Mental Evolution in Man 55

Mental Evolution in Man 55

Cheroki presents thirteen different verbs to signify different kinds

of washing, without any to indicate “washing” itself;[292] and Milligan

says that the aborigines of Tasmania had “no words representing

abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree, wattle-tree, &c., they

had a name, but they had no equivalent for the __EXPRESSION__ of ‘a tree;’

neither could they express abstract qualities, such as hard, soft,

warm, cold, long, short, round.”[293]

 

Lastly, to give only one other example, Dr. Latham states that a Kurd

of the Zaza tribe, who furnished Dr. Sandwith with a list of native

words, was not “able to conceive a hand or father, except so far as

they were related to himself, or something else; and so essentially

concrete rather than abstract were his notions, that he combined the

pronoun with the substantive whenever he had a part of the human body

or a degree of consanguinity to name,” saying _sere-min_, “my head,”

and _pie-min_, “my father.”

 

Thus, as Professor Sayce remarks, after alluding to some of the above

facts, “we may be sure that it was not “the ‘ideas of prime importance’

which primitive man struggled to represent, but those individual

objects of which his senses were cognisant.”[294] And, without further

multiplying testimony, we may now be prepared to accept from him the

general statement that, “all over the world, indeed, wherever we come

across a savage race, or an individual who has been unaffected by the

civilization around him, we find this primitive inability to separate

the particular from the universal by isolating the individual word,

and extracting it, as it were, from the ideas habitually associated

with it.”[295] Or, in my own phraseology, among all primitive races

still existing, we meet with what must seem to my opponents a wholly

unintelligible incapacity to evolve a concept from any number of

recepts, notwithstanding that the latter may all be most nearly

related together, and severally named by as many denotative signs:

even with their numberless already-formed words for different kinds

of trees, the aborigines of Tasmania could not designate “a tree.”

Of course they must have had a recept of a tree, or a generic image

formed out of innumerable perceptions of particular trees—so that,

for instance, it would doubtless have surprised a Tasmanian could he

have seen a tree (even though it were a new species for which he had no

name) standing inverted with its roots in the air and its branches in

the ground. In just the same way a dog is surprised when it first sees

a man walking on his hands: the dog will bark at such an object because

it conflicts with the generic image which has been automatically formed

by numberless perceptions of individual men walking on their feet.

But, in the absence of any name for trees in general, there is nothing

to show that the savage has a concept answering to “tree,” any more

than that the dog has a concept answering to “man.” Indeed, unless my

opponents vacate the basis of Nominalism on which their opposition is

founded, they must acknowledge that in the absence of any _name_ for

tree there _can be no conception_ of tree.

 

So much, then, for what Archdeacon Farrar has called “_the hopeless

poverty of the power of abstraction_” in savages. Their various

languages unite, in verbal testimony, to assure us that human thought

does _not_ “proceed from the abstract to the concrete;” but, on the

contrary, that in the race, as in the individual, receptual ideation is

the precursor of conceptual—denotation the antecedent of denomination,

as in still earlier stages it was itself preceded by gesticulation.

Such being the case with regard to names, it is no wonder, as we

previously found, that low savages are so extraordinarily deficient in

their forms of predication.

 

* * * * *

 

The palæontology of human thought, then, as recorded in language,

incontestibly proves that the origin and progress of ideation in

the race was psychologically identical with what we now observe in

the individual. All the stages of ideation which we have seen to be

characteristic of psychogenesis in a child, are thus revealed to us as

having been characteristic of psychogenesis in mankind.

 

First there was the indicative stage. This is proved in two ways. On

the one hand, all philologists will now agree with Geiger—“But, what

says more than anything, language diminishes the further we look back,

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

no existence at all.”[296] On the other hand, even if we tap the tree

of language as high up in its stem as the pronominal roots of Sanskrit,

what is the kind of ideational sap which flows therefrom? It is, as we

have already seen, so strongly suggestive of gesture and grimace that

even Professor Max Müller allows that in it we have “remnants of the

earliest and almost pantomimic phase of language, in which language was

hardly as yet what we mean by language, namely _logos_, a gathering,

but only a pointing.”[297]

 

Secondly, we have clear evidence of sentence-words, as well as of

what I have called the denotative phase, or the naming of simple

recepts—whether only of actions, or, as we may safely assume,

likewise also of objects and qualities; and whether arbitrarily,

or, as seems virtually certain, in chief part by onomatopœia. Both

these subordinate points, however—which are rendered more doubtful

on account of the struggle for existence among words having proved

favourable to denotative terms expressive of actions, and unfavourable

to the survival of onomatopœia—are of comparatively little moment to

us; the important fact is the one which is most clearly testified to by

the philological record, namely, that the lowest strata of this record

yield fossils of the lowest order of development: the “121 concepts,”

appear to be, for the most part, denotations of simple recepts.

 

Thirdly, higher up in the stratified deposits, we meet with

overwhelming evidence of the connotative extension of these denotative

terms. Indeed, many of these terms have probably undergone a certain

amount of connotative extension as the condition to their having

survived as roots; and, therefore, in these lowest deposits it is

difficult to be sure that an apparently denotative term is not really a

term which has undergone the earlier stages of connotative extension.

If such were the case, we can understand the loss of any onomatopoetic

significance which it may originally have presented. But, however this

may be, there is an endless mass of evidence to prove the subsequent

and continuous growth of connotative extension throughout the whole

range of philological time.

 

Lastly, as regards the predicative phase, we have seen that philology

shows the same order and method to have been followed in the race as

in the child. In the growing child, as we have seen, pre-conceptual

predication is contemporary with—or occupies the same psychological

level as—the connotative extension of denotative terms. Indeed, the

very act of connotation is in itself an act of predication—if in the

conceptual sphere, of conceptual predication (denomination); if in

the pre-conceptual, of pre-conceptual. Again, in the psychogenesis of

the child we noted how important a part is played in the development

of pre-conceptual predication by the mere apposition of connotative

terms—such apposition being rendered inevitable by the laws of

association. If A is the connotative name for _A_, B the connotative

name for _B_, when the young child sees that _A_ and _B_ occur

together, the statement A B is rendered inevitable by “the logic of

events;” and this statement is a pre-conceptual proposition. Now,

in both these respects philology yields abundant parallels. The

quotations which I have given conclusively prove that “every word

must originally have been a sentence;” or, in my own terminology, a

pre-conceptual proposition of precisely the same kind as that which is

employed by a young child. If it be replied that the young child is

without self-consciousness, while the primitive man was not without

self-consciousness, this would merely be to beg the whole question on

which we are engaged, and, moreover, to beg it in the teeth of every

antecedent probability, as well as of every actual analogy, to which

appeal can possibly be made. If it be true—and who will venture to

doubt it?—that “language diminishes the further we look back, in

such a way that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no

existence at all,” will it be maintained that the man-like being who

was then unable to communicate with his fellows by means of any words

at all was gifted with self-consciousness? Should so absurd a statement

be ventured, it would be fatal to the argument of my adversaries; for

the statement would imply, either that concepts may exist without

names, or that self-consciousness may exist without concepts. The

truth of the matter is that philology has proved, in a singularly

complete manner, the origin and gradual development in time, first of

pre-conceptual communication, and next of the self-consciousness which

supplied the basis of conceptual predication. No wonder, therefore,

as Professor Max Müller somewhat naively observes, “it may be said

that the first step in the formation of names and concepts is very

imperfect. So it is.” Truly “to name the act of carrying by a root

formed from sounds which accompany the act of carrying a heavy load,

is a far more primitive act than to fix an attribute by a name”

conceptually applied. So primitive, indeed, is nomination of this

kind, that I defy any one to show wherein it differs psychologically

from what I have called the denotation of a young child, or even of a

talking bird.

 

And, having reduced the matter to this issue so far as the results of

philology are concerned, I may fitly conclude by briefly indicating

the principal point which appears to divide my opinions from those

of the eminent philologist just alluded to—if not also from those

of the majority of my psychological opponents. Briefly, the point is

that on the other side an unwarrantable assumption is made—to wit,

that conceptual thought is an antecedent condition, _sine quâ non_, to

any and every act of bestowing a name; and, _a fortiori_, to any and

every act of predication. This is the fundamental assumption, which,

whether openly expressed or covertly implied, serves as the basis of

the whole superstructure of my opponents’ argument. Now, I claim to

have shown, by a complete inductive proof, that this assumption is not

only unwarrantable in theory, but false in fact. There are names and

names. Not every name that is bestowed betokens conceptual thought on

the part of the namer. Alike from the case of the talking bird, of the

young child, and of early man (so far as he has left any traces of his

psychology in the structure of language), I have demonstrated that

prior to the stage of denomination there are the stages of indication,

denotation, and receptual connotation. These are the psychological

stepping-stones across that “Rubicon of Mind,” which, owing to their

neglect, has seemed to be impassable. The Concept (and, _a fortiori_,

the Proposition) is not a structure of ideation which is presented to

us without a developmental history. Although it has been uniformly

assumed by all my opponents “that the simplest element of thought” can

have had no such history, the assumption is, as I have said, directly

contradicted by observable fact. Had the case been otherwise—had

the concept really been without father and without mother, without

beginning of days or end of life—then truly a case might have been

shown for regarding it as an entity _sui generis_, destitute of kith

or kin among all the other faculties of mind. But, as we have now so

fully seen, no such unique exception to the otherwise uniform process

of evolution can here be maintained: the phases of development which

have gradually led up to conceptual thought admit of being as clearly

traced as those which have led to any other product, whether of life or

of mind.

 

Here, then, I bring to a close this brief and imperfect rendering of

the “Witness of Philology.” But, brief and imperfect as the rendering

is, I am honestly unable to see how it is conceivable that the witness

itself could have been more uniform as to its testimony, or more

multifarious as to its facts—more consistent, more complete, or more

altogether overwhelming than we have found it to be. In almost every

single respect it has corroborated the results of our psychological

analysis. It has come forward like a living thing, which, in the very

voice of Language itself, directly and circumstantially narrates to

us the actual history of a process the constituent phases of which we

had previously inferred. It has told us of a time when as yet mankind

were altogether speechless, and able to communicate with one another

only by means of gesticulation and grimace. It has described to us

the first articulate sounds in the form of sentence-words, without

significance apart from the pointings by which they were accompanied.

It has revealed the gradual differentiation of such a protoplasmic form of language into “parts of speech;”