rising and falling of the wind; she shouted aloud in the voices of the mountain and the sea; and it might be conceivable that so far, he might translate into living and articulate utterance these multitudinous and varied intonations. But what imaginable connection had this vast chorus of sounds with the dumb the dumb or inaudible sensations which thronged to him through the gateway of four other senses, in the sweetness of odours, in the multitude of tastes, in the warmth of the sunlight, or even in the soft eye-music' of the colour and the light? It might have seemed in the very nature of things an impossibility to translate the manifestation of one sense into any form of analogy which should be comprehensible to another, or to render the expression of such distant analogies in any way significant to the strange totality of the individual mind. And when this apparent impossibility was complicated by what might have seemed the yet greater impossibility of finding an utterance for the invisible, voiceless, inward emotions of the intellectual and spiritual being,—of co-ordinating the expression of sensations from the outward, with impressions from the inward microcosm, and of rendering them alike intelligible to the separate world which comes before us in the personality of each individual man, -here was a problem before which even a divine Thoth or an eloquent Hermes might have yielded in despair. Yet here was a problem which the simplest 6 savage infant had, somehow or other, been taught unconsciously to solve; so that by the fluid air which he articulates into human utterance man has found it easy to fill the universe with living words which are at once the pictures of its material phenomena and the shadows of his own soul;' and on a sonorous wave, more evanescent than the tremulous laughter which ripples the summer sea, he can impress records of his outward history and of his inmost being more indestructible than Babylonian palace or Egyptian pyramid. And short as is the reach of that pulse of articulated air,' and rapidly as its undulations disappear, he can yet grave the symbols of its vibrations on the rock, or paint them on the vellum, or print them in the book, so that they can live from generation to generation, and reach from pole to pole. That by long researches into evidence derived from every country and every age, this almost incredible problem has been at least approximately solved, it has been my object to maintain in a little work On the Origin of Language, and subsequently to defend against the strictures of more than one eminent opponent. I have there endeavoured to prove that the Idea of Speech-the dúvaμis or potential faculty of it as distinguished from the evέpyɛia or actual exercise-lay implicitly in two undeniable natural instincts, and one psychological law. The conception that it was possible to render intelligible to the ear sensations derived from the outer world arose from the instinct which leads to the articulate reproduction of natural sounds. The conception that it was possible to express in sound the inward emotions-the invisible life of the individual soularose from the felt significance of those instinctive and involuntary cries which are the germs of interjections. The conception that it was possible to develope these elementary methods of expressing and recalling the phenomena alike of the ego and of the non-ego, and to combine the utterances of both into intelligible speech, was due to the Law of Association. An imitation of the sound made by any animal was readily accepted as a symbol of the animal whose image the sound recalled, and also as a symbol of the ideal conceptions which the animal naturally represented. The free and necessary use of such symbols would rapidly lead, as it does among the deaf and dumb, to the perception of certain inexplicable analogies between the impressions produced by external objects on different senses. Thus there would arise that metaphorical mode of expressing thought which so completely permeates the whole of language as to render it one vast volume of compressed allegories and implied resemblances. Each metaphor, as it became current, would be accepted in its secondary meaning, and language would soon become, what now it is, a conventional and artificial instrument for the utterance and intercommunion of human thought.* Into the grounds of this demonstration,—a demonstration which, as far as I can see, elucidates every single step of the process, and which is deduced from and supported by the actual facts of languages in every stage of crudity or development, -I do not purpose to enter in these Lectures; both because the arguments on which it rests are before the world, and have never, so far as I am aware, been proved to be erroneous, and also because I have already published all that I immediately desire to say upon the subject. Suffice it to call attention to the repeated admission that by such a process language could have been developed, and that no other theory deserving of the name has ever been offered in its place. It is rather my purpose in these Lectures summarily to sketch the broadest and most general results of linguistic inquiry, and to dwell less on disputed theories than on well-established facts. But as I wish first of all to pass in review the gradual growth of Comparative Philology, I may mention that although among the rude primeval races to which I have alluded, language excited little or no speculation, and even Grimm, with his immense research, only knew of one legend bearing *Itaque si antiquum sermonem nostro comparemus, pæne quicquid loquimur figura est.'-Quinct. Instt. Orat. ix. 3. * upon it, yet, curiously enough, that legend shows a rude attempt to express the true theory. It is the Esthonian legend that the Aged One,' as they call the Deity,† placed on the fire a kettle of boiling water, from the hissing and bubbling of which the various nations learned their languages. This kettle is no other than the mist-wreathed crest of the Kesselberg with its storms and thunders; so that this aboriginal people instinctively conjectured that nature alone had taught men how to modulate vague sounds into intelligible utterances, just as they supposed that Song had been learned by man first, and by all voiceful creatures, from listening to Wäinämöinen as he sat and played amid the roaring woods of the Domberg, while the fish only remained dumb because, when they stuck up their heads, their ears still remained under water, and they could only imitate the motions of the god's mouth. A similar legend is that of the Australians who explained the gift of speech by saying * See Chapters on Language, p. 118. I trust that I may be pardoned for trenching once or twice in this Lecture on ground which I have already traversed. † Cf. the Ancient of Days.'-Dan. vii. 9. In the Kalewala, however, the national epic of the Finns, there is nothing special in the conduct of the fish while Wäinämöinen sings.-Rune. xli. 1. 117. 'Damals gab es keine Wesen, (Schliefner's translation, p. 241.) |