On the Study of Words | Page 7

great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce
anything nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered
leaf to unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the
child with the latent capabilities of 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 âge 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 rôle
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 rôles 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