of my readers to use exaggerated language, but the only exaggeration I am really guilty of is my taking for granted that what has been proved of Sanskrit, can be proved of any other Aryan language also. Whether that is so or not, I gladly leave to be settled by future scholars. But even if at present we have proved no more than that the myriads of thoughts that swarmed through the hive of the Indian intellect are all the offspring of not more than a hundred and twenty mother-ideas, a step in advance has been made by the Science of Thought such as few philosophers have ever dreamt of. prehension. The creative power of mind which has given origin to the material machinery of the nineteenth century must take a very humble place beside that of the men who first put thought and words together. The former harnessed heat and electricity; the latter made available the true Promethean fire.' CHAPTER VIII. Radical FORMATION OF WORDS. I HAVE Sometimes spoken of roots and their formation as representing a complete period in the history of the human mind. In a certain sense this may be true, but in a very restricted sense only. Growth does not submit to hard and fast lines, and we have no right therefore to suppose or to assert that all the roots of a language were elaborated before another step was made in advance. Many roots show by their form, and still more by the concepts which they embody, that they belong to what we should call secondary stages of thought, and though we can perfectly understand that all the purposes of language could be realised with roots only this is the case to the present day with Chinese-we have no right to imagine that, until every single root had been finally settled, no progress was made in the synthesis of roots, i. e. in the formation of words. When I speak of roots I do not simply mean a phonetic element which has been discovered as shared by a number of words in common. That would be to a certain extent Pânini's view of a root. But though it would explain the process by which, under proper precautions, a root may be discovered, the result of that process might be something purely abstract and unreal. I mean by root something real, Imperative. something that was actually used in conversation, though I willingly grant to the logician that a root, as soon as it forms part of a sentence, should be distinguished by a new name and be called a word. Now the shortest sentence of all is, no doubt, the imperative, and it is in the imperative that almost to the present day roots retain their simplest form. If KHAN is the root, khana is the imperative, meaning Dig! If DÂ is the root, dâ, give! might have been the imperative. DÂ, however, and similar roots take dhi or hi as a suffix of the imperative in Sanskrit. Thus AD, to eat, becomes ad-dhi (ad-hi), eat thou! Whether this hi or dhi was originally a pronominal element, indicating the second person, or whether it was purely exhortative, is a question which I gladly leave to those who have better ears than I have. Anyhow this form was old, and appears almost identical in Sanskrit and Greek, as in To us there seems a great difference between the imperative and the indicative. Yet the fact remains that in Greek the second person plural and dual in the active and passive, indicative and imperative, are identical, φέρετον, φέρετε, φέρεσθε, φέρεσθον. In Sanskrit, on the contrary, several forms of the imperative coincide with the imperfect, if we drop the augment, which in the earliest Sanskrit is frequently absent, and always so after the prohibitive, that is, the negatively imperative, particle mâ; namely, 1, 2, 3 pers. 1 Curtius, Verbum, vol. ii. p. 46. dual, 1, 2 pers. plur. Parasm., 2, 3 pers. dual, 2 pers. plur. Atmanep.; and in the Second Conjugation, 2, 3 pers. dual, 2 pers. plur. Parasm., 2, 3 pers. dual, 2 pers. plur. Åtmanep. This similarity in form between the imperative and the indicative present in Greek may be explained by a similarity in intention, and we must remember that even in modern languages we can say 'you go' instead of go,' or in German 'du gehst jetzt gleich' instead of geh jetzt gleich. In Sanskrit, however, the similarity between certain forms of the imperative and the imperfect is apparent only, because, by a reference to Vedic Sanskrit, what seem to be forms of the imperfect without the augment, turn out to be really Let or subjunctive forms. If we accepted Aristotle's definition that every enunciation (arópavois) declares what is either true or false (De Interp. c. 4), the imperative could hardly claim that name, as little as what Aristotle mentions, the prayer (ex). From a higher point of view, however, the imperative also may be called a sentence, for it makes the hearer understand something which the speaker wishes him to know. Nor is it difficult to imagine a transition from an imperative to an indicative sentence. Suppose a threatening command had been conveyed to a gang of lazy slaves-'Dig!' would not a blubbering utterance of the same word have been the natural response, deprecating by its frequent repetition the punishment that was impending on their backs1? Nay, even the most primitive form of a conditional 1 See Pân. iii, 4, 2, lunîhi lunihity evam lunâti. sentence would soon spring from these early monosyllabic conversations. A master requiring his slaves to labour and promising them their food in the evening, would have no more to say than 'Dig— Feed,' and this would be quite as intelligible as 'Dig, and you shall have food,' or, as we now say, 'If you dig, you shall have food.' But we are anticipating what belongs to later phases of human speech. Next to the imperative, what is now called the Vocative, a kind of nominal imperative, Vocative. belongs likewise to the earliest attempts of language. As little as the imperative presupposes a scheme of conjugation, does the vocative presuppose a complete system of declension. It is possible to imagine a vocative even before the formation of a real noun. As soon as the root YUDH, to fight, is used in the sense of fighter, it has passed, even though it undergoes no outward change, through a complete process of predication. This process, which we may represent by Fight-here' or 'Fighting-he,' gives us a concept and a noun. YUDH has then really become what is called a general term, applicable to many. But in an early phase of thought, even roots may have been used as what we should call proper names, or nick-names, and these singular terms would hardly require that previous process of predication which produced such words as digger, fighter, striker. Proper names, in a primitive state of society, seem often to be mere imperatives, such as 'Fear-not,' 'Trust-God,' etc. Here then imperative and vocative would run very close together. 'Strike' might be an imperative, and at the same time, though possibly with a change of intonation, a vocative also, just as |