generalisations in which that school delighted. When I saw that it was mistaken for my own matured opinion, I protested in every later edition of my Lectures against that interpretation, and I carefully guarded in everything I wrote against seeming to express a preference for any of the current theories on the origin of roots, or of language. The result has been that the upholders of almost every theory on the origin of language have claimed me as one of their supporters, while Heyse's theory, which I neither adopted nor rejected, but which, as will be seen, is by no means incompatible with that which for many years has been gaining on me, and which of late has been so clearly formulated by Professor Noiré, has been assailed with ridicule and torn to pieces, often by persons who did not even suspect how much truth was hidden behind its paradoxical appearance. We are still very far from being able to identify roots with nervous vibrations, but if it should appear hereafter that sensuous vibrations supply at least the raw material of roots, it is quite possible that the theory, proposed by Oken and Heyse, will retain its place in the history of the various attempts at solving the problem of the origin of language, when other theories, which in our own days were received with popular applause, will be completely forgotten.

Psychologists

When at the end of my Lectures on the Science of Language I left untouched the two great ought to problems, how mere cries, whether interstudy mind in jectional or imitative, could develop into language. phonetic types, and how mere vibrations of the nerves could develop into rational concepts, I confess that I did so with a strong hope that philo

sophers by profession would quickly work the mine that had been opened before their eyes, or rather take possession of the new world that had been discovered for them. I have often wondered since at the apathy, particularly of the students of psychology, with regard to the complete revolution that has been worked in these days in the realm of language. Surely even if language were only the outward form of thought, no philosophy that wishes to gain an insight into the nature of thought, and particularly into the origin of reason, could dispense with a careful study of language. What would Hobbes or Locke have given for Bopp's Comparative Grammar?

Is it not extraordinary, for instance, that in the latest work on the Principles of Psychology, language should hardly ever be mentioned, language without which no thought can exist, or, at all events, without which no thought has ever been realised or expressed? It does not matter what view we take of language; under all circumstances, its intimate relation to thought cannot be doubtful. Call language a mass of imitative cries, or a heap of conventional signs; let it be the tool or the work of the mind; let it be the mere garment or the very embodiment of thought -whatever it is, surely it has something to do with the historical or palaeontological, and with the individual or embryological evolution of the human mind. It may be very interesting to the psychologist to know the marvellous machinery of the senses, beginning with the first formation of nervous channels, tracing the process in which the reflex action of the molecules of the afferent nerves produces a reaction of the molecules of the efferent nerves, following up the establishment of nervous centres and nervous

plexuses, and laying bare the network of those telegraphic wires through which messages are flashed from station to station. Yet, much of that network and its functions admits, and can admit, of an hypothetical interpretation only, while we have before our eyes another network,-I mean language in its endless variety, where every movement of the mind, from the first tremor to the last utterance of our philosophy, may be studied as in a faithful photograph.

And while we know the nervous system only such as it is, or, if we adopt the theory of evolution, such as it has gradually grown from the lowest to the highest state of organisation, without ever being able to watch the actual historical or palaeontological process of its formation, we know language, not only as it is, but can watch it in its constant genesis, and in its historical progress from simplicity to complexity, and again from complexity to simplicity.

For let it not be forgotten that language has two aspects. We, the historical races of mankind, use it, we speak and think it, but we do not make it. Even those who call the faculty of language con-genital, must admit that to us every language is traditional. The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready-made for us. The work of making language belongs to a period in the history of mankind beyond the reach of the ordinary historian, and of which we, in our advanced state of mental development, can hardly form a clear conception. Yet that period must have had an historical reality as much as the period during which small annual deposits formed the strata of the globe on which

we live. As during enormous periods of time the Earth was absorbed in producing the carboniferous vegetation which still supplies us with the means of warmth, light, and life, there must have been a period likewise during which the human mind had no other work but that of linguistic vegetation, the produce of which still supplies the stores of our grammars and dictionaries. After the great bulk of language was finished, a new work began, that of arranging and defining, and of now and then coining a new word for a new thought or a new shade of thought. And all this we can watch ourselves in the quarries opened by the Science of Language. No microscope will enable us to watch the formation of a new nervous ganglion, while we can see with our own eyes the formation of new mental ganglia in the formation of every new word. Besides, whatever physiological psychologists may say, the whole network of the nerves is as much outside the mind as our skin is. A state of nervous action, it has been truly said1, may be parallel, but it never is identical with a state of consciousness, and even the assumed parallelism between nervous states and states of consciousness is, when we come to details, beyond all comprehension. Language, on the contrary, is not outside the mind, but is the outside of the mind. Language is very thought as much as thought is very language.

Is it not strange that Mr. Herbert Spencer, who is so much impressed with the idea that mental tendencies originally derived from experience impress

1 H. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, ii. 592.

2 H. Spencer, 1. c., i. 140.

Spencer's Inheritance,

explained by Language.

themselves permanently on the cerebral structure and are transmitted by inheritance, should have looked for the traces of these impressions in the convolutions of the brain, where no microscope will ever discover them, and not where they are visible to unaided sight and palpable to the commonest understanding, namely in language? How can it be otherwise than that the modes of thinking and speaking which are acquired by the race should become traditional, when every new generation has to make itself at home in the grammatical building inherited from its ancestors, and has to learn to walk in the shoes left by its fathers? We do not want a revival of mysterious innate ideas, if we can only open our eyes to see the unbroken continuity which holds untold generations together by the intellectual chains of language.

Just at the end of his interesting work on the Principles of Psychology Mr. Herbert Spencer makes a remark which shows that he is by no means ignorant of what a psychologist might learn from a careful study of language1. 'Whether it be or be not a true saying,' he writes, 'that mythology is a disease of language, it may be said with truth that metaphysics, in all its anti-realistic developments, is a disease of language.' No doubt it is, but does Mr. H. Spencer not perceive what enormous consequences flow from this view of language for a proper study of psychology, nay, of philosophy in general? If a disease of language can produce such hallucinations as mythology and metaphysics, what then is the health of language and what its bearing on