this advantage, that they are both told by truly scientific observers. The first is taken from Autenrieth, in his Ansichten über Natur und Seelenleben, published in 1836. "The grub of the Nachtpfauenauge spins, at the upper end of its case, a double roof of stiff bristles, held together at the end by very fine threads. This roof opens through a very light pressure from within, but offers a strong resistance to any pressure from without. If the grub acted according to judgment and reason, it would, according to human ideas, have had to consider as follows:-That it might possibly become a chrysalis, and be exposed to all sorts of accidents without any chance of escape, unless it took sufficient precautions; that it would rise from the chrysalis as a butterfly, without having the organs and power to break the covering which it had spun as a grub, or without being able, like other butterflies, to emit a liquid capable of dissolving silky threads; that, therefore, unless it had, while a grub, made preparations for an easy exit from its prison, it would suffer in it a premature death. While engaged in building such a prison the grub ought to have perceived clearly that, in order to escape hereafter as a butterfly, it would have to make a roof so constructed that it should protect from without, but open easily from within, and that this could be effected by means of stiff silky bristles, converging in the middle, but otherwise free. It would also have to know beforehand that, for that purpose, the same silky substance had to be used out of which the whole covering was built up, only with greater art. And yet it could not have been instructed in this by its parents, because they were dead before it escaped from its egg. Nor could it have learnt it by habit and experience, for it performs this work of art once only in its life; nor by imitation, for it does not live in society. Its understanding, too, could be but little cultivated during its grub-life, for it does nothing but creep about on the shrub on which it first saw the light, eat its leaves, cling to it with its feet, so as not to fall to the ground, and hide beneath a leaf, so as not to be wetted by the rain. To shake off by involuntary contortions its old skin whenever it became uncomfortable, was the whole of its life, the whole of its reasoning, before it began to spin its marvellous shroud.' The other case is an experiment very ingeniously contrived, with a view of discovering traces of generalisation in the ordinary habits of animals. The experiment was made by Mr. Amtsberg, of Stralsund, and described by Dr. Möbius, Professor of Zoology at Kiel.* 'A pike, who swallowed all small fishes which were put into his aquarium, was separated from them by a pane of glass, so that, whenever he tried to pounce on them, he struck his gills against the glass, and sometimes so violently that he remained lying on his back, like dead. He recovered, however, and repeated' his onslaughts, till they became rarer and rarer, and at last, after three months, ceased altogether. After having been in solitary confinement for six months, the pane of glass was removed from the aquarium, so that the pike could again roam about freely among the other fishes. He at once swam towards them, but he never touched any one of them, but always halted at a respectful distance of about an inch, and was satisfied to share with the rest the meat that was thrown into the aquarium. He had therefore been trained so as not to attack the other fishes which he knew as inhabitants of the same tank. As soon, however, as a strange fish was thrown into the aquarium, the pike in nowise respected him, but swallowed him at once. After he had done this forty times, all the time respecting the old companions of his imprisonment, he had to be removed from the aquarium on account of his large size.' 'The training of this pike,' as Professor Möbius remarks, was not, therefore, based on judgment; it consisted only in he establishment of a certain direction of will, in consequence of uniformly recurrent sensuous impressions. The merciful treatment of the fishes which were familiar to him, or, as some would say, which he knew, shows only that the pike acted without reflection. Their view provoked in him, no doubt, the natural desire to swallow them, but it evoked at the same time the recollection of the pain which he had suffered on their account, and the sad impression that it was impossible to reach the prey * Schriften des Naturwissenschaftlichen Vereins für Schleswig-Holstein. Separatabdruck. Kiel, 1873. which he so much desired. These impressions acquired a greater power than his voracious instinct, and repressed it at least for a time. The same sensuous impression, proceeding from the same fishes, was always in his soul the beginning of the same series of psychic acts. He could not help repeating this series, like a machine, but like a machine with a soul, which has this advantage over mechanical machines, that it can adapt its work to unforeseen circumstances, while a mechanical machine can not. The pane of glass was to the organism of the pike one of these unforeseen circumstances.' Truly scientific observations and experiments, like the two here mentioned, will serve at least to show how much can be achieved by purely intuitional knowledge, possessed in common by men and animals, and without the help of that conceptual knowledge which I regard as the exclusive property of man. With us, every element of knowledge, even the simplest impression of the senses, has been so completely conceptualised, that it is almost impossible for us to imagine intuitional without conceptual knowledge. It is not always remarked that we men have almost entirely left the sphere of purely intuitional knowledge, and that the world in which we live and move and have our being is a world of concepts; a world which we have created ourselves, and which, without us, without the spectators in the theatre, would vanish into nothing. What do we mean when we say we know a thing? A child which for the first time in his life sees an elephant, may stare at the huge beast, may fix his eyes on its trunk and tusks, may touch its skin, and walk round the monster so as to measure it from every side. While this is going on the child sees the beast, feels it, measures it; but we should never say the first time the child sees an elephant, that he knows it. When the child sees the same elephant, or another elephant, a second time, and recognises the animal as the same, or nearly the same which he saw before, then, for the first time, we say that the child knows the elephant. This is knowledge in its lowest and crudest form. It is no more than a connecting of a present with a past intuition or phantasm; it is, properly speaking, remembering only, and not yet cognition. The animal intellect, according to the ordinary interpretation, would go as far as this, but no farther. But now let us take, not exactly a child, but a boy who for the first time sees an elephant. He, too, does not know the elephant, but he knows that what he sees for the first time, is an animal. What does that mean? It means that the boy possesses the concept of a living and breathing being, different from man, and that he recognises this general concept in the elephant before him. Here, too, cognition takes place by means of recognition, but what is recognised is not connected with a former intuition, but with a concept, the concept of animal.* Now, an animal, as such, has no actual existence. A boy may have seen dogs, cats, and mice, but never an animal in general. The concept of animal is therefore of man's own making, and its only object is to enable man to know. What is But now let us make a further step, and instead of a child or a boy, take a young man who knows the elephant, not only as what he has seen in the Zoological Garden, not only as an animal, but scientifically, as we call it, as a vertebrate. the difference between his knowledge and that of the boy? Simply this, that he has formed a new concept-that of the vertebrate-comprehending less than the concept of animal, but being more definite, more accurate, and therefore more useful for knowing one class of animals from another. These scientific concepts can be made narrower and narrower, more and more accurate and scientific, till at last, after having classed the elephant as a vertebrate, a mammal, a pachydermatous animal, and a proboscidate, we leave the purely physical classification, and branching off into metaphysical language, call the elephant a living object, a material object, an object in general. In this, and in no other way, do we gain knowledge, whether scientific or unscientific; and if we should ever meet with an intuition for which we have no concept whatsoever, not even that of material object, then that intuition would be inconceivable, and utterly unknowable; it would transcend the When the Romans first became acquainted with the elephant, they used the concept of or for the conception of the new animal, and called it Bos Luca. In the same manner savage tribes, who had never seen horses, called horses large pigs. limits of our knowledge.* The whole of what we call the human intellect consists of these concepts, a kind of net for catching intuitional knowledge, which becomes larger and stronger with every draught that is brought to land. Wonderful as the human intellect may appear, when we look upon it as a whole, its nature is extremely simple. It separates and combines, it destroys and builds up, it throws together at haphazard or classifies with the minutest care, the materials supplied by the senses, and it is for this very reason, because it intermixes, or interlaces, or interlinks, that it was called the Inter-lect, softened into Intellect. The more concepts we possess, the larger is our knowledge; the more carefully we handle or interlink our concepts, the more closely do we reason; and the more freely we can tumble out the contents of these pigeon-holes, and throw them together, the more startling is our power of imagination. We now come to the next point, How is this work of the human intellect, the forming and handling of concepts, carried on ? Are concepts possible, or, at least, are concepts ever realised without some outward form or body? I say decidedly, No. If the Science of Language has proved anything, it has proved that conceptual or discursive thought can be carried on in words only. There is no thought without words, as little as there are words without thought. We can, by abstraction, distinguish between words and thought, as the Greeks did when they spoke of inward (Evdiálɛros) and outward (pooptkóg) Logos, but we can never separate the two without destroying both. If I may explain my meaning by a homely illustration, it is like pealing an orange. We can peel an orange, and put the skin on one side and the flesh on the other; and we can peel language, and put the words on one side and the thought or meanings on the other. But we never find in nature an orange without peel, nor peel without an orange; nor do we ever find in nature thought without words, or words without thought. It is curious, however, to observe how determinately this conclusion has been resisted. It is considered humiliating that *See the whole of this subject treated most excellently by Mr. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, p. 79. what is most spiritual in us, our thoughts, should be dependent on such miserable crutches as words are supposed to be. But words are by no means such miserable crutches. They are the very limbs, aye, they are the very wings of thought. We do not complain that we cannot move without legs. Why then should we consider it humiliating that we cannot think without words? The most ordinary objection to this view of thought and language is, that if thought were dependent on words the deaf and dumb would be without conceptual thought altogether. But, according to those who have best studied this subject, it is perfectly true* that deaf and dumb persons, if left entirely to themselves, have no concepts, except such as can be expressed by less perfect symbols-and that it is only by being taught that they acquire some kind of conceptual thought and language. Were this otherwise, however, we, at all events, could know nothing of their concepts, except through some kind of language, intelligible both to them and to ourselves, while, according to the premiss, the deaf and dumb are supposed to be without language altogether. Another and more powerful objection is, that the invention of language involves the previous existence of concepts, because we can only feel impelled to express what already exists in our mind. This objection, however, has been met by showing that in the usual sense of that word language was never invented, and that here, as in all other cases, though we may say that, logically, the function is the antecedent of the organ, yet in reality organ and function always presuppose each other, and cannot exist the one without the other. A third objection is, that language, in the usual sense of the word, is not the only organ cf conceptual thought. Now this is perfectly true, and has never been questioned. Besides the phonetic symbols of language, there are other less perfect symbols of thought, which are rightly called ideographic. We can form the concept of 'three' without any spoken word, by simply holding up three fingers. In the same manner the hand might stand for five, both hands for ten, hands and feet for twenty. This is how people who *Lectures on the Science of Language, II. 74, note. possessed no organs of speech, would speak; this is how the deaf and dumb do speak. Three fingers are as good as three strokes, three strokes are as good as three clicks of the tongue, three clicks of the tongue are as good as the sound three, or trois, or drei, or shalosh in Hebrew, or san in Chinese. But all these are signs; and being signs, symbols or embodiments of concepts, they fall under the general category of logos or language. 'As a matter of necessity,' Professor Mansel remarked, men must think by symbols; as a matter of fact, they do think by language.'t Nothing, however, seems of any avail to convince our opponents that they cannot do what they imagine they have been doing all their lives, viz., thinking silently, or without words. Some of the Polynesian savages would seem to have a far truer insight into the nature of thought, for their expression for thinking is speaking in the stomach.' But modern philosophers inagine they are wiser than these primitive savages; and in order to put an end to all controversy, they have had recourse even to the test of experiment. I shall try to describe these experiments as well as I can, and if my description seems incredible, it is certainly not my fault. As far as I can follow those who have tried the experiment, they begin by shutting their eyes and ears, and holding their breath. They then sink into unconsciousness, and when all is dark and still, they try their new art of ventriloquism, thinking thoughts without words. They begin with a very simple case. They want to conjure up the thought of a . . . . I must not say what, for it is to be a nameless thing, and every time that its name rises, it is gulped down and ordered to vanish. However, in confidence, I may whisper that they want to conjure up the thought of adog. Now the word dog is determinately suppressed; hound, cur, and all the rest, too, are ordered away. Then begins the work. 6 Rise up, thou quadruped with ears and wagging tail!' But alas! the charm is already broken! Quadruped, * See some excellent remarks on gesture-language by Mr. E. B. Tylor, in the Fortnightly Review, 1866, p. 544. t North British Review, 1850. ears, tail, wagging, all are words which cannot be admitted. Silence is restored, and a new effort begins. This time there is to be nothing about quadruped, or animal, or hairy brute; the inner consciousness sinks lower, and at last there rises a being, to be developed gradually and insensibly into a dog. But, alas! being,' too, is a word, and as soon as it is whispered, all the potential dogs vanish into nothing. A last appeal, however, remains. No animal, no being, nothing is to be talked of; complete silence is restored; no breath is drawn. There is a something coming. near, the ghost appears, when suddenly he is greeted by the recognising self with Bow-wow! bow-wow! Then at last, the effort is given up as hopeless, the eyes are opened, the ears unstopped, the breath is allowed to rise again, and as soon as the word dog is uttered, the ghost appears, the concept is there, we know what we mean, we think and say Dog. Let any one try to think without words, and, if he is honest, he will confess that the process which he goes through is somewhat like the one I have just tried to describe. But I believe that there would have been far less unwillingness to admit that conceptual thought is impossible without language, if people had not been frightened by the recollection of the old controversies between Nominalism and Realism. the Science of Language has nothing to do with either Nominalism or Realism. It does not teach that concepts are nothing but words, but only that concepts are nothing without words, and words nothing without concepts. If Condillac maintained that science is but a well-made language, he was right, but only because he assigned to language a much fuller meaning than it usually has. Again, when Horne Tooke said that the business of the mind extended no further than to receive impressions, that what are called its operations are merely the operations of language, he too was right, only that he used mind where we generally use sense, and language where we use λóyog or reason. I quoted on a former occasion* the words of Schelling and Hegel on the indivisibility of thought and language; I may add to-day the testimony of one who looked upon the philosophy of Schelling * Lectures on the Science of Language, II. p. 77. and Hegel as verba præterquam nihil, and who yet fully supports their view on this point. 'That language (verbal or other) is inseparable from thought, is rendered morally certain by the impossibility under which we all labor of forming universal notions without the aid of voluntary symbols. The instant we advance beyond the perception of that which is present now and here, our knowledge can be only representative; as soon as we rise above the individual object, our representative sign must be arbitrary. The phantasms The phantasms of imagination may have more or less resemblance to the objects of sense; but they bear that resemblance solely by virtue of being, like those objects themselves, individual. I may recall to mind, with more cr less vividness, the features of an absent friend, as I may paint his portrait with more or less accuracy; but the likeness in neither case ceases to be the individual representation of an individual man. my conception of a man in general can attain universality only by surrendering resemblance; it becomes the representative of all mankind only because it has no special likeness to any one man.'* But But this is not all. The Science of Language teaches us not only that there can be no concept without a word, but that every word of our language, (with the exception of purely interjectional and imitative words) is based on a concept. Let us clear the ground a little before we proceed. We know, first of all, that all words which express abstract ideas are borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow.' We know that anima in Latin means the wind, the breath of living beings, life, and lastly, soul. Sallust says, Ingenii facinora, sicut anima, immortalia sunt, the works of genius are immortal, like the soul. We may therefore say that in anima, the French âme, the original concept is breathing. But we have now to advance a step farther into that earlier stratum of language and thought where we want to find *Letters, Lectures, and Reviews, by H. L. Mansel, p. 8. + See Emerson, Complete Works, Vol. 149. out, not only the original concept of anima, soul, but the original concept of anima, wind. Why was it, and how was it, that the wind was ever called anima? In fact, why has any word in Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, just that form and that meaning which it has? That is what we want to know if, as scholars, we speculate on the origin of language. The answer which the Science of Language gives is this: Take any word you like in any language which has a past, and you will invariably find that it is based on a concept. a concept. The process of names-giving was, in fact, the first attempt at classification, very weak, very unscientific, no doubt, but for that very reason all the more interesting for watching the pre-historic growth of the human mind. Thus, in the old Aryan name for horse, Sansk., asva, equus, innо5, Old Saxon, chu, we discover nothing like the neighing of a horse, but we discover the concept of quickness embodied in the root AK, to be sharp, to be quick, from which we have likewise the names for mental quickness, such as acutus. We therefore see here, not in theory, but by actual historical evidence, that the concept of quickness existed, had been fully elaborated first, and that through it the conceptional, as distinct from the purely intuitional knowledge of horse was realised. That name, the quick, might have been applied to many other animals too; but having been repeatedly applied to horses, it became for that very reason unfit for any other purposes. Serpents, for instance, are quick enough when they fall on their prey, but their name was formed from another concept, that of squeezing or throttling. They were called ahi in Sanskrit; exts in Greek; anguis in Latin, all from a root AH, to squeeze; or sarpa, in Latin serpens, from a root SARP, to creep, to go. The goose is called hamsa-s in Sanskrit; gós (for gans) in Anglo-Saxon; 'ans-er (for ganser) in Latin. The root from which these words are derived was GHA, to open the mouth, to gape, modified to GHAN in xaivw, and to GHANS. The Greek χήν, χηνός, comes from the same root as its simpler form GHAN. The goose was, therefore, originally conceived as the gaping, or hissing bird, and hence. its name. The wolf was called varka-s, from a root VARK, to tear, and the same word |