Mental Evolution in Man 49

Mental Evolution in Man 49

“In the portion of the essay relating to the Coptic, it was observed:

‘What are called the auxiliary and substantive verbs in Coptic are

still more remote from all essential verbal character (than the

so-called verbal roots). On examination they will almost invariably be

found to be articles, pronouns, particles, or abstract nouns, and to

derive their supposed verbal functions entirely from their accessories,

or from what they imply.’ In fact any one who examines a good Coptic

grammar or dictionary will find that there is nothing formally

corresponding to our _am_, _art_, _is_, _was_, &c., though there is a

counterpart to Lat. _fieri_ (_sthopi_) and another to _poni_ (_chi_,

neuter passive of _che_); both occasionally rendered _to be_, which,

however, is not their radical import. The Egyptians were not, however,

quite destitute of resources in this matter, but had at least half a

dozen methods of rendering the Greek verb-substantive when they wished

to do so. The element most commonly employed is the demonstrative _pe_,

_te_, _ne_; used also in a slightly modified form for the definite

article; _pe_ = is, having reference to a subject in the singular

masculine; _te_, to a singular feminine; and _ne_ = are, to both

genders in the plural. The past tense is indicated by the addition of a

particle expressing remoteness. Here, then, we find as the counterpart

of the verb-substantive an element totally foreign to all the received

ideas of a verb; and that instead of its being deemed necessary to

say in formal terms ‘Petrus est,’ ‘Maria est,’ ‘Homines sunt,’ it is

quite sufficient, and perfectly intelligible, to say, ‘Petrus hic,’

‘Maria hæc,’ ‘Homines hi.’ The above forms, according to Champollion

and other investigators of ancient hieroglyphics, occur in the oldest

known monumental inscriptions, showing plainly that the ideas of the

ancient Egyptians as to the method of expressing the category _to be_,

did not exactly accord with those of some modern grammarians.... Every

Semitic scholar knows that personal pronouns are employed to represent

the verb-substantive in all the known dialects, exactly as in Coptic,

but with less variety of modification. In this construction it is not

necessary that the pronoun should be of the same person as the subject

of the proposition. It is optional in most dialects to say either _ego

ego, nos nos_, for _ego sum, nos sumus_, or _ego ille, nos illi_. The

phrase ‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’ is, in the Syriac version,

literally ‘You they (_i.e._ the persons constituting) the salt of the

earth.’ Nor is this employment of the personal pronoun confined to the

dialects above specified, it being equally found in Basque, in Galla,

in Turco-Tartarian, and various American languages.... It is true

that the Malayan, Javanese, and Malagassy grammarians talk of words

signifying _to be_; but an attentive comparison of the elements which

they profess to give as such, shows clearly that they are no verbs at

all, but simply pronouns or indeclinable particles, commonly indicating

the time, place, or manner of the specified action or relation. It is

not therefore easy to conceive how the mind of a Philippine islander,

or of any other person, can supply a word totally unknown to it, and

which there is not a particle of evidence to show that it was ever

thought of.... A verb-substantive, such as is commonly conceived,

vivifying all connected speech, and binding together the terms of every

logical proposition, is much upon a footing with the phlogiston of

the chemists of the last generation, regarded as a necessary pabulum

of combustion, that is to say, _vox et præterea nihil_.... If a given

subject be ‘I,’ ‘thou,’ ‘he,’ ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘one;’ if it be ‘here,’

‘there,’ ‘yonder,’ ‘thus,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘by;’ if it ‘sits,’

‘stands,’ ‘remains,’ or ‘appears,’ we need no ghost to tell us that it

_is_, nor any grammarian or metaphysician to proclaim that recondite

fact in formal terms.”[248]

 

* * * * *

 

Having thus briefly considered the philology of predicative words, we

must next proceed to the not less important matter of the philology

of predication itself. And here we shall find that the evidence is

sufficiently definite. We have already seen good reason for concluding

that what Grimm has called the “antediluvian” pronominal roots were the

phonetic equivalents of gesture-signs—or rather, that they implied

accompanying gesture-signs for the conveyance of their meaning. Now, it

is on all hands allowed that these pronominal roots, or demonstrative

elements, afterwards became attached to nouns and verbs as affixes or

suffixes, and so in older languages constitute the machinery both of

declension and conjugation. Thus, we can trace back, stage by stage,

the form of predication as it occurs in the most highly developed, or

inflective, languages, to that earliest stage of language in general,

which I have called the indicative. In order to show this somewhat more

in detail, I will begin by sketching these several stages, and then

illustrate the earliest of them that still happen to survive by quoting

the modes of predication which they actually present.

 

As we thus trace language backwards, its structure is found to

undergo the following simplification. First of all, auxiliary words,

suffixes, affixes, prepositions, copulas, particles, and, in short,

all inflections, agglutinations, or other parts of speech which are

concerned in the indication of _relationship_ between the other

component parts of a sentence, progressively dwindle and disappear.

When these, which I will call relational words, are shed, language is

left with what may be termed object-words (including pronominal words),

attributive-words, action-words, and words expressive of states of mind

or body, which, therefore, may be designated condition-words. Roughly

speaking, this classification corresponds with the grammatical nouns,

pronouns, adjectives, active verbs, and passive verbs; but as our

regress through the history of language necessitates a total disregard

of all grammatical forms, it will conduce to clearness in my exposition

if we consent to use the terms suggested.

 

The next thing we notice is that the distinction between object-words

and attributive-words begins to grow indistinct, and eventually all but

disappears: substantives and adjectives are fused in one, and whether

the resulting word is to be understood as subject or predicate—as the

name of the object or the name of a quality—depends upon its position

in the sentence, upon the tone in which it is uttered, or, in still

earlier stages, upon the gestures by which it is accompanied. Thus,

as Professor Sayce remarks, “the apposition of two substantives [and,

_a fortiori_, of two such partly or wholly undifferentiated words as

we are now contemplating] is the germ out of which no less than three

grammatical conceptions have developed—those of the genitive, of the

predicate, and of the adjective.”[249]

 

While this process of fusion is being traced in the case of

substantives and adjectives, it becomes at the same time observable

that the definition of verbs is gradually growing more and more vague,

until it is difficult, and eventually impossible, to distinguish a verb

at all as a separate part of speech.

 

Thus we are led back by continuous stages, or through greater and

greater simplifications of language-structure, to a state of things

where words present what naturalists might term so generalized a

type as to include, each within itself, all the functions that

afterwards severally devolve upon different parts of speech. Like those

animalcules which are at the same time but single cells and entire

organisms, these are at the same time single words and independent

sentences. Moreover, as in the one case there is life, in the other

case there is meaning; but the meaning, like the life, is vague

and unevolved: the sentence is an organism without organs, and is

generalized only in the sense that it is protoplasmic. In view of

these facts (which, be it observed, are furnished by languages still

existing, as well as by the philological record of languages long since

extinct) it is impossible to withhold assent from the now universal

doctrine of philologists—“language diminishes the farther we look back

in such a way, that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had

no existence at all.”[250]

 

* * * * *

 

From all the evidence which has now been presented showing that

aboriginally words were sentences, it follows that aboriginally

there can have been no distinction between terms and propositions.

Nevertheless, although this follows deductively from the general truth

in question, it is desirable that we should study in more detail the

special application of the principle to the case of formal predication,

seeing that, as so often previously remarked, this is the place where

my opponents have taken their stand. The reader will remember that I

have already disposed of their assertions with regard to the copula.

It will now be my object to show that their analysis is equally

erroneous where it is concerned with both the other elements of which a

formal proposition consists. Not having taken the trouble to acquaint

themselves with the results of linguistic research, and therefore

relying only on what may be termed the accidents of language as these

happen to occur in the Aryan branch of the great language-tree, these

writers assume that a proposition must always and everywhere have been

thrown into the precisely finished form in which it was analyzed by

Aristotle. As a matter of fact, however, it is now well known that

such is not the case; that the form of predication as we have it in

our European languages has been the outcome of a prolonged course of

evolution; and that in its most primitive stage, or in the earliest

stage which happens to have been preserved in the palæontology of

language, predication can scarcely be said to have been differentiated

from what I have called indication. For the sake of placing this

important fact beyond the reach of doubt, I will begin by quoting the

statements of a few among the leading authorities upon the philology of

the subject.

 

“Primitive man would not trouble himself much with such propositions

as ‘Man is mortal,’ ‘Gold is heavy,’ which are a source of such

unfailing delight to the formal logician; but if he found it necessary

to employ permanent attribute-words, would naturally throw them into

what is called the attributive form, by placing them in immediate

proximity with the noun, whose inflections they would afterwards

assume. And so the verb gradually came to assume the purely formal

function of predication. The use of verbs denoting action necessitated

the formation of verbs to denote ‘rest,’ ‘continuance in state,’ and

when, in course of time, it became necessary in certain cases to

predicate permanent as well as changing attributes, these words were

naturally employed for the purpose, and such a sentence as ‘The sun

continues bright’ was simply ‘The bright sun’ in another form. By

degrees these verbs became so worn away in meaning, gradually coming

to signify simple existence, that at last they lost all vestiges of

meaning whatever, and came simply to be marks of predication. Such is

the history of the verb ‘to be,’ which in popular language has entirely

lost even the sense of ‘existence.’ Again, in a still more advanced

state, it was found necessary to speak, not only of things, but of

their attributes. Thus such a sentence as ‘Whiteness is an attribute of

snow,’ has identically the same meaning as ‘Snow is white’ and ‘White

snow;’ and the change of ‘white’ into ‘whiteness’ is a purely formal

device to enable us to place an attribute-word as the subject of a

proposition.”[251]

 

“Now comes a very important consideration, that not only is the order

of subject and predicate to a great extent conventional, but that the

very idea of the distinction between subject and predicate is purely

linguistic, and has no foundation in the mind itself. In the first

place, there is no necessity for a subject at all: in such a sentence

as ‘It rains,’ there is no subject whatever, the _it_ and the terminal

_s_ being merely formal signs of predication. ‘It rains: therefore I

will take my umbrella,’ is a perfectly legitimate train of reasoning,

but it would puzzle the cleverest logician to reduce it to any of his

figures. Again, the mental proposition is not formed by thinking first

of the subject, then of the copula, and then of the predicate; it is

formed by thinking of the three simultaneously. When we formulate in

our minds the proposition ‘All men are bipeds,’ we have two ideas, ‘all

men’ and ‘an equal number of bipeds,’ or, more tersely, ‘as many men,

as many bipeds,’ and we think of the two ideas simultaneously [_i.e._

in _apposition_] not one after the other, as we are forced to express

them in speech. The simultaneity of conception is what is expressed by

the copula in logic, and by the various forms of sentences in language.

It by no means follows that logic is entirely destitute of value, but

we shall not arrive at the real substratum of truth until we have

eliminated that part of the science which is really nothing more than

an imperfect analysis of language.”