Chapter IV.

Chapter IV.Language And MindThe number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June number of theDeutsche Rundschauis a good example of these communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to give them publicity. That there was no lack of coarse letters as well, may be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand what attraction there can[pg 106]be in coarseness. The coarse work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their unsuitable attire.Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself, much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time, have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world, that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man, because here, as Lord Kelvin[pg 107]has shown, astronomical physics and geology have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary implies something beyond,i.e.an unbounded, until we arrive at the region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (On the Perception of the Infinite) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical beginnings of religion. When the Aryans[pg 108]felt, thought, and named their god, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a God. But, as stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely have had anything to object.His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show that the human mind was a mere phantom of man's making, that there are only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and therefore constituted, not theprius, but theposteriusof those bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me.“The mind,”so wrote the Horseherd,“is not aprius, it is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon.”Everything is now development, and there is no better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last work,The Ascent of Man, that“Order of events is history, and evolution is history”(p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is what I have been preaching in season[pg 109]and out of season for at least thirty years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had been content to say,“The human mind is also a development,”certainly no student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted him. But he says:“Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is aprius. But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken.”In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that“spirit,”in such expressions as“He has yielded up his spirit,”means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of“spirit”in such a phrase as“his spirit has departed.”But easy as it is to distinguish between[pg 110]spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not aprius, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerousembarras de richesse. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce[pg 111]a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic termÂtman, which I translate into“the Self”(neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase“the Self”(masculine).“Soul”has a too tender quality to be the equivalent ofÂtman.This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives. While theEsseof all objects is apercipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, theEsseof the self is apercipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta philosophers calledAvidyâ(not knowing, ignorance), or alsoMâyâ(appearance, or illusion), vanishes.[pg 112]The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simplyultra viresby every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things? The Vedânta philosophers consider theAvidyâ(ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such anAvidyâ, not to discover its origin; and then in theVidyâ, the Vedânta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed. How or when the Self came into this ignorance,Avidyâ, orMâyâ(illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So[pg 113]far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations,i.e.the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther. Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.In one place40he says,“I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.”In another place41[pg 114]he speaks still more plainly and says,“In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.”Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word“evolution”or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond,“Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before.”42Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before,“How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension.”In theContemporary Review, November, 1871,43Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology,“I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.”Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of[pg 115]ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers callsak-kid-ânanda, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed,i.e.that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (forkidis not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained[pg 116]behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line? It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness,[pg 117]or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.Above all things we must settle what we are really[pg 118]to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says,“Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own.”44Undoubtedly by“generically”is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a differencein kind, that isin genere, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its[pg 119]being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. Itisso—that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the[pg 120]genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and blustering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of a child develop in the following order:—After three weeks fear is manifested;After seven weeks social affections;After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;After five months sympathy;After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.45[pg 121]We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals, the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds, sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and lastly, in the anthropoid apes,[pg 122]remorse, shame, and a sense of the ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition, and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints either in embryological or physiological development, about the real historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery or out of a zoölogical garden.As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood, horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for kindling fire belonged to a higher period,post hominem natum, although it has been[pg 123]thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons, though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book onMental Evolution in Animals, has collected a large number of illustrations of animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading, and an English weekly,The Spectator, has from week to week given us similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception—a perception which in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although[pg 124]we can only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their sentient perceptions.Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed or had died, the Tasmanian languageipso factoceased; and even if any literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically, we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least fifteen hundred years before our chronology—what an age had elapsed before these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals are the same in these three languages,[pg 125]and yetkatvārassounds quite differently fromτέσσαρεςandquatuorand our four. The words for eight,octoin Latin,ὀκτώin Greek, andashtauin Sanskrit, are nearly identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (ἑκατόν), Sanskritsatám,centum. There is the formation and fixing of names for these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary, because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two tetrads, which, combined inasht-au,oct-o,ὀκτ-ώ, expressed the number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible thatasht-iwas a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four fingers of the hand without the thumb. Analogies occur in other families of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure general recognition and value for the name given to each number,[pg 126]we shall readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold of our thinking, have found their expression.Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life[pg 127]to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the[pg 128]makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar. Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such asPâninihave systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really constituted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists[pg 129]accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.46With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the learning of a language, as[pg 130]is done by every child, with the first invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different, and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.47They do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennæ of ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that“Any means by which information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language.”48That is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as it is, must be treated quite differently by the[pg 131]philologist, compared with the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy, even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after work, which signifies and communicates to every observer,“It is warm”or“I am tired,”and the man who can actually say,“It is warm,”“I am tired.”Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids' sieves.Just consider what effort was required to enable an Aryan man to say,“It is warm.”We shall say nothing of“it”; it may be a simple demonstrative stem, which needed little for its formation. But[pg 132]before this“i-t”or“id”could become an impersonal“it,”long-continued abstraction, or, if you prefer, long-continued polishing, was required. Take the wordis. Whence comes such a verbal form, Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest? Was the abstract“to be”onomatopoetically imitated? Often, of course, we cannot answer such questions at all. In this case, however, it is possible. The rootasinasti, that we now translate asis, means as we see fromas-u, breath, originallyto breathe. Whoever likes may see inas, to breathe, an imitation of hissing breath. We neither gain or lose anything by this; for the critical step always remains to be taken from a single imitation of a single act, to the comprehension of many such acts, at various places, and at various times, as one and the same, which is called abstraction or the forming of a concept.This may appear to be a very small step, just as the first slight deviation in a railroad track is scarcely a finger's breadth, but in time changes the course of the train to an entirely different part of the world. The formation of an idea, such as to be, or to become, or to take a still simpler one, such as four or eight, appears to us to be a very small matter, and yet it is this very small matter that distinguishes man from the animal, that pushed man forward and left the animal behind on his old track. Nay, more, this“concept”has caused much shaking of the head among philosophers of all times. That one and one are two, two and two, four, four and four, eight,[pg 133]eight and eight, sixteen, etc., appears to be so very easy, that we do not understand how such things can constitute an eternally intended distinction between man and animal. I have myself seen an ape so well trained that as the word“seven”was spoken, he picked up seven straws. But what is such child's play in comparison with the first formation of the idea of seven? Do you not see that the formation of such an abstract idea, isolating mere quantity apart from all qualities, requires a power of abstraction such as has never been displayed by an animal? If there were any languages now that actually had no word for seven, it would be a valuable confirmation of this view. I doubt only, whether the speakers of such languages could not call composition to their aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; but language—never.This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians, even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any danger there could be no fear. The facts are[pg 134]there and show us the right path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preëxisting conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man absolutely unthinkable. Language—as ethnologists should have learned—has neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds. That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such pantomimes asL'enfant prodigue. We have long known that imitations of sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by myself.49But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure, and that even Noiré'sclamor concomitansdoes not explain every case. Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language leaves a certain number of roots[pg 135]which are not mere sound-imitations, such as“bow wow,”or“moo moo.”There are people who have taken much pains to discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of the one or the other view is a useless undertaking. It appears to be the most reasonable plan to assume for the Aryan languages a period that approaches the Chinese, in which roots had the same sound and the same form as the corresponding noun, adjective, and verb. Even in Sanskrit roots appear at times still unchanged, although it is quite right that as soon as they take on grammatical functions, they should no longer be called roots. Much may be said in favour of both views, without arriving one step nearer our goal. If we now only remember that the whole Sanskrit language has been reduced to 121 primitive ideas, and that the roots denoting these (which are of course much more numerous) are not imitations of sound in the strict sense of the word, but sounds about whose origin we may say much but can prove little, we have at least aπου στῶfor our researches. I myself, like my deceased friend Noiré, have looked upon roots asclamor concomitans, that is, not as sound-imitations, but as actual sounds, uttered by men in common occupations, and to be heard even now. Why, however, the Aryans used and retained[pg 136]adfor eat,tanfor stretch,marfor rub,asfor breathe,stafor stand,gafor go, no human thought can find out; we must be content with the fact that it was so, and that a certain number of such roots—of course much greater than the 121 ideas expressed by them—constitute the kernels from which has sprouted the entire flora of the Indian mind.If we now return, to ouris,—Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest,—we see that it originally meant“to breathe out.”This blowing or breathing was then used for“life,”as inas-u, breath of life, and from life it lost its content until it could be applied to everything existing, and meant nothing more than the abstract“to be.”There are languages that possess no such pale word as“be”and could not form such a sentence as“It is warm.”The auxiliary verb“to have”is also lacking in many languages, especially the ancient, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and even classical Latin. If the words failed, the ideas failed as well, and such languages had to try and fulfil their requirements in other ways. If there was no such word as“be,”“stand”was employed; where there was no word for“have,”then“hold,”tenere, would render the same, or at least similar service. But this implied not only different speech, but different thought.But here I should like to call attention to the long process through which a language must pass, before it could reduce“breathe”to“be”and form such a sentence as“It is warm.”Even an animal feels[pg 137]warmth, and can in various ways make known if it is overheated. But in all this it is only a question of feelings, not to ideas, and still less of language. Let us consider“warm.”Of course“warm”may represent a mere feeling, and then a simple panting would suffice to express it. That is communication, but not language. To think a word like warm, a root and an idea are necessary. Probably, and in spite of a few phonetic difficulties, the root was in this caseghar(ingharmá,θερμός), and this meant at first to be bright, to glitter, to shine, then to burn, to heat, to be warm; that is to say, the observing mind of man was able to abstract brightness from the sense-impressions produced by sun, fire, gold, and many other objects, and, letting everything else drop, to reach the idea of shining, then of being warm. These ideas, of course, do not exist on their own account anywhere in the world; they must be and have been constructed by man alone, never by an animal. Why? Because an animal does not possess what man possesses: the faculty of grasping the many as one, so as to form an idea and a word. Light or lighting, warmth or warming, exist nowhere in the world, and are nowhere given in sentient experience. Every object of sense exists individually, and is perceived as such individually, such as the sun, a torch, a stove; but heat in general, like everything general, is the product of our thought; its name is made by us, and is not given us.Of all this, of course, when we learn to speak as[pg 138]children, we have no suspicion. We learn the language made by others who came before us, and proceed from words to ideas, not from ideas to words. Whether the relation between ideas and words was a succession, it is hard to say, because no idea exists without a word, any more than a word without an idea. Word and idea exist through each other, beside each other, with each other; they are inseparable. We could as easily try to speak without thinking, as to think without speaking. It is at first difficult to grasp this. We are so accustomed to think silently, before speaking aloud, that we actually believe that the same is true, even of the first formation of ideas and words. Our so-called thinkingbeforespeaking, however, refers simply to reflection, or deliberation. It is something quite different, and occurs only with the aid of silent words that are in us, even if they are not uttered. Every person, particularly in his youth, believes that he cherishes within himself inexpressible feelings, or even thoughts. These are chiefly obscure feelings, and the expression of feelings has always been the most difficult task to be performed by language, because they must first pass through a phase of conception. If, however, they are actually ideas, they are such as have an old expression that is felt to be inconvenient, or inadequate, and must be replaced by a new one. We cannot do enough to rid ourselves of the old error, that thought is possible without words. We can, of course, repeat words without meaning; but that is not speaking,[pg 139]only making a noise. If any one, however, tells us that he can think quite well without words, let this silent thinker be suddenly interrupted, ask him of what he has thought in silence, and he will have to admit that it was of a dog, a horse, or a man—in short, of something that has a name. He need not utter these words—that has never been maintained, but he must have the ideas and their signs, otherwise there are not, and there cannot be for him, either ideas or things. How often we see children move their lips while they are thinking, that is, speaking without articulation. We can, of course, in case of necessity, use other signs; we can hold a dog on high and show him, but if we ask what is shown, we shall find that the actual dog is only a substitute for the abstract word“dog,”not the reverse, for a dog that is neither a spaniel, poodle, dachshund, etc., is nowhere to be found,in rerum natura, or in domestic life. These things, that give us so much trouble, were often quite clear to the ancient Hindus, for their usual word for“thing”ispadârtha; that is, meaning or purpose of the word. But men persist that they are able to think without speaking aloud, or in silence. They persist that thought comes first, and then speech; they persist that they can speak without thinking,—and that is often quite true,—and that they can also think without speaking, which must first be proved. Consider only what is necessary to form so simple a word as“white.”The idea of[pg 140]white must be formed at the same time, and this can only be done by dropping everything but the colour from the sense-perceptions of such things as snow, snowdrop, cloud, chalk, or sugar, then marking this colour, and, by means of a sign (in this case a vocal one), elevating it to a comprehensible idea, and at the same time to a word. How this vocal token originates it is often difficult, often quite impossible, to say. The simplest mode is, for example, if there be a word for snow, to take this and to generalise it, and then to call sugar, for instance, snow, or snowy, or snow-white. But the prior question, how snow was named, only recedes for a while, and must of course be answered for itself. Given a word for snow, it can easily be generalised. But how did we name snow? I believe that snow, which forms into balls in melting and coheres, was namednix nivis, from a rootsnighorsnu, denoting everything which melted and yet stuck together or cohered. But these are mere possibilities that may be true or false; yet their truth or falsity leave undisturbed the fundamental truth, that each individual perception, as, for example, this snow or this ice, first had to be brought under a general conception, before it could be clearly marked, or elevated to a word. In such a case men formed, by living and working together, a general conception and a root, for an oft-repeated action, such as forming into balls; and under this general concept they then conceived an individual impression like snow; that is, that which is formed[pg 141]into a ball, so that they had the sign, and with the sign the concept of snow, both inseparable in reality, distinguishable as they are in their origin. Having this, they could extend the concept in the vocal sign for snow, and speak of snowy things, just as they spoke of rosy cheeks. Only we must not imagine that it will ever be possible to make the origin of root sounds perfectly clear. This goes back to times that are entirely withdrawn from our observation. It goes back to times in which the first general ideas were formed, and thereby the first steps were taken in the development of the human mind. How is it possible that any recollection should have remained of such early times, or even any understanding of these mental processes? We may settle many things, but in the end nothing is left but to say: It is so, and remains so, whether we can explain it or not. The first general concept may no doubt have been, as Noiré affirmed, an often repeated action, such as striking, going, rubbing, chewing—acts that spontaneously present themselves to consciousness, as manifold and yet single, that is, as continually repeated, in which the mind consequently found the first natural stimulus to the formation of concepts. Why, however, rub was denoted bymar, eat byad, go byga, strike bytud, we may perhaps apprehend by feeling, but we could not account for or even conceive it. Here we must be content with the facts, especially as in other families of languages we find entirely different vocal signs. No doubt there was a[pg 142]reason for all of them; but this reason, even if we could prove it historically, would always remain incomprehensible to us, and only as fact would it have any significance for science.At any rate, we can now understand in what manner language offers us really historical documents of the oldest stages which we can reach in the development of the human mind. I say,“which we can reach,”for what lies beyond language does not exist for us. Nothing remains of the history ofhomo alalus. But every word represents a deed, an acquisition of the mind. If we take such a word as the Vedicdeva, there may have been many older words for god, but let us not imagine that a fetish or totem, whose etymology is or should be known, belongs to them. But at all events we know fromdevaand the Latindeus, that even before the Aryan separation a rootdyuordivhad been formed, as well as the conception“shine.”If this root was first used actively for the act of shedding light, of striking a spark, of shining, it was a step farther to transfer this originally active root to the image which the sky produces in us, and to call it a“shiner,”dyu(nom.dyaus), and then with a new upward tendency to call all bright and shining beings,deva,deus. Man started, therefore, from a generalisation, or an idea, and then under this idea grouped other single presentations, such as sun, moon, and stars, from which“shining”had been withdrawn, or abstracted, and thus obtained as a mental acquisition a sign for the[pg 143]idea“shine,”and further formations such asDyaus(shiner) anddeva(shining). Now observe howDyaus, as“shiner,”at the same time assumed the significance of an otherwise unknown agent or author of light, and developed into the ancient Dyaus, into Zeus and Jove; that is, into the oldest personal God of the still united Aryans. These are the true stages of the development of the human mind, which are susceptible of documentary proof in the archives of language.All this occurred, of course, on exclusively Aryan ground, while the Semitic and other branches went their own way in the formation of ideas, and of sounds for their ideas. Physiologically all these branches may have one and the same origin, but linguistically they have various beginnings, and have not, at least as far as scientific proof is possible, sprung from one and the same source. The common origin of all languages is not impossible, but it is and remains undemonstrable, and to science that is enough,sapienti sat. If we analyse the Semitic and other languages, we shall find in them as many ancient documents of the development of the human mind as in the Aryan. And just as we can clearly and plainly trace back the Frenchdieu, the Latindeus, the Sanskritdeva, divine, to the physical ideadiv,“shine,”so we can with thousands of other words, of which each indicates an act of will, and each gives us an insight into the development of our mind. Whether the Aryans were in possession of other ideas and sounds for[pg 144]“shine,”etc., before the formation ofdiv,Dyaus, anddeva, must be left uncertain; at all events we see how naturally the first consciousness of God developed in them, how the idea conditioned the language, and the language the idea, and both originated and continued inseparable one from the other.If we take any root of the Aryan language, we shall be astonished at the enormous number of its derivatives and the shades in their meaning. Here we see very plainly how thought has climbed forward upon words. We find, for instance, in the list of Sanskrit roots, the rootbharwith the simple meaning to bear. This we see plainly inbharâmi, inbibharmi, inbibharti(I bear, he bears), also inbhárasorbhartár(a bearer), andbhârás(load) andbhármanandbhartí(bearing), etc.But these forms, with all their cases and persons and tenses, give us no idea of the fruitfulness of a root, especially if we follow its ramifications in the cognate languages. In Greek we haveφέρω, in Latinfero, in Gothicbairan, in Englishto bear. The principal meanings which this root assumes are, to carry, carry hither, carry away, carry in, to support, to maintain, to bring forth, etc. We find simple derivatives such as the GermanBahre, Englishbier(Frenchbière, borrowed), and alsoφέρετρονandferetrum, as well asferculum(a litter). On the other hand there isφόρετρον(a porter's wages), andφaρέτρa(quiver). Andbarrowin wheel-barrow has the same origin.Burdenis that which is borne,[pg 145]then a load, as, for instance, the burden of years. A step farther takes us toφερτός(bearable) andἄφερτος(unbearable). We also find in Greekδύσφορος, which corresponds exactly to the Sanskritdurbhara, with the meaning“heavy to bear.”In Latin, however,fertussignifies fruitful, likefertilis,ferax. We say,“The earth bears”(trägt), andGetreide(grain) meant originally that borne (getragen) by the earth (hence in Middle High GermanGeträgede). So we have alsofar, the oldest corn grown by the Romans, derived fromfero, and along with itfārina(flour), if it stands forfarrina.Farmay originally, however, have also meant food, maintenance, and the Anglo-Saxonbere, the Englishbarley, are again related to it. Of course we have the same root in derivatives, such aslucifer,frugifer, in Greekκαρποφόροςorφερέκαρπος. In German it becomes a mere suffix, asfruchtbar,dankbar,scheinbar,urbar. Likeφόρος,φοράmeans also what is carried or brought, hence specially tribute, duty, tax. To bear a child was used in the sense of to bring forth, and from this we have many derivatives such asbirth,born, and Gothicberusjos(parents),parentesandbarn(the child), like the Greekφέρμα.

Chapter IV.Language And MindThe number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June number of theDeutsche Rundschauis a good example of these communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to give them publicity. That there was no lack of coarse letters as well, may be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand what attraction there can[pg 106]be in coarseness. The coarse work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their unsuitable attire.Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself, much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time, have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world, that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man, because here, as Lord Kelvin[pg 107]has shown, astronomical physics and geology have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary implies something beyond,i.e.an unbounded, until we arrive at the region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (On the Perception of the Infinite) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical beginnings of religion. When the Aryans[pg 108]felt, thought, and named their god, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a God. But, as stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely have had anything to object.His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show that the human mind was a mere phantom of man's making, that there are only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and therefore constituted, not theprius, but theposteriusof those bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me.“The mind,”so wrote the Horseherd,“is not aprius, it is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon.”Everything is now development, and there is no better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last work,The Ascent of Man, that“Order of events is history, and evolution is history”(p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is what I have been preaching in season[pg 109]and out of season for at least thirty years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had been content to say,“The human mind is also a development,”certainly no student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted him. But he says:“Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is aprius. But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken.”In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that“spirit,”in such expressions as“He has yielded up his spirit,”means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of“spirit”in such a phrase as“his spirit has departed.”But easy as it is to distinguish between[pg 110]spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not aprius, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerousembarras de richesse. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce[pg 111]a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic termÂtman, which I translate into“the Self”(neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase“the Self”(masculine).“Soul”has a too tender quality to be the equivalent ofÂtman.This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives. While theEsseof all objects is apercipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, theEsseof the self is apercipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta philosophers calledAvidyâ(not knowing, ignorance), or alsoMâyâ(appearance, or illusion), vanishes.[pg 112]The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simplyultra viresby every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things? The Vedânta philosophers consider theAvidyâ(ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such anAvidyâ, not to discover its origin; and then in theVidyâ, the Vedânta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed. How or when the Self came into this ignorance,Avidyâ, orMâyâ(illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So[pg 113]far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations,i.e.the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther. Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.In one place40he says,“I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.”In another place41[pg 114]he speaks still more plainly and says,“In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.”Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word“evolution”or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond,“Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before.”42Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before,“How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension.”In theContemporary Review, November, 1871,43Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology,“I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.”Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of[pg 115]ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers callsak-kid-ânanda, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed,i.e.that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (forkidis not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained[pg 116]behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line? It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness,[pg 117]or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.Above all things we must settle what we are really[pg 118]to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says,“Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own.”44Undoubtedly by“generically”is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a differencein kind, that isin genere, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its[pg 119]being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. Itisso—that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the[pg 120]genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and blustering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of a child develop in the following order:—After three weeks fear is manifested;After seven weeks social affections;After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;After five months sympathy;After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.45[pg 121]We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals, the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds, sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and lastly, in the anthropoid apes,[pg 122]remorse, shame, and a sense of the ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition, and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints either in embryological or physiological development, about the real historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery or out of a zoölogical garden.As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood, horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for kindling fire belonged to a higher period,post hominem natum, although it has been[pg 123]thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons, though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book onMental Evolution in Animals, has collected a large number of illustrations of animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading, and an English weekly,The Spectator, has from week to week given us similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception—a perception which in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although[pg 124]we can only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their sentient perceptions.Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed or had died, the Tasmanian languageipso factoceased; and even if any literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically, we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least fifteen hundred years before our chronology—what an age had elapsed before these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals are the same in these three languages,[pg 125]and yetkatvārassounds quite differently fromτέσσαρεςandquatuorand our four. The words for eight,octoin Latin,ὀκτώin Greek, andashtauin Sanskrit, are nearly identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (ἑκατόν), Sanskritsatám,centum. There is the formation and fixing of names for these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary, because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two tetrads, which, combined inasht-au,oct-o,ὀκτ-ώ, expressed the number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible thatasht-iwas a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four fingers of the hand without the thumb. Analogies occur in other families of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure general recognition and value for the name given to each number,[pg 126]we shall readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold of our thinking, have found their expression.Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life[pg 127]to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the[pg 128]makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar. Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such asPâninihave systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really constituted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists[pg 129]accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.46With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the learning of a language, as[pg 130]is done by every child, with the first invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different, and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.47They do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennæ of ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that“Any means by which information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language.”48That is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as it is, must be treated quite differently by the[pg 131]philologist, compared with the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy, even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after work, which signifies and communicates to every observer,“It is warm”or“I am tired,”and the man who can actually say,“It is warm,”“I am tired.”Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids' sieves.Just consider what effort was required to enable an Aryan man to say,“It is warm.”We shall say nothing of“it”; it may be a simple demonstrative stem, which needed little for its formation. But[pg 132]before this“i-t”or“id”could become an impersonal“it,”long-continued abstraction, or, if you prefer, long-continued polishing, was required. Take the wordis. Whence comes such a verbal form, Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest? Was the abstract“to be”onomatopoetically imitated? Often, of course, we cannot answer such questions at all. In this case, however, it is possible. The rootasinasti, that we now translate asis, means as we see fromas-u, breath, originallyto breathe. Whoever likes may see inas, to breathe, an imitation of hissing breath. We neither gain or lose anything by this; for the critical step always remains to be taken from a single imitation of a single act, to the comprehension of many such acts, at various places, and at various times, as one and the same, which is called abstraction or the forming of a concept.This may appear to be a very small step, just as the first slight deviation in a railroad track is scarcely a finger's breadth, but in time changes the course of the train to an entirely different part of the world. The formation of an idea, such as to be, or to become, or to take a still simpler one, such as four or eight, appears to us to be a very small matter, and yet it is this very small matter that distinguishes man from the animal, that pushed man forward and left the animal behind on his old track. Nay, more, this“concept”has caused much shaking of the head among philosophers of all times. That one and one are two, two and two, four, four and four, eight,[pg 133]eight and eight, sixteen, etc., appears to be so very easy, that we do not understand how such things can constitute an eternally intended distinction between man and animal. I have myself seen an ape so well trained that as the word“seven”was spoken, he picked up seven straws. But what is such child's play in comparison with the first formation of the idea of seven? Do you not see that the formation of such an abstract idea, isolating mere quantity apart from all qualities, requires a power of abstraction such as has never been displayed by an animal? If there were any languages now that actually had no word for seven, it would be a valuable confirmation of this view. I doubt only, whether the speakers of such languages could not call composition to their aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; but language—never.This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians, even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any danger there could be no fear. The facts are[pg 134]there and show us the right path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preëxisting conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man absolutely unthinkable. Language—as ethnologists should have learned—has neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds. That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such pantomimes asL'enfant prodigue. We have long known that imitations of sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by myself.49But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure, and that even Noiré'sclamor concomitansdoes not explain every case. Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language leaves a certain number of roots[pg 135]which are not mere sound-imitations, such as“bow wow,”or“moo moo.”There are people who have taken much pains to discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of the one or the other view is a useless undertaking. It appears to be the most reasonable plan to assume for the Aryan languages a period that approaches the Chinese, in which roots had the same sound and the same form as the corresponding noun, adjective, and verb. Even in Sanskrit roots appear at times still unchanged, although it is quite right that as soon as they take on grammatical functions, they should no longer be called roots. Much may be said in favour of both views, without arriving one step nearer our goal. If we now only remember that the whole Sanskrit language has been reduced to 121 primitive ideas, and that the roots denoting these (which are of course much more numerous) are not imitations of sound in the strict sense of the word, but sounds about whose origin we may say much but can prove little, we have at least aπου στῶfor our researches. I myself, like my deceased friend Noiré, have looked upon roots asclamor concomitans, that is, not as sound-imitations, but as actual sounds, uttered by men in common occupations, and to be heard even now. Why, however, the Aryans used and retained[pg 136]adfor eat,tanfor stretch,marfor rub,asfor breathe,stafor stand,gafor go, no human thought can find out; we must be content with the fact that it was so, and that a certain number of such roots—of course much greater than the 121 ideas expressed by them—constitute the kernels from which has sprouted the entire flora of the Indian mind.If we now return, to ouris,—Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest,—we see that it originally meant“to breathe out.”This blowing or breathing was then used for“life,”as inas-u, breath of life, and from life it lost its content until it could be applied to everything existing, and meant nothing more than the abstract“to be.”There are languages that possess no such pale word as“be”and could not form such a sentence as“It is warm.”The auxiliary verb“to have”is also lacking in many languages, especially the ancient, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and even classical Latin. If the words failed, the ideas failed as well, and such languages had to try and fulfil their requirements in other ways. If there was no such word as“be,”“stand”was employed; where there was no word for“have,”then“hold,”tenere, would render the same, or at least similar service. But this implied not only different speech, but different thought.But here I should like to call attention to the long process through which a language must pass, before it could reduce“breathe”to“be”and form such a sentence as“It is warm.”Even an animal feels[pg 137]warmth, and can in various ways make known if it is overheated. But in all this it is only a question of feelings, not to ideas, and still less of language. Let us consider“warm.”Of course“warm”may represent a mere feeling, and then a simple panting would suffice to express it. That is communication, but not language. To think a word like warm, a root and an idea are necessary. Probably, and in spite of a few phonetic difficulties, the root was in this caseghar(ingharmá,θερμός), and this meant at first to be bright, to glitter, to shine, then to burn, to heat, to be warm; that is to say, the observing mind of man was able to abstract brightness from the sense-impressions produced by sun, fire, gold, and many other objects, and, letting everything else drop, to reach the idea of shining, then of being warm. These ideas, of course, do not exist on their own account anywhere in the world; they must be and have been constructed by man alone, never by an animal. Why? Because an animal does not possess what man possesses: the faculty of grasping the many as one, so as to form an idea and a word. Light or lighting, warmth or warming, exist nowhere in the world, and are nowhere given in sentient experience. Every object of sense exists individually, and is perceived as such individually, such as the sun, a torch, a stove; but heat in general, like everything general, is the product of our thought; its name is made by us, and is not given us.Of all this, of course, when we learn to speak as[pg 138]children, we have no suspicion. We learn the language made by others who came before us, and proceed from words to ideas, not from ideas to words. Whether the relation between ideas and words was a succession, it is hard to say, because no idea exists without a word, any more than a word without an idea. Word and idea exist through each other, beside each other, with each other; they are inseparable. We could as easily try to speak without thinking, as to think without speaking. It is at first difficult to grasp this. We are so accustomed to think silently, before speaking aloud, that we actually believe that the same is true, even of the first formation of ideas and words. Our so-called thinkingbeforespeaking, however, refers simply to reflection, or deliberation. It is something quite different, and occurs only with the aid of silent words that are in us, even if they are not uttered. Every person, particularly in his youth, believes that he cherishes within himself inexpressible feelings, or even thoughts. These are chiefly obscure feelings, and the expression of feelings has always been the most difficult task to be performed by language, because they must first pass through a phase of conception. If, however, they are actually ideas, they are such as have an old expression that is felt to be inconvenient, or inadequate, and must be replaced by a new one. We cannot do enough to rid ourselves of the old error, that thought is possible without words. We can, of course, repeat words without meaning; but that is not speaking,[pg 139]only making a noise. If any one, however, tells us that he can think quite well without words, let this silent thinker be suddenly interrupted, ask him of what he has thought in silence, and he will have to admit that it was of a dog, a horse, or a man—in short, of something that has a name. He need not utter these words—that has never been maintained, but he must have the ideas and their signs, otherwise there are not, and there cannot be for him, either ideas or things. How often we see children move their lips while they are thinking, that is, speaking without articulation. We can, of course, in case of necessity, use other signs; we can hold a dog on high and show him, but if we ask what is shown, we shall find that the actual dog is only a substitute for the abstract word“dog,”not the reverse, for a dog that is neither a spaniel, poodle, dachshund, etc., is nowhere to be found,in rerum natura, or in domestic life. These things, that give us so much trouble, were often quite clear to the ancient Hindus, for their usual word for“thing”ispadârtha; that is, meaning or purpose of the word. But men persist that they are able to think without speaking aloud, or in silence. They persist that thought comes first, and then speech; they persist that they can speak without thinking,—and that is often quite true,—and that they can also think without speaking, which must first be proved. Consider only what is necessary to form so simple a word as“white.”The idea of[pg 140]white must be formed at the same time, and this can only be done by dropping everything but the colour from the sense-perceptions of such things as snow, snowdrop, cloud, chalk, or sugar, then marking this colour, and, by means of a sign (in this case a vocal one), elevating it to a comprehensible idea, and at the same time to a word. How this vocal token originates it is often difficult, often quite impossible, to say. The simplest mode is, for example, if there be a word for snow, to take this and to generalise it, and then to call sugar, for instance, snow, or snowy, or snow-white. But the prior question, how snow was named, only recedes for a while, and must of course be answered for itself. Given a word for snow, it can easily be generalised. But how did we name snow? I believe that snow, which forms into balls in melting and coheres, was namednix nivis, from a rootsnighorsnu, denoting everything which melted and yet stuck together or cohered. But these are mere possibilities that may be true or false; yet their truth or falsity leave undisturbed the fundamental truth, that each individual perception, as, for example, this snow or this ice, first had to be brought under a general conception, before it could be clearly marked, or elevated to a word. In such a case men formed, by living and working together, a general conception and a root, for an oft-repeated action, such as forming into balls; and under this general concept they then conceived an individual impression like snow; that is, that which is formed[pg 141]into a ball, so that they had the sign, and with the sign the concept of snow, both inseparable in reality, distinguishable as they are in their origin. Having this, they could extend the concept in the vocal sign for snow, and speak of snowy things, just as they spoke of rosy cheeks. Only we must not imagine that it will ever be possible to make the origin of root sounds perfectly clear. This goes back to times that are entirely withdrawn from our observation. It goes back to times in which the first general ideas were formed, and thereby the first steps were taken in the development of the human mind. How is it possible that any recollection should have remained of such early times, or even any understanding of these mental processes? We may settle many things, but in the end nothing is left but to say: It is so, and remains so, whether we can explain it or not. The first general concept may no doubt have been, as Noiré affirmed, an often repeated action, such as striking, going, rubbing, chewing—acts that spontaneously present themselves to consciousness, as manifold and yet single, that is, as continually repeated, in which the mind consequently found the first natural stimulus to the formation of concepts. Why, however, rub was denoted bymar, eat byad, go byga, strike bytud, we may perhaps apprehend by feeling, but we could not account for or even conceive it. Here we must be content with the facts, especially as in other families of languages we find entirely different vocal signs. No doubt there was a[pg 142]reason for all of them; but this reason, even if we could prove it historically, would always remain incomprehensible to us, and only as fact would it have any significance for science.At any rate, we can now understand in what manner language offers us really historical documents of the oldest stages which we can reach in the development of the human mind. I say,“which we can reach,”for what lies beyond language does not exist for us. Nothing remains of the history ofhomo alalus. But every word represents a deed, an acquisition of the mind. If we take such a word as the Vedicdeva, there may have been many older words for god, but let us not imagine that a fetish or totem, whose etymology is or should be known, belongs to them. But at all events we know fromdevaand the Latindeus, that even before the Aryan separation a rootdyuordivhad been formed, as well as the conception“shine.”If this root was first used actively for the act of shedding light, of striking a spark, of shining, it was a step farther to transfer this originally active root to the image which the sky produces in us, and to call it a“shiner,”dyu(nom.dyaus), and then with a new upward tendency to call all bright and shining beings,deva,deus. Man started, therefore, from a generalisation, or an idea, and then under this idea grouped other single presentations, such as sun, moon, and stars, from which“shining”had been withdrawn, or abstracted, and thus obtained as a mental acquisition a sign for the[pg 143]idea“shine,”and further formations such asDyaus(shiner) anddeva(shining). Now observe howDyaus, as“shiner,”at the same time assumed the significance of an otherwise unknown agent or author of light, and developed into the ancient Dyaus, into Zeus and Jove; that is, into the oldest personal God of the still united Aryans. These are the true stages of the development of the human mind, which are susceptible of documentary proof in the archives of language.All this occurred, of course, on exclusively Aryan ground, while the Semitic and other branches went their own way in the formation of ideas, and of sounds for their ideas. Physiologically all these branches may have one and the same origin, but linguistically they have various beginnings, and have not, at least as far as scientific proof is possible, sprung from one and the same source. The common origin of all languages is not impossible, but it is and remains undemonstrable, and to science that is enough,sapienti sat. If we analyse the Semitic and other languages, we shall find in them as many ancient documents of the development of the human mind as in the Aryan. And just as we can clearly and plainly trace back the Frenchdieu, the Latindeus, the Sanskritdeva, divine, to the physical ideadiv,“shine,”so we can with thousands of other words, of which each indicates an act of will, and each gives us an insight into the development of our mind. Whether the Aryans were in possession of other ideas and sounds for[pg 144]“shine,”etc., before the formation ofdiv,Dyaus, anddeva, must be left uncertain; at all events we see how naturally the first consciousness of God developed in them, how the idea conditioned the language, and the language the idea, and both originated and continued inseparable one from the other.If we take any root of the Aryan language, we shall be astonished at the enormous number of its derivatives and the shades in their meaning. Here we see very plainly how thought has climbed forward upon words. We find, for instance, in the list of Sanskrit roots, the rootbharwith the simple meaning to bear. This we see plainly inbharâmi, inbibharmi, inbibharti(I bear, he bears), also inbhárasorbhartár(a bearer), andbhârás(load) andbhármanandbhartí(bearing), etc.But these forms, with all their cases and persons and tenses, give us no idea of the fruitfulness of a root, especially if we follow its ramifications in the cognate languages. In Greek we haveφέρω, in Latinfero, in Gothicbairan, in Englishto bear. The principal meanings which this root assumes are, to carry, carry hither, carry away, carry in, to support, to maintain, to bring forth, etc. We find simple derivatives such as the GermanBahre, Englishbier(Frenchbière, borrowed), and alsoφέρετρονandferetrum, as well asferculum(a litter). On the other hand there isφόρετρον(a porter's wages), andφaρέτρa(quiver). Andbarrowin wheel-barrow has the same origin.Burdenis that which is borne,[pg 145]then a load, as, for instance, the burden of years. A step farther takes us toφερτός(bearable) andἄφερτος(unbearable). We also find in Greekδύσφορος, which corresponds exactly to the Sanskritdurbhara, with the meaning“heavy to bear.”In Latin, however,fertussignifies fruitful, likefertilis,ferax. We say,“The earth bears”(trägt), andGetreide(grain) meant originally that borne (getragen) by the earth (hence in Middle High GermanGeträgede). So we have alsofar, the oldest corn grown by the Romans, derived fromfero, and along with itfārina(flour), if it stands forfarrina.Farmay originally, however, have also meant food, maintenance, and the Anglo-Saxonbere, the Englishbarley, are again related to it. Of course we have the same root in derivatives, such aslucifer,frugifer, in Greekκαρποφόροςorφερέκαρπος. In German it becomes a mere suffix, asfruchtbar,dankbar,scheinbar,urbar. Likeφόρος,φοράmeans also what is carried or brought, hence specially tribute, duty, tax. To bear a child was used in the sense of to bring forth, and from this we have many derivatives such asbirth,born, and Gothicberusjos(parents),parentesandbarn(the child), like the Greekφέρμα.

Chapter IV.Language And MindThe number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June number of theDeutsche Rundschauis a good example of these communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to give them publicity. That there was no lack of coarse letters as well, may be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand what attraction there can[pg 106]be in coarseness. The coarse work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their unsuitable attire.Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself, much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time, have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world, that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man, because here, as Lord Kelvin[pg 107]has shown, astronomical physics and geology have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary implies something beyond,i.e.an unbounded, until we arrive at the region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (On the Perception of the Infinite) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical beginnings of religion. When the Aryans[pg 108]felt, thought, and named their god, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a God. But, as stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely have had anything to object.His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show that the human mind was a mere phantom of man's making, that there are only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and therefore constituted, not theprius, but theposteriusof those bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me.“The mind,”so wrote the Horseherd,“is not aprius, it is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon.”Everything is now development, and there is no better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last work,The Ascent of Man, that“Order of events is history, and evolution is history”(p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is what I have been preaching in season[pg 109]and out of season for at least thirty years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had been content to say,“The human mind is also a development,”certainly no student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted him. But he says:“Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is aprius. But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken.”In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that“spirit,”in such expressions as“He has yielded up his spirit,”means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of“spirit”in such a phrase as“his spirit has departed.”But easy as it is to distinguish between[pg 110]spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not aprius, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerousembarras de richesse. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce[pg 111]a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic termÂtman, which I translate into“the Self”(neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase“the Self”(masculine).“Soul”has a too tender quality to be the equivalent ofÂtman.This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives. While theEsseof all objects is apercipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, theEsseof the self is apercipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta philosophers calledAvidyâ(not knowing, ignorance), or alsoMâyâ(appearance, or illusion), vanishes.[pg 112]The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simplyultra viresby every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things? The Vedânta philosophers consider theAvidyâ(ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such anAvidyâ, not to discover its origin; and then in theVidyâ, the Vedânta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed. How or when the Self came into this ignorance,Avidyâ, orMâyâ(illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So[pg 113]far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations,i.e.the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther. Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.In one place40he says,“I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.”In another place41[pg 114]he speaks still more plainly and says,“In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.”Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word“evolution”or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond,“Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before.”42Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before,“How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension.”In theContemporary Review, November, 1871,43Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology,“I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.”Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of[pg 115]ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers callsak-kid-ânanda, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed,i.e.that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (forkidis not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained[pg 116]behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line? It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness,[pg 117]or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.Above all things we must settle what we are really[pg 118]to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says,“Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own.”44Undoubtedly by“generically”is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a differencein kind, that isin genere, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its[pg 119]being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. Itisso—that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the[pg 120]genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and blustering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of a child develop in the following order:—After three weeks fear is manifested;After seven weeks social affections;After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;After five months sympathy;After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.45[pg 121]We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals, the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds, sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and lastly, in the anthropoid apes,[pg 122]remorse, shame, and a sense of the ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition, and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints either in embryological or physiological development, about the real historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery or out of a zoölogical garden.As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood, horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for kindling fire belonged to a higher period,post hominem natum, although it has been[pg 123]thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons, though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book onMental Evolution in Animals, has collected a large number of illustrations of animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading, and an English weekly,The Spectator, has from week to week given us similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception—a perception which in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although[pg 124]we can only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their sentient perceptions.Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed or had died, the Tasmanian languageipso factoceased; and even if any literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically, we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least fifteen hundred years before our chronology—what an age had elapsed before these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals are the same in these three languages,[pg 125]and yetkatvārassounds quite differently fromτέσσαρεςandquatuorand our four. The words for eight,octoin Latin,ὀκτώin Greek, andashtauin Sanskrit, are nearly identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (ἑκατόν), Sanskritsatám,centum. There is the formation and fixing of names for these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary, because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two tetrads, which, combined inasht-au,oct-o,ὀκτ-ώ, expressed the number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible thatasht-iwas a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four fingers of the hand without the thumb. Analogies occur in other families of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure general recognition and value for the name given to each number,[pg 126]we shall readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold of our thinking, have found their expression.Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life[pg 127]to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the[pg 128]makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar. Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such asPâninihave systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really constituted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists[pg 129]accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.46With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the learning of a language, as[pg 130]is done by every child, with the first invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different, and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.47They do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennæ of ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that“Any means by which information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language.”48That is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as it is, must be treated quite differently by the[pg 131]philologist, compared with the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy, even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after work, which signifies and communicates to every observer,“It is warm”or“I am tired,”and the man who can actually say,“It is warm,”“I am tired.”Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids' sieves.Just consider what effort was required to enable an Aryan man to say,“It is warm.”We shall say nothing of“it”; it may be a simple demonstrative stem, which needed little for its formation. But[pg 132]before this“i-t”or“id”could become an impersonal“it,”long-continued abstraction, or, if you prefer, long-continued polishing, was required. Take the wordis. Whence comes such a verbal form, Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest? Was the abstract“to be”onomatopoetically imitated? Often, of course, we cannot answer such questions at all. In this case, however, it is possible. The rootasinasti, that we now translate asis, means as we see fromas-u, breath, originallyto breathe. Whoever likes may see inas, to breathe, an imitation of hissing breath. We neither gain or lose anything by this; for the critical step always remains to be taken from a single imitation of a single act, to the comprehension of many such acts, at various places, and at various times, as one and the same, which is called abstraction or the forming of a concept.This may appear to be a very small step, just as the first slight deviation in a railroad track is scarcely a finger's breadth, but in time changes the course of the train to an entirely different part of the world. The formation of an idea, such as to be, or to become, or to take a still simpler one, such as four or eight, appears to us to be a very small matter, and yet it is this very small matter that distinguishes man from the animal, that pushed man forward and left the animal behind on his old track. Nay, more, this“concept”has caused much shaking of the head among philosophers of all times. That one and one are two, two and two, four, four and four, eight,[pg 133]eight and eight, sixteen, etc., appears to be so very easy, that we do not understand how such things can constitute an eternally intended distinction between man and animal. I have myself seen an ape so well trained that as the word“seven”was spoken, he picked up seven straws. But what is such child's play in comparison with the first formation of the idea of seven? Do you not see that the formation of such an abstract idea, isolating mere quantity apart from all qualities, requires a power of abstraction such as has never been displayed by an animal? If there were any languages now that actually had no word for seven, it would be a valuable confirmation of this view. I doubt only, whether the speakers of such languages could not call composition to their aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; but language—never.This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians, even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any danger there could be no fear. The facts are[pg 134]there and show us the right path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preëxisting conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man absolutely unthinkable. Language—as ethnologists should have learned—has neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds. That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such pantomimes asL'enfant prodigue. We have long known that imitations of sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by myself.49But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure, and that even Noiré'sclamor concomitansdoes not explain every case. Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language leaves a certain number of roots[pg 135]which are not mere sound-imitations, such as“bow wow,”or“moo moo.”There are people who have taken much pains to discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of the one or the other view is a useless undertaking. It appears to be the most reasonable plan to assume for the Aryan languages a period that approaches the Chinese, in which roots had the same sound and the same form as the corresponding noun, adjective, and verb. Even in Sanskrit roots appear at times still unchanged, although it is quite right that as soon as they take on grammatical functions, they should no longer be called roots. Much may be said in favour of both views, without arriving one step nearer our goal. If we now only remember that the whole Sanskrit language has been reduced to 121 primitive ideas, and that the roots denoting these (which are of course much more numerous) are not imitations of sound in the strict sense of the word, but sounds about whose origin we may say much but can prove little, we have at least aπου στῶfor our researches. I myself, like my deceased friend Noiré, have looked upon roots asclamor concomitans, that is, not as sound-imitations, but as actual sounds, uttered by men in common occupations, and to be heard even now. Why, however, the Aryans used and retained[pg 136]adfor eat,tanfor stretch,marfor rub,asfor breathe,stafor stand,gafor go, no human thought can find out; we must be content with the fact that it was so, and that a certain number of such roots—of course much greater than the 121 ideas expressed by them—constitute the kernels from which has sprouted the entire flora of the Indian mind.If we now return, to ouris,—Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest,—we see that it originally meant“to breathe out.”This blowing or breathing was then used for“life,”as inas-u, breath of life, and from life it lost its content until it could be applied to everything existing, and meant nothing more than the abstract“to be.”There are languages that possess no such pale word as“be”and could not form such a sentence as“It is warm.”The auxiliary verb“to have”is also lacking in many languages, especially the ancient, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and even classical Latin. If the words failed, the ideas failed as well, and such languages had to try and fulfil their requirements in other ways. If there was no such word as“be,”“stand”was employed; where there was no word for“have,”then“hold,”tenere, would render the same, or at least similar service. But this implied not only different speech, but different thought.But here I should like to call attention to the long process through which a language must pass, before it could reduce“breathe”to“be”and form such a sentence as“It is warm.”Even an animal feels[pg 137]warmth, and can in various ways make known if it is overheated. But in all this it is only a question of feelings, not to ideas, and still less of language. Let us consider“warm.”Of course“warm”may represent a mere feeling, and then a simple panting would suffice to express it. That is communication, but not language. To think a word like warm, a root and an idea are necessary. Probably, and in spite of a few phonetic difficulties, the root was in this caseghar(ingharmá,θερμός), and this meant at first to be bright, to glitter, to shine, then to burn, to heat, to be warm; that is to say, the observing mind of man was able to abstract brightness from the sense-impressions produced by sun, fire, gold, and many other objects, and, letting everything else drop, to reach the idea of shining, then of being warm. These ideas, of course, do not exist on their own account anywhere in the world; they must be and have been constructed by man alone, never by an animal. Why? Because an animal does not possess what man possesses: the faculty of grasping the many as one, so as to form an idea and a word. Light or lighting, warmth or warming, exist nowhere in the world, and are nowhere given in sentient experience. Every object of sense exists individually, and is perceived as such individually, such as the sun, a torch, a stove; but heat in general, like everything general, is the product of our thought; its name is made by us, and is not given us.Of all this, of course, when we learn to speak as[pg 138]children, we have no suspicion. We learn the language made by others who came before us, and proceed from words to ideas, not from ideas to words. Whether the relation between ideas and words was a succession, it is hard to say, because no idea exists without a word, any more than a word without an idea. Word and idea exist through each other, beside each other, with each other; they are inseparable. We could as easily try to speak without thinking, as to think without speaking. It is at first difficult to grasp this. We are so accustomed to think silently, before speaking aloud, that we actually believe that the same is true, even of the first formation of ideas and words. Our so-called thinkingbeforespeaking, however, refers simply to reflection, or deliberation. It is something quite different, and occurs only with the aid of silent words that are in us, even if they are not uttered. Every person, particularly in his youth, believes that he cherishes within himself inexpressible feelings, or even thoughts. These are chiefly obscure feelings, and the expression of feelings has always been the most difficult task to be performed by language, because they must first pass through a phase of conception. If, however, they are actually ideas, they are such as have an old expression that is felt to be inconvenient, or inadequate, and must be replaced by a new one. We cannot do enough to rid ourselves of the old error, that thought is possible without words. We can, of course, repeat words without meaning; but that is not speaking,[pg 139]only making a noise. If any one, however, tells us that he can think quite well without words, let this silent thinker be suddenly interrupted, ask him of what he has thought in silence, and he will have to admit that it was of a dog, a horse, or a man—in short, of something that has a name. He need not utter these words—that has never been maintained, but he must have the ideas and their signs, otherwise there are not, and there cannot be for him, either ideas or things. How often we see children move their lips while they are thinking, that is, speaking without articulation. We can, of course, in case of necessity, use other signs; we can hold a dog on high and show him, but if we ask what is shown, we shall find that the actual dog is only a substitute for the abstract word“dog,”not the reverse, for a dog that is neither a spaniel, poodle, dachshund, etc., is nowhere to be found,in rerum natura, or in domestic life. These things, that give us so much trouble, were often quite clear to the ancient Hindus, for their usual word for“thing”ispadârtha; that is, meaning or purpose of the word. But men persist that they are able to think without speaking aloud, or in silence. They persist that thought comes first, and then speech; they persist that they can speak without thinking,—and that is often quite true,—and that they can also think without speaking, which must first be proved. Consider only what is necessary to form so simple a word as“white.”The idea of[pg 140]white must be formed at the same time, and this can only be done by dropping everything but the colour from the sense-perceptions of such things as snow, snowdrop, cloud, chalk, or sugar, then marking this colour, and, by means of a sign (in this case a vocal one), elevating it to a comprehensible idea, and at the same time to a word. How this vocal token originates it is often difficult, often quite impossible, to say. The simplest mode is, for example, if there be a word for snow, to take this and to generalise it, and then to call sugar, for instance, snow, or snowy, or snow-white. But the prior question, how snow was named, only recedes for a while, and must of course be answered for itself. Given a word for snow, it can easily be generalised. But how did we name snow? I believe that snow, which forms into balls in melting and coheres, was namednix nivis, from a rootsnighorsnu, denoting everything which melted and yet stuck together or cohered. But these are mere possibilities that may be true or false; yet their truth or falsity leave undisturbed the fundamental truth, that each individual perception, as, for example, this snow or this ice, first had to be brought under a general conception, before it could be clearly marked, or elevated to a word. In such a case men formed, by living and working together, a general conception and a root, for an oft-repeated action, such as forming into balls; and under this general concept they then conceived an individual impression like snow; that is, that which is formed[pg 141]into a ball, so that they had the sign, and with the sign the concept of snow, both inseparable in reality, distinguishable as they are in their origin. Having this, they could extend the concept in the vocal sign for snow, and speak of snowy things, just as they spoke of rosy cheeks. Only we must not imagine that it will ever be possible to make the origin of root sounds perfectly clear. This goes back to times that are entirely withdrawn from our observation. It goes back to times in which the first general ideas were formed, and thereby the first steps were taken in the development of the human mind. How is it possible that any recollection should have remained of such early times, or even any understanding of these mental processes? We may settle many things, but in the end nothing is left but to say: It is so, and remains so, whether we can explain it or not. The first general concept may no doubt have been, as Noiré affirmed, an often repeated action, such as striking, going, rubbing, chewing—acts that spontaneously present themselves to consciousness, as manifold and yet single, that is, as continually repeated, in which the mind consequently found the first natural stimulus to the formation of concepts. Why, however, rub was denoted bymar, eat byad, go byga, strike bytud, we may perhaps apprehend by feeling, but we could not account for or even conceive it. Here we must be content with the facts, especially as in other families of languages we find entirely different vocal signs. No doubt there was a[pg 142]reason for all of them; but this reason, even if we could prove it historically, would always remain incomprehensible to us, and only as fact would it have any significance for science.At any rate, we can now understand in what manner language offers us really historical documents of the oldest stages which we can reach in the development of the human mind. I say,“which we can reach,”for what lies beyond language does not exist for us. Nothing remains of the history ofhomo alalus. But every word represents a deed, an acquisition of the mind. If we take such a word as the Vedicdeva, there may have been many older words for god, but let us not imagine that a fetish or totem, whose etymology is or should be known, belongs to them. But at all events we know fromdevaand the Latindeus, that even before the Aryan separation a rootdyuordivhad been formed, as well as the conception“shine.”If this root was first used actively for the act of shedding light, of striking a spark, of shining, it was a step farther to transfer this originally active root to the image which the sky produces in us, and to call it a“shiner,”dyu(nom.dyaus), and then with a new upward tendency to call all bright and shining beings,deva,deus. Man started, therefore, from a generalisation, or an idea, and then under this idea grouped other single presentations, such as sun, moon, and stars, from which“shining”had been withdrawn, or abstracted, and thus obtained as a mental acquisition a sign for the[pg 143]idea“shine,”and further formations such asDyaus(shiner) anddeva(shining). Now observe howDyaus, as“shiner,”at the same time assumed the significance of an otherwise unknown agent or author of light, and developed into the ancient Dyaus, into Zeus and Jove; that is, into the oldest personal God of the still united Aryans. These are the true stages of the development of the human mind, which are susceptible of documentary proof in the archives of language.All this occurred, of course, on exclusively Aryan ground, while the Semitic and other branches went their own way in the formation of ideas, and of sounds for their ideas. Physiologically all these branches may have one and the same origin, but linguistically they have various beginnings, and have not, at least as far as scientific proof is possible, sprung from one and the same source. The common origin of all languages is not impossible, but it is and remains undemonstrable, and to science that is enough,sapienti sat. If we analyse the Semitic and other languages, we shall find in them as many ancient documents of the development of the human mind as in the Aryan. And just as we can clearly and plainly trace back the Frenchdieu, the Latindeus, the Sanskritdeva, divine, to the physical ideadiv,“shine,”so we can with thousands of other words, of which each indicates an act of will, and each gives us an insight into the development of our mind. Whether the Aryans were in possession of other ideas and sounds for[pg 144]“shine,”etc., before the formation ofdiv,Dyaus, anddeva, must be left uncertain; at all events we see how naturally the first consciousness of God developed in them, how the idea conditioned the language, and the language the idea, and both originated and continued inseparable one from the other.If we take any root of the Aryan language, we shall be astonished at the enormous number of its derivatives and the shades in their meaning. Here we see very plainly how thought has climbed forward upon words. We find, for instance, in the list of Sanskrit roots, the rootbharwith the simple meaning to bear. This we see plainly inbharâmi, inbibharmi, inbibharti(I bear, he bears), also inbhárasorbhartár(a bearer), andbhârás(load) andbhármanandbhartí(bearing), etc.But these forms, with all their cases and persons and tenses, give us no idea of the fruitfulness of a root, especially if we follow its ramifications in the cognate languages. In Greek we haveφέρω, in Latinfero, in Gothicbairan, in Englishto bear. The principal meanings which this root assumes are, to carry, carry hither, carry away, carry in, to support, to maintain, to bring forth, etc. We find simple derivatives such as the GermanBahre, Englishbier(Frenchbière, borrowed), and alsoφέρετρονandferetrum, as well asferculum(a litter). On the other hand there isφόρετρον(a porter's wages), andφaρέτρa(quiver). Andbarrowin wheel-barrow has the same origin.Burdenis that which is borne,[pg 145]then a load, as, for instance, the burden of years. A step farther takes us toφερτός(bearable) andἄφερτος(unbearable). We also find in Greekδύσφορος, which corresponds exactly to the Sanskritdurbhara, with the meaning“heavy to bear.”In Latin, however,fertussignifies fruitful, likefertilis,ferax. We say,“The earth bears”(trägt), andGetreide(grain) meant originally that borne (getragen) by the earth (hence in Middle High GermanGeträgede). So we have alsofar, the oldest corn grown by the Romans, derived fromfero, and along with itfārina(flour), if it stands forfarrina.Farmay originally, however, have also meant food, maintenance, and the Anglo-Saxonbere, the Englishbarley, are again related to it. Of course we have the same root in derivatives, such aslucifer,frugifer, in Greekκαρποφόροςorφερέκαρπος. In German it becomes a mere suffix, asfruchtbar,dankbar,scheinbar,urbar. Likeφόρος,φοράmeans also what is carried or brought, hence specially tribute, duty, tax. To bear a child was used in the sense of to bring forth, and from this we have many derivatives such asbirth,born, and Gothicberusjos(parents),parentesandbarn(the child), like the Greekφέρμα.

The number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June number of theDeutsche Rundschauis a good example of these communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to give them publicity. That there was no lack of coarse letters as well, may be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand what attraction there can[pg 106]be in coarseness. The coarse work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their unsuitable attire.

Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself, much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.

I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time, have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world, that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man, because here, as Lord Kelvin[pg 107]has shown, astronomical physics and geology have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary implies something beyond,i.e.an unbounded, until we arrive at the region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (On the Perception of the Infinite) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical beginnings of religion. When the Aryans[pg 108]felt, thought, and named their god, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a God. But, as stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely have had anything to object.

His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show that the human mind was a mere phantom of man's making, that there are only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and therefore constituted, not theprius, but theposteriusof those bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me.“The mind,”so wrote the Horseherd,“is not aprius, it is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon.”Everything is now development, and there is no better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last work,The Ascent of Man, that“Order of events is history, and evolution is history”(p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is what I have been preaching in season[pg 109]and out of season for at least thirty years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had been content to say,“The human mind is also a development,”certainly no student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted him. But he says:“Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is aprius. But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken.”

In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an assertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that“spirit,”in such expressions as“He has yielded up his spirit,”means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of“spirit”in such a phrase as“his spirit has departed.”But easy as it is to distinguish between[pg 110]spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not aprius, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerousembarras de richesse. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.

It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce[pg 111]a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic termÂtman, which I translate into“the Self”(neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase“the Self”(masculine).“Soul”has a too tender quality to be the equivalent ofÂtman.

This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives. While theEsseof all objects is apercipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, theEsseof the self is apercipere, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedânta philosophers calledAvidyâ(not knowing, ignorance), or alsoMâyâ(appearance, or illusion), vanishes.

The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simplyultra viresby every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things? The Vedânta philosophers consider theAvidyâ(ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such anAvidyâ, not to discover its origin; and then in theVidyâ, the Vedânta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidyâ could be destroyed. How or when the Self came into this ignorance,Avidyâ, orMâyâ(illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedânta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.

How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So[pg 113]far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations,i.e.the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the assumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther. Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally passed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.

In one place40he says,“I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself.”In another place41[pg 114]he speaks still more plainly and says,“In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated.”Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word“evolution”or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond,“Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before.”42Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before,“How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension.”In theContemporary Review, November, 1871,43Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology,“I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected.”Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of[pg 115]ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers callsak-kid-ânanda, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed,i.e.that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.

If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (forkidis not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals—and this class includes the whole of them—that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have passed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained[pg 116]behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not grass grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cucumber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line? It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?

These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness,[pg 117]or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions—otherwise we only end by substituting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds—a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.

Above all things we must settle what we are really[pg 118]to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the assertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says,“Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own.”44Undoubtedly by“generically”is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a differencein kind, that isin genere, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.

What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to shine, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its[pg 119]being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. Itisso—that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere analogies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy documents, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?

Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the[pg 120]genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and blustering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of a child develop in the following order:—

After three weeks fear is manifested;

After seven weeks social affections;

After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;

After five months sympathy;

After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;

After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.45

We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.

The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals, the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds, sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and lastly, in the anthropoid apes,[pg 122]remorse, shame, and a sense of the ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition, and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints either in embryological or physiological development, about the real historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery or out of a zoölogical garden.

As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood, horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for kindling fire belonged to a higher period,post hominem natum, although it has been[pg 123]thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons, though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book onMental Evolution in Animals, has collected a large number of illustrations of animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading, and an English weekly,The Spectator, has from week to week given us similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.

What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception—a perception which in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although[pg 124]we can only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their sentient perceptions.

Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed or had died, the Tasmanian languageipso factoceased; and even if any literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically, we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least fifteen hundred years before our chronology—what an age had elapsed before these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals are the same in these three languages,[pg 125]and yetkatvārassounds quite differently fromτέσσαρεςandquatuorand our four. The words for eight,octoin Latin,ὀκτώin Greek, andashtauin Sanskrit, are nearly identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (ἑκατόν), Sanskritsatám,centum. There is the formation and fixing of names for these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary, because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two tetrads, which, combined inasht-au,oct-o,ὀκτ-ώ, expressed the number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible thatasht-iwas a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four fingers of the hand without the thumb. Analogies occur in other families of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure general recognition and value for the name given to each number,[pg 126]we shall readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold of our thinking, have found their expression.

Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they constitute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans constitute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great masses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to assume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life[pg 127]to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again mere assumption, and as bare of all analogy as the attempt to see in the salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the[pg 128]makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.

But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the butterfly from the caterpillar. Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such asPâninihave systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really constituted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists[pg 129]accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.46With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they asserted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in classical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have constituted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?

These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the learning of a language, as[pg 130]is done by every child, with the first invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different, and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.47They do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennæ of ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that“Any means by which information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language.”48That is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as it is, must be treated quite differently by the[pg 131]philologist, compared with the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy, even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after work, which signifies and communicates to every observer,“It is warm”or“I am tired,”and the man who can actually say,“It is warm,”“I am tired.”Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids' sieves.

Just consider what effort was required to enable an Aryan man to say,“It is warm.”We shall say nothing of“it”; it may be a simple demonstrative stem, which needed little for its formation. But[pg 132]before this“i-t”or“id”could become an impersonal“it,”long-continued abstraction, or, if you prefer, long-continued polishing, was required. Take the wordis. Whence comes such a verbal form, Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest? Was the abstract“to be”onomatopoetically imitated? Often, of course, we cannot answer such questions at all. In this case, however, it is possible. The rootasinasti, that we now translate asis, means as we see fromas-u, breath, originallyto breathe. Whoever likes may see inas, to breathe, an imitation of hissing breath. We neither gain or lose anything by this; for the critical step always remains to be taken from a single imitation of a single act, to the comprehension of many such acts, at various places, and at various times, as one and the same, which is called abstraction or the forming of a concept.

This may appear to be a very small step, just as the first slight deviation in a railroad track is scarcely a finger's breadth, but in time changes the course of the train to an entirely different part of the world. The formation of an idea, such as to be, or to become, or to take a still simpler one, such as four or eight, appears to us to be a very small matter, and yet it is this very small matter that distinguishes man from the animal, that pushed man forward and left the animal behind on his old track. Nay, more, this“concept”has caused much shaking of the head among philosophers of all times. That one and one are two, two and two, four, four and four, eight,[pg 133]eight and eight, sixteen, etc., appears to be so very easy, that we do not understand how such things can constitute an eternally intended distinction between man and animal. I have myself seen an ape so well trained that as the word“seven”was spoken, he picked up seven straws. But what is such child's play in comparison with the first formation of the idea of seven? Do you not see that the formation of such an abstract idea, isolating mere quantity apart from all qualities, requires a power of abstraction such as has never been displayed by an animal? If there were any languages now that actually had no word for seven, it would be a valuable confirmation of this view. I doubt only, whether the speakers of such languages could not call composition to their aid, and attain the idea of seven by two, two, two, plus one. We still know too little of these languages and of those who speak them. Of what takes place in animals we know absolutely nothing, and nowhere would a dose of agnosticism be more useful than here. Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; but language—never.

This fact, as a bare undeniable fact, should have startled the Darwinians, even as it startled the venerable Darwin, when I simply set the facts before him, and he immediately drew the necessary consequences. Of any danger there could be no fear. The facts are[pg 134]there and show us the right path. And it is not only simple facts, but the consequences of preëxisting conditions which render every so-called transition from animal to man absolutely unthinkable. Language—as ethnologists should have learned—has neither originated from artificial signs, nor from imitation of sounds. That we can communicate with signs without saying a word, that we even now use signs in our speech, is best learned in southern races, and in such pantomimes asL'enfant prodigue. We have long known that imitations of sound exist in greater or lesser numbers in every language, and how far they can reach has probably never been shown in such detail as by myself.49But that our Aryan tongues, and also the Semitic, and all others that have been studied scientifically, originated from roots, is now generally known and recognised. That these roots may in remote times have contained an element of imitation, we may readily concede, for it is really self-evident; only we should not from the beginning bar our way by conceiving them as mere imitations of sound. If this were so, the problem of language would long since have been solved, and the first formation of ideas would require no further reflection. It must be conceded on the other side that the origin of roots still contains much that is obscure, and that even Noiré'sclamor concomitansdoes not explain every case. Only it is firmly established that a scientific analysis of language leaves a certain number of roots[pg 135]which are not mere sound-imitations, such as“bow wow,”or“moo moo.”There are people who have taken much pains to discover whether the roots ever had an independent existence, or if they have merely been scientifically abstracted, or shelled out of the words in which they occur. These are vain questions, for we can never of course come at the matter historically, and the attempt to prove the necessity of the one or the other view is a useless undertaking. It appears to be the most reasonable plan to assume for the Aryan languages a period that approaches the Chinese, in which roots had the same sound and the same form as the corresponding noun, adjective, and verb. Even in Sanskrit roots appear at times still unchanged, although it is quite right that as soon as they take on grammatical functions, they should no longer be called roots. Much may be said in favour of both views, without arriving one step nearer our goal. If we now only remember that the whole Sanskrit language has been reduced to 121 primitive ideas, and that the roots denoting these (which are of course much more numerous) are not imitations of sound in the strict sense of the word, but sounds about whose origin we may say much but can prove little, we have at least aπου στῶfor our researches. I myself, like my deceased friend Noiré, have looked upon roots asclamor concomitans, that is, not as sound-imitations, but as actual sounds, uttered by men in common occupations, and to be heard even now. Why, however, the Aryans used and retained[pg 136]adfor eat,tanfor stretch,marfor rub,asfor breathe,stafor stand,gafor go, no human thought can find out; we must be content with the fact that it was so, and that a certain number of such roots—of course much greater than the 121 ideas expressed by them—constitute the kernels from which has sprouted the entire flora of the Indian mind.

If we now return, to ouris,—Sanskritas-ti, Greekἔστι, Latinest,—we see that it originally meant“to breathe out.”This blowing or breathing was then used for“life,”as inas-u, breath of life, and from life it lost its content until it could be applied to everything existing, and meant nothing more than the abstract“to be.”There are languages that possess no such pale word as“be”and could not form such a sentence as“It is warm.”The auxiliary verb“to have”is also lacking in many languages, especially the ancient, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and even classical Latin. If the words failed, the ideas failed as well, and such languages had to try and fulfil their requirements in other ways. If there was no such word as“be,”“stand”was employed; where there was no word for“have,”then“hold,”tenere, would render the same, or at least similar service. But this implied not only different speech, but different thought.

But here I should like to call attention to the long process through which a language must pass, before it could reduce“breathe”to“be”and form such a sentence as“It is warm.”Even an animal feels[pg 137]warmth, and can in various ways make known if it is overheated. But in all this it is only a question of feelings, not to ideas, and still less of language. Let us consider“warm.”Of course“warm”may represent a mere feeling, and then a simple panting would suffice to express it. That is communication, but not language. To think a word like warm, a root and an idea are necessary. Probably, and in spite of a few phonetic difficulties, the root was in this caseghar(ingharmá,θερμός), and this meant at first to be bright, to glitter, to shine, then to burn, to heat, to be warm; that is to say, the observing mind of man was able to abstract brightness from the sense-impressions produced by sun, fire, gold, and many other objects, and, letting everything else drop, to reach the idea of shining, then of being warm. These ideas, of course, do not exist on their own account anywhere in the world; they must be and have been constructed by man alone, never by an animal. Why? Because an animal does not possess what man possesses: the faculty of grasping the many as one, so as to form an idea and a word. Light or lighting, warmth or warming, exist nowhere in the world, and are nowhere given in sentient experience. Every object of sense exists individually, and is perceived as such individually, such as the sun, a torch, a stove; but heat in general, like everything general, is the product of our thought; its name is made by us, and is not given us.

Of all this, of course, when we learn to speak as[pg 138]children, we have no suspicion. We learn the language made by others who came before us, and proceed from words to ideas, not from ideas to words. Whether the relation between ideas and words was a succession, it is hard to say, because no idea exists without a word, any more than a word without an idea. Word and idea exist through each other, beside each other, with each other; they are inseparable. We could as easily try to speak without thinking, as to think without speaking. It is at first difficult to grasp this. We are so accustomed to think silently, before speaking aloud, that we actually believe that the same is true, even of the first formation of ideas and words. Our so-called thinkingbeforespeaking, however, refers simply to reflection, or deliberation. It is something quite different, and occurs only with the aid of silent words that are in us, even if they are not uttered. Every person, particularly in his youth, believes that he cherishes within himself inexpressible feelings, or even thoughts. These are chiefly obscure feelings, and the expression of feelings has always been the most difficult task to be performed by language, because they must first pass through a phase of conception. If, however, they are actually ideas, they are such as have an old expression that is felt to be inconvenient, or inadequate, and must be replaced by a new one. We cannot do enough to rid ourselves of the old error, that thought is possible without words. We can, of course, repeat words without meaning; but that is not speaking,[pg 139]only making a noise. If any one, however, tells us that he can think quite well without words, let this silent thinker be suddenly interrupted, ask him of what he has thought in silence, and he will have to admit that it was of a dog, a horse, or a man—in short, of something that has a name. He need not utter these words—that has never been maintained, but he must have the ideas and their signs, otherwise there are not, and there cannot be for him, either ideas or things. How often we see children move their lips while they are thinking, that is, speaking without articulation. We can, of course, in case of necessity, use other signs; we can hold a dog on high and show him, but if we ask what is shown, we shall find that the actual dog is only a substitute for the abstract word“dog,”not the reverse, for a dog that is neither a spaniel, poodle, dachshund, etc., is nowhere to be found,in rerum natura, or in domestic life. These things, that give us so much trouble, were often quite clear to the ancient Hindus, for their usual word for“thing”ispadârtha; that is, meaning or purpose of the word. But men persist that they are able to think without speaking aloud, or in silence. They persist that thought comes first, and then speech; they persist that they can speak without thinking,—and that is often quite true,—and that they can also think without speaking, which must first be proved. Consider only what is necessary to form so simple a word as“white.”The idea of[pg 140]white must be formed at the same time, and this can only be done by dropping everything but the colour from the sense-perceptions of such things as snow, snowdrop, cloud, chalk, or sugar, then marking this colour, and, by means of a sign (in this case a vocal one), elevating it to a comprehensible idea, and at the same time to a word. How this vocal token originates it is often difficult, often quite impossible, to say. The simplest mode is, for example, if there be a word for snow, to take this and to generalise it, and then to call sugar, for instance, snow, or snowy, or snow-white. But the prior question, how snow was named, only recedes for a while, and must of course be answered for itself. Given a word for snow, it can easily be generalised. But how did we name snow? I believe that snow, which forms into balls in melting and coheres, was namednix nivis, from a rootsnighorsnu, denoting everything which melted and yet stuck together or cohered. But these are mere possibilities that may be true or false; yet their truth or falsity leave undisturbed the fundamental truth, that each individual perception, as, for example, this snow or this ice, first had to be brought under a general conception, before it could be clearly marked, or elevated to a word. In such a case men formed, by living and working together, a general conception and a root, for an oft-repeated action, such as forming into balls; and under this general concept they then conceived an individual impression like snow; that is, that which is formed[pg 141]into a ball, so that they had the sign, and with the sign the concept of snow, both inseparable in reality, distinguishable as they are in their origin. Having this, they could extend the concept in the vocal sign for snow, and speak of snowy things, just as they spoke of rosy cheeks. Only we must not imagine that it will ever be possible to make the origin of root sounds perfectly clear. This goes back to times that are entirely withdrawn from our observation. It goes back to times in which the first general ideas were formed, and thereby the first steps were taken in the development of the human mind. How is it possible that any recollection should have remained of such early times, or even any understanding of these mental processes? We may settle many things, but in the end nothing is left but to say: It is so, and remains so, whether we can explain it or not. The first general concept may no doubt have been, as Noiré affirmed, an often repeated action, such as striking, going, rubbing, chewing—acts that spontaneously present themselves to consciousness, as manifold and yet single, that is, as continually repeated, in which the mind consequently found the first natural stimulus to the formation of concepts. Why, however, rub was denoted bymar, eat byad, go byga, strike bytud, we may perhaps apprehend by feeling, but we could not account for or even conceive it. Here we must be content with the facts, especially as in other families of languages we find entirely different vocal signs. No doubt there was a[pg 142]reason for all of them; but this reason, even if we could prove it historically, would always remain incomprehensible to us, and only as fact would it have any significance for science.

At any rate, we can now understand in what manner language offers us really historical documents of the oldest stages which we can reach in the development of the human mind. I say,“which we can reach,”for what lies beyond language does not exist for us. Nothing remains of the history ofhomo alalus. But every word represents a deed, an acquisition of the mind. If we take such a word as the Vedicdeva, there may have been many older words for god, but let us not imagine that a fetish or totem, whose etymology is or should be known, belongs to them. But at all events we know fromdevaand the Latindeus, that even before the Aryan separation a rootdyuordivhad been formed, as well as the conception“shine.”If this root was first used actively for the act of shedding light, of striking a spark, of shining, it was a step farther to transfer this originally active root to the image which the sky produces in us, and to call it a“shiner,”dyu(nom.dyaus), and then with a new upward tendency to call all bright and shining beings,deva,deus. Man started, therefore, from a generalisation, or an idea, and then under this idea grouped other single presentations, such as sun, moon, and stars, from which“shining”had been withdrawn, or abstracted, and thus obtained as a mental acquisition a sign for the[pg 143]idea“shine,”and further formations such asDyaus(shiner) anddeva(shining). Now observe howDyaus, as“shiner,”at the same time assumed the significance of an otherwise unknown agent or author of light, and developed into the ancient Dyaus, into Zeus and Jove; that is, into the oldest personal God of the still united Aryans. These are the true stages of the development of the human mind, which are susceptible of documentary proof in the archives of language.

All this occurred, of course, on exclusively Aryan ground, while the Semitic and other branches went their own way in the formation of ideas, and of sounds for their ideas. Physiologically all these branches may have one and the same origin, but linguistically they have various beginnings, and have not, at least as far as scientific proof is possible, sprung from one and the same source. The common origin of all languages is not impossible, but it is and remains undemonstrable, and to science that is enough,sapienti sat. If we analyse the Semitic and other languages, we shall find in them as many ancient documents of the development of the human mind as in the Aryan. And just as we can clearly and plainly trace back the Frenchdieu, the Latindeus, the Sanskritdeva, divine, to the physical ideadiv,“shine,”so we can with thousands of other words, of which each indicates an act of will, and each gives us an insight into the development of our mind. Whether the Aryans were in possession of other ideas and sounds for[pg 144]“shine,”etc., before the formation ofdiv,Dyaus, anddeva, must be left uncertain; at all events we see how naturally the first consciousness of God developed in them, how the idea conditioned the language, and the language the idea, and both originated and continued inseparable one from the other.

If we take any root of the Aryan language, we shall be astonished at the enormous number of its derivatives and the shades in their meaning. Here we see very plainly how thought has climbed forward upon words. We find, for instance, in the list of Sanskrit roots, the rootbharwith the simple meaning to bear. This we see plainly inbharâmi, inbibharmi, inbibharti(I bear, he bears), also inbhárasorbhartár(a bearer), andbhârás(load) andbhármanandbhartí(bearing), etc.

But these forms, with all their cases and persons and tenses, give us no idea of the fruitfulness of a root, especially if we follow its ramifications in the cognate languages. In Greek we haveφέρω, in Latinfero, in Gothicbairan, in Englishto bear. The principal meanings which this root assumes are, to carry, carry hither, carry away, carry in, to support, to maintain, to bring forth, etc. We find simple derivatives such as the GermanBahre, Englishbier(Frenchbière, borrowed), and alsoφέρετρονandferetrum, as well asferculum(a litter). On the other hand there isφόρετρον(a porter's wages), andφaρέτρa(quiver). Andbarrowin wheel-barrow has the same origin.Burdenis that which is borne,[pg 145]then a load, as, for instance, the burden of years. A step farther takes us toφερτός(bearable) andἄφερτος(unbearable). We also find in Greekδύσφορος, which corresponds exactly to the Sanskritdurbhara, with the meaning“heavy to bear.”In Latin, however,fertussignifies fruitful, likefertilis,ferax. We say,“The earth bears”(trägt), andGetreide(grain) meant originally that borne (getragen) by the earth (hence in Middle High GermanGeträgede). So we have alsofar, the oldest corn grown by the Romans, derived fromfero, and along with itfārina(flour), if it stands forfarrina.Farmay originally, however, have also meant food, maintenance, and the Anglo-Saxonbere, the Englishbarley, are again related to it. Of course we have the same root in derivatives, such aslucifer,frugifer, in Greekκαρποφόροςorφερέκαρπος. In German it becomes a mere suffix, asfruchtbar,dankbar,scheinbar,urbar. Likeφόρος,φοράmeans also what is carried or brought, hence specially tribute, duty, tax. To bear a child was used in the sense of to bring forth, and from this we have many derivatives such asbirth,born, and Gothicberusjos(parents),parentesandbarn(the child), like the Greekφέρμα.

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