This general idea we have in our mind of which wecan talk, but our eyes cannot see it as they could a real object. Nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary can ever be heard, or seen, or felt. “We can even have names for things which never existed, such as gnomes; also for things which exist no more, or which exist not yet, such as the grapes of the last harvest, and those of the next. The mere fact that I call a thing past or future ought to be sufficient to show that it is my concept of which I am speaking, and not the thing as independent of me.”[44]
Berkeley showed that it is simply impossible for any human being to make to himself a general image of a triangle, for such an image would have to be at the same time right-angled, obtuse-angled, acute-angled, and other kinds also; such an object does not exist; whereas it is perfectly possible to have an image of any single triangle; to name some characteristic features common to all triangles, and thus to form a name and at the same time a concept of a triangle.[45]This mental process which Berkeley described so well as applied to modern concepts we can adopt with regard to all, even the most primitive. Man, in entering a forest, discovered in the trees something that was interesting to him. For practical purposes trees were particularly interesting to the primitive framers of language, because they could be split in two, three, or four pieces, cut, shaped according to the size of the piece into blocks, planks, boats, and shafts; any object for which the necessity had made itself felt. Hence, from a rootdar, to tear, our Aryan ancestors called treesdru, ordâru, literally what can be torn, or split, or cut; from the same root the Greeks called the skin of an animaldérma, because it was torn off, and a sackdóros(in Sanscritdriti), because it was made of leather, and a speardóry, because it came from a tree, and was cut and shaped and planed.
Such words being once given would produce many offshoots; the Celts of Gaul and of Ireland called their priestsDruids, literally the men of oak-groves. The Greeks called the spirits of the forest treesDryades; and the Hindoos called a man of wood, or a man with a wooden, or, as we say, flinty heart,dâruna, cruel.
The immense number of intelligible roots gave birth to many new images, these roots crossed and recrossed, for the concepts of to go, to give, to move, to make, would be the foundations of others, in some ways differing; one idea or thought in its flight would meet others perhaps of a conflicting nature, thoughts and words would equally undergo incessant modifications, which fact explains why in these earlier stages of language the members of a community soon ceased to understand each other if separated but for a short period of time.
Ovid, in speaking of the chaos at the beginning of the world, makes a picture which would equally well describe the birth of language. “Matter was in an unformed mass ... the sky, the earth, the sea had all one aspect; there where was the earth, was also the sea, and the sky was there also.”
The extraordinary destinies of the roots I have named constitutes a short chapter only, in the birth and development of tongues; but short as it is, it suffices to give us an idea of the elastic nature of these roots, their faculty of extension, and the part they play in the economy of language, and in the administration of the affairs of the human mind.
Every mental phenomenon has its history, which can only be discovered by tracing it to its source; and as speech has undergone many phases, of which the earlier must have been very different from those now in existence, it is pardonable in the greatest philosophers of antiquity not to have known the intricacies of the human mind, which this changeable speech could alone interpret. Theancients knew their own times, but were ignorant of the preceding ones, in the same way they knew their own language only, and of this language only its contemporary form; and in the case of a word whose meaning was lost or of a foreign word, they sought its origin in an idiom with which they were familiar; in other words, not where it could be found.
For a long time man only knew one kind of being, his own; and possessed one language only, that which expressed his own acts and his own states; the primitive men were sufficiently advanced to say: “let us dig,” “grind,” “they weave”; but if, at the beginning, concepts and speech arose from the consciousness of their own activity, how was the advance made when men desired to speak of the external objects of the world which they saw around them, and were conscious of not having made, and which consequently remained outside the sphere of their wills and of their experience? It is clear that these outward objects to be grasped and named, must have their part in the human activities for which names had already been found. When he saw the lightning tearing a hole in the field, or splitting the trunk of a tree, man could no longer say, “Wehave dug this hole,youhave split the tree.” It was no longersomeone, butsomethingthat had dug and struck. Nothing seems more simple to us than after saying “I dig” to say also “it digs,” and yet it was a passing to a new world of thought, from the conscious feeling of our own activity to the intuition of the activity of an outward object; this mental act, though inevitable, was by no means an easy one; men realised that the world around was a reflex of themselves, the only light was the light from within. If men could measure, so could the moon; hence he was called the measurer of the sky, from the rootMâ, to measure; the moon was calledMâs, that which measures, its actual name in Sanscrit; in Latin,mensis; in Greek,mêné; English,moon;German,Monat; in Russian,miésets. Men who ran called themselves runners; also the rivers they namedsar, running; and to designate the position of the river they added the suffixit,sar-it; literally, running here. Thussaritis river in Sanscrit;Mâsandsaritthus become complete, intelligible sentences. What we call lightning was originally, tearing, digging, bursting, sparkling; what we call storm and tempest were, grinding, smashing, bursting, blowing; if man could smash, so could the thunderbolt, hence it was called the smasher; and tempest and storm and thunderbolt may have been, smashing, grinding, hurling; and with the addition of the suffix, smashing here, now, there, then.
We have seen that the attribute which was the peculiar characteristic of an object supplied its name, but as most objects possessed more than one attribute, more than one designation were given to it; thus several names were used for river besidessarit, each representing one of its aspects; when flowing in a straight line it was calledsîrâ, arrow, plough, plougher; if it seemed to nourish the fields it wasmâtar, mother; if it separated or protected one country from another, it becamesindhu, the defender, fromsidhorsedhati, to keep off; if it became a torrent it received the name ofnadi, noisy. In all these forms the river is considered as acting, and is named by roots expressing action; it nourishes, it traces a furrow, it guards, it roars as a wild beast roars. The sun has many attributes; he is brilliant, the warmer, the generator, the scorcher, he is vivifying, overpowering, his many qualities giving him fifty different names, all synonyms of the sun. The earth also had many, it was known by twenty-one names, amongst others it wasurvî, wide;jurithvî, broad;mahî, great; but each characteristic trait of the earth could also be found in other objects, thusurivîalso meant a river; sky and dawn were calledprithvî; andmahî(great, strong) is used for cow and speech. Hence earth,river, sky, dawn, cow, and speech would become homonyms.
These names are of clearly defined objects, all recognisable by the senses; this fact entitles us to apply the following definition to this primitive stage of language; the conscious expression of impressions perceived by the senses.
But there is another class of words differing somewhat from those we have named, such words, as day, night, spring, winter, dawn and twilight; these lack the individuality and tangibleness of the others; and when we say “day approaches, night comes,” we attribute acts to things which are not agents, we affirm propositions, which, logically analysed, have no properly defined subjects. Semi-tangible names, such as sky, earth, belong to the same category. When we say “the earth nourishes man,” we do not allude to any well defined portion of the soil, we take the earth as a whole; and the sky is not only the small portion of the horizon grasped by our eyes, our imagination conceives objects not within the ken of our senses, but inasmuch as we look upon the earth or sky as a whole, see in it a power or an ideal, we make of it, involuntarily, an individuality. Now these words had certain terminations affixed to them indicating what we call gender, and became masculine or feminine, the neuter gender at that time did not enter into the language, until thought becoming more lucid perceived it in nature. What was the result? That it was impossible to speak of morning or night, of spring or winter, of dawn or twilight, of sky and earth, without clothing them not only with active and individual characteristics, but with personal and sexual attributes; hence all the objects of discourse as used by the founders of language became necessarily so many actors, as men and women act; and thought, when once launched in this direction, being irresistibly attracted by the tendency towards analogy and metaphor, overspread the whole world of human experience with this method ofrepresentation. What is called animism, anthropomorphism, and personification, have therefore their source in this inevitable dynamic stage, as Max Müller calls it, of thought and language, in which the psychological necessity of representing the external objects as resembling themselves operated on our ancestors. This necessity might have been named subjectivism had it not received more specific terms such asanimism, which consists in conceiving of inanimate objects as animate;anthropomorphism, conceiving objects as men, andpersonification, conceiving objects as persons. As soon as this new mental act was performed, a new world was called into existence, a world of names, or as we now call it, the world of myths.
“So long as the real identity of thought and language had not been grasped, so long as people imagined that language is one thing and thought another, it was but natural that they should fail to see the real meaning of treating mythology, if not as a disease, at all events as an inevitable affection of language. If the active verb was merely a grammatical, and not at the same time a psychological, nay, an historical fact, it might seem absurd to identify the active meaning of our roots with the active meaning ascribed to the phenomena of nature. But let it be once perceived that language and thought are one and indivisible, and nothing will seem more natural than that what, as the grammarian tells us, happened in language, should, as the psychologist tells us, have likewise happened in thought.”[46]
The men who spoke in this manner of the external phenomena understood perfectly that they themselves, who struck, who measured, who ran, who rose up, who lay down, were not to be confounded with the thunder, the moon, the river, and the sun; those scholars who studied thought as apart from language, rather allowed themselves selves to be misled by the phraseology of the time, andconsidered it a proof that our Aryan ancestors looked upon their physical surroundings as human beings, endowed with the appropriate organs and acts. Not only had the early Aryans perfectly understood that they were not identical with themselves, but they were far more struck by the differences between them than by any imaginary similarities. The confirmation of this theory is preserved for us in the Veda. “The torrent is roaring—not a bull,”i.e.like a bull; instead of saying as we do, “firm as a rock,” the poets of the Veda would say “firm—not a rock.” “The mountains werenotto be thrown down, but they werenotwarriors,” “The fire was eating up the forest, yet it wasnota lion.”
The men of that time used few words; all thoughts that went beyond the narrow horizon of their daily and practical lives had to be expressed by the transference of a name from the object to which it properly belongs to other well known objects. It was the birth of metaphor; it was metaphor that enabled the inner consciousness to project itself into the outer chaos of the world of objects; which it recreated with personal images; and the fact that each natural phenomenon bore many names, and that these same names were used for many other different objects furnished germs of metaphor. Metaphor was to language what rain and sunshine are to the harvest, it multiplies each grain a hundred and a thousand fold; and metaphor in multiplying language disperses it in every direction; without it no language would have progressed beyond the simplest rudiments.
We must be careful not to confuse the radical metaphor with the poetical which we use daily, and which is very different from the former. If we open any book of poetry at whatever page, we shall find inanimate and mute objects described as speaking, rejoicing, praising their Creator; there is no portion of nature however insentient, however incapable of thought, in which we do not infuse our ownsentiments, our own ideas. This mode of expression is especially a poet’s prerogative, and that it does not strike us as incongruous is owing to the fact that poetry appeals to the generality of men, and is more natural to them than prose, and that this outpouring of our heart towards nature costs us less effort than to speak of it in the abstract. It requires cold reflection to describe lightning as an electrical discharge, and rain as condensed vapour; in this case it is no longer the transference of the characteristic of a known object to one still unknown, but that of a known object to another equally well known; the poet who transfers the word tear to the dew has already clear names and concepts both for tear and dew; the poetical metaphor is thus a voluntary creative act of our mind, and as such takes no part in the formation of the human mind.
The world was astonished some few years ago by a declaration made by students of the science of language that the 250,000 words comprehended in the English Dictionary now being published at Oxford all proceeded from about 800 roots; and it has now been found possible to reduce this number. In any case 500 to 800 Sanscrit roots, on account of their great fertility, sufficed our Aryan ancestors for all the many words occurring in Sanscrit literature, and suffice also for us who have 245,000 living animals and 95,000 fossil specimens to name; also 100,000 living and 2500 fossil plants, without speaking of crystals, metals and minerals. Another surprising discovery is that every thought that has ever passed through a human brain can be expressed in 121 radical concepts, of which I give a list. It is taken from Max Müller’sScience of Thought, p. 404. Each single word of every phrase that we use has its origin in one of the 800 roots, and not a thought but proceeds from the 121 fundamental concepts. This is as accepted a fact as that all that is visible on the earth and in the vault of heaven is composed of about 60 elementary substances.