Mental Evolution in Man 66

Mental Evolution in Man 66

And so it is with all the other so-called “parts of speech,” in

those languages which, in having passed beyond the primitive stage,

have developed parts of speech at all. “These are the very broadest

outlines of the process by which conceptual roots were predicated, by

which they came under the sway of the categories—became substantives,

adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, or by whatever other names the results

thus obtained may be described. The minute details of this process, and

the marvellous results obtained by it, can be studied in the grammar of

every language or family of languages.”[340] Thus, philology is able to

trace back, stage by stage, the form of predication as it occurs in the

most highly developed, or inflective language, to that earliest stage

of language in general, which I have called the indicative.

 

Many other authorities having been quoted in support of these general

statements, and also for the purpose of tracing the evolution of

predicative utterance in more detail, I proceeded to give illustrations

of different phases of its development in the still existing languages

of savages; and thus proved that they, no less than primitive man, are

unable to “supply the blank form of a judgment,” or to furnish what

my opponents regard as the criterion of human faculty. Therefore, the

only policy which can possibly remain for these opponents to take up,

is that of abandoning their Aristotelian position: no longer to take

their stand upon the grounds of purely _formal_ predication as this

happens to have been developed in the Indo-European branch of language;

but altogether upon those of _material_ predication, or, as I may say,

upon the meaning or substance of a judgment, as distinguished from its

grammar or accidents.

 

In other words, it may possibly still be argued that, although the

issue is now thrown back from the “blank form” of predication on which

my opponents have hitherto relied, to the hard fact of predication

itself, this hard fact still remains. Even though I have shown that in

the absence of any parts of speech predication requires to be conducted

in a most inefficient manner; still, it may be said, predication _is_

conducted, and _must be_ conducted—for assuredly it is only in order

to conduct it that speech can ever have existed at all.

 

Now, I showed that if my opponents do not adopt this change of

position, their argument is at an end. For I proved that, after

all the foregoing evidence, there is no longer any possibility of

question touching the continuity of growth between the predicative

germ in a sentence-word, and the fully evolved structure of a formal

proposition. But, on the other hand, I next showed that this change

of position, even if it were made, could be of no avail. For, if the

term “predication” be thus extended to a “sentence-word,” it thereby

becomes deprived of that distinctive meaning upon which alone the

whole argument of my adversaries is reared: it is conceded that no

distinction obtains between speaking and pointing: the predicative

phase of language has been identified with the indicative: man and

brute are acknowledged to be “brothers.” That is to say, if it be

maintained that the indicative signs of the infant child or the

primitive man are predicative, no shadow of a reason can be assigned

for withholding this designation from the indicative signs of the

lower animals. On the other hand, if this term be denied to both, its

application to the case of spoken language in its fully evolved form

must be understood to signify but a difference of phase or degree,

seeing that the one order of sign-making has been now so completely

proved to be but the genetic and improved descendant of the other.

In short, the truth obviously is that we have _a proved continuity

of development between all stages of the sign-making faculty_; and,

therefore, that any attempt to draw between one and another of them a

distinction of kind has been shown to be impossible.

 

The conclusions thus reached at the close of Chapter XIV. with regard

to the philology of predication were greatly strengthened by additional

facts which were immediately adduced in the next Chapter with regard

to the philology of conception. Here the object was to throw the

independent light of philology upon a point which had already been

considered as a matter of psychology, namely, the passage of receptual

denotation into conceptual denomination. This is a point which had

previously been considered only with reference to the individual: it

had now to be considered with reference to the race.

 

First it was shown that, owing to the young child being surrounded by

an already constructed grammar of predicative forms, the earlier phases

in the evolution of speech are greatly foreshortened in the ontogeny

of mankind, as compared with what the study of language shows them to

have been in the phylogeny. Gesture-signs are rapidly starved out when

a child of to-day first begins to speak, and so to learn the use of

grammatical forms. But early man was under the necessity of elaborating

his grammar out of his gesture-signs—and this at the same time as he

was also coining his sentence-words. Therefore, while the acquisition

of names and forms of speech by infantile man must have depended in

chief part upon gestures and grimace, this acquisition by the infantile

child is actively inimical to both.

 

Next we saw that the philological doctrine of “sentence-words” threw

considerable additional light on my psychological distinction between

ideas as general and generic. For a sentence-word is the __EXPRESSION__

of an idea hitherto _generalized_, that is to say _undifferentiated_.

Such an idea, as we now know, stands at the antipodes of thought from

one which is due to what is called a _generalization_—that is to say,

a conceptual synthesis of the results of a previous analysis. And the

doctrine of sentence-words recognizes an immense historical interval

(corresponding with the immense psychological interval) between the

generic and the general orders of ideation.

 

Again, we saw that in all essential particulars the semiotic

construction of this the most primitive mode of articulate

communication which has been preserved in the archæology of spoken

language, bears a precise resemblance to that which occurs in the

natural language of gesture. As we saw, “gesture-language has no

grammar properly so called;” and we traced in considerable detail the

analogies—so singularly numerous and exact—between the forms of

sentences as now revealed in gesture and as they first emerged in the

early days of speech. In other words, the earliest record that speech

is able to yield as to the nature of its own origin, clearly reveals to

us this origin as emerging from the yet more primitive language of tone

and gesture. For this is the only available explanation of their close

family resemblance in the matter of syntax.

 

Furthermore, we have seen that in gesture language, as in the forms of

primitive speech now preserved in roots, the purposes of predication

are largely furthered by the mere apposition of denotative terms. A

generalized term of this kind (which as yet is neither noun, adjective,

nor verb), when brought into apposition with another of the same kind,

serves to convey an idea of relationship between them, or to state

something of the one by means of the other. Yet apposition of this kind

need betoken no truly conceptual thought. As we have already seen, the

laws of merely sensuous association are sufficient to insure that when

the objects, qualities, or events, which the terms severally denote,

happen to occur together in Nature, they _must_ be thus brought into

corresponding apposition by the mind: it is the logic of events which

inevitably guides such pre-conceptual utterance into a statement of

the truth that is perceived: the truth is _received into_ the mind,

not _conceived by_ it. And it is obvious how repeated statements of

truth thus delivered in receptual ideation, lead onwards to conceptual

ideation, or to statements of truth as true.

 

Now, if all this has been the case, it is obvious that aboriginal

words can have referred only to matters of purely receptual

significance—_i.e._ “to those physical acts and qualities which are

directly apprehensible by the senses.” Accordingly, we find in all the

earliest root-words, which the science of philology has unearthed,

unquestionable and unquestioned evidence of “fundamental metaphor,” or

of a conceptual extension of terms which were previously of no more

than receptual significance. Indeed, as Professor Whitney says, “so

pervading is it, that we never regard ourselves as having read the

history of any intellectual or moral term till we have traced it back

to its physical origin.” Without repeating all that I have so recently

said upon this matter, it will be enough once more to insist on the

general conclusions to which it led—namely, psychological analysis

has already shown us the psychological priority of the recept; and now

philological research most strikingly corroborates this analysis by

actually finding the recept in the body of every concept.

 

Lastly, I took a brief survey of the languages now spoken by many

widely separated races of savages, in order to show the extreme

deficiency of conceptual ideation that is thus represented. In the

result, we saw that what Archdeacon Farrar calls “the hopeless

poverty of the power of abstraction” is so surprising, that the most

ardent evolutionist could not well have desired a more significant

intermediary between the pre-conceptual intelligence of _Homo alalus_,

and the conceptual thought of _Homo sapiens_.

 

* * * * *

 

Having thus concluded the Philology of our subject, I proceeded, in the

last chapter, to consider the probable steps of the transition from

receptual to conceptual ideation in the race.

 

First I dealt with a view which has been put forward on this matter

by certain German philologists, to the effect that speech originated

in wholly meaningless sounds, which in the first instance were due to

merely physiological conditions. By repeated association with the

circumstances under which they were uttered, these articulate sounds

are supposed to have acquired, as it were automatically, a semiotic

value. The answer to this hypothesis, however, evidently is, that

it ignores the whole problem which stands to be solved—namely, the

genesis of those powers of ideation which first put a soul of meaning

into the previously insignificant sounds. That is to say, it begs the

whole question which stands for solution, and, therefore, furnishes

no explanation whatsoever of the difference which has arisen between

man and brute. Nevertheless, the principles set forth in this the

largest possible extension of the so-called interjectional theory, are,

I believe, sound enough in themselves: it is only the premiss from

which in this instance they start that is untrue. This premiss is that

aboriginal man presented no rudiments of the sign-making faculty, and,

therefore, that this faculty itself required to be created _de novo_ by

accidental associations of sounds with things. But we have seen, as a

matter of fact, that this must have been very far from having been the

case; and, therefore, while recognizing such elements of truth as the

“purely physiological” hypothesis in question presents, I rejected it

as in itself not even approaching a full explanation of the origin of

speech.

 

Next I dealt with the hypothesis that was briefly sketched by Mr.

Darwin. Premising, as Geiger points out, that the presumably superior

sense of sight, by fastening attention upon the movements of the mouth

in vocal sign-making, must have given our simian ancestry an advantage

over other species of quadrumana in the matter of associating sounds

with receptual ideas; we next endeavoured to imagine an anthropoid ape,

social in habits, sagacious in mind, and accustomed to use its voice

extensively as an organ of sign-making, after the manner of social

quadrumana in general. Such an animal might well have distanced all

others in the matter of making signs, and even proceeded far enough to

use sounds in association with gestures, as “sentence-words”—_i.e._

as indicative of such highly generalized recepts as the presence of

danger, &c.,—even if it did not go the length of making denotative

sounds, after the manner of talking-birds. Moreover, as Mr. Darwin has

pointed out, there is a strong probability that this simian ancestor

of mankind was accustomed to use its voice in musical cadences, “as do

some of the gibbon-apes at the present day;” and this habit might have

laid the basis for that semiotic interruption of vocal sounds in which consists the essence of articulation.