On the Study of Words | Page 7

manhood, he is himself rather the man prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.
But the truer answer to the inquiry how language arose, is this: God gave man language, just as He gave him reason, and just because He gave him reason; for what is man's word but his reason, coming forth that it may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the same that the Greek language has one word for them both. He gave it to him, because he could not be man, that is, a social being, without it. Yet this must not be taken to affirm that man started at the first furnished with a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were with his first dictionary and first grammar ready-made to his hands. He did not thus begin the world with names, but _with the power of naming_: for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as one of us teaches a parrot, from without; but gave him a capacity, and then evoked the capacity which He gave. Here, as in everything else that concerns the primitive constitution, the great original institutes, of humanity, our best and truest lights are to be gotten from the study of the first three chapters of Genesis; and you will observe that there it is not God who imposed the first names on the creatures, but Adam-- Adam, however, at the direct suggestion of his Creator. He brought them all, we are told, to Adam, 'to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof' (Gen. ii. 19). Here we have the clearest intimation of the origin, at once divine and human, of speech; while yet neither is so brought forward as to exclude or obscure the other.
And so far we may concede a limited amount of right to those who have held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of embodying thought in words. I believe that we should conceive the actual case most truly, if we conceived this power of naming things and expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being, one of the divine capabilities with which he was created: but one (and in this differing from those which have produced in various people various arts of life) which could not remain dormant in him, for man could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud and blossom out from within him at every solicitation from the world without and from his fellow-man; as each object to be named appeared before his eyes, each relation of things to one another arose before his mind. It was not merely the possible, but the necessary, emanation of the spirit with which he had been endowed. Man makes his own language, but he makes it as the bee makes its cells, as the bird its nest; he cannot do otherwise. [Footnote: Renan has much of interest on this matter, both in his work _De l'Origine du Langage_, and in his _Hist. des Langues Semitiques_. I quote from the latter, p. 445: Sans doute les langues, comme tout ce qui est organisé, sont sujettes à la loi du développement graduel. En soutenant que le langage primitif possédait les éléments nécessaires à son intégrité, nous sommes loin de dire que les mécanismes d'un age plus avancé y fussent arrivés a leur pleine existence. Tout y était, mais confusément et sans distinction. Le temps seul et les progrès de l'esprit humain pouvaient opérer un discernement dans cette obscure synthèse, et assigner à chaque élément son r?le spécial. La vie, en un mot, n'était ici, comme partout, qu'à la condition de l'évolution du germe primitif, de la distribution des r?les et de la séparation des organes. Mais ces organes eux-mêmes furent détermines dès le premier jour, et depuis l'acte générateur qui le fit être, le langage ne s'est enrichi d'aucune fonction vraiment nouvelle. Un germe est posé, renfermant en puissance tout ce que l'être sera un jour; le germe se développe, les formes se constituent dans leurs proportions régulières, ce qui était en puissance devient en acte; mais rien ne se crée, rien ne s'ajoute: telle est la loi commune des êtres soumis aux conditions de la vie. Telle fut aussi la loi du langage.]
How this latent power evolved itself first, how this spontaneous generation of language came to pass, is a mystery; even as every act of creation is of necessity such; and as a mystery all the deepest inquirers into the subject are content to leave it. Yet we may perhaps a little help ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and what it was not, if we liken it to the growth