not unfrequently in the works of Mr. Darwin and his followers. Whenever the distance between two points in the chain of creation seems too great, and there is no chance of finding the missing links, we are told again and again that we have only to imagine a large number of intermediate beings, insensibly sloping up or sloping down, in order to remove all difficulty. Whenever I meet with this line of reasoning, I cannot help thinking of an argument used by Hindu theologians in their endeavors to defend the possibility and the truth of Divine revelation. Their opponents say that between a Divine Being, who they admit is in possession of the truth, and human beings who are to receive the truth, there is a gulf which nothing can bridge over; and they go on to say that, admitting that Divine truth, as revealed, was perfect in the Revealer, yet the same Divine truth, as seen by human beings, must be liable to all the accidents of human frailty and fallibility. The orthodox Brahmans grow very angry at this, and, appealing to their sacred books, they maintain that there was between the Divine and the human a chain of intermediate beings, Rishis or seers, as they call them; that the first generation of these seers was, say, nine-tenths divine and one-tenth human; the second, eight-tenths divine and two-tenths human; the third, seven-tenths divine and three-tenths human; that each of these generations handed down revealed truth, till at last it reached the ninth generation, which was one-tenth divine and ninetenths human, and by them was preached to ordinary mortals, being tentenths, or altogether human. In this way they feel convinced that the gulf between the Divine and the human is safely bridged over; and they might use the very words of Mr. Darwin, that in this series of forms graduating insensibly from the Divine to the human, it is impossible to fix on any definite point where the term 'man' ought to be used.

This old fallacy of first imagining a continuous scale, and then pointing out its indivisibility, affects more or less all systems of philosophy which, wish to get rid of specific distinctions. That fallacy lurks in the word 'Development,' which is now so extensively used, but which requires very careful testing before it should be allowed to become a current coin in philosophical transactions. The admission

ofthis insensible graduation would eliminate, not only the difference between ape and man, but likewise between black and white, hot and cold, a high and a low note in music: in fact, it would do away with the possibility of all exact and definite knowledge, by removing those wonderful lines and laws of nature which change the Chaos into a Kosmos, the Infinite into the Finite, and which enable us to count, to tell, and to know.

There have always been philosophers who have an eye for the Infinite only, who see All in One, and One in All. One of the greatest sages of antiquity, nay, of the whole world, Herakleitos (460 B.C.), summed up the experience of his life in the famous words, πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει, 'All is moving, and nothing is fixed,' or as we should say, 'All is growing, all is developing, all is evolving.' But this view of the universe was met, it may be by anticipation, by the followers of Pythagoras. When Pythagoras was asked what was the wisest of all things, he replied,' Number,' and next to it, He who gave names to all things.' How should we translate this enigmatical saying? I believe, in modern philosophical language, it would run like this: "True knowledge is impossible without definite generalisation or concepts (that is, number), and without definite signs for these concepts (that is, language).'

The Herakleitean view is now again in the ascendant. All is changing, all is developing, all is evolving. Ask any evolutionist philosopher whether he can conceive any two things so heterogeneous that, given a few millions of years and plenty of environment, the one cannot develop into the other, and I believe he will say, No. I do not argue here against this line of thought; on the contrary, I believe that, in one sphere of mental aspirations, it has its legitimate place. What I protest against is this, that in the sphere of exact knowledge we should allow ourselves to be deceived by inexact language. sensible graduation' is self-contradictory. Translated into English, it means graduation without graduation, degrees without degrees, or something which is at the same time perceptible and imperceptible. Millions of years will never render the distance between two points, however near to each other, imperceptible. If the evolutionist philosopher asks for a few millions of years, the specialist philosopher

In

asks for eyes that will magnify a few million times, and the Bank which supplies the one will readily supply the other. Exact science has nothing to do with insensible graduation. It counts thousands of vibrations that make our imperfect ears hear definite tones; it counts millions of vibrations that make our weak eyes see definite colors. It counts, it tells, it names, and then it knows; though it knows at the same time that beyond the thousands and beyond the millions of vibrations there is that which man can neither count, nor tell, nor name, nor know, the Unknown, the Unknowable —ay, the Divine.

But if we return to Mr. Darwin's argument, and simply leave out the word 'insensibly,' which begs the whole question, we shall then have to meet his statement, that in a series of forms graduating from some ape-like creature to man as he now is, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term 'man' ought to be used. This statement I meet by a simple negative. Even admitting, for argument's sake, the existence of a series of beings intermediate between ape and mana series which, as Mr. Darwin repeatedly states, does not exist*-I maintain that the point where the animal ends and man begins could be determined with absolute precision, for it would be coincident with the beginning of the Radical Period of language, with the first formation of a general idea embodied in the only form in which we find them embodied, viz. in the rcots of our language.

Mr. Darwin was, of course, not unprepared for that answer. He remembered the old pun of Hobbes, Homo animal rationale, quia orationale (Man is a rational animal, because he is an orational animal), and he makes every effort in order to eliminate language as something unattainable by the animal, as something peculiar to man, as a specific difference between man and beast. In every book on Logic, language is quoted as the specific difference between man and all other beings. Thus we read in Stuart Mill's Logic : The attribute of being capable of understanding a language is a proprium of the species man, since, without being connoted by the word, it follows from an attribute which the word does connote, viz. from the attribute of rationality.'

It is curious to observe how even Mr. Darwin seems, in some places, fully prepared to admit this. Thus he says in one passage,* Articulate language is peculiar to man.' In former days we could not have wished for a fuller admission, for peculiar then meant the same as special, something that constitutes a species, or something which belongs to a person in exclusion of others. exclusion of others. But in a philosophy which looks upon all living beings as developed from four or five primordial cells, there can, in strict logic, exist four or five really and truly peculiar characters only, and therefore it is clear that peculiar, when used by Mr. Darwin, cannot mean what it would have meant if employed by others.

As if to soften the admission which he had made as to articulate language being peculiar to man, Mr. Darwin continues: 'But man uses, in common with the lower animals, inarticulate cries to express his meaning, aided by gestures, and the move

ments of the muscles of the face.' No one would deny this. There are many things besides, which man shares in common with animals. In fact, the discovery that man is an animal was not made yesterday, and no one seemed to be disturbed by that discovery. Man, however, was formerly called a 'rational animal, and the question is, whether he possesses anything peculiar to himself, or whether he represents only the highest form of perfection to which an animal, under favorable circumstances, may attain. Mr. Darwin dwells more fully on the same point, viz. on that kind of language which man shares in common with animals, when he says, 'This holds good, especially with the more simple and vivid feelings, which are but little connected with our higher intelligence. Our cries of pain, fear, surprise, anger, together with their appropriate actions, and the murmur of a mother to her beloved child, are more expressive than any words.'

No doubt they are. A tear is more expressive than a sigh, a sigh is more expressive than a speech, and silence itself is sometimes more eloquent than words. But all this is not language in the true sense of the word.

Mr. Darwin himself feels, evidently, that he has not said all; he struggles manfully with the difficulties before him; nay, he

* I. p. 54.

reaily represents the case against himself as strongly as possible. 'It is not the mere power of articulation,' he continues, 'that distinguishes man from other animals, for, as everyone knows, parrots can talk; but it is his large power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas?'

Here, then, we might again imagine that Mr. Darwin admitted all we want, viz. that some kind of language is peculiar to man, and distinguishes man from other animals; that, supposing man to be, up to a certain point, no more than an animal, he perceived that what made man to differ from all other animals was something nowhere to be found except in man, nowhere indicated even in the whole series of living beings, beginning with the Bathybius Haeckelii, and ending with the tailless ape. But, no; there follows immediately after, the finishing sentence, extorted rather, it seems to me, than naturally flowing from his pen, This obviously depends on the development of the mental faculties.'

What can be the meaning of this sentence? If it refers to the mental faculties of man, then no doubt it may be said to be obvious. But if it is meant to refer to the mental faculties of the gorilla, then, whether it be true or not, it is, at all events, so far from being obvious, that the very opposite might be called so-I mean the fact that no development of mental faculties has ever enabled one single animal to connect one single definite idea with one single definite word.

I confess that after reading again and again what Mr. Darwin has written on the subject of language, I cannot understand how he could bring himself to sum up the subject as follows: 'We have seen that the faculty of articulate speech in itself does not offer any insuperable objection to the belief that man has been developed from some lower animal' (p. 62).

Now the fact is that not a single instance has ever been adduced of any animal trying or learning to speak, nor has it been explained by any scholar or philosopher how that barrier of language, which divides man from all animals, might be effectually crossed. I do not mean to say that there are no arguments which might be urged, either in favor of animals possessing the gift of language, but

*See Wundt, Menschen- und Thierseele, vol. ii. p. 265.

preferring not to use it, or as tending to show that living beings, to use the words of Demokritos, speak naturally, and in the same manner in which they cough, sneeze, bellow, bark, or sigh. But Mr. Darwin has never told us what he thinks on this point. He refers to certain writers on the origin of language, who consider that the first materials of language are either interjections or imitations; but their writings in no wise support the theory that animals also could, either out of their own barkings and bellowings, or out of the imitative sounds of mocking-birds, have elaborated anything like what we mean by language, even among the lowest savages.

It may be in the recollection of some of my hearers that, in my Lectures on the Science of Language, when speaking of Demokritos and some of his later followers, I called his theory on the origin of language the Bow-wow theory, because I felt certain that, if this theory were only called by its right name, it would require no further refutation. It might have seemed for a time, to judge from the protests that were raised against that name, as if there had been in the nineteenth cen

tury scholars holding this Demokritean theory in all its crudity. But it required but very little mutual explanation before these scholars perceived that there was between them and me but little difference, and that all which the followers of Bopp insist on as a sine quâ non of scholarship is the admission of roots, definite in their form, from which to derive, according to strict phonetic laws, every word that admits of etymological analysis, whether in English and Sanskrit, or in Arabic and Hebrew, or in Mongolian and Finnish. For philological purposes it matters little, as I said in 1866, what opinion we hold on the origin of roots so long as we agree that, with the exception of a number of purely mimetic expressions, all words, such as we find them, whether in English or in Sanskrit, encumbered with prefixes and suffixes, and mouldering away under the action of phonetic decay, must, in the last instance, be traced back, by means of definite phonetic laws, to those definite. primary forms which we are accustomed to call roots.

These roots stand like barriers between the chaos and the kosmos of human speech. Whoever admits the historical character of roots, whatever opinion he may hold on their origin, is

not a Demokritean, does not hold that theory which I called the Bow-wow theory, and cannot be quoted in support of Mr. Darwin's opinions that the cries of ani mals represent the earliest stage of the language of man.

If we speak simply of the materials, not of the elements of language-and the distinction between these two words is but too often overlooked-then, no doubt, we may not only say that the phonetic materials of the cries of animals and the languages of man are the same, but following in the footsteps of evolutionist philosophers, we might trace the involuntary exclamations of men back to the inanimate and inorganic world. I quoted formerly the opinion of Professor Heyse, who appealed to the fact that most substances, when struck or otherwise set in motion, show a power of reaction manifested by their various rings, as throwing light on the problem of the origin of language; and I do not think that those who look upon philosophy as a 'knowledge of the highest generalities' should have treated Professor Heyse with so much contempt. But neither those who traced the material elements of language back to interjections and imitations, nor those who went farther and traced them back to the ring inherent in all vibrating substances, ought to have imagined for one moment that they had thus accounted for the real elements of language. We may account for the materials of many things, without thereby accounting for what they are, or how they came to be what they are. we take, for instance, a number of flints, more or less carefully chipped and shaped and sharpened, and if we were to say that these flints are like other flints found by thousands in fields and quarries, this would be as true as that the materials for forming the words of our language are the same as the cries of animals, or, it may be, the sounds of bells. But would this explain the problem which we wish to explain? Certainly not. If, then, we were to go a step farther, and say that apes had been seen to use flints for throwing at each other,* that they could not but have discovered that sharp-edged flints were the most effective, and would therefore have either made a natural se

If

*The Pavians in Eastern Africa.' See Caspari, Urgeschichte, i. p. 244.

lection of them, or tried to imitate them— that is to say, to give to other flints a sharp edge-what would antiquaries say to such heresies? And yet I can assure them that to say that no traces of human workmanship can be discovered in these flints,* that they in no wise prove the early existence of man, or that there is no insuperable objection to the belief that these flints were made by apes, cannot sound half so incongruous to them, as to a man who knows what language is made of being told that the first grammatical edge might have been imparted to our words by some lower animals, or that, the materials of language being given, everything else, from the neighing of a horse to the lyric poetry of Goethe, was a mere question of development.

It would not be fair, however, to disguise the fact that in his view that animals possess language, Mr. Darwin has some very powerful allies, and that in quarters where he would least expect to find them. Archbishop Whately writes: 'Man is not the only animal that can make use of language to express what is passing in his mind, and can understand more or less what is so expressed by others.'

But even with bishops and archbishops against me, I do not despair. I believe I have as high an opinion of the faculties of animals as Mr. Darwin, Archbishop Whately, or any other man-nay, I may perhaps claim some credit for myself for having, in my Lectures delivered in 1862, vindicated for the higher animals more than ever was vindicated for them before.

But after reading the most eloquent eulogies on the intellectual powers and social virtues of animals—of which we have had a great deal of late-I always feel that all this and even much more might be perfectly true, and that it would yet in no way affect the relative position of man and beast.

Let us hear the most recent panegyrist : To become man! Who should believe that so many, not only laymen, but students of nature, believe in God becoming man, but consider it incredible that an animal should become man, and that there should be a progressive development from the ape to man? The ancient world, and even now the highest among the Eastern

*See Whitley's Researches on Flints near Spi ennes, in Belgium.

nations, thought and think very differently on this point. The doctrine of metempsychosis connects man and beast, and binds the whole world together by a mysterious cord. Judaism alone, with its hatred of nature deities, and dualistic Christianity, have made this rift between man and beast. It is remarkable how in our own time and among the most civilised nations a deeper sympathy for the animal world has been roused, and has manifested itself in the formation of societies for preventing cruelty towards animals, thus showing that what, on one side, is the result of scientific research, viz. the surrendering of the exclusive position of man in nature, as a spiritual being, is received at the same time as a general sentiment.

'Public opinion, however, and what I may call the old orthodox natural science, persist nevertheless in considering man and beast as two separate worlds which no bridge can ever connect, were it only because man is man in so far only as he from the beginning possesses something which the beast has not and never will have. According to the Mosaic account, God created the beasts, as it were, in a lump; but in the case of man, He first formed his body of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. This living soul of the old Jewish writers has afterwards been changed by Christianity into an immortal soul, a being different in kind and dignity from such other common souls as might be allowed to beasts. Or, the soul of man and beast being admitted to be the same, man was endowed in addition with a spirit, as the substantial principle of the higher intellectual and moral faculties by which he is distinguished from the beast.

'Against all this,' the writer continues, 'we have now the fact of natural science which can no longer be ignored, viz. that the faculties of beasts differ from those of man in degree only, and not in kind. Voltaire said truly, "Animals have sensation, imagination, memory, also desires and movements, and yet no one thinks of claiming for them an immaterial soul. Why should we, for our small surplus of these faculties and acts, require such a soul?" Now the surplus on the side of man is not indeed so small as Voltaire's rhetoric represents it; on the contrary, it is enormous. But for all that, it is a plus

Even with

only, it is not something new. animals of the lower orders it would take volumes, as Darwin says, to describe the habits and mental powers of an ant. The same with bees. Nay, it is remarkable that the more closely an observer watches the life and work of any class of animals, the more he feels inclined to speak of their understanding. The stories about the memory, the reflection, the faculties of learning and culture in dogs, horses, and elephants are infinite; and even in so-called wild animals similar qualities may be detected. Brehm, speaking of birds of prey, says: "They act after having reflected; they make plans and carry them out." The same writer says of thrushes: "They perceive quickly and judge correctly; they use all means and ways to protect themselves." Those varieties which have grown up in the quiet and undisturbed forests of the North are easily taken in; but experience soon makes them wise, and those who have once been deceived are not easily cheated a second time (therein they certainly differ from man). Even among men, whom they never trust completely, they know well how to distinguish between the dangerous and the harmless; they allow the shepherd to approach more nearly than the hunter. In the same sense Darwin speaks of the incredible degree of acuteness, caution, and cleverness on the part of the furry animals of North America, as being chiefly due to the constant snares and wiles of the hunter.

Mr. Darwin tries particularly to show in the higher animals the beginnings of moral sentiments also, which he connects with their social instincts. A kind of sense of honor and of conscience can hardly fail to be recognised in nobler and wellbred horses and dogs. And even if the conscience of dogs has not unjustly been traced back to the stick, it may well be asked whether the case is very different with the lower classes of man. Those instincts in animals which refer to the education of their young, to the care, trouble, and sacrifices on their behalf, must be considered as the first germs of higher moral faculties. Here, as Goethe says, we see indicated in the animal the bud of what in man becomes a blossom.'

So far the panegyrist; in reply to whom I can only say that, without doubting any of the extraordinary accounts of the intellect, the understanding, the caution, the