SECTION I
CLEARING THE WAY
  CHAPTER I
THE AIM, AND THE METHOD OF TREATMENT
But that same Where (Space), with its brother When (Time),
are from the first the master-colours of our Dream-Grotto; the
Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams
and Life-Visions are painted.---CARLYLE, <1Sartor Resartus,>1 1830.
WHEN Kant in his investigation of the nature and validity
of human knowledge in the <1Critique of Pure Reason>1 (1781)
undertook an examination of the nature of Space and Time
as the starting point in the discussion, he struck the path
which all fruitful philosophical investigation has followed
since.  Since Space and Time are the two "forms' within
which the whole system of life and nature unfolds itself to
the human mind, and are at the same time the "warp and
woof' on which man elaborates his mental sense-picture of
the world, an examination of these two sense-forms should
be the self-evident starting point in any true cosmic philo-
sophy.  Yet it seems to have taken something more than a
century for the full significance of Kant's method to sink
into the general philosophical consciousness, and it is only
in our own time that its fruits have begun to mature.  What
strikes one in the philosophical writings of the present cen-
tury, whether starting from mathematics, or science, or pure
speculation, is the common assumption in all of them that
some exposition of Space and Time must form the founda-
tion of any adequate treatment of the nature of the world,
the human mind, and the structure of human knowledge.
The title of Professor Alexander's book, <1Space, Time, and>1
<1Deity>1 (1920), is symbolic of the modern point of view.
  From these modern philosophical treatises, however, one
significant human phenomenon has been omitted---language.
So far as I know no attempt has been made to explore the
   3
  CLEARING THE WAY
nature of language in relation to space and time.  And yet
among the "novelties' which 'emerged' to actuality with
man's emergence from the realm of nature into the realm
of free mind, language is the most distinctive and significant.
It is the one unique human instrument which man has
designed for the purpose of elaborating within his own
mind an actual mental picture of the material world of space
and time in which he lives.  By means of these designed
symbols of language he has built up, and is still building
up within his own mind a space-time picture of the space-
time world; and since the space-time mental picture
elaborated by language is the approximating image or
counterpart of the actual space-time world, there must be
a close correspondence between the structure of language
and the structure of the world which language images.
It seems probable, therefore, that an examination of the
structure and significance of language in relation to Space
and Time may bring to light certain characteristics of
language, and of the human mind that created it, that are
not otherwise apparent.  It is in this hope that the present
investigation has been undertaken.
  To work the problem out adequately, however, some
preliminary clearing of the way will be necessary.  This
preliminary work will include three things : first, a very brief
statement and exposition of the old Hebrew theory of
language origin ; second, a short reference to Plato's theory
as being the first freely scientific and radical treatment of
the question; and third, an outline of the development of
modern language theory from the publication of Herder's
radical essay in 1772 to the publication of Darwin's <1Descent>1
<1of Man>1 in 1871, when the stream of modern philosophic
thought regarding the origin and meaning of language was
deflected so violently from its natural course that it has not
recovered since.
  Because of this deflection I shall take 1871 as the starting
point in time for the development of my own view.  In this,
                         4
             AIM, AND METHOD OF TREATMENT
the main part of the work, I shall give first of all a statement
and criticism of Darwin's view, and then, using this as a
logical starting point, I shall attempt a new philosophical
exposition of the origin and structure of language in relation
to the two sense-forms of Space and Time.
                     CHAPTER II
          TWO OLD-WORLD THEORIES OF LANGUAGE
      1.  <1The Genesis Theory (c.>1 950 B.C.)
Adam's first task was giving names to natural Appearances :
what is ours still but a continuation of the same ?---CARLYLE,
<1Sartor Resartus,>1 1830.
WHAT is now usually known as the 'external divine-origin
theory' of language---a misnomer which arose from
erroneous theological expositions of the narrative given in
the early chapters of Genesis---has still an interest for the
modern student; first, because of the prolonged influence
which it has had upon language theory in the Western
world; and second, because of certain significant facts
regarding language which an understanding reader still
finds in that old story of language origin, to say nothing
of the poetic attractiveness of the story itself.
  The Hebrew writer of the Genesis narrative had observed
the fact that of the gifts which God had bestowed on man
language was one of the most significant.  Man had come
into possession of the unique power of naming and classify-
ing the things of the world; and in attempting an explana-
tion of how this naming process was actually accomplished
that early writer put it in the following manner: 'And out
of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field,
and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam
to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam
called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the
air, and to every beast of the field.'  That is the Hebrew
writer's brief and naive story of the birth of language; a
story which the modern child of ten years will still accept
                          6
at literal face value, which the man of twenty who puts
away childish things will reject, and which the philosopher
of forty, who has grown in discernment as well as in know-
ledge, will re-accept with some surprise at the amount of
factual truth contained in it.  We do not think now, of
course, that the naming of living things in the world hap-
pened in such a summary matter-of-fact fashion as that,
and yet there are three things in this old account that have
significance still to the modern scientist, despite the new
views about language which have become orthodox since
1871.
  First.  Whether it was that the animals were brought to
man, or that man went to the animals, or that they mutually
confronted each other---the method of early poetic state-
ment of the fact matters little---the result was that man <1did>1
naine the animals ; and the fact of his naming them indicated
that he had come into possession of this unique power of
language which the animals apparently did not have, because
they had not given names to themselves or to one another.
Furthermore, this record of man's having named the
animals of the world was written some three thousand-odd
years ago, and the animals have not yet made any start at
naming themselves.  This difference between man and the
animals as evidenced in man's power of giving names, and
thus making explicit classification of things, is a unique
difference between the two, a difference whose significance
has not yet been clearly brought out in modern discussions
of the subject.  In fact, since Darwin's formulation of the
evolutionary theory in reference to man in 1871, the differ-
ence has been persistently either obscured or denied
altogether.
  Second.  According to this old writer's account, man's
first interest was with the world of living things rather than
with insentient life or inanimate nature.  'Adam gave
names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every
beast of the field.'  No mention is made of the naming of
                          7
trees, or plants, or inanimate objects.  This furnishes no
conclusive evidence of course, of the actual order in which
man named the things of the world; but the things which
the first writer observed as having been named by Adam
were very probably the things that first interested man and
induced him to mark their differences by giving them
names.  At all events, the passage has interest as giving us
one of the earliest records of man's first impression about
the matter.
  Third.  This writer saw also that when the name was
once given to the animal it stuck to him.  'Whatsoever
name Adam called every living creature, that was the name
thereof.'  Some of these names given in the remote begin-
nings of the Semitic language, long before the Genesis
record was written, have, as a matter of fact, stuck to these
animals down to the present time ; though countless genera-
tions of the animals themselves have come into being and
disappeared again in a continuously vanishing stream.  The
giving of the name was thus the introduction of a new
element into the world, the element of <1permanence>1 which
persists through the series of un-permanent things.  This
permanent element, as I hope to show later, belongs in its
explicit form to the mind of man alone, and takes on its
adequate outward form in language.
  In interpreting the old Genesis story in this explicit
modern way one may be guilty of discovering more in it
than the author intentionally put there; though one who
has been trained in the literalism of Western thought and
expression is seldom sure whether he is finding too much
or too little in even the simplest objective symbolism of
the East, as in the older portions of the Bible.  In any case,
to have observed and recorded the fact of this sticking
power of names in contrast to the vanishing series of things
that are named, was a distinct achievement or lucky hit for
so early a thinker and, when adequately interpreted, turns
out to be a permanent contribution to the philosophy of
                          8
language.  But we shall have occasion to revert to this a
little farther on.
  The Genesis writer had also observed the diversity of
languages in the world, and ventured an explanation of
this. Originally, he says, "the whole world was of one
language and of one speech.'  But when God saw that by
the use of this single language man aspired "to build a city
and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven,' He 'con-
founded their language so that they might not understand
one another's speech,' and 'scattered them abroad from
thence upon the face of the earth.'  The "city and tower'
was obviously used by the writer as a figure to symbolize
the inordinate vanity of man's knowledge and power, and
since language was man's prime instrument for the realiza-
tion of his ambitious aims, his vanity could be most effec-
tively curbed by the confusion of his language.  This whole
explanatory story is based upOn a purely moral conception
of the world, and was no doubt a very plausible explanation
at a time when the man-inhabited world was conceived as
a relatively small place, and man's sojourn on it of relatively
short duration.
  This Genesis account of the beginnings and diversity of
language when looked at in a sensible way is really quite a
natural one, though the naive statement that God brought
the animals to Adam, as one person might bring them to
another, indicates a point of view quite different from the
modern.  It was Adam, however, according to the narra-
tive, who actually did the naming, that is, who actually
made the first words of language.  In the process of time,
however, theological preconception and prejudice gradually
shifted the emphasis from Adam to God, and interpreted
the story as meaning that language was a direct and ready-
made gift from God to man.
  From the modern point of view this theological explana-
tion of language origin and vicissitudes has turned out to
be unsatisfactory, but it is interesting as showing man's
                         9
very early interest in the problem and some of his first
guesses about it.  It is significant also from the fact that it
was the generally accepted language-origin theory up until
the middle of the eighteenth century.
  2. <1Plato>1 (427-347 B.C.)
  Plato's theory of language origin requires mention here,
though for valid reasons its exposition will be postponed
to another place.  The Hebrew writer of the Genesis narra-
tive gave us merely a factual statement of language origin.
While the facts which he noted are, as we saw, significant,
he attempted no scientific or metaphysical exposition of
them.  Plato, on the other hand, accepts the facts of lan-
guage as given, starting, as it were, where the Hebrew
account leaves off, and then asks the question: "How did
the facts of language come about?' or more specifically:
"How were the first words of language actually made, and
what was the principle which operated in and guided the
process of making?'  His approach to the question was
entirely radical, and his treatment of it in the <1Cratylus,>1
which, as usual with Plato, is a compound of science and
philosophy, is on the whole more fundamental and adequate
than any modern treatment of the subject that I know.
Emerson once spoke of the "perpetual modernness' of
Plato's dialogues.  As with the other dialogues this per-
petual modernness lifts the <1Cratylus>1 quite above the stream
of historical treatises upon language origin which we are
discussing in this section, and makes it contemporary with
the best modern discussions of the subject.  Hence the
examination of Plato's theory will be postponed until we
come to the specific question of the actual beginnings of
language which must be the subject of another volume.
  Plato, however, was aware of a prime difficulty in his
quest of language origin in not having an adequate body of
foreign language material for purpose of comparative study.
Socrates, who leads the discussion, frequently comes across
10
a word which is obviously not of Greek origin.  These
words, he says, must have been imported by the Greeks
from their barbarian neighbours, and he makes in one place
the significant remark, from the point of view of language
study, that "the barbarians are older than we are.'  He points
out that to give a complete account of language origin these
words of foreign source would have to be traced home to
their original forms in the language of the people who made
them, but the Greeks had no knowledge of the language
of their barbarian neighbours to enable them to carry
out this investigation.  Plato, with respect to this difficulty,
was in the same position as were Herder and other early
modern investigators of language prior to Sir William
Jones's discovery of Sanskrit in the seventeen-eighties.
  CHAPTER III
ROUSSEAU (1712-72): THE OLD AND THE NEW
DURING the Middle Ages, and up to the middle of the
eighteenth century, the theologians' mutilated version of
the Genesis account of language origin, the divine-origin
theory as it came to be called, was the theory held by
Christian Europe.  In the eighteenth century, however, the
question of the probability of a natural rather than a super-
natural origin of language began to stir in men's minds.
Rousseau's essay on the <1Origin of Languages,>1 about 1750,
might be taken as the historical landmark which stands
between the old and new points of view.  This essay is in
itself disappointing to one who is acquainted with Rous-
seau's other works.  His mental interests were practical
rather than speculative, and he had no real convictions
about the question of language as he had about education,
society, and government.  He was interested in language,
and the changes in language, in relation to the practical
needs of the people in social and national groups, and in
diverse climatic conditions, rather than in the origin of
language itself as an instrument of human reason.  As a
consequence his essay on the <1Origin of Languages>1---not
"Language'---is hardly more than a series of disconnected
reflections upon various aspects of languages, including a
discussion of the relation of language to melody and
harmony in music which occupies about one-third of the
essay.
  There is a curious inconsistency in the essay, which, in
so far as Rousseau can be accepted as a representative of
the current thought of the time, may mark historically the
last association of the theological and the philosophical
conceptions of language in a single treatise, on the eve of
12
the final parting of their ways.  Rousseau admits, in at
least a lukewarm fashion, the divine-origin theory of lan-
guage : "Adam spake; very well: Adam had been taught by
God Himself. . . . It is easy to reconcile the authority of
the Scripture with the monuments of antiquity, and one is
not reduced to treating as fables traditions as old as the
people who transmitted them to us.'  His own independent
comments, however, all point to a natural origin of lan-
guage, though he did not develop them with sufficient
philosophic acumen to be of much value to a modern
student of language.  The sentence by which he closes the
essay might be taken quite literally as a fair judgment of
the philosophical value of his work, and as showing also,
in his quotation from M. Duclos, the source and nature of
his own interest in language : "I shall close these superficial
reflections, but from which others more profound may arise,
by a passage from M. Duclos, which suggested them to me :
"It would be the subject of a very philosophical examination
to show by examples how much the character, the morals,
and the interests of a people influence their language."
Rousseau's essay has interest for the modern student rather
as a historical signpost than as a philosophical exposition.
It stands, as I have said, between the old world and the
new, and I have allowed a chapter to Rousseau's name to
mark symbolically his position between the two worlds.
                     CHAPTER IV
               HERDER AND THE NEW WORLD
            1. <1The New-World View>1
       In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
       I walk and work, above, beneath,
       Work and weave in endless motion !
       Birth and Death,
       An infinite ocean ;
       A seizing and giving
       The fire of living.
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave the living Robe of Deity.
  GOETHE, Song of the Earth-Spirit, <1Faust,>1 1774.
IF pressed for an exact date of the true beginning of the
scientific investigation of language, one would naturally
think of the date of the publication of Johann Gottfried
Herder's prize essay on the <1Origin of Language,>1 1772.  In
passing from Rousseau's essay to Herder's---although they
are separated by only twenty-two years, and by the distance
between Paris and Strassburg---we step clearly over the
threshold from medievalism into the new world of free
philosophical investigation, into an atmosphere as clear as
that in which Plato and Aristotle worked.  Herder's essay
on language is the starting point for all the scientific work
that has since been done on that subject, and has thus a
very important historical significance in addition to its
permanent scientific value.  Its full significance, however,
can be fully appreciated only in relation to the general
scientific and philosophic thought of the time, and it will
be necessary to digress for a few pages to describe the
intellectual atmosphere in which Herder worked in the
latter half of the eighteenth century in Germany.
                        14
Professor Jespersen, in tracing the history of linguistic
science in his recent book on the <1Language, its Nature,>1
<1Development, and Origin,>1 says that: "The chief innovation
of the beginning of the nineteenth century was the historical
point of view .  .  .  the application of the notion of history
to other things than wars and the vicissitudes of dynasties,
and the discovery of the idea of development or evolution
as pervading the whole universe.'  This statement is in the
broad sense true.  Yet it must be remembered that while
the thoroughgoing application of the principle of evolution
to the many phases of existence was the achievement of the
nineteenth century, the discovery of the principle as a
directing agency in the world, together with its corollary
or co-principle of the organic unity of the world, was
really the discovery of the closing half of the eighteenth
century.  It was the central and stimulating idea in the
scientific work of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) in Britain,
and of Buffon (1707-88) and Lamarck (1744-1829) in
France; and in the philosophy, science, and poetry of Kant
(1724-1804),  Herder (1744-1803),  and Goethe  (1749-1832)
in Germany, to mention only the greatest names.  The
movement in Germany is our chief concern here.  It was
more comprehensive in scope than the movement in Eng-
land and France, and had a greater influence upon the
course of world thought in the nineteenth century; and
Herder himself, whose essay on language is our main
interest, bore an active part in it.  His essay on language,
however, was only a special phase of the general evolution-
ary theory of the world which was being formulated in the
thought of the time, and the comments upon the general
scientific and philosophic work of Kant, Goethe, and
Herder in the next few paragraphs are given merely with a
view to a better understanding of Herder's language essay.
 15
  CLEARING THE WAY
2.  <1Kant>1 (1724-1804) <1and Goethe>1 (1749-1832)
But here, as in so many other cases, Germany, learned, inde-
fatigable, deep-thinking Germany, comes to our aid.---CARLYLE,
<1Sartor Resartus,>1 1830.
  Kant was a mathematician and scientist before he became
a philosopher, and these pre-philosophical studies played
a large part in shaping his philosophy.  In his first import-
ant scientific work, the <1General History of Nature and Theory>1
<1of the Heavens,>1 1755, he explained the present animate
world as the result of a very long and gradual evolution,
through natural causation, from the less to the more com-
plex forms of life.  To the general conception of evolution
then gradually coming to view he contributed the original
ideas of Selection, Adaptation, Environment, and Inherit-
ance as essential factors in the general development.  In
his last significant philosophic work, <1The Critique of Judg->1
<1ment,>1 1790, which he designed and developed as the coping
stone for his two former philosophical works, <1The Critique>1
<1of Pure Reason,>1  1781, and <1The Cririque of Practical Reason,>1
1788, the conception of development is a dominating and
shaping idea.  Here, however, in his final views, he unites
the law of natural causation with the teleological principle
of final causes acting towards definite ends.  Haeckel, in
his estimate of Kant's work, considers this introduction of
<1purpose>1 into world-evolution as a retrograde step, on the
part of Kant, from the views of natural causation developed
in his <1History of Nature>1 thirty-five years earlier.  Kant,
however, considered his final statement as the more com-
prehensive and logical, more in accordance with the entire
phenomena of nature, life, and mind in the world.  But the
interesting part of the whole <1Critique of Judgment>1 is the
modernness of the conception of evolution developed in it.
There is one paragraph in the book that might have been
used by Darwin himself as a statement in outline of all that
16
he afterwards worked out in detail in the <1Origin of Species>1
(1859) and <1Descent of San>1 (1871).  This paragraph alone
would give us perhaps better than anything else we could
find a clear image of the advanced scientific and philosophic
thought of the time in Germany.
  It is desirable [says Kant] to examine the great domain of
organized beings, by means of comparative anatomy, in order to
see whether we may not find in them something resembling a
system, and indeed something in accordance with the principle
of generation.  Otherwise we would have to be content with a
mere consideration of things as they are---which gives us no in-
sight into their generation---and, in despair, give up all hope or
claim of natural insight into this field.  The agreement of so
many genera of animals in a certain common plan of structure,
which seems to be fundamental not only in the structure of their
bones, but also in the arrangements of their other parts---so that
with an admirable simplicity of original outline, a great variety
of species has been produced by the shortening of one member
and the lengthening of another, the involution of this part and
the evolution of that---allows a ray of hope, however faint, to
penetrate into our minds, that some results might be obtained
here by the application of the principle of the mechanism of
Nature, without which there can be no natural science at all.
This analogy of forms, which with all their differences seem
to have been produced according to a common original type,
strengthens our surmise of an actual relationship among them in
their procreation from a common parent, through the gradual
approximation of one animal-genus to another---from that genus
in which the principle of purposiveness seems best authenticated,
namely man, down to the polyp, and again from this down to
mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest form of Nature
observable to us, namely to raw matter.  And so the whole
technique of Nature, which, as perceived in organized beings, is
so incomprehensible to us that we feel ourselves compelled to
think a different principle for it, seems to have been derived from
matter and its powers according to mechanical laws (like those
which are operative in the formation of crystal).---KANT, <1Critique>1
<1of Judgment,>1 Bernard's translation, p. 337.
  This was published, as we have said, in 1790, and this
view of the organic unity of the diversified forms of the
world, and their natural evolution from simple beginnings,
together with the principle of purpose which Kant associated
                          17
with it, constitutes the logical groundwork of the <1Critique>1
<1of Judgment.>1
  The same idea pervades the contemporary work of
Goethe.  "Goethe,' says Professor Osborn, "was the greatest
poet of Evolution ; he saw the law as a poet, as a philosopher,
and as an anatomist.'  His scientific work is very well
known in a general way to those who have read the story of
modern scientific thought ; but as a recent visitor to Weimar
says :
  It is impossible to have an adequate conception of the part
played by science in Goethe's life unless one has visited the
Goethe house in Weimar.  The place resembles a museum
rather than a private home, and several large rooms of this
museum contain nothing but the apparatus and materials which
Goethe used in his scientific experimentation.  Chemicals, rocks,
and ores of all kinds, and many species of intricate instruments
occupy table after table.  But most surprising of all is Goethe's
private library.  One would expect to find there a rich collec-
tion of belles lettres; instead one finds the shelves lined with
journals of chemistry, physics, geology, etc.  It is only after
such a visit that one appreciates the many-sided thoroughness ot-
that great mind.---STEINHAUER.
  Goethe was a lifelong student of science, and during his
first Weimar period from 1775 to 1786 his interest was
devoted almost exclusively to scientific study: mineralogy,
botany, geology, physiology, osteology.  He went to Jena
for a course in anatomy under Loder, and to perfect his own
knowledge he gave weekly lectures on the skeleton to the
young men there.  His absorption in science caused great
concern to Herder and others of his friends in Weimar who
already knew his genius for poetry.  But all these systematic
studies over a dozen years were carried on from a purely
scientific curiosity to know how the present world came
to be what it is, and the idea of evolution gave him the
answer to the question.  His research in natural science
alone would have given him a place in modern thought had
it not been overshadowed by his greater work in poetry.
  He went to Italy in 1786, and it was during his two years'
                           18
stay there that his main interest was turned back again
from science to poetry.  "I have abandoned,' he writes
from Italy, "my master Loder for my friend Schiller, and
Linnaeus for Shakespeare.'  He saw perhaps, as Shake-
speare did, that the poet in his creative activity "shares with
great creating nature,' and in his art, as nature's agent, may
add another rung to the ladder of evolution itself, while
science at best can only examine and tabulate the rungs
that are already set; and if, in his return to poetry,  science
lost a disciple who would have ranked among the very
highest, if not the highest,'  the world, in compensation,
has gained an edifice of art whose foundations are laid in
the excavations of scientific research and whose upper
structure will itself be the object of many scientific investiga-
tions in the future.  Poetry deals primarily with human life ;
and with nature only as it affects the growth and course of
human life.  Even in his scientific years Goethe believed
that "the chief study of Mankind is Man,' but he saw that
the roots of man's life are in nature, and his scientific
research had a purpose in relation to his poetry.  It gave a
proportioned perspective to his view of life and the world
as a whole, and gave depth and unity of design to his repre-
sentations of life in both his verse and prose.  If, as Schiller
says of him, "his spirit works and seeks in every direction,
<1striving to create a whole,'>1 his scientific studies contributed
not a little to that unifying impulse and vision.  His work,
as Carlyle pointed out, is significantly original and modern,
the intellectual faculty as clear as the imaginative faculty
is vivid.  Everywhere in the world he saw development and
evolution, not mechanical, but organic and vital.  The song
of the Earth-Spirit in <1Faust,>1 quoted above, considered as a
vital expression of the principle of development at work in
the world, has not been surpassed by anything of a similar
kind and length in the nineteenth century.  It is the core
of his interpretation of life and the world.
  19
  3.  <1Herder>1 (1744-1803)
By his work on language,  <1Uberden Ursprung der Sprache>1 (1772),
Herder may be said to have laid the first rude foundations of the
science of comparative philology, and of that deeper science of
the ultimate nature and origin of language.---J. SULLY (1911).
  It was in this atmosphere that Herder lived.  He was a
student under Kant---who was twenty years his senior---
at Ko%nigsberg between 1762 and 1764, and Kant's <1History>1
<1of Nature>1 had been published seven years before.  He met
and became an intimate friend of Goethe---who was five
years his junior---at Strassburg in 1770, and from 1776 when
Herder, through the influence of Goethe, moved to Weimar,
the two men lived in more or less intimate contact with one
another there until Herder's death in  1803.  With the
greatest scientist-philosopher on one side and scientist-poet
on the other, and with his own native genius for science,
literature, and philosophy, all working under the impulse
of a new idea that promised to give unity to the whole world
of nature and man, Herder's own contributions to the
general movement had every likelihood of being important
and unique.  He absorbed Kant's ideas of evolution in
nature, and in his own work, <1Ideas for a Philosophy of the>1
<1History of Mankind>1 (1784-91), he carried them forward in
several important directions, notably by his development
of the doctrine of the Unity of Type pervading the entire
animal world.  The clearness of his grasp of the general
principle of evolution, and the significance of his own con-
tributions to it may be estimated by the fact that when F.
von Barenach published his exposition of Herder's works
in 1877 he gave it the title, <1Herder as the Precursor of>1
<1Darwin and Modern Natural Philosophy.>1  From all this one
can estimate Herder's general equipment for the investiga-
tion of language origin and development as a particular
phase of genesis and evolution ; and since, as we have said,
his essay is the starting point of modern language study, it
                            20
seemed worth while giving this space to a description of
the intellectual atmosphere out of which it came.
  His essay on language was stimulated chiefly by Johann
Peter Su%ssmilch's treatise on language in 1766, which was
written with the purpose of proving the orthodox view which
was held generally up to that time, that "human language
is a direct gift from God.'  Herder's primary object was to
refute this thesis by submitting evidence and argument to
show that language was invented and gradually perfected
by man as the natural means of developing his own reason.
He starts with a statement from Su%ssmilch which Su%ssmilch
claimed to have proved in his treatise, namely, that "the use
of language is indispensable for the use of reason,' and he
uses this statement as a basis for refuting Su%ssmilch's whole
theory.  He pointed out that when man, in the very first
step of his reasoning power, had isolated one object of his
environment from all other objects, this isolated object
"retained in the mind, was a word in the soul. . . . With
this first distinct concept of an object isolated from other
objects, language was already in his soul, hence it was
invented through his own resources and not in a mechanical
manner through divine instructions.  It was not God who
invented language for man.  Man himself had to invent
language in exercising his own powers.'
  One of Herder's strong negative arguments against the
divine origin of language was based upon "the imperfection
of language.'  The fact, for example, that the Arab lan-
guages had a great many synonyms for common and
familiar things---"fifty different names for the lion, two
hundred for the snake, eighty for honey, seventy for a
stone'---and was often lacking altogether in words for the
expression of "difficult and rare ideas,' shows that language
was made by man in his own imperfect groping fashion,
and not by God.  This line of argument is interesting to
the modern student as a record of the contemporary attitude
of mind that had to be broken down before men could get
  21
forward in the natural investigation of language.
  Herder's essay will always remain an important document
in the history of linguistic science for two reasons.  First,
for the preliminary clearing of the way which we have just
mentioned above.  He did effectively refute, once for all,
the divine-origin theory of language, and make the way
clear and open for the free scientific investigation of lan-
guage which has gone on since the publication of his essay
one hundred and sixty-five years ago.  This was a very
necessary piece of work at the time, even though it has
little more than an historical interest for us now.
  Second.  Herder's real interest, however, was not in this
negative work of refuting an inadequate theory, but in
replacing it by a sound philosophical theory of his own.
"If,' says he, "it is incomprehensible to others how a human
mind could invent language, it is incomprehensible to me
how a human mind could be what it is without discovering
language for itself.'  This is his starting point, and his long
and closely written essay of some ninety-odd pages is so
rich in evidence and suggestion regarding the natural origin
and development of language that no serious modern
student of language can afford to be unacquainted with it.
  But, as already pointed out, for the successful investiga-
tion of the problem of language one requires an adequate
body of concrete language data as well as a directing
principle, and that body of fact was not available in 1772.
Herder, who knew the contemporary data well, says in hIs
essay that the language material of the various foreign
peoples is as yet so meagre and unreliable that "an exact
science of comparative language is not yet possible,' so that
despite his own great natural endowment he was in the
position of a bird attempting a flight with one of its wings
as yet inadequately feathered.
                        22
  CHAPTER V
FROM HERDER TO DARWIN,  1772-1871
<1The Discovery of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology>1
Nature leads the way.  Man emerges on the scene, follows
her footprints, marks and registers them in language, and makes
a <1Science of Nature.>1  Then he looks back and discovers that Lan-
guage, while following the path of Nature, has left a trail of her
own.  He returns on this new trail, again marks and registers <1its>1
footprints, and makes a <1Science of Language.>1
My purpose in this book is not to compare languages as
in linguistic science, or to trace their concrete development
as in language history; but to describe the problem which
gave birth to language, to show the place of language in
the general scheme of world evolution, and to point out
its basic structure in relation to the two forms of sense,
Space and Time.  I have dealt at some length with Herder
and his time because that period was the beginning of the
modern movement in language investigation in which we
are still engaged. For the next hundred years, from
Herder's essay in 1772 to Darwin's <1Descent of Man>1 in 1871,
I can only touch some of the peaks in the development of
linguistic theory and science, that, in their combined results,
have prepared the way for the present inquiry, and that may
help to give the perspective necessary to set the fabric of
language clearly in its place among the other phenomena
of the world.  If this mode of treatment should appear to
the language specialist as in some degree wanting in the
"hard factualness' of language, the explanation is that the
inclusion of such factual material would not contribute to
the investigation in hand.  If one can make clear the world-
problem which called language into existence, and show the
structure which language was destined to assume in order
   23
to answer this problem, then the way should be better pre-
pared and the impulse quickened for tracing man's first
steps and subsequent windings in the actual making of
language.
  Herder, as we saw, had a clear grasp of the general
principle of evolution, but was handicapped in his applica-
tion of the principle to language because of the lack of an
adequate and trustworthy body of foreign language material
in 1772.  At the close of the century, however, while Herder
was still living, that required material came to hand in a
rather unexpected but quite natural way.
  The struggle between the French and English in the
eighteenth century for the possession of the territory and
wealth of India brought a number of French and English
scholars, who were connected with the military or civil
occupation of India, into contact with the Sanskrit lan-
guage. A French Jesuit missionary, Courdoux, sent a
memoir to the French Institute in 1767, calling attention
to numerous similarities between Sanskrit and Latin words,
and also to certain similarities between the respective
inflections of these words.  His observations were not
published, however, until forty years later, and meanwhile
similar observations were made and announced by others.
  The scholar whose name stands first among the intro-
ducers of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics into Europe
is Sir William Jones (1746-94).  He had shown a genius
for language while a student at Harrow and Oxford, and
at twenty-four had a mastery of ten foreign languages, in-
cluding Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian.  Though an accom-
plished classical scholar he had a preference for oriental
languages.  He took up law as a means of livelihood, was
called to the Bar in 1774, and in 1783 was appointed a judge
of the Supreme Court of Calcutta.  This gave him the
opportunity he had been awaiting for the study of the
Sanskrit language at first hand.  In 1784, the year after his
arrival in Calcutta, with the co-operation of Sir Charles
                           24
Wilkins (1749-1836), "the first Englishman who acquired a
critical knowledge of the Sanskrit language . . . and
opened the mine of Sanskrit literature' (Sir W. Jones), he
founded the Asiatic Society for the study of the language
and literature of the East.  This was an important event.
"The history of what may be called European Sanskrit
philology,' says Max-Mu%ller, "dates from the foundation
of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1784.'  It was his third
address before this society, on 27th September 1786, <1On>1
<1the Hindus,>1 that Sir William Jones gave the memorable
paragraph that became the starting point for the modern
science of Comparative Philology in Europe.
  The <1Sanskrit>1 language [says he], whatever be its antiquity, is
of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more
copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either ;
yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots
of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could  possibly have
been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer
could examine them all three without believing them to have
sprung from <1some common source,>1 which perhaps no longer exists.
There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for sup-
posing that both the <1Gothick>1 and the <1Celtick,>1 though blended with
a very diffierent idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit;
and the old <1Persian>1 might be added to the same family.
  Sir William Jones did not live to carry out in detail the
comparison which he here makes, but in this single para-
graph he clearly formulated the conception which became
the basis for the whole science of comparative linguistics,
which was subsequently developed in Europe during the
first three-quarters of the nineteenth century.
  In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) published his book
on <1The Language and Wisdom of the Indians,>1 in which he
carried out in detail the comparison between Sanskrit and
the European languages suggested by Jones in his address
of 1786. By tracing the similarities in vocabulary and
grammatical structure, he established beyond any doubt
  25
the family relationship between Sanskrit and the better-
known languages of Europe, chiefly Greek, Latin, and
German.  He is the first, so far as I know, to use the phrase
"comparative grammar.'
  Rasmus Rask (1787-1832), the Danish scholar, by his
genius for linguistic studies, by his comprehensive first-hand
knowledge of many languages obtained by extensive travels
from Sweden to India (1816-23), and by his method of
painstaking comparison and classification of languages on
the basis of grammatical structure, and of similarity and
difference in the most essential and indispensable words,
became in a very true sense the actual founder of the modern
science of language.
  Jakob Grimm (1785-1863)---with the co-operation of his
brother Wilhelm (1786--1859)--was first led to the investiga-
tion of language through his study of old German popular
poetry and folklore.  Starting with Rask's observation of
certain regular "consonant shifts' in the transition of certain
groups of words from Greek and Latin into the Germanic
languages, he formulated what is now known as "Grimm's
Law,' which revealed certain hitherto unnoticed consonant
relations between well-known words in these two groups of
languages, and in this way gave a new fascination and
impulse to the science of comparative philology, which has
continued from the publication of Grimm's comparative
<1German Grammar>1 in 1822 down to the present time.  He
was also the first philologist tO separate language from
literature, and to raise all languages, and even dialects, to a
common level of dignity for purposes of scientific study,
independent of the value of the literature which they might
or might not possess.
  Franz Bopp (1791-1867), the next significant contributor
to linguistic science, received his first impulse towards com-
parative language study from Schlegel's book referred to
above, on <1The Language and Wisdom of the Indians,>1 which
was published, as we have noticed, in 1808 while Bopp was
                           26
still a student of seventeen at the Lyceum in Bavaria.  ln
1812 he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian
Government to study Sanskrit.  After four years' study
there he published in 1816---when he was twenty-five---his
first and most important book, <1On the Conjugation System>1
<1of the Sanskrit Language in Comparison with Greek, Latin,>1
<1Persian, and German.>1  Schlegel and his followers had
already established the family relationship among these
languages.  Bopp was inspired with the hope that by a
complete analytic comparison of the grammars of these
related languages he could discover their oldest recorded
shapes, and by this route might be able to discover the
ultimate origin of grammatical forms.  The preliminary
work of comparison was so well done that while he failed
in his quest for the ultimate origin of language, he founded
the science of Comparative Grammar---"a\ peu pre\s comme
Christophe Colomb a de/couvert l'Ame/rique en cherchant
la route des Indes' (Meillet).  In recognition of this fact,
the Bopp Foundation, for the promotion of the study of
Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar, was established at
Berlin in 1866, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
his book, by contributions from scholars in all parts of the
world. Bopp was appointed professor of Sanskrit and
Comparative Grammar at Berlin in 1822, and continued
writing and publishing there on comparative languages
until his death in 1867.
  Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was not so much a
philologist as a philosopher who chose language as the chief
object of his philosophical investigations.  He developed
the theory that the structure of each separate language grew
out of and reflected the peculiar mental life of the people
who made it, and that each language had therefore its own
individuality which separated it from all other languages.
The essay in which he presented this view, <1The Heterogeneity,>1
<1of Language and its Influence upon the Intellectual Develop->1
<1ment of Mankind>1---published in  1836, the year after his
 27
death---has often been called "the text-book of the philo-
sophy of speech,' a tribute to the force with which he
developed his thesis.  His insistence upon essential differ-
ences between languages is pertinent here, since the object
of the present treatise is to establish the opposite point of
view, namely, first, the identity of the problem which
originally called language into existence in all parts of the
world, and, second, the consequent identity of the basic
structure of all languages in meeting this problem, despite
the individual differences that have entered into the various
languages made by various races of people.
  The names given above mark sufficiently for our purpose
the steps in the development of language science and theory
from Herder to the middle of the nineteenth century.  Two
more names must be added to bring us from that point to
the eighteen-seventies when Darwin entered the field.
  Max Mu%ller (1823-1900), the German-English philologist
and philosopher, and William Dwight Whitney (1827-94),
the American philologist, came at a time---they did the
important part of their language work between 1850 and
1875---when the young science of language had already
made sufficient progress to claim a place of respect among
the other modern sciences.  Their work consisted mainly
in gathering together, sifting, and unifying into some kind
of single view, the best of the work that had been done in
the preceding seventy-odd years. Both of them had,
though in quite diffierent ways, "the gift of expression,
which enabled them to present their views in a style which
was scientifically adequate and at the same time popular,
and which rendered a high service to the science of language
by bringing it out of the enclosed field of specialists and
making it understandable and attractive to the general
reader who had an interest in human history and develop-
ment.  In this respect they did for linguistics, though in a
lesser way, what Darwin in the corresponding years did for
biology,
28
Max Mu%ller was born and educated in Germany.  After
graduating from Leipzig he went to Berlin University,
where he learned comparative philology from Bopp, and
philosophy from Schelling.  He came to Oxford in 1850,
and lived, lectured, and wrote there until his death in 1900.
His chief strength as a philologist was his imaginative
insight.  He saw the living significance of words, which
gave him a clue to their relations and life-history, and
guided him in selecting and arranging them into a system.
In this way he did much towards transforming the growing
mass of language material from a mere burden of the
memory to a significant structure of the reason, whose
various parts suggested and sustained each other easily in
the mind ; and incidentally he raised the status of his reader
from hod-carrier to architect, whose interest was not merely
in carrying loads of word-material at a master's bidding,
but in the actual reconstruction of the word-edifice which
told the story of human progress.  His aim in philology
was similar to Darwin's in biology, but the field was more
subtle and recondite, much of the necessary factual material
was lost or obscured by time, and more pertinent still,
Mu%ller had not the same comprehensive synthetic grasp
of the whole field as Darwin had, so that his work had
nothing like the rounded completeness of Darwin's, which
renders it capable of being easily held and visualized in a
single view.
  Mu%ller's gift of style, of figure, and rhetoric, which was
very similar to Huxley's in science, gave imaginative con-
creteness to his work, frequently raising his science into
literature.  But his strength here was at times his weakness.
Fascinated by the symmetry of the structure he was build-
ing, he had a tendency to strain or modify the fact so as to
make it fit more neatly its particular niche in the system.
His impulse towards rhetoric often led him also into colour-
ful and telling forms of expression where the subject
required quietness and precision.
 29
Another impulse also tended to lead Max Mu%ller astray
in his theory of language.  He seemed to be obsessed with
the desire to win for linguistics a place of respect and dignity
equal to that already accorded the older and better-estab-
lished natural sciences.  Hence in the opening chapter of
his first important book, <1The Science of Language>1 (1861),
he writes: "I always took it for granted that the science of
language, which is best known in this country by the name
of comparative philology, is one of the physical sciences,
and that therefore its method ought to be the same as that
which has been followed with so much success in botany,
geology, anatomy, and other branches of the study of
nature.'  This physical-science bias led him to his peculiar
cause-and-effect theory of the origin of language. In
nature, he says, every object when struck by a solid body
responds with its own peculiar sound.  Hence the four-
hundred-odd original roots of language, which the philo-
logists at that time thought they had discovered, were,
according to Mu%ller's physical theory, the original "phonetic
types or typical sounds' which man's mind gave off in re-
sponse to the various impacts which the world made upon
it.  "What is antecedent to the production of these roots
is the work of nature; what follows after is the work of
30
man.' Just how or why the first part of the history of
language should be considered as the work of nature and
the second part as the work of man is not very clear.  For-
tunately he did not consistently hold to his physical-science
theory of language.  Most of his work, and by far the most
valuable part of it, is concerned with language development
as a non-physical phenomenon.
  He had an extensive and, in most cases, an exact know-
ledge of words and languages, and one is constantly sur-
prised at the many vital suggestions which are found in his
works.  He popularized the science enormously and stirred
his students to an enthusiasm corresponding to his own.
One cannot read his books without being curiously stimu-
lated by them, even if the stimulus is often, as it was to his
American contemporary philologist, Whitney, one of
antipathy; and like some of Ruskin's art criticisms, by his
genius for making dead things live, his errors are often more
valuable to the reader than the true findings of pedantic
scholars.
  Max Mu%ller's contemporary and co-worker in the task
of giving a unified view of linguistic science as it stood in
the third quarter of the nineteenth century was the American
philologist, W. D. Whitney. Curiously enough, both
scholars were trained under the same teacher.  Ater two
years' study of Sanskrit at Yale University, Whitney went
to Berlin---in the same year, 1850, in which Mu%ller left
Berlin for Oxford---to take a three years' course in Sanskrit
under Bopp.  On his return to America in 1854 he was
appointed professor of Sanskrit at Yale, where he lived and
worked until his death in 1894, the hundredth anniversary
of the death of Sir William Jones, "the founder of Indo-
European philology.'  Incidentally Whitney was the winner
of the first Bopp prize awarded by the Berlin Academy of
Science in 1870 "for the most important contribution to
Sanskrit philology during the preceding three years.'
  31
The two books in which Whitney gave his summarized
view of linguistic science, with significant contributions of
his own, <1Language and the Study of Language>1 (1867) and
<1The Life and Growth of Language>1 (1875), were translated
into several languages, and were hardly less popular than
those of his co-worker and antagonist in the field, Max
Mu%ller. The second book covers with some important
modifications the same ground as the first, and the fact that
it was designed to give, as the author says, "an outline of
linguistic science,' based upon "the now generally accepted
facts of language,' and that it was written at the request of
the publishers of the International Scientific Series (it
appeared as vol. xvi of the series), indicates that the young
science of language had won its place among the older
sciences.  Though nominally an "outline' of the science of
language up to that time, the book when finished, by the
clear organization of the already available material and
theories, and by its numerous original and fruitful sug-
gestions, proved itself to be a distinct contribution to the
new science.  His discussion of "The Nature and Origin of
Language' (Chap. XIV) is as valuable and valid as anything
written before or since, and is still, on the whole, perhaps
the best single chapter available on that subject.  His
differentiation between human language and the cries of
animals is unusually precise and clear, and is in most points
convincing still, despite the bias which Darwin and his
disciples have given to the thinking on that question.
  The preceding paragraphs bring us to the close of the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, a hundred years
from Herder's essay.  During this period the question of
the beginnings and development of language, while dis-
cussed in a purely scientific and philosophical manner, was
confined to the human species alone, in the belief that the
capacity for language was unique in man, and separated
him from the animal world beneath him.  Max Mu%ller and
Whitney, the chief representatives of the linguistic thought
32
of the time, both clearly stated the position, and a sentence
from each will give the definite starting point for the next
stage of our advance.  "What, then,' Mu%ller asks, "is the
difference between brute and man?  What is it that man
can do, and of which we find no signs, no rudiments, in
the whole brute world?  I answer without hesitation: the
one great barrier between the brute and man is Language'
<1(Science of Language, Collected Works,>1 vol. ii, p. 489).
"But, as things are,' Whitney writes, "every community of
men has a common language, while none of the lower
animals are possessed of such ; their means of communica-
tion being of so different a character that it has no right to
be called by the same name' <1(Life and Growth of Language,>1
Chap. XIV, p. 281, 1875).  These two  quotations  give
quite adequately the view, regarding man and language,
which was held by linguistic scientists from 1772, when
Herder first clearly formulated it in his essay, until Darwin
entered the field in 1871.
 33
CHAPTER VI
  DARWIN
In this year falls the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Charles
Darwin---one of those rare individuals who have altered the main
trend of thought and inaugurated a new attitude and a new out-
look in human affairs.---JULIAN HUXLEY, <1Contemporary Review,>1
October 1932.
  1.  <1Darwin's Expansion of the Problem>1
  Language has justly been considered as one of the chief distinc-
tions between man and the lower animals.  But man, as a highly
competent judge, Archbishop Whately, remarks, "is not the only
animal that can make use of language to express what is passing
in his mind, and can understand, more or less, what is so ex-
pressed by another.'---DARWIN, <1Descent of San,>1 Chap. III.
THE investigation of language, as pointed out in the last
chapter, had been carried on for a hundred years in the
belief that language was a unique characteristic of man,
and did not extend to the animal world beneath him.  But
with the publication of the <1Descent of Man>1 in 1871 the whole
problem of language was suddenly expanded into a much
wider region.  Darwin, in that book, distinctly challenged
the human boundaries that had been set to language as
being artificial and arbitrary, and extended the problem over
into the animal world, maintaining that the difference
between the language of man and the cries of animals was
not a difference in kind, as had been formerly thought, but
a difference in degree only, a difference in definiteness of
connotation and distinctness of articulation.  This differ-
ence in language followed naturally, he maintained, upon
the difference in degree of their mental development.
  Max Mu%ller, with other philologists, opposed Darwin's
view, claiming that articulate language was the evidence of
man's "power of abstraction,' a power which differentiated
him completely from the animals. Darwin and his
34
scientific colleagues replied that animals had also this power
of abstraction, and produced a considerable body of evid-
ence from the mental habits of animals (Chaps. III and IV
in the <1Descent of Man),>1 which was at least plausible enough
to win the majority of votes from the semi-scientific reading
public before whom the debate was carried on.
  Meantime neither party gave any exact definition of the
word <1abstraction,>1 upon which the controversy turned; nor
did either party give any sufficiently accurate definition of
the <1articulate language>1 of man that would enable them to
come to a precise answer as to whether it was the same as
or different from the so-called language of the animals.
And so, as often happens in heated debate, the meanings
of the two significant words, <1abstraction>1 and <1articulate>1
<1language,>1 which occupied the centre of the controversy,
remained themselves involved in a mist, which prevented
any kind of precise comparison between the language of
man and the cries of animals.
  Before the end of the nineteenth century, however, the
Darwinian theory of evolution in general, together with
the subsidiary theory of the identification of man and the
lower animals with respect to both their intelligence and
their language, had so completely won its way, both with
the scientists themselves and with the general reading public,
that the other side of the argument had sunk almost entirely
out of view.  It has hardly shown its head since.  It is
customary now and a mark of modernism to speak of the
language of animals and the language of man as merely two
branches of the same thing, as though there were no longer
any doubt about the question.  One purpose of the present
treatment is to open the question again and to re-examine
more closely the difference between man and the animals
which Darwin practically obliterated some sixty-six years
ago ; to discover if possible what specifically happened when
man emerged from animal nature into a new world, whose
new conditions necessitated articulate language.  What
  35
were the limits of the animal world from which he emerged
whose needs were answered by a few natural cries; what
were the new horizons, new needs, new potentialities opened
to him in his new world whose actualization urged him to
the making of language?
  2. <1Darwin's Contribution to the Investigation>1
  On her great venture, Man,
  Earth gazes while her fingers dint the breast
  Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,
  And fair to scan.
  GEORGE MEREDITH, <1Earth and Mad.>1
  Before undertaking a criticism of Darwin's arguments
with a view to answering the questions raised at the close
of the preceding chapter, one should say a word or two
upon the positive contribution which Darwin has made to the
whole question.  He advanced the investigation of the pro-
blem of language definitely as it seems to me, in three ways.
  First.  Previous to the appearance of Darwin's book it
had always been assumed that the problem of language was
confined to the life of man ; that it was a product of man's
reason, and that man's reason marked him of distinctly
from the rest of the world.  Darwin distinctly challenged
this view, maintaining that man is not separated from the
animal world, either by his intelligence or his language,
except in degree of development.  He presented this new
view with such force, and supported it with so much con-
crete evidence, that the old view of man's unique position
in the world could never again be merely assumed or taken
for granted.  If man <1does>1 occupy a unique position, that
position must now be described and made explicitly clear.
So that whether Darwin was right or wrong he unequivoc-
ally raised the problem into view, so as to give a very
definite starting point for any new advance in the steps
towards its solution.
  Second.  Darwin brought together so large a body of
facts, and pointed out so many characteristics of animal life
36
which rises in ascending steps toward the life of man, that
we have now a very completely detailed picture of the whole
background of nature out of which the life of man emerges ;
so that if man has actually risen to, and does actually hold,
a unique and solitary position in the known world, the back-
ground of animal nature beneath him is now so fully
elaborated that man's characteristic portrait may be dis-
tinctly drawn in comparison and contrast with it.
  Third.  Darwin's work has brought home to our minds
in a most distinct way the view that man is a natural and
integral part of the world, and not a mere exotic, or
foreigner, or temporary sojourner placed by deliberate
external design upon the surface of an alien world of
mechanical forces which are externally manipulated in his
exclusive interests.  That is his third contribution to our
better understanding of the world.
  On this last point, however, it is worth while noting that
not very many modern scientists or modern readers and
writers in general have come to a full realization of what
Darwin has done in this last respect.  Darwin himself
seems never to have absorbed this idea of the organic unity
of the world from matter to man so completely into his
mind as to fix it there as a permanent and native element
in his instinctive thought and speech.  To the end, at least
when off his guard, he continued to speak of man <1and>1 the
world as two separate though related things rather than as
two phases of the one thing.  This was, no doubt, due, in
part at least, to the rigidity of language and its consequent
limitations for the immediate expression of a new idea,
But it was due also to the difficulty of assimilating and
domesticating a new and radical idea within the mind so
that it will function unconsciously there in adjusting one's
instinctive thought and speech to the new view.
  37
Most modern scientists continue to speak of the material
world of mechanical forces as the real and permanent world,
and of man with all his mental faculties and moral purposes
as an extrinsic chance-comer and would-be usurper, that by
some kind of "biological accident,' as Mr. Santayana puts
it, has got upon the surface of a physical world of mechani-
cal forces that have no intrinsic connection with the higher
part of his own life, his mental and moral aims.  This
pseudo-scientific view appears in various ways in much of
the representative poetry and fiction of the last seventy-five
years, as well as in science and philosophy.  Matthew
Arnold's statement of man's relation to the world he lives
in in <1Empedocles:>1
  No, we are strangers here; the world is from of old,
or
  To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime,
are typical examples of it; and Arnold, like some of the
materialistic scientists for whom he speaks, takes some
pride in thus facing "unpalatable facts,' and stating them
frankly.  In Thomas Hardy's representation of life and the
world in his greatest novels, as <1The Return of the Native>1 or
<1Tess of the d'Urbervilles,>1 and in many of his metaphysical
poems,  the determining agencies of the world, mechanical
for the most part, and always blind and powerful, are con-
ceived as not merely indifferent to man's destiny, but often
as in an actually sinister relation to it.
  This dualism between man's higher destiny and the world
out of which he emerged is not in consonance with the aim
and tenor of Darwin's work, even though Darwin himself
did not, as I think, succeed in developing his view into a
concrete logical philosophy.  He did believe in the organic
unity of the world from matter to man, and in his books,
especially the <1Origin>1 and the <1Descent,>1 he has amassed and
organized such a body of evidence upon the resemblances
between man and the animals with respect both to their
38
  DARWIN
physical and mental qualities, and between the animals and
the lower forms of life, that we can hardly ever again think
of man as separate from the world.  The whole world now
appears to us as a single world; and if this view is right,
then man with his complex physiological structure, and all
his mental faculties and moral purposes as well, has in some
way or other come out of this same world, and has risen by
gradual steps, many of which still lie hidden, into the posi-
tion where he now stands.  Darwin, as pointed out above,
was not the originator of this organic view of the world, but
accepting the general view from his predecessors and con-
temporaries, he assembled and organized such a mass of
concrete evidence in support of it, and presented it in such
a popular, readable, and logical form as to give the organic
view of the world an almost universal currency among
thinking readers.  In this respect his was without doubt
the most distinct contribution of the last seventy-five years
to our better understanding of the world.
  3. <1Darwin's Argument>1
  Why language, then, to man confined ?
  The dog can say what's in his mind.
  <1Odd Rhymes.>1
  Darwin, though convinced of the organic unity of the
world in its evolution from its lowest to its highest forms,
did not succeed in completely establishing his conviction
by logical proof or actual evidence. There were at least
two gaps in the development process that he saw no way of
bridging: (a) the gap between inorganic and organic nature,
and (b) the gap between organic nature without intelligence
and organic nature with intelligence.  In the third chapter
of the <1Descent>1 he writes : "In what manner the mental powers
were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless
an inquiry as how life itself first originated.  These are
problems for the distant future, if they are ever to be solved
39
by man.'  Scientists since Darwin's time, who believe with
him that life and mind were not always co-present with
matter in world history, but emerged at some given time
from lifeless and mindless ancestry, have from time to time
given attention to the first of these two problems, namely
the connection between non-living and living matter, but
have as yet made no measurable advance from Darwin's
position.  Mr. Lloyd Morgan, speaking as a biologist in
his latest book, <1Emergence of Novelty>1 (1933), writes: "Of
the passage from matter to life, if it occurred as an original
novelty, along a suite of emergent steps, we are as yet wholly
in the region of evolutionary conjecture.'
  But a third gap that was always thought to exist, Darwin,
as noted above, did attempt to close, and, as far as the minds
of what is called the intelligent public were concerned, suc-
ceeded in closing, at least for the last twenty-five years;
the gap, namely, between the intelligence of the animals and
the intelligence of man.  Having successfully established the
general evolutionary theory within the plant and animal life
of the world in the <1Origin of Species,>1 he was then confronted
with the further question : "In what relation does man stand
to the rest of the animal life of the world?'  This is the
question which he answers in the <1Descent of Man,>1 1871, and
the significant parts of that book are the third and fourth
chapters, where he makes the "Comparison of the Mental
Powers of Man and the Lower Animals.'  He puts his view
and purpose quite clearly in the opening lines of the third
chapter.  "My object in this chapter,' he says, "is to show
that there is no fundamental difference between man and
the higher mammals in their mental faculties.'  Recogniz-
ing that language is connected with the mental faculties,
Darwin includes his now well-known discussion of language
in the closing part of the same third chapter.  He opens
the discussion with the following : "The faculty of language
has justly been considered as one of the chief distinctions
between man and the lower animals.  But man, as a highly
40
competent judge, Archbishop Whately, remarks, is not the
only animal that can make use of language to express what
is passing in his mind, and can understand more or less what
is expressed by another. . . , In Paraguay the <1Cebus>1
<1Azarae>1 when excited utters at least six distinct sounds,
which excite in other monkeys similar emotions.'  The dog
barks "in at least four or five distinct sounds.'  From
accumulated evidence of this kind Darwin draws the con-
clusion at the end of the fourth chapter, to use his own
words, that "the difference in mind between man and the
higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and
not of kind.'  The same he holds to be true of language.
  Throughout these two chapters Darwin supports his
view of the identity of the various mental faculties of man
with those of the lower animals, and of the identity of their
languages, by the evidence of facts which he has either ob-
served himself or has received from other trustworthy
observers.  The facts which he presents in order to show
that animals possess the various mental faculties and
emotions which he ascribes to them, and language as well---
in <1his>1 connotation of language---would, I think, be accepted
by every unprejudiced reader, except the facts and evidence
submitted in his paragraph on the imagination.  This excep-
tion turns out to be a very vital one, and we shall return to
it later.
  4. <1The Evidence from Language against Darwin's View>1
  On the whole, man's development and control over language
is unquestionably the greatest single achievement which his in-
telligence has compassed, and whether one thinks of it as cause
or effect, its presence, more than any other one factor, is respon-
sible for his enormous superiority to his animal neighbours.---
<1The Evolution of Intelligence,>1 J. R. ANGELL, President of Yale
University.
  Meantime there is one large body of facts that stands in
contradiction to Darwin's whole case.  The animals and
birds of nature have each, as he points out, a certain number
 41
of natural sounds---not the conventionalized sounds of lan-
guage---say from one to twelve, that have significance for
others of their kind; and these sounds, he maintains, must
be called language, because they do not differ from the
language of man except in degree of distinctness.  Ancestral
man, if our theory of natural evolution is true, had also in
his early natural life a certain number of natural sounds, say
twelve, that had significance for his own kind, and perhaps
for other animals about him.  Now, there are two things
to be noted in these natural sounds as we find them among
the animals and birds of to-day, and as we assume they were
with preconscious man, two things which distinguish them
from language.
  First, they are <1natural>1 sounds, and consequently <1indefinite>1
in significance.  They are like the few mere exclamations
or cries of pleasure or pain which man still uses and which
convey to the hearer no <1definite>1 significance, either of the
kind of pain or of the specific cause of it.  We call these
cries interjections, i.e. unconventionalized sounds <1inter->1
<1jected>1 into the structure of language proper.  They are
somewhat analogous to the sounds of instrumental music
which affect the mind of the hearer only in a vague and
undefined way.
  Second, the animals do not increase the number of their
few natural sounds, nor do they show any impulse or ten-
dency or need to increase them as time goes on, except
where man deliberately interferes in order to effect a tem-
porary increase in the imitative vocabulary, say, of the
parrot.  The few instinctive natural sounds without increase
seem to satisfy the needs and capacity of the animal's mind,
and to correspond with its nature.
  These two things bring us to the point of difference
between man and the animals with respect to language.
At some time and, as it seems to me, from some creative
and purposive force at work in the world, there emerged
into life within the mind of man a new power or faculty for
42
<1explicitly>1 differentiating the objects of the world, both in
their distribution in Space and their succession in Time;
and with this awakened power of explicit differentiation a
consequent need and corresponding impulse for something
far more definite and elaborate than the few nebulous or
nusty-edged natural sounds which satisfied his preconscious
needs.  And eventually with this new power of explicit
differentiation, and his urge to actualize it, man got started
upon a free course, first, of shaping these vague natural
sounds into definite-edged or definitely articulated sounds---
words, as we now call them---that could be clearly distin-
guished from one another; and second, of investing each
definite sound with a definite meaning, a conventional and
arbitrary meaning as distinguished from the vague natural
significance of natural sounds; and third, of increasing or
multiplying without limit the number of these definitely
shaped conventionalized sounds.  By these three things,
the definite shaping of natural sounds, the conventionaliza-
tion of their meaning, and their multiplication without liniit,
man has elaborated out of his few original sounds an
immense structure of articulate language whose parts are
as distinctly differentiated and organized as are the objects
of the natural world which this language fabric now reflects.
The two conventionalized sounds "dog' and "cat,' for
example, are as clearly differentiated from one another as
are the two natural objects for which they stand.  Mean-
time, the animal world lies unawakened at man's feet with-
out, as we said, showing any need, impulse, or power for
transmuting their natural cries into articulate sounds,
investing them with conventional meanings, or increasing
their number.
  This is an enormous difference between man and the
animals, a difference in actualized fact not in theory, too
obvious to be questioned when attention is called to it, and
two significant to be overlooked; and it stands, as I have
said, in unequivocal contradiction to the whole tenor of
 43
Darwin's arguments.  It is true, as remarked above, that
certain birds under man's instruction can be taught, by
some kind of instinctive imitation of both sound and con-
tent, to increase the number of their own natural sounds;
but they show no power of breaking through the "charmed
circle of nature,' in which they are in some way confined,
into the realm <1offree and conscious mind>1 where articulate
language has its birth and growth, and in which man now
lives, moves, and has his being.'
Now this shaping and conventionalization of natural
sounds, giving to each a definite form and specific connota-
tion, and the consequent free unlimited cumulative develop-
ment of human language as contrasted with the few, fixed,
stationary, uncumulative, natural cries of animals must be
due to some very real difference in their respective mental
powers.  To say that this difference is merely a difference
in "degree' and not in "kind' of intelligence at this stage of
the inquiry tells us nothing.  Man has broken through
some barrier which, up to the present time at least, encloses
the minds of the animals, and the plain scientific question
confronting us now is : "What <1is>1 the difference between the
two?'
  5.  <1"kind' and "Degree'>1
  To clear the way toward an exact answer to this question
a word should be said first upon the diction to be used.
There is no longer any profit to be gained by dwelling upon
the question which Darwin took as the starting point and
pivot of his discussion sixty-six years ago, the question
whether this difference between animals and man is one of
<1kind>1 or <1degree.>1  The two words, as already noted, were
never clearly defined or differentiated, although at that time
they did stand, in a general way, for two different points of
view, two opposing schools of thought, and Darwin's use
of them was perhaps the most effective method for breaking
down the traditional dualistic view, and removing the
44
prejudice that stood in the way of a free scientific considera-
tion of the whole question.  But now that the prejudice is
gone, the original need of the two words in their general
significance has disappeared, and they have no sufficiently
precise significance that would render them useful at the
present advanced stage of the inquiry.  What we now need
is an exact and concrete marking of specific likenesses and
differences, and these two long-bandied-about words are
no longer accurate enough for that purpose.  The vague-
ness of their connotation, overlooked in their former general
use, becomes apparent as soon as one attempts to use them
with precision, so that they cloud the issue instead of clear-
ing it.  To reassure myself on this point I recently asked a
well-known biologist if he could give me from the whole
field of biology one clear example of a difference which
scientists would unequivocally agree upon as a difference in
kind, and another which they would agree upon as a differ-
ence In degree, so that there would be no longer any doubt
about the precise meanings of the two words.  He was
unable to give the required examples.  I have since put the
query to a number of other scientists and psychologists with
no better luck.
  This alone makes it clear that to get forward now in the
investigation we must discard these two misty words.  And
since the organic unity of the world including man---thanks
chiefly to Darwin---seems to be now pretty generally
accepted, we might assume all differences to be differences
of degree only; and assuming this, we may profitably dis-
card both words and speak simply of differences, differences
in the explicit forms of life and mind which have successively
emerged in the spiral course of evolutionary advance.
  Some of these differences, however, and among them, as
I shall try to show, the difference in mental power between
man and the animals, are vital and significant ; and although
misconceived as totally disparate realms in pre-Darwin
times, their legitimate boundaries have been blurred during
 45
the last sixty years through the pressure for unity by Darwin
and the neo-Darwinians.  But now that the pressure is
relaxed by the lapse of time and the disappearance of opposi-
tion, these differences are emerging into notice again, and
the time has come in our thinking when their characteristic
differences must be analysed and described closely and con-
cretely, and their significance specifically marked in relation
to one another and to the general underlying unity.  For
this closer work, general categories like "kind' and "degree'
can render no service.  A more precise diction is required.
  Realizing then the difference described above between
the large and rapidly growing structure of the articulate
language of man, and the meagre static body of the natural
sounds of animals, we are confronted with the plain con-
crete question : What <1is>1 this difference in mental power that
has enabled man to so "get the start' of the <1natural>1 world
and "bear the palm alone ' ?  Is the difference of such a kind
as can be concretely analysed and described so as to set out
the significant characteristics of the human mind in clear
and definite differentiation from the background of animal
intelligence ?
  I think it can be so described, and if one can succeed in
doing this one should be able to come fairly upon the origin
of language, and its nature as a phenomenon in the world;
for language, as I think can be shown, arose just out of this
difference, arose in answer to the new mental problem that
confronted man when he emerged from the realm of animal
nature into the realm of free mind,
  6.  <1The Fallacy in Darwin's Method>1
<1I>1---this thought which is called I---is the mould into which the
world is poured like melted wax.---EMERSON, <1The Transcen->1
<1dentalist,>1 1842.
  Why, it may be asked, in the investigation of language
origin, should one go back to Darwin when so much has
46
been written since both on evolution and on language?
The answer is that Darwin's name still stands at the centre
of the modern point of view, and while his views on language
in 1871 have not altered to any extent the progress of the
specific science of language since that time, they have altered
in a very significant way our philosophy or general con-
ception of language in relation to other phenomena in the
world.  They have, as a matter of fact, from the date of their
publication deflected the philosophy of language From the
natural course which it had been following for the previous
hundred years, and the first step now in any new investiga-
tion is to correct if possible that deflection.
  In the <1Descent of Man,>1 as noted above, Darwin undertook
to complete the story which was begun in the <1Origin of>1
<1Species>1 by making the final connecting link between the
animal intelligence and the intelligence of man, thus estab-
lishing his theory of the complete organic unity of the world.
But, as also pointed out above, in his intuitive and right
sense of organic unity, and in his strong desire to establish
it by logical proof, he overlooked, and for the time obliter-
ated, the cardinal difference between the two.  His over-
sight and obscuration of this difference was due to a lurking
fallacy and a consequent fundamental error in his method
of comparison.
  The error was summarily this : Throughout the discussion
he makes no inquiry into the nature of the total or <1central>1
unifrying mental faculty of man, nor of the corresponding
<1central>1 unifying mental faculty of the animals; nor does he
make any comparison between these two.  He proceeds
by enumerating the separate sub-faculties, instincts, and
emotions, which psychology has differentiated within the
total faculty of reason, and taking these one by one he finds
by comparison that the animals seem to possess them all
in at least an incipient degree.  He finds, for example, that
the animals have the same senses as man, the same instincts,
the same emotions, such as fear, terror, suspicion, courage,
 47
timidity, rage, revenge, as well as the more complex
emotions of jealousy, shame, modesty, scorn, humour;
that they possess also the more intellectual emotions, such
as wonder and curiosity; and that they show the same
powers of imitation, attention, memory, imagination, and
reason.  Finding no apparent difference in the operation of
these differentiated sub-faculties in animals and in man,
he merely adds up the results instead of unifying them ; and
comes to the quite illegitimate conclusion that there is no
difference in the <1total faculty>1 of reason in each ; no difference
between the central unifying mental faculty of animals  and
the corresponding mental faculty of man---the <1nous,>1 as
Aristotle calls it in his <1Posterior Analytics->1--which co-
ordinates and uses as its agents the differentiated sub-
faculties, and which, in man, is conscious both of itself and
its sub-faculties, and can examine and carry on a discussion
about them as we are doing here.  He moves forward in
such a plain manner and with such clear matter-of-fact
evidence, that the reader is seduced into the same logical
error.
  But this method of reasoning and deduction is clearly
not sound.  We cannot pass at a jump from the apparent
identity of these differentiated sub-faculties in man and the
lower animals, to the identity of the central faculty of reason
itself, which, as we have pointed out, includes and uses as
its instruments all these subordinate faculties.  And the
significant difference between man and the animals, which
opened the way to articulate language for man, while
restricting animals to natural cries, seems to be a difference
in the central unifying faculty, and not in its subordinate
agents.  For this reason the new investigation which fol-
lows here will consist in a comparison of the unified faculty
of mind in man and the animals respectively, with a view to
discovering the difference between the two which led man
to articulate language and left the animals without it.
48
     SECTION II
THE NEW INVESTIGATION
                     INTRODUCTION
                     THE PROBLEM
We must therefore see the whole varied congeries of living
things as a single very ancient Being, of inconceivable vastness,
and animated by one Spirit.---SAMUEL BUTLER, <1God the known>1
<1and God the Unknown.>1
  Science has opened all kinds of perspectives.  In particular it
has shown life as a slow upward-evolving process.  It has shown
that there is something in evolution which we must call progress,
and it his shown that we ourselves are now trustees for any evolu-
tionary progress that remains to be made.---JULIAN HUXLEY,
<1Science and Social Needs,>1 1936.
WHAT, then, is the difference between the central unifying
faculty of reason in man, out of which language arose, and
the corresponding central faculty in the animals, which
expresses itself in a few natural cries ; and how in our present
state of knowledge can this difference be distinctly brought
into view and described in a concrete way?  This is a
complex question, and can be best answered for our purpose
by breaking it into four parts.
  First. What was the actual nature of the world of
matter, and of plant and animal life, before the awakening
of conscious reason in man?
  Second. What were the nature and characteristics of
the new mental power that then came to life and actuality
in man?
  Third. What new problem came into existence with
the emergence of this new mental power, that gave birth
to the articulate and cumulative language of man?
  Fourth.  What was the predestined form and structure
of language to meet this new problem of free and conscious
mind ?
  I shall attempt a plain, concrete descriptive answer to
these four questions in order.
  51
            CHAPTER I
THE PRE-CONSCIOUS WORLD : A SPACE-AND-
          TIME PICTURE
But deepest of all illusory Appearances are your two grand
world-enveloping Appearances, Space and Time.---CARLYLE,
<1Sartor Resartus>1, 1830.
  I.  <1The Space-Picture>1
  The Prime, that willed ere wareness was,
  Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws.
  THOMAS HARDY, <1The Dynasts.>1
QUESTION one.  What were the nature and characteristics
of the world in its three main divisions of matter, plant life,
and animal life, before it emerged to its fourth main divi-
sion in the explicitly conscious life of man?  The answer
to this question carries us backward in time to a period so
remote from the present that no answer would be at all
possible were it not that in his emergence to consciousness
man rose above the time-stream of sense, and by the help
of language has been able to recover and reconstruct the
otherwise irrecoverable past.  While the actual sense-facts
which constituted the natural environment contemporary
with man's emergence have long since vanished in the stream
of change, we know now, from our knowledge of the past
and present, that in any piece of virgin timber or park land
of to-day we should have, substantially and typically, the
same natural environment from which man emerged
thousands of years ago.  We should have, first of all, the
same inorganic world of fixed geographic relations and
definite structures : sun, moon, stars, clouds, winds, waters,
soil, rocks, etc. ; second, the differentiated forms of organic
insentient life : grass, flowers, shrubs, trees, etc, ; third, the
52
various forms of sentient life : fishes, birds, reptiles, mam-
mals ; all these multitudinous forms, inorganic and organic,
differentiated from each other and united with each other
in a complete network of space, time, and causal relations.
That, in epitome, is a space-picture of the world of nature
as it confronts our eyes to-day, and the only significant
animal absent from it, that we would have found in the old
pre-conscious world, is the natural animal-like progenitor
of man.  In his <1actualized>1 life, however, at that period---if
our evolutionary theory is the true one---he would be only
one more animal whose actual presence, if we omit his
potential destiny, would not alter the significant character-
istics of the general picture.
  2. <1The Time-Picture>1
  Modern science and philosophy, however, have discovered
that this contemporary space-picture has a history; that its
present complex and highly differentiated features are the
product of a time-evolution; and science and philosophy
have also succeeded in recovering and reconstructing in its
main outlines that past time-picture of the world which we
require as the complement and interpretation of the con-
temporary space-picture.  By drawing the outlines of this
time-picture, and noting the significant differences that
came into explicit existence as the developing force at work
in the world emerged from inorganic to organic insentient
life in the vegetable world, and again from insentient to
sentient life in the animal world, we shall be able to see
more distinctly the significant characteristics that came to
life and actuality in the last step from inconscious sentient
to conscious sentient life, i.e. man.  To outline this time-
picture and mark as we go the significant emerging differ-
ences will be our next step, and, at the risk of appearing
elementary, I shall do this very simply and with considerable
detail.
  Furthermore, I shall construct the picture on the hypo-
  53
thesis of the complete organic unity of the world from
matter to man.  I assume, in other words, that man in his
complete life, his mental powers and his moral purposes,
no less than in his physical organism, is a natural product
and a natural part of the world; and that in the general
evolution of the matter-life-and-mind of the world man
eventually emerged from some original diffused or permeat-
ing life-and-mind force into an actual, individualized,
objective organism and explicitly purposive agent as we
now find him.  To regard man's physical organism as hav-
ing come out of the world by natural evolution, and his
mental powers and moral aims as having come in some
accidental way from other than natural sources, is a dualism
of modern mechanistic thought which seems as naive from
a philosophic point of view as any of the older superstitions
which it has replaced.  If the world is in verity the organic
unity which we claim it to be, then man is not merely <1in>1
the world or <1on>1 it.  He <1is>1 the world at the highest point of
its physico-mental life that we know on this planet; and
the specific purpose of the present treatise is to differentiate
this last phase of the world, that has emerged to actuality
in the body and mind of man, from its next lower phase in
animal life.
  A large part of the contemporary space-picture outlined
in the preceding section is made up of distinctly differen-
tiated organic forms of both insentient and sentient life.
But there was a period in the time-picture of the world, if
we can trust our science, when none of these differentiated
organic forms were to be found in actualized existence upon
the earth's surface; a time when only those forms or forma-
tions which we now call inorganic could be found in actual
existence there.  If a company of modern scientists could
at that period have stepped upon this globe with their fully
equipped modern laboratories they might have given an
adequate explanation of all they found by means of the
physical sciences alone, mathematics, physics, chemistry,
54
geology, etc.  It would be a material world organized in
the media of space and time, and explained by the mechani-
cal laws of "matter, motion, and force.'  That the earth had
a long pre-organic history, a long evolution of changing and
developing inorganic formations before the concrete living
forms emerged upon its surface, seems now to be reasonably
certain.  What the specific nature or duration of this pre-
organic history may have been does not materially affect
our present purpose.
  Our interest begins with the emergence of life, and here
we are met with a problem that is still unsolved.  "How life
itself first originated' was, in Darwin's estimate in 1871, a
"hopeless inquiry,' "a problem for the distant future if it is
ever to be solved by man.'  Mr. Lloyd Morgan writes in
1926: "There is as yet no plain tale of the passage from the
non-living to the living' <1(Life, Mind, and Spirit,>1 p. 77).  The
problem is still in the dark as far as specific or scientific
knowledge of it is concerned, so that in our present dis-
cussion we are obliged to start from one of the two hypo-
theses that are put forward regarding it, the Mechanistic
and the Organic; and since the one or the other of these
hypotheses is, in our present state of knowledge, a necessary
starting point for any complete world-view of evolution, I
shall suspend for a few pages the development of the specific
time-picture which we have begun, in order to give a brief
statement of the two hypotheses.
  I am aware of the danger in attempting an abridged state-
ment of these two opposing views.  One finds so many
variations in the various presentations of the two theories
by writers who are in professed agreement that it would be
vanity to think of being able to make any abstract of either
theory that would win the unanimous assent of its sup-
porters. Each writer of any consequence makes some
modification of his predecessors' views, and adds something
of his own, and the reader's own view is altered somewhat
by each new book, so that he is often not sure of how to
  55
  THE NEW INVESTIGATION
state his own position.  If asked, e.g., whether I am a
"creative' or "emergent' evolutionist, I would answer "both,'
though that might appear to some as a hopelessly non-
discriminative answer. All I can do here is to give a
succinct statement of my own understanding of the two
different views and incur the ensuing risks.
  CHAPTER II
THE MECHANISTC HYPOTHESIS
I have spoken of variations sometimes as if they were due to
chance.  This is a wholly incorrect expression ; it merely serves
to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each par-
ticular variation.---DARWIN.
BOTH the mechanistic and the organic hypotheses agree that
in the world as it stands at present we find not only matter,
but also life, mind, and purpose.  The mechanistic hypo-
thesis, however, as I understand it, holds that this earth
was originally a purely inorganic world without life, mind,
or purpose, governed by purely mechanical laws alone ; and
that at some point of time in the relatively recent past, life
got started upon the surface of this mechanical world by
some kind of "biological accident,' and having got started
in "one or more primordial forms' it then set out on a course
of evolution impelled by a strong reproductive impulse,
presumably co-accidental with life itself; and with a strong
tendency to reproduce or repeat the type, coupled with a
lesser tendency to slight variations and an occasional
tendency to a great variation, it gradually differentiated its
"one or more primordial forms' into many genera and
species of life, each species or genus then moving forward
towards greater and greater perfection under the operation
of "natural selection,' until we have the multi-variegated
organic world as we find it to-day.
  Upon this hypothesis the non-vital material world is alone
basic and permanent.  Life, mind, and purpose are tem-
porary phases which have come into existence in some
accidental or unknown way at a certain point of time, and
which may disappear again at some future time through the
mindless and purposeless operation of the mechanical laws
  57
of the basic non-vital material world.  In the meantime, to
preserve a consistent world-unity, life, mind, and purpose
must be explained, so far, at least, as scientific explanation
is possible, by mechanistic laws similar to those which
operate in the purely physical world.
  This might be loosely called the neo-Darwinian hypo-
thesis; though Darwin himself remained inclined either
towards a dualistic view---the original creation of some
"simple archetypal creature,' with the possibility of sub-
sequent differentiations under chance variation and natural
selection---as indicated, for example, in the closing para-
graph of the <1Origin of Species,>1 or towards a suspended
judgment about it, as in the sentences quoted at the begin-
ning of this chapter.
  There are, however, some difficulties in the hypothesis
that should be noted here.  In the first place, nearly all the
significant words used to set out the theory were originally
merely tentative terms used of necessity to <1describe>1 processes
that were as yet inexplicable.  But these tentative terms by
repetition and consequent familiarity have tended more and
more to become accepted as <1explanations>1 of the phenomena
rather than tentative descriptions.  Hence their tendency
to obscure or conceal without explaining the problem.
  The word "accident,' for example, when used with refer-
ence to the first appearance of life, may imply either that
(1) the first phenomenon of life had actually no causal
connection with the pre-life matter of the world, or only
that (2) the causal connections are not yet discovered.  If
the former is implied, then it stands in contradiction to the
fundamental assumption of all science, namely, that every
event has a cause.  If the second, then it is merely an
admission of present ignorance.  In neither case does it
give any explanation of the phenomenon; but by frequent
repetition of the word we get into the habit of thinking that
it is an explanation.
  Again "reproductive impulse' merely <1names>1 an essential
58
factor in life without explaining it.  An explanation would
involve some knowledge of the origin and significance of
this "impulse.'  When, how, why did this impulse get into
the world-machinery? The tendency, however, is to
accept the name as if it were an explanation.  Similarly a
"tendency to variation' comes to be accepted as an explana-
tion, so that the mind stops short of the real and scientific
questions : Where did the "tendency' come from, and what
is its role in world history; what causes the "variation,' and
for what purpose?  Are these also to be described as
"accidental,' and, if so, what does the term specifically mean ?
Did the "tendency' and "variation' originally come without
a cause, or did they emerge from some causal source as
yet undiscovered?  And where are the "tendency' and the
"variation' leading to ?
  It becomes obvious, when examined closely, that this first
hypothesis of an original world of purely non-vital matter,
if tested by the standards of other knowledge, is not even a
tentative explanation of the origin of life.  Darwin himself
was fully aware of this, as is shown in the closing sentences
of the <1Origin of Species,>1 where, in a very memorable last
paragraph, he sums up the view of the world which he has
developed in detail through four-hundred-odd pages.
  It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately
constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent
upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
by laws acting around us.  These laws, taken in the largest sense,
being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost
implied by reproduction ; Variability From the indirect and direct
action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio
of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a con-
sequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character
and Extinction of less improved forms.  Thus, from the war of
nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which
we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the
higher animals, directly follows.  There is grandeur in this view
  59
of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed
by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this
planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
  The significant words in this paragraph from our point
of view, are : "this view of life, with its several powers, <1having>1
<1been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or>1
<1into one.'>1  Darwin apparently saw that this, <1or something>1
<1akin to it,>1 was an essential link in the spiral chain of his
evolution theory, the link between lifeless and living forms.
Some Neo-Darwinians, I fancy, might explain this phrase
of Darwin's as either a conciliatory concession to contem-
porary opinion, or as a carry-over from his pre-scientific
religious beliefs, which he was not yet quite ready (1859)
to abandon, but which the more confident of the mechanistic
scientists of the present time would naturally reject as an
inconsistent  ingredient.
  To one, however, who tries to work out a concrete
philosophical view of the world as a whole, on the basis of
a time-evolution of all its forms from matter to man, the
mechanistic hypothesis appears at the present juncture to
obscure the real problem of the beginnings of life by taking
on the semblance of an explanation without the reality.
The large and increasing acceptance of this hypothesis
during the present century, at least on the American con-
tinent, is due, I think, first, to its reiterated claims of being
the only thoroughgoing scientific method of explanation,
and second, to the general revolt against the old dogma of
external design and direction, a revolt which has rather
outlived its usefulness.
60
  CHAPTER III
THE ORGANIC HYPOTHESIS
It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato
and the preaching of the immortality of the soul.  Yet all must
come as surely as the first atom has two sides.---EMERSON,
<1Nature,>1  1841.
  1. <1The Attest of Logic>1
  How can purposive forms of organization arise without a
purposive working cause ?  How can work full of design build
itself up without a design and without a builder ?---KANT, <1The>1
<1General History of Nature>1,  1755.
  But there can be no reasonable doubt that living matter, in due
process of time, originated from non-living ; and if that be so, we
must push our conclusion farther, and believe that not only living
matter, but all matter, is associated with something of the same
general description as mind in the higher animals.  We come,
that is, to a monistic conclusion, in that we believe that there is
only one fundamental substance, and that this possesses not only
material properties, but also properties for which the word
<1mental>1 is the nearest approach.---JULIAN HUXLEY, <1Essays of a>1
<1Biologist>1,  1926.
THE organic hypothesis holds that the world was at no
time of its evolution a merely purposeless mechanical world,
in which matter was prior to mind in the time order.  The
real original world was already and always a world of
matter, life, mind, and purpose, actual or latent.  Matter
on this hypothesis is regarded not as an independent sub-
stance in its own right, but as the means or material through
which the life and mind of the world works itself out from
its potential to its actual destiny.  The life-force, or mind-
force, or whatever we may call it in its earlier stages, works
within the sensuous material of the world, and gradually
shapes and moulds this material first into what we now call
inorganic formations, and then, in the ripeness of time and
  61
  THE NEW INVESTIGATION
environment, into those organic forms in which the life-
principle rises into recognizable living shapes, and emerges
into actual objective existence.  On this view evolution
through the reproductive impulse, the persistence of the
general type with certain tendencies to variation, natural
selection, etc., is not the directing agency, but the <1method>1
by which the directing agency, the life-and-mind force,
works itself out to actuality.
  Upon this hypothesis life, mind, and purpose are not
temporary and accidental, but basic and permanent elements
in the world; potential and latent---so far at least as human
perception upon this planet is concerned---in the first a|eons
of their history, and emerging to actuality at a certain
point of time in the world evolution.  With the actual
emergence of these new phases of the world there emerge
also new principles of activity that were not in objective
operation in the pre-life period of the world, and whose
mode of working could not have been predicted by any
human study of non-living matter.
  This view does not stand in contradiction to the mechanis-
tic laws of nature.  The mechanistic laws are considered as
the means by which the vital force advances from potential
to actual life-forms.  I call it "vital force' because one has
to use some known term to describe it, and while its inner
nature is still unknown, this term seems to come closer to
a description of its objective behaviour than any other term
we have.  That the vital force, the life principle, works by
mechanical means which biology, physiology, etc., are busy
exploring, is no evidence at all that the vital force itself is
mechanistic, in the accepted connotation of that word ; and
to call a living organ a "mechanism,' in the same sense as
one would speak about a machine,-seems a sheer confusion
or denial of significant characteristics by which we distin-
guish one thing from another.
  This modern error---for so, at least, it seems to me--of
characterizing life-activity as mechanism seems to have
62
arisen from a too exclusive concentration (a) upon the
causal relations among the various physical parts within
the individual organism itself, and (b) upon the relation
between the individual organism and its physical environ-
ment, until by the mere accumulation of the details of these
physical causal relations, internal and external, the central
unifying life-force is buried out of sight.  Eventually the
life-force itself, too elusive to be caught by the mechanical
mode of investigation, and now hidden from view under
the growing mass of details of its external behaviour, is
denied altogether, and the aggregate of its behaviouristic
relations substituted for it.  This is an easy but unsatisfac-
tory method of disposing of the most difficult element in
the whole problem.
  When, for example, a dog crosses a street, you have forty
pounds of matter moved and directed by an automatic
force within the dog's skin.  When the dog is suddenly
killed by an automobile you have the same size, shape, and
avoirdupois of matter lying upon the street, still subject to
all the mechanistic laws of non-vital matter, but without
any powers now of moving itself from within.  It can be
moved now only by contact with physical force from with-
out. The inner life-force that formerly moved it from
within, without any impact from material force from with-
out, is gone.  The difference is enormous; as great as any
difference which comes within the realm of knowledge.  To
call this life-force mechanistic in the same sense as the disin-
tegrating chemical changes that are now going on within
the dog's dead body are mechanistic, or in the sense in
which the dog's dead body may be moved by an external
force, is merely, as we have said, to confuse all those
boundaries of knowledge by which we differentiate one
phase of reality from another.  Life or life-force may have
to be redefined so as to show more closely its connection
with the mechanistic forces of the matter through which it
works, but to discard the word because the common
  63
connotation is now not sufficiently precise, and to replace
it by a word that refers primarily to lifeless relations, can
afford no help to clear thinking, unless its temporary use
and its felt inadequacy may operate as the gad-fly for
stimulating the mind to a new definition of the old term
"life.'
  This second hypothesis, that life, mind, and purpose are
permanent elements in the world, though their emergence
in individualized objective forms may have occurred at a
particular point of time in world evolution, on this planet
at least, is the hypothesis which I have adopted here, because
it appears the more scientific and logical, and is more In
accord with our complete experience of the world at the
present time.  Upon this view the emergence of living forms
upon the earth's surface would be neither a miracle nor an
accident, but a next causal advance, predestined by some
creative and purposive energy inherent in the world, in the
evolution of life and mind from its potential to its actual
existence. While this is a hypothesis only and not an
explanation of the emergence of life and mind any more
than is the mechanistic view, it does leave the way open for
a logical explanation without any break in the cause-and-
effect sequence.  It is the hypothesis put forward by Kant,
the first of the moderns, as already observed, to give vital
expression to the evolutionary theory as an explanation of
the present world of living forms.
  Though Kant was a mechanist within the realm of know-
ledge which encompassed, as he put it, the "phenomenal'
world <1(The Critique of Pure Reason,>1 1781), he saw that
mechanistic categories could not explain all experience, and
especially the obligations of duty; and so he postulated a
"noumenal' world <1(The Critique of Practical Reason,>1 1788),
which lay beyond the boundaries of cause-and-effect know-
ledge, but was nevertheless real, and related to the "pheno-
menal' world through a unifying purposiveness.  His sum-
marized statement of the hypothesis regarding the genera-
64
tion of the organic world under a purposive force is worth
quoting here because it is one of the earliest statements we
have of the theory, and because it appears in Kant's last
book, <1The Critique of Judgment>1 (1790), the "coping-stone,'
as he said, of his philosophy, and is his final judgment after
a long life of devotion to science and philosophy.
  Here [he says], it is permissible for the Archaeologist of nature
to derive from the surviving traces of its oldest revolutions,
according to all its mechanism known or supposed by him, the
great family of creatures (for so we must represent them if the
said thoroughgoing relationship is to have any ground) which
exists in the world to-day.  He can suppose the bosom of mother
earth, as she passed out of her chaotic state (like a great animal)
to have given birth in the beginning to creatures of less purposive
form, that these again gave birth to others which formed them-
selves with greater adaptation to their place of birth and their
relations to each other; until this womb, becoming torpid and
ossified, limited its births to definite species not further modi-
fiable, and the manifoldness remained as it was at the end of the
operation of that formative period---only he must still in the end
ascribe to this universal mother an organization purposive in
respect of all these creatures ; otherwise it would not be possible
to think the possibility of the purposive form of the products of
the animal and vegetable kingdom.  He has then only pushed
further back the ground of explanation and cannot pretend to
have made the development of those two kingdoms independent
of the condition of final causes.
  Kant's view here, if one can simplify it by explanatory
paraphrase, is that all the specific forms which we find in
the world to-day were produced by the purposive activity
of a mind-force working in and through the sensuous
matter of the world, and shaping-out these diversified
organic forms as the means of realizing in an objective way
its own potential destiny.  In other words, Kant believed
that the present manifold differentiated forms of the world
are the result of a complete and thoroughgoing inner pur-
posiveness of the world, working its way, especially in its
  65
early history, upward and outward through sensuous
matter, from the lowest forms of organic life up-to and into
the life of man.  In man, however, this inner inconscious
purposiveness emerges to consciousness and begins to work
now, through man's brain and hand, in an explicitly pur-
posive manner upon the matter of the world, imposing new
purposive forms upon this matter now from the outside
(the artificial world, or world of art, as we now call it), as
contrasted with the purposive forms (the organic forms of
nature) previously shaped by the same purposive activity of
the world working embryonically, as we might say, from the
inside.
  Upon this view the plant, the tree, the bird, the animal,
and man, are the forms which the world by its creative
activity has shaped into these objective expressions of its
own evolving life.  Professor Haldane has in a different
form expressed the same view, as I understand him, in
<1Mechanism, Life, and Personality,>1 where he maintains that
when the present investigations of the problem are even-
tually carried out to their completion it will most likely be
found that instead of mechanical law giving the explanation
to life and mind, it will be life and mind and personality
which will eventually give the explanation and significance
of mechanical law and of what is now called inorganic
matter. According to this view, then, with the actual
emergence of life in individual organic forms upon the
earth's surface, the world advanced to a new phase of its
evolution.  Life, mind, and purpose, latent and potential
in the preorganic period, emerge to actuality in the organic
world, in an ascending series from plant to man.
  Professor A. N. Whitehead, who, like Kant, is both a
scientist and a philosopher, expresses in a paragraph the
same view as Kant regarding the purposive nature of the
world, and it is interesting to see the two paragraphs side
by side with an interval of some hundred and forty years
between.
66
There is clear evidence that certain operations of certain animal
bodies depend upon the foresight of an end and the purpose to
attain it.  It is no solution of the problem to ignore this evidence
because other operations have been explained in terms of physical
and chemical laws.  The existence of a problem is not even
acknowledged.  It is vehemently denied.  Many a scientist has
patiently designed experiments for the <1purpose>1 of substantiating
his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes.
He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove
that human beings are as other animals so that "purpose' is a
category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities,
his own included.  Scientists animated by the purpose of proving
that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for
study.
  2. <1The Intuition of Poetry>1
  Shall we not maintain, then, that Mind is the first origin and
moving power of all that is, or has been, or will be, since it has
been clearly shown that Mind is the source of change and motion
in all things ?---PLATO, <1The Laws, c.>1 360 B.C.
                                          Even then I felt
          Gleams like the flashing of a shield; the earth
          And common face of Nature spake to me
          Rememberable things.
                   WORDSWORTH, <1The Prelude,>1 Book I, 1798.
  This conception of a vital purposive principle in the world
received its first powerful intuitive expression in English
literature in Wordsworth's <1Prelude,>1 a poem whose signi-
ficance and originality in relation to modern views of the
world are not yet fully realized.  In this poem Wordsworth
labours by all the devices of language---by concrete illustra-
tion, by philosophic exposition, by poetry---to convey lus
knowledge (for so he calls it) of the organic and spiritual
unity of the world which has been revealed to him through
often-repeated mystic experiences ; a knowledge, however,
which, in the end, he confesses to be incommunicable
through the ordinary resources of words, except to the
kindred mystic whose own personal experience can piece
together the broken arches of common speech.  It is the
  67
knowledge of immediate contact.  "I have <1felt>1 a presence'
is the statement which he reiterates with many variations
throughout the <1Prelude.>1  His thought, expressed in cold
prose, is that Man is the apex of the pyramidal world struc-
ture, where the Mind which permeates the whole fabric
emerges to the light of consciousness, and, in the organism
and mind of man, becomes the inheritor of all its own lower
manifestations from the base to the top of the pyramid.
But to Wordsworth the Mind which comes out so clearly
at the apex is already present and stirring at the very base,
and may <1befelt>1 there by the sensitive mind of man, though
hidden from the reach of sense.  This view of a living world,
even in that portion of it which to sense appears as non-
living matter, Wordsworth deduced from his own living
contact with it, repeated in countless experiences from child-
hood, youth, and manhood.  He gave the first powerful
expression of the view when he was twenty-eight years old,
In the now familiar though often unapprehended lines:
  And I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things.
  It should be noticed that the "presence' which he feels is
a living "something' which exists not only in the "mind of
man,' but in the "round ocean' and the "blue sky,' and is
discoverable through its immediate cause-and-effect relation
with his own mind.  The "joy of elevated thoughts,' which
he has experienced not once but hundreds of times, is an
effect, indubitable and profoundly significant, of which the
"blue sky' is the cause; and where others stop with the fact
68
Wordsworth presses on for the scientific interpretation of
the fact.  The "joy of elevated thoughts' is a <1mental>1 effect,
and he deduces that the "blue sky' and the "round ocean,'
which are its cause, and which to the senses and sense
instruments appear as mindless phenomena, are in reality
animated by mind, whose influences, while dead to the
physical senses, are appropriable to the sensitive mind of
man through immediate feeling.  "I have <1felt>1 a Presence,'
he says.  All of us have felt in varying degrees the same
influences from what we call, from the sense level, inanimate
nature, the sudden reinvigorating influence, for example, of
a sunset after a fatiguing day's work indoors.  But while,
as I have said, most of us are contented with the fact, Words-
worth probed for the interpretation, and the unique value
and originality of his great nature poetry, 1798-1808, is
due, first, to his vivid experiences of the mental joys offered
us by nature; second, to his scientific questionings about
their cause; and third, to his confidence that other less
sensitive minds may, under the guidance of his poetry,
become richer sharers of these joys by consciously seeking
them.  To indoor people whose minds are perturbed by
"the many shapes of joyless daylight . . . the fretful stir
unprofitable and the fever of the world,' in a word, by all
the vanities that seem inseparable from human society,
Wordsworth reiterates in poem after poem the invitation:
  Come forth, and bring with you a heart
  That watches and receives.
  At a later period, 1814, when his vivid experiences of the
mental nature of the entire world had decayed to little
more than a memory of things that were, he gave a more
explicitly philosophic, though less poetic, statement of his
views :
  To every Form of being is assigned
  An <1active>1 Principle :---howe'er removed
  69
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures; in the stars
Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters, and the invisible air.
Whate'er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed;
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.
This is the freedom of the universe;
Unfolded still the more, more visible,
The more we know; and yet is reverenced least,
And least respected in the human Mind,
Its most apparent home.
  <1The Excursion,>1 Book IX.
While this "active Principle' is not so "apparent' in the
lower orders of nature as it is in the human mind, yet it
may be <1felt>1 everywhere throughout the realm of nature, if
its awakened human forin, man, is sensitive to mental
affinities.
  Wordsworth also had an unalterable conviction that this
active Principle' was a permanent and indestructible element
in the world structure, as is shown in the following rather
remarkable lines :
  Should the whole frame of earth by inward throes
  Be wrenched, or fire come down from far to scorch
  Her pleasant habitations, and dry up
  Old Ocean, in his bed left singed and bare,
  Yet would the living Presence still subsist
  Victorious, and composure would ensue,
  And kindlings like the morning---presage sure
  Of day returning and of life revived.
                           <1The Prelude,>1 Book V.
These lines express an integral element of the organic
hypothesis which we have been discussing in this chapter.
  The main characteristic of Wordsworth's interpretation
of the world in <1The Prelude>1 is that he carries the scientific
70
method farther forward than do the scientists, beyond the
bounds of matter into the realm of mind.  He experiences,
for example, a memorable stimulus of joy from the sight of
the "floating cloud.'  This experience, as noted in a parallel
passage above, is an effect of which the floating cloud is
the cause.  But the experience is fundamentally a mental
one, and he reasons that the cause is also a mental reality,
though embodied in a physical phenomenon, the cloud, and
transmitted to the mind through the physical eye and the
physical filaments that connect the eye with the cloud.
Mind, to him, on the ground of cause and effect, is a <1real>1
presence, not only in man, but also in nature, though its
activity in nature---at least below the animal sphere---is not
palpable to sense perception.  <1The Prelude,>1 as Coleridge
pointed out, is fundamentally a philosophical poem, and is
in a very real sense the original English text upon which all
the expository work on creative or emergent evolution of
the present century has been based, however unconscious
the expositors may have been of Wordsworth's pioneer
work in the field.
  The laboratory scientist may be inclined to discount the
poet's evidence here on the ground that it is based on mystic
or intuitive insight rather than on scientific observation and
analysis.  But Wordsworth was a close scientific observer
and reasoner as well as a mystic, and in all original work
both faculties are necessary.  What makes Plato the great-
est of all philosophers is the fine commingling of steady
observation and logical reasoning with a penetrative mystic
insight.  In the <1Ion,>1 for example, Plato, by his mystic in-
sight, brings us to the very life and springs of poetry which
Aristotle misses entirely by his purely analytic method in
the <1Poetics.>1  As Bertrand Russell says in his illuminating
essay on <1Mysticism and Logic:>1
  The greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the
need of both science and mysticism.  .  .  .  Reason is a harmoni-
zing controlling force rather than a creative one.  Even in the
  71
most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what
is new.
  In returning in the next chapter to the reconstruction of
the time-picture of the evolution of the living forms in the
world which we suspended two chapters back, I shall assume
the organic hypothesis outlined above as the background for
the construction of the picture.  The concrete picture
itself, however, is in no way hypothetical, but is drawn from
empirical observation and objective evidence, and is sub-
mitted for scientific examination quite independent of the
metaphysical hypothesis submitted above as a probable
ultimate basis and explanation of the picture.
72
                 CHAPTER IV
     THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIC LIFE: THE TIME-
               PICTURE CONTINUED
  All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two car-
dinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time.
Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and has
taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our
Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style.  .  .  .  Now we
learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock
is formed, then before the rock is broken and the first lichen race
has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened
the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to
come in.  How far off yet is the trilobite !  how far the quad-
ruped !  how inconceivably remote is Man !  Yet all duly
arrive.---EMERSON,  <1Nature,>1  1841.
THE entire phenomenon of the organic world divides itself
by its external behaviour into three well-defined classes,
plant life, animal life, and man, each class with new and
original characteristics of its own.  To trace and mark these
new characteristics as they emerge in their time-evolution
upwards through plant and animal life to where the life-
and-mind of the world eventually emerges from its unfreed
and inconscious activity to its freed and conscious activity
in the life and mind of man, is our next step.
  I shall not attempt any analytic definition of either life or
mind, though that would be germane to our present purpose
if it could be done; nor any discussion of the detailed
material structure or processes of life from the biological
or physiological point of view, as that would fall outside
our present purpose.  While biologists have learned much
of the material organism through which life manifests itself,
they have not yet hit upon the thing itself, the life-principle,
or whatever we may call it, that animates and unifies the
organism.  Some of them, as we have seen, hold it to be
  73
merely a mechanistic principle, others a vital formative
principle, so that as far as <1knowledge>1 is concerned the
question is still in the realm of conjecture.  I only wish to
trace and describe some of the significant ways in which the
life-principle manifests itself in its objective appearance and
behaviour as we follow its evolution through an ascending
series from lower to higher life-forms, and eventually to the
highest form we know---man.
  By tracing the Time-picture in this way, and noting the
new significant characteristics as they emerge in the ascend-
ing scale, we shall be able to see more distinctly the actual
emergence and peculiar nature of the mental power in man
that gave birth to language.  The treatment will consist, as
indicated above, in a series of descriptions of the significant
forms and behaviour of the three cardinal classes of life:
plant, animal, and man.
  I. <1Plant Life>1
  When life emerges in the vegetable world it emerges as
an active and formative energy, with the power of gathering
and forming a given quantity of matter into a certain pre-
determined and self-determining shape.  J. S. Haldane
writes of it thus: "Life manifests itself in two ways---as
<1structure>1 and as <1activity.>1  But we also recognize---a biolo-
gist feels it in his very bones---that this is <1living>1 structure and
<1living>1 activity '  In order to work more directly to the end
in view here, I shall substitute for Haldane's "structure' and
"activity' the two words "individuality' and "freedom,' and
change his sentence to read: "Life manifests itself in two
ways---as <1individuality>1 and as <1freedom,'>1 and add that as we
ascend the life series those two features become more pro-
nounced and significant.  "Individuality' includes "struc-
ture,' but connotes also, a little more explicitly, unity and
definite boundaries.  "Freedom,' as used above, is almost
synonymous with "living activity,' except that it connotes
74
a little more pointedly the idea of liberation, <1in a certain>1
<1sense,>1 from mechanical law.  But a more explicit and posi-
tive definition of the two terms may help towards clearness.
  By "individuality' I mean that the delimited piece of
matter which we call the plant has within itself an active
and formative life-principle which draws around itself a
certain quantity of stuff from its natural environment, and
organizes this into its own body with a definite and limited
material form, whose parts have not only a definite spatial
relation to each other, but are actively and vitally main-
tained in that relation.  A quantity of inorganic matter, a
stone, for example, has no individuality in the sense of
<1actively>1 related parts, whose spatial relations to each other
depend upon the continuance of a vital unifying principle
within the particular body.  Break the stone into two parts
and the shape of each half, and the spatial relations of the
parts within each half, remain the same.  Cut a branch
from an individual tree, on the other hand, so as to sever it
from the unifying and form-sustaining life-principle, and
thus abandon it to the influences of mechanical laws alone,
and in a given time these mechanical forces will destroy the
definite formation of its parts and reduce its substance to
formless matter. In the tree an active principle has
emerged to visible actuality, that does not appear as actual
in what we call non-living matter, though the formative
energy which produced the tree must, as it seems to me,
have been latent in the pre-life matter, according to all our
conceptions of cause and effect.
  By attributing "freedom' to the plant I mean that a new
principle of activity has come to life within the material
organism with a power of motion and work from its own
centre, thus rising in some sense above the operation of
mere mechanical law and mechanical motions, as we know
these at present, where objects are moved only by external
impact.  The motions of an inorganic object, a stone, are
determined solely by mechanical laws such as gravitation.
  75
Left unsupported in the air it will drop to the ground;
placed in water it will sink; set on an inclined plane it will
roll to the bottom.  In all cases its motion can be predicted
by mechanical calculations.
  An organic object, on the other hand, a tree for example,
manifests a new principle of motion as it organizes and
raises its form and matter out of and above the earth's sur-
face.  This motion is originated and carried on from within
the tree, not from without, and this new kind of motion
could not have been predicted by any study of non-living
matter previous to the appearance of plant life.  In this
self-active upward movement there is a certain liberation
of this individualized living piece of matter from bare
mechanical law, for the tree in a given time will organize
several tons of matter into its own tree-substance and raise
this up several feet above the earth's surface in opposition,
for example, to the law of gravity.  No non-living object
has the power of raising itself in this way.
  As our language stands at present this new power of self-
motion from within is best described as a mode <1of freedom>1
to distinguish it from motion by impact from without, which
we designate as mechanical motion.  Something like this
we are obliged to do if we are to describe characteristic
differences at all.
  But this new motion of freedom is not a cancellation of
the lower mechanical laws.  The tree in its free movement
upward is dependent, for example, upon the law of gravity
for the very rise which it makes above the law.  It raises
its trunk perpendicularly in obedience to the law and
depends upon the constancy of the law for the steadiness
of its rise. It uses also many other mechanical laws---
which botanical science investigates---as the means by which
it accomplishes its growth, maintains its life, and realizes
in this way its own particular degree of freedom; and it
depends upon the constancy of all these mechanical laws in
order to rise to freedom at all.  The freedom of organized
76
plant life is thus not so much a freedom <1from>1 mechanical
law as it is a freedom obtained by <1means of>1 mechanical law.
  2. <1Animal Life>1
  In the emergence to animal life the world advances to a
new cycle in its evolution, embodies its life-energies in a
more highly organized and self-contained individuality with
a higher degree of freedom.  In this new cycle three new
characteristics emerge to actuality that have significance in
our time-picture : <1mind, self-motion,>1 and <1purposive sound,>1 or
inarticulate language, as we usually call it for want of an
exact name of its own.  We shall consider these three in
the order set down.
  (a)  <1Mind>1
  What is mind?  For the approach to language this
question can be better answered by comparative descrip-
tion than by analytic definition ; and I shall attempt now to
describe <1mind>1 in its objective appearance and behaviour in
relation to space-and-time, by comparison and contrast
with body as represented in the lower cycle of plant life,
where mind does not yet explicitly appear.
  The tree, as noted above, has an organized and self-
contained individuality with an active power of selecting
sensuous material from its environment, synthesizing this
into its own individual form, and actively maintaining it in
that synthesis.  But its individuality does not extend, as
we might say, beyond its own bark.  It is contained within
its own physical dimensions and stands confined to its own
particular physical point in space and time.  There is no
perceptible power within the tree of reaching beyond its
own physical boundaries, so that it does not differ signi-
ficantly in that respect from any inorganic material object.
It has, in other words, no actualized mind.
  In the animal, on the other hand, the new and unique
  77
  THE NEW INVESTIGATION
power of mind has actually emerged from the creative and,
as I think, purposive energies of the world.  The animal
has the same power of active assimilation and growth as
the tree.  Its body has similar limited and defined physical
dimensions.  But centred within its body is the new power
which we now call <1mind,>1 which through the avenues of the
sense-organs of sight, hearing, and smelling, radiates or
reaches out a certain distance into space and time, beyond
the body's limits, so that the animal's individuality, by this
new power of mind, extends beyond its own skin, beyond
its own material body, and holds in its mental grasp, and
actually occupies mentally, a much larger space-and-time
environment than the body occupies.  In contrast with the
plant whose individuality is confined to its own physical
dimensions and which is thence confined to a physical world
alone, the animal with its double body-and-mind nature
lives in a double physical-and-mental world.  The new
phenomenon of mind and its correspondent mental world
emerge together.
  This mental world which emerges as the habitation of
this new power of mind in animal life is a non-material
world which transcends the laws of the material world and
the material bodies in it, as for example the law that two
bodies cannot simultaneously occupy the same point of
space.  The living physical body in which the mind centres
is subject to all the laws of the physical world as is any
non-living material body; but the mind radiates, as we said,
into a much larger region, so that the minds of two animals
whose bodies occupy mutually exclusive regions of space
can occupy a common mutually inclusive mental region.
The difference between the two can be made objectively
clear by an illustration, as also the difference between the
plant and the animal with respect to this new power of mind.
  The two trees A and B stand separated from one another
in mutually exclusive regions of space, the individuality of
each confined within itself.  The physical bodies of the two
78
animals, C and D, are in a similar way mutually exclusive.
But the individualized mind, though centred or focused
in the space-and-time-bound body, extends into the larger
region represented by the circumferences of the two circles,
E and F, and these two mental worlds are not mutually
exclusive.  The greater portion of the occupied circles js
"common mental ground.  This is a new phenomenon in
the world that could not have been predicted by any study
of non-mental organic objects.
  Whether we are to speak of the animal's mind as <1confined>1
<1within>1 its own body and <1looking out>1 upon this larger world ;
or as merely centred or focused within the body and <1actually>1
<1extending>1 to the larger circumference, may be largely a
matter of agreement upon the connotation of words.  The
latter, however, is the more accurate description of the
phenomenon of mind.  It is also in more direct agreement
with Kant's exposition of space and time, as I understand
Kant.  But however we may describe it, it is clear that in
animal existence the creative life-force of the world has
produced individualized material organisms through which,
as physical space-time centres, the mind of the world
emerges into some kind of individual consciousness of its
  79




































surrounding environment of space and time, and takes some
kind of mental possession of this.
  (b)  <1Self-Motion>1
  Corresponding with its unique environing world of mind
the animal has the new and unique power of self-motion.
By means of this active power of motion within its own
body, initiated, controlled, and directed by the mind, the
animal can move itself from place to place within its larger
mental world, and take successive physical possession of it.
  But in this new movement of the world towards freedom
in animal life there is no cancellation of lower laws.  The
squirrel by its own power of motion from within, coupled
with the law of gravity that keeps its feet firm upon the
ground, can go up an inclined plane while the stone on the
same plane will roll to the bottom.  But the same law
which takes the stone down enables the squirrel to go up.
The animal's freedom rests upon the constancy of mechani-
cal law. Similarly, the squirrel could not continue to
subsist were it not that the oak tree remained constant to
its own oak-tree laws in producing acorns for the squirrel
to eat.
  To speak in this way of the oak producing acorns for
the squirrel to eat may at first sight seem like attributing an
unwarranted purposiveness to the system of nature.  It is,
admittedly, an external and bald way of putting it, and yet
one can see no other alternative if one attempts to think out
in detailed completeness the idea of the organic unity of
the world.  We are accustomed to think of the oak tree
producing acorns to fulfil its own nature in reproducing
and maintaining itself, rather than to feed the squirrels;
and to say that the squirrel must adjust himself to this
nature of the tree, and to his environment in general, if he
wishes to subsist.  That <1seems>1 the solider way of putting
it because the environment seems a much more durable,
solid, and intractable thing than does any small animal
 80
animals, C and D, are in a similar way mutually exclusive.
But the individualized mind, though centred or focused
in the space-and-time-bound body, extends into the larger
region represented by the circumferences of the two circles,
E and F, and these two mental worlds are not mutually
exclusive.  The greater portion of the occupied circles is
  FIG. 1
common mental ground.  This is a new phenomenon in
the world that could not have been predicted by any study
of non-mental organic objects.
  Whether we are to speak of the animal's mind as <1confined>1
<1within>1 its own body and <1looking out>1 upon this larger world ;
or as merely centred or focused within the body and <1actually>1
<1extending>1 to the larger circumference, may be largely a
matter of agreement upon the connotation of words.  The
latter, however, is the more accurate description of the
phenomenon of mind.  It is also in more direct agreement
with Kant's exposition of space and time, as I understand
Kant.  But however we may describe it, it is clear that in
animal existence the creative life-force of the world has
produced individualized material organisms through which,
as physical space-time centres, the mind of the world
emerges into some kind of individual consciousness of its
 79
species like the squirrel that subsists within it.  But this
appearance is surely due to the deception of the senses, and
to a dualistic mode of thinking.  As soon as the observer
begins to think and speak particularly of a single small
animal like the squirrel this animal immediately stands out
alone in his mind in its smallness and apparent insignificance
against the entire and durable background of nature, and
the observer, with these two unequal opposites objectively
in his eye, forgets for the moment the organic unity of the
world which he theoretically asserts as the whole basis of
his thinking, and thinks and speaks of the squirrel adjusting
itself in an external way to its environment.  He forgets for
the time that the environment and the squirrel are only
differentiated elements in a single self-differentiating world,
whose life and mind are gradually emerging into concrete
actuality through an ascending series of differentiated
organic forms, where the higher cycle is, in each step, con-
ditioned by and dependent upon the lower; and that the
world unfolding itself in this way could not have produced
and sustained the more highly individualized life-organism
of the squirrel with its power of self-motion, its senses, its
finer assimilative organs, its half-freed, half-conscious mind,
until it had first developed the plant life with its power of
modifying the nutritive substance of the inorganic world
over into that intermediated state, acorns, etc., that could
be assimilated as food by the more finely wrought organ-
isms of animal life.  The world, though unfolding itself as
a hierarchy in the successive steps of its evolution, appears,
nevertheless, as a single, not a multiple, world, each higher
order resting upon, supported by, and evolving from the
one beneath.  Conceiving it this way, it seems more con-
sistent to think of the creative world-force as evolving and
directing the lower order, plant life, for example, with a
view to the subsequent evolution and sustenance of the
higher order of animal life, than to think of the animal as
adjusting itself to the lower plant order, when that lower
 81
  THE NEW INVESTIGATION
order must have been already adjusted both to the prospec-
tive lite and subsequent sustenance of the animal before the
animal could have come into existence at all or have any
prospect of continuing to exist.  The squirrel does not in
fact adjust himself to his environment except in the most
meagre degree.  On the contrary he finds the environment
already adjusted to his needs, and requires only a rudi-
mentary instruction as to how to appropriate what he
requires from this preadjusted environment.
  (c) <1Purposive Sound>1
  The third unique characteristic which, in the evolution of
the life-force of the world, emerges to actuality now for the
first time in animal life is <1purposive sound,>1 the cry or call
by which one animal communicates with another.
Mechanical sound which is made by external impact among
solid or semi-solid material bodies expresses no purpose.
It is the effect of the physical impact, and merely reports
what has happened or is happening.  Hence it has signi-
ficance only in reference to the past or concurrent present.
The call of an animal is also no doubt a report of the
animal's present or immediate past state, but its chief
significance is its reference to the future, towards some
effect of which it is the intentional or purposive cause.  The
call of the wolf, for example, to rally the hunting pack.  It
explicitly anticipates time.  In this way as expressing ex-
plicit purpose it resembles the language of man, and
Darwin, as observed above, has actually established the
habit of calling it language.  But being inarticulate it is
not really language, as I hope to show more clearly a little
farther on, so I shall use a new word and call this purposive
sound of animal-life "rudi-language,' to distinguish it from
mechanical and non-purposive sound on the one hand and
from language on the other.
  This rudi-language of the animals is the natural accom-
82
paniment of mind and locomotion.  The three appear as
being teleologically related.  With the individualized mind
which holds an expanse of space beyond the body's limits,
and with the power of self-movement to take, in a given
time, successive physical possession of this larger expanse,
the animals have vocal organs by which they can produce
these significant sounds for purpose of intercommunication
within the larger expanse of their mental world, and for
mutual physical co-operation within it.  The plant, having
no mind nor locomotion, has no language.  The three
things emerge together.
  CHAPTER V
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE AND EXPRESSION
  1.  <1Animal Cries and Language>1
The goal of truth lies in a single point from which we can
survey all sides and discover that no animal can invent language,
that no God must invent it, and that man as a human being can
and must invent it.---HERDER, <1Origin of Language,>1 1772.
SINCE these animal cries have purposive significance similar
to that of language, in what respect do they differ from
language?  I shall try to give a definite answer to this
question.
  First, they are inarticulate while language is articulate.
And what precisely does "inarticulate' mean?  It means
(1) that these cries are not explicitly articulated sounds with
clear-edged beginnings, middles, and endings, as are the
word-sounds "h-a-p' and "h-o-p,' or "d-i-g' and "d-i-p,' so
that one sound can be clearly and definitely differentiated
from another; and (2), as a corollary to this, the sounds
have no conventional meanings; that is, they are not
invested each with an arbitrary and definite connotation
quite apart from any natural sound-suggestion which they
may have, so that one sound stands exclusively for one
thing, another sound for another thing, as do the words of
language like "wolf' and "bear.' In other words, the
animals' cries are natural cries as distinguished from the
conventionalized sounds which we call words, and they
have the characteristic vagueness or indefiniteness of signi-
ficance which all natural sounds have.  In this respect of
natural vagueness of significance the cries of animals re-
semble the mechanical sounds in nature, though differing
from these in expressing purpose.  They resemble also in
this respect the vagueness of instrumental music which is
84
  ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
expressed also in natural mechanical sounds which have
no explicit definiteness for the mind.
  Some more specific characteristics of the animal cries
should be set down here to remove any possible ambiguity.
  (1)  It is true that the animal or bird does, as Darwin and
other naturalists have pointed out, utter several natural
cries that can be distinguished from one another.  But
these cries all relate directly to their immediate physical
needs or emotional moods, and are of three kinds:
  (a)  Calls giving notice of the presence or prospect of food.
  (b) Calls of warning in the presence or prospect of
danger.
  (c) Calls expressing feelings of joy or pain.
  (a) and (b) are natural vocal responses to the immediate
physical environment, (c) is the expression of immediate
feeling.  The call to food is given by the partridge only in
the presence of food ; the warning cry for danger only in the
presence of danger.  While both, as we have said, refer to
the future, it is always the near or immediate future.  They
stop there.  The particular cry is never separated from the
particular environment to which it is the natural response.
  (2)  Because of the limited physical needs for which these
calls are used, and because of the general vagueness of their
significance, these distinguishable calls are few in number,
ranging from, say, one to twelve, and these few completely
answer the bird's needs.  They do not increase in number.
The partridge gives the same call in the presence of a dozen
different kinds of food.  Similarly in the case of danger.
As natural sounds they are inarticulate and hence non-
differentiating.  When the dog barks, for example, outside
the house, the bark intimates only that <1something>1 is ap-
proaching, but leaves the human inmates of the house in
doubt as to whether it is a man, horse, cow, wolf, bear, etc.
The child goes to the door to ascertain what it is that is
approaching and reports that it is a "man.'  The articulated
85
sound "man,' which he utters, explicitly differentiates the
approaching object from all other possible alternatives,
because "man' is not a natural sound like the "wow' of the
dog, but a conventionalized sound ; and it is this articulation
and conventionalization of sound, (a) shaping it out with
clear edges to distinguish it from other sounds, and (b)
investing it with a definite limited meaning, that makes
language.
  Articulate language is a composite thing; and in every
word there are three distinguishable elements.  (a) The
natural sound out of which the word is made.  This is the
raw material of language. The animal's rudi-language
stops here.  (b) The definite shape given to this natural
sound in its beginning, its middle, and its end, to separate
it from other similarly shaped sounds.  For example, the
conventionalized sound "d-o-g' has a definite distinguishable
beginning "d,' a definite distinguishable tone-body "o,' and
a definite distinguishable ending "g,' which, or any one of
which, mark this sound off clearly from all other sounds.
(c) This clearly shaped sound is invested with a definite,
limited, arbitrary (or conventional) meaning.  The sound
"dog' stands for a particular object in nature, and is differen-
tiated, both by its sound-shape and its conventional mean-
ing, from its near-neighbour sound "hog' as clearly as these
two objects are differentiated from each other by their space-
shape in nature.  In the cries of animals the two last ele-
ments of language, namely (b) and (c), are absent.
  Since language is a direct product of the mind, and since
the language of man differs thus clearly from the rudi-
language of animals, this difference in their utterances must
signify certain differences in mental powers between the
two.  The language differences ought to give the clue to
the mental differences if we can follow the logical deductions
closely enough.  If the animal does not conventionalize
sound so as to differentiate one sound explicitly from
another, and to multiply their number as man has done, it
 86
would seem to follow that he does not <1in his mind>1 differen-
tiate one object from another in space, or one event from
another in time, in the explicit way that man differentiates
them.  Man's power of explicit mental differentiation was
what brought human language into existence. For
example, looking around him in any given bit of spatial
environment, a man will differentiate by his eye and mind,
say, fifty different objects, and will require fifty distinguish-
able sound symbols, concrete nouns, to differentiate them
in his mental world which he elaborates by language, and
which, as I shall try to show in some detail farther on,
corresponds in its parts and structure to the parts and
structure of the natural world he is looking at.  A dog
standing by his side in the same environment shows no
mental urge for any such clearly defined sound symbols at
all, so that he evidently does not mentally differentiate the
various objects with that distinctness which creates the need
of language.  There is little doubt that the dog can see as
man does with his physical eyes, though perhaps not so
clearly, but there seems to be no <1mental>1 recognition, and
hence no <1mental>1 interest in or curiosity about the various
differentiated objects which are before his eyes.  Otherwise
he would be urged to the making of mental symbols to
designate them as man has been urged.  He seems interested
in material objects in his environment only as they affect
his physical needs.  He sees the tree or thorn bush and
avoids it; or the hole in the hedge and goes through it;
and he crosses the flower bed with the same indifference as
the gravel walk.  He shows no mental recognition of the
flower, weed, tree, hedge, stone, as objects that can be
mentally differentiated.  He does not see with his mind,
or with a mental interest, as man does.  Bring him into his
master's library and he is mentally incognizant of the book,
the magazine, the jug, the pipe, the chair, the ink-bottle,
as things distinguished from one another physically and
distinguishable mentally.
 87
The difference is illustrated in another way by the
animal's well-known habit of remaining motionless,
"freezing' as it is called, to escape the notice of other animals
that are within seeing distance.  I stood motionless once
in a quite open space for at least five minutes within twenty
yards of a fox that was hunting for mice in a rotted log.
There were a few stumps in the vicinity, and three times he
looked at me as if curious about my identity, and eventually
trotted off in a quite unconcerned manner.  I should have
had no difficulty in identifying the fox had he been stock-
still.  That the difference between the two minds does exist
is obvious from the facts of language and from other
evidence similar to the instance cited here.  The real diffi-
culty is in getting the difference set out clearly enough by
the more observational method to lift it above ambiguity.
To do this I shall approach the question presently by another
method.
  There is, however, another interesting and, as I think,
legitimate comparison that might help us forward a step
towards clearness in conceiving the fact of language.  The
articulately differentiated sounds of human speech stand to
undifferentiated natural sounds in much the same relation
as the explicitly differentiated bodies of the various animals
stand to the undifferentiated common matter of the earth
out of which the various animals' bodies have been made.
All names of animals have been fashioned by man out of the
common element of sound, just as all animals themselves
have been fashioned by nature out of the common elements
of matter.  In the pre-animal stage of the world these
common elements of matter were undifferentiated and
formless.  With the emergence of animal life individualized
portions of matter took on various specific shapes and
features that stand out sharply differentiated from one
another in the various animals' bodies.  So with language.
In the pre-language stage of the world the natural sounds
from which language was to be made were undifferentiated,
 88
or at most vaguely differentiated.  When shaped and con-
ventionalized by men into the names of animals these
sound-names stand out as clear and distinct from one
another as do the animals which they name.  The world-
force first differentiated common matter into distinguish-
able individual forms, plants, animals, birds, etc., and in
this way added a new story to its life.  Similarly the same
world-force (whatever that force may be) working con-
sciously in the mind of man has differentiated natural
sounds into distinguishable individual names for these
plants, animals, birds, etc., and in this way has again
added a new story to world-life.  The inconscious organ-
ized and multiform world of matter has now a duplicate in
the conscious organized and multiform world of mind by
means of language symbols.  If the world is the veritable
unity which we assert it to be, then the fabric of human
language which now extends over the world of nature is as
distinct a cycle in its evolution as is the cycle of animal life
which extends over the surface of insentient nature.  This
will be made clearer a little farther on.
  2. <1Earth and Birds>1
  To most of us, a bird 's a feathered song
  Which for our pleasure gives a voice to spring.
  We make a symbol of its airy wing
  Bright with the liberty for which we long.
  Or we discover them with love more strong
  As each a separate individual thing
  Which only learns to act or move, or sing
  In ways that wholly to itself belong.
  But some with deeper and more inward sight
  See them a part of that one Life which streams
  Slow on, towards more mind---a part more light
  Than we ; unburdened with regrets, or dreams,
  Or thought.  A winged emotion of the sky,
  The birds through an etemal Present fly.
  JULIAN HUXLEY, 1934.
  89
Before passing on to the next step, the life of man, I
should like to say a few things more about the relation
between animate life and the earth beneath it, that are
implied in the conception of the organic unity of the world.
The unity between the plant life and the inorganic matter
of the world is apparent to the senses as well as to the mind.
The tree is rooted in the earth, and we can see it with our
eyes as an obvious outgrowth of the inorganic world in
which its roots remain bedded.  But when we come to the
animate world, the birds, for example, our senses tend to
deceive us.  The robin with its body freed from the earth
appears to the sight as something moving upon or above
the earth's surface, rather than as an outgrowth or projec-
tion of the earth.  Yet the robin, when we consider it, is
obviously a projection of the earth in the same literal sense
as is the tree, and is also, like the tree, an expression of an
aspect of the general world-life, one step in advance of the
tree in the general evolution towards freedom.  And there
was a time in the history of the world, no doubt, when the
robin's remote ancestors were not detached from the
physical environment out of which they were emerging ; and
a point or period of time when that detachment was effected,
and the great step made towards freedom.  <1How>1 the step
was made is a question for the naturalist.
  Similarly, when we listen to the various songs of the birds
around us we are apt to think of these as merely the voices
of isolated birds upon the surface of a material world.
But here again if our theory of the organic nature of the
world corresponds in verity to the actual nature of the world
---and all our thinking leads us more and more to that view
---then these voices of the birds are the voices of the world
breaking through these individualized living forms which
the world, in the creative evolution or unfolding of its life
and mind, has by long processes produced and developed
for that particular kind of utterance.  In other words, the
voices of the birds are the individualized and localized
90
voices of the world; and the living impulses of joy that
emanate in the bird's songs are the joy impulses of the
world, as Plato pointed out long ago in <1The Laws.>1  These
songs and cries are the recently inchoate life and mind of
the world emerged now into voice and expression through
individualized organic bodies.  What other ultimate inter-
pretation can be given them?  All recent scientific and
philosophic thought, and the no less authoritative intuitive
thought of poetry, when carried through to the end, lead us
to this view.  It is interesting to think, under the conception
of emergent evolution, of the many steps and long history
that lie between the original huge, formless, voiceless matter
of the world in its pre-life period, and the tiny, individual-
ized, liberated, animated piece of matter that mounts in the
skylark's body and gives its portion of the world's life back
to the world in song.  This would be a typical example of
the manner in which the world rises to its actual life and
voice.  The skylark, if it could speak, might well say, like
Caliban's pipe in Browning's poem:
  I make the cry my maker cannot make
  With his great round mouth ; he must blow through mine !
  If it should be objected by the modern realist that the
above world-view is a rather outmoded idealism at the
present time, I would agree; with the rejoinder, however,
that the view has persisted through many alternating
fashions of philosophic thought from pre-Platonic to post-
Hegelian times, and is likely to survive in modified form the
present anti-idealistic mode of thought.  The idealism (the
word is entirely misleading to most moderns) of Hegel,
for example, is not wanting in realistic content, witness his
philosophy of history and of art, as the detractors of Hegel
would find if they took the trouble to read his work, though
he does rather ruthlessly crush the factual material in order
to extract its significance.  If it should be further objected
that the language employed in presenting the view is the
 91
diction and phraseology of poetry rather than of sober
science, the answer would be that these higher aspects of
the world which we call life and mind are the aspects with
which poetry is especially concerned, and that many of
these aspects are so subtle, elusive, and fugitive in their
nature that they cannot be caught or accurately conveyed
by any diction less subtle, fluid, and accurate than the
diction of poetry.  And for readers who have made no
close study of the exactness of poetry in dealing with its
own particular phase of the truth of the world it may be
worth while recalling Coleridge's observation "that poetry
has a logic of its own as severe as that of science, and more
difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent
upon more fugitive causes.'
  The Canadian poet, Bliss Carman, in one of his poems,
<1The Choristers,>1 has given a rather striking poetic expression
of the emergence of life and purposive sound in the world.
He follows Plato, whether consciously or not, in conceiving
mind (God) as an original element and the guiding agency
in world evolution, and love and gladness as active and
creative principles which in their strain and urge for expres-
sion eventually produced those tiny animated pieces of
matter, the birds, with their throats fashioned for song.
Carman has used a very simple and naive diction, some of
it, like "seraphs' chorus,' quite archaic in comparison with
modern scientific diction, but in spite of this he has suc-
ceeded in conveying in a rather telling way the whole idea
of the organic unity of the world of matter-and-mind as it
emerges from lifeless to living activity.
  When earth was finished and fashioned well
  There was never a musical note to tell
  How glad God was, save the voice of the rain
  And the sea and wind on the lonely plain
  And the rivers among the hills.
  And so God made the marvellous birds
  For a choir of joy transcending words,
 92
He filled their tiny bodies with fire,
He taught them love for their chief desire,
And to each he apportioned a fragment of song---
Those broken melodies that belong
To the seraphs' chorus.  .  .  .
So music dwells in the glorious throats
Forever, and the enchanted notes
Fall with rapture upon our ears,
Moving our hearts to joy and tears
  For things we cannot say.
The fact that we, the conscious recipients of these world-
voices, are so deeply and variously moved by them, is itself
the strongest kind of presumptive evidence of a causal con-
nection, other than merely physical, between man's mind
and the world-cycles of life beneath it, and also of some
kind of vital purposiveness throughout the rising cycles of
nature from matter to man.
  This whole view is, of course, based upon the organic
hypothesis described above, of a purposive activity in the
world which <1was working towards>1 the making, say, of birds
before it had actually made them.  When the stage was
prepared and set this same purposive activity made the
birds so that they could fly and sing.  The length of time
involved in the making, whether a thousand or a million
years, does not affect the theory.
  One can see no way of concretely imaging or describing
this prime purposive agency, or its mode of working in the
world, since, in fashioning the bird's body, it works appar-
ently from <1within>1 matter; while all purposive activity, which
we can observe in operation now, whether in animal or in
human life, imposes its purpose upon matter from <1without.>1
I accept the purposive hypothesis because it appears the
only logical one.  If the parts of the bird's body were not
purposively combined into a purposive organism, then they
must have come together by chance.  I have tried to think
 93
how particles of inorganic matter might by chance have
formed themselves, in a million years, into the bones,
muscles, digestive and respiratory organs, blood, flesh, skin,
eyes, feathers, wings, etc., of a bird, all the parts co-ordin-
ated and unified with the vital principle of life, and I find it
absolutely impossible to imagine how it could so happen
at all, any more than I can imagine particles of matter
"shooting out in millions of directions for millions of years,'
if you like, forming themselves into a locomotive with the
power of pulling a train of cars.
  But this analogy, the reader may object, between the bird
and the locomotive is going back again to Paley's analogy
of the watch.  Partly, yes.  But Paley's error was not in
his idea of design, or purposive activity in itself, but in his
anthropomoiphic conception of it. He conceived the
prime creative activity as standing outside the matter of
the world, and making purposive living things in much the
same way as a man makes a watch.  The analogy, drawn in
this fashion, will not hold.  The bird is a living piece of
matter; the watch lifeless.  The bird seeks its own daily
food, propagates its species, etc.; the watch has to be
wound by man and when worn out has to be replaced by a
man-made new one.  The purposiveness of the watch---to
mark the time---is imposed upon lifeless matter from with-
out by external design; the purposiveness of the bird---to
sing, fly, propagate, etc.---is infused into matter from within,
by internal design.  How so infused one sees no way of
conceiving in detail at all.  One merely deduces the inher-
ence of a purposive activity in the world from the purposive
nature of its products---animate nature and man.  In man
the purposive activity of the world comes out to complete
explicitness.  The entire world of art, for example, both of
use and beauty, which is now spread over the world of
nature on this planet is the product of explicit purpose
working through the brain and hand of man, who is nature's
chief product.  To conceive an unbroken unity in the world
 94
one seems forced to carry the purposive activity backward
down the scale of existence from the highest form, man, to
its lowest form, matter.
  But why, one might here ask, do I not at once call this
prime vital activity in the world "God,' instead of using
only vague descriptive words that appear to be evading the
issue?  Because that would be going farther in the direction
of definiteness than the formulated conception ofthe organic
hypothesis would warrant.  The word "God' connotes in
the minds of most people an anthropomorphic agency, a
limited personality who works towards limited particular
ends, in a manner very similar to that in which human beings
work.  But whatever one's <1belief>1 may be, there seems to
be no way of <1knowing>1 or <1conceiving>1 the central creative force
of the world in this definite way.  The anthropomorphic
conception of purpose is the highest form we <1know>1 in the
cycles of reality, and there is as yet no way of <1definitely>1
<1conceiving>1 a higher form of purposive agency who could
produce purposive animated pieces of matter---birds,
animals, etc.---which would be even remotely analogous to
the purpose-serving inanimate machines which man can
make.  Since the whole hypothesis can be conceived only
in a general way the diction and phraseology in which it
is set out cannot legitimately be more definite than the con-
ception in the mind.
  CHAPTER VI
MAN AND THE ANIMALS
Every animal has its sphere to which it belongs by birth, into
which it instantly enters, in which it continues all through life,
and in which it dies. .  .  . The spider weaves with as much skill
as did Minerva, but all its skill is restricted to this narrow sphere ;
this is its universe.  How marvellous is the insect and how nar-
row the sphere of its activity.---HERDER, <1Origin of Language,>1
1772.
IN the preceding pages we have given a descriptive outline
of the Space-Time picture of the life and mind of the world
as it has emerged by successive steps towards freedom and
individuality, up to and including animal life and intelli-
gence.  But there is as yet no language; and, from all that
we can discover, no power nor problem in the animal
nature which would bring language into existence.  There
seems to be some barrier that holds the animal's mind back
from that realm of free mind into which man has entered,
where language first emerges.  What is the barrier?  Can
it be intellectually grasped and described?  These are the
two questions.
  Darwin, as we have seen, held that there was no barrier ;
that the difference was merely "a difference in degree of
mental development.'  While this statement, as we have
also seen, gives us no specific light on the problem at its
present stage, it had a value in its time, and has been con-
sidered adequate by most biologists and general readers
since Darwin's time, who have made no close study of
language.  His followers, to illustrate the view, have fre-
quently made the statement that the difference in mental
development between the lowest type of savage, the Fuegian,
for example, and a fully civilized and cultivated man is
greater than the difference between the same savage and
96
the anthropoid ape.  Recently I came across the following
illustration, used to symbolize the relative differences.
  CIVILIZED MAN
  FUEGIAN
  CHIMPANZEE
  FIG. 2
But both the statement and the illustration are clearly
erroneous, owing to the confusion of <1resemblance>1 of power
with <1identity>1 of power.  The error can be made very clear
by an example.
  If we were to take a six-month-old Fuegian infant and
place him in an educated English-speaking home in Canada
with its common educational opportunities, what and
where would he be in twenty years?  He would be first of
all in complete working possession of a highly developed
language, the instrument by which man has elaborated the
world of mind into which he has entered and in which he
realizes his characteristic destiny.  Then, by means of this
language, he would have elaborated concretely for himself
the various parts of this mental world, in history, geography,
literature, mathematics, science, and would stand in much
the same position as any Canadian boy who had a long line
of civilized ancestors.  The seeming gulf between the
savage and the civilized man would be practically bridged
in a quarter of a single life-span.
  Now put the chimpanzee's six-month-old offspring in
the same home and environment, and at twenty years he
would know none of these things.  He is excluded by some
 97
impassable barrier from man's mental world, the world
which man has actualized and elaborated by means of
language.  Darwin expresses surprise that some men should
still think that there is any such barrier between the two.
"Nevertheless,' he writes, "many authors have insisted that
man is divided by an insuperable barrier from the lower
animals in his mental faculties.'  Well, these authors, as a
matter of demonstrable fact, are right and Darwin wrong.
The Fuegian is at the outset already across the barrier that
stands between nature and free mind, and moves forward
in that new world of free mind immediately opportunity is
given.  The chimpanzee is still in the world of nature, and
is blocked, as yet at least, by the barrier that stands between
nature and free mind, whether we can ever explicitly de-
scribe that barrier or not.  The savage is, as it were, just
across the barrier into the new world, while the civilized
man has gone a great way inland, so that the savage in his
outward appearance more closely resembles his nearest of
kin in the old world which he has just left than he does his
actual brother who has gone so far ahead of him in the
new world.  But whatever <1resemblances>1 there may be in
mental faculty between the chimpanzee and the savage, it
is clearly a <1resemblance>1 merely and not an <1identity>1 of power.
  That Darwin and his followers should have fallen into
and persisted in this now obvious confusion regarding the
respective mental powers of the animals and man is a
striking illustration of how even the most careful scientist
may fall a prey to unscientific prejudices against old forms
of thought and their mode of expression; and how these
prejudices, coupled with his desire for complete coherence
in the new thought which he is elaborating, may blind him
to significant facts in the old quite as completely as any
popular or theological prejudice can blind its adherents to
the truth of the new.  When, for example, the old writer
on the Genesis of life in the world represented man's fall
(or awakening) from innocence as resulting from his eating
98
of a forbidden fruit, and the consequent opening of his eyes
to a knowledge of good and evil, truth and error, etc.,
leading in turn to his expulsion from the Garden of Eden
(the world of nature, in modern colourless phraseology),
and his giving names to the things in the natural world, he
gave one of the most memorable accounts that will ever be
given of one of the most momentous facts in the story of
emergent evolution of life and mind in the world.  When
the novelty of recent discoveries has worn off a little, and
the mind of the modern world, settled into something of a
sober perspective again, returns with a more flexible intelli-
gence to a reading of that old story, it will perhaps wonder
that an allegory which so vividly images forth a cardinal
fact in world history should have fallen into even temporary
disrepute through the obloquy thrown upon it by the
prejudice of novel discoveries, however important these
discoveries themselves may turn out to be.  Every new
truth, however, must at first make its way against the
jealous prejudices of the old, and by the very spirit of
aggression necessary to expel the old the new truth is apt
to develop its own prejudice in the manner of a defensive
armour. It requires only a little heat in the mind to
smudge the features of the fairest truth with its affined
prejudice.
  CHAPTER VII
THE BARRIER OF SPACE AND TIME
Space and Time as infinite and all-embracing wholes are <1a>1
<1priori>1 intuitions which are the condition of and antecedent to all
our knowledge of particular objects in space and time.---KANT,
<1Critique of Pure Reason,>1 1781.
WHAT, then, is the barrier between the animals and man,
that excludes the animals from man's mental world?  It is
the barrier primarily of Space and Time.  This, I think, can
be made clear.
  First, consider Time.  It is clear, to begin with, that the
dog holds in his memory, at least in some dim way, the
time-span, or the time experiences, within the physical
duration of his own life.  The dog will go to-day where
he found food yesterday.  Darwin's dog recognized him
after an absence of five years and two days.  Odysseus's
dog, Argus, according to Homer, recognized his master,
even through his beggar's disguise, after an absence of
twenty years.  There is no doubt that the dog has memory
of this kind, which shows that he has some grasp of time
within his own life-span.  Whether it is conscious memory
with an explicit measurement of a stretch of time between a
point in past time and the present moment, as is the case
with man's memory, is extremely doubtful.  It seems to be
rather a recognition of the master's identity, or sameness,
through a succession of experiences, each of which is for
the dog a present experience without any explicit differen-
tiation of time into past and present.
  Because---and this is the vital point---while it is clear that
the dog has some kind of memory, and hence some grasp
of time within his own physical life-span, it is equally clear,
so far as can be discovered, that the dog has no sense of
 100
time prior to his own birth or subsequent to his own death.
He has no sense or consciousness of any dog's life of a
hundred years ago.  He could not be awakened to any con-
sciousness of or nterest in the story of Darwin's dog, nor
could Darwin's dog have been awakened to an interest in
the dog of Odysseus.  The time before and after his own
actual life-span is as completely hidden from him as the
past and future were hidden from the passengers over
Mirza's bridge by the impenetrable mist's that hung at
either end.  His mind is enveloped and confined by time
within the short span of his own physical life.
  Man's mind, on the other hand, though centred in a
material body like the dog's, has broken through this
envelope or sense-barrier of time, and holds all time now
in its grasp instead of being held by it.  It has no more
difficulty in holding Homer's story of three thousand years
ago than Darwin's of a hundred years ago, and it explicitly
differentiates the stretch of time between the two events.
To all this past time the dog's mind is stone-dead.  To
object that the dog has no language for the differentiation
of time into explicit parts is to reverse the true logic, because
language is just the instrument created by man to actualize
and elaborate his new world of Free Mind into which he
had emerged, and of which time is one of the forms; and
the dog whose mind is unfreed and still encompassed in
time has no such time-world of mind to elaborate, and
hence no language or need of language.  In other words
man's mind has broken through the sense-limiting medium
of time, has encompassed time in its grasp, and now holds
all time in its single view as the potential form in which to
build up and arrange a mental world of succession and
development.  Language is the system of symbols created
to elaborate this new world.
  The same difference is true of Space.  The dog has some
kind of mental knowledge of that local portion of space in
which his body moves about, the space which lies within
 101
the range of his senses and experience, but he never breaks
through the circle of that limited range to the grasp of
space as a whole.  While he remains in Vancouver his
mind cannot be awakened to any sense or consciousness of
a dog show in Montreal, three-thousand-odd miles away.
His mind, though radiating to a certain circumference
beyond his body, is nevertheless enclosed, like his body,
within a local space as we found it enclosed within a local
time.  To the dog's master, on the other hand, the dog show
three thousand miles away is as mentally present while he
reads of it on the news page of his evening paper as the dog
show two blocks away in his own town, which he reads of
also on the same page.  Distance or nearness in actual
space makes no difference mentally at all, since all points
are merely differentiations of a single space which he holds
within his mind as an always-present mental world.
  It is true that man never actually <1perceives>1 space and
time in their entirety with his senses.  The range of his
physical sight has apparently the same physical limitations
as the range of the animal's.  But his mental differentiation
of objects within his local space-time environment is so
complete and explicit that the mind has no difficulty in
visualizing liinitless stretches of space and time beyond the
range of the senses.  A small map of the world's surface,
for example, of a single square foot in dimension, which he
looks at with his eyes, is only a miniature material picture
of the mental picture which he visualizes in his mind, and
whose actual physical dimensions extend to thousands of
square miles, far beyond the range of his senses.
  This is the unique characteristic of the human mind.
In each isolated piece of matter of some two and three-
quarter cubic feet and one hundred and seventy-five pounds
avoirdupois, which makes up a man's body, there is centred
a power which radiates to the farthest boundaries of space
and time.  Even the behaviourist who attempts to explain
all actions of the mind on a physical basis of stimulus and
102
response will admit this.  (See J. B. Watson, <1Behaviorism,>1
1930, Chap. X on "Talking and Thinking.')
  It is very probable, though one sees no way as yet of
actually demonstrating it, that the animal's mental inability
to differentiate objects explicitly within his local environ-
ment, which we have referred to above, is due to the fact
that his mind does not hold space and time explicitly within
its grasp as does man's mind.  Kant held, and in fact made
it quite clear, that man's mental possession of space and
time as wholes preceded the explicit differentiation of local
objects in a limited portion of space and time, and so, in
the <1Transcendental Aesthetic,>1 he enunciated the doctrine
that space and time are forms of the mind, and not external
to it, as they appear to the senses to be.  This was perhaps
his most significant original contribution to the whole
problem of mind, though, as pointed out in the beginning,
we have not yet made full use of it.
  This sense and grasp of space and time as wholes, with
the consequent explicit differentiation of objects within
any local portion of space and time, is perhaps the signi-
ficant part of the concrete definition of consciousness in
man as distinguished from the inconscious mind of animals.
The clearest single statement I know of this difference comes
from Browning. In his discussion of the problem of
human happiness in <1Cleon,>1 he has, in a memorable passage
of twenty-eight lines, made one of the most determined and
successful attempts to set out clearly the nature of this
special quality or power in the human mind which dis-
tinguishes man from the animals. Though written in
verse it is expressed with unique precision, and is intended
to be read with the same literalness as the most exact
scientific prose.  The passage is supposedly written by a
Greek philosopher-poet, Cleon, in a letter to his king and
patron, Protus.
  If, in the morning of philosophy,
  Ere aught had been recorded, nay perceived,
 103
Thou, with the light now in thee, couldst have looked
On all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird,
Ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage---
Thou wouldst have seen them perfect, and deduced
The perfectness of others yet unseen.
Conceding which---had Zeus then questioned thee
"Shall I go on a step, improve on this,
Do more for visible creatures than is done?'
Thou wouldst have answered, "Ay, <1by making each>1
<1Grow conscious in himself>1---by that alone.
All's perfect else : the shell sucks fast the rock,
The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims
And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight,
Till life's mechanics can no further go---
And all this joy in natural life is put
Like fire from off thy finger into each,
So exquisitely perfect is the same.
But 'tis pure fire, and they mere matter are :
<1It has them, not they it,- and so I choose>1
<1For man, thy last premeditated work>1
(If I might add a glory to the scheme),>1
<1That a third thing should stand apart from both,>1
<1A quality arise within his soul,>1
<1Which, intro-active, made to supervise>1
<1And feel the force it has, may view itself,>1
And so be happy.'
It would be difficult to make a clearer or more precise
statement in prose of the difference in mental fact between
the animals and man, though Browning has stated the
difference in relation to conduct and happiness while we
are investigating the difference in relation to knowledge.
  Following out our argument from the point of view of
space and time, let us attempt to put the significant differ-
ence between the two into a concise statement. The
animal's mind, like his body, is held within the sense limits
of space and time ; but man's mind, though focused in the
body, has broken completely through both these forms
and now holds both time and space within itself.  Or more
succinctly still, time-and-space holds the animal's and;
man's mind holds time-and-space.  The difference is funda-
mental, and, in the things that follow from it, is as significant
104
as any difference we know in the scale of emergent organic
life in the world.  The whole point made here is only, as
already pointed out, the logical extension and concrete  -
application of Kant's view in the <1Transcendental Aesthetic>1
<1of Pure Reason>1 where he showed that space and time are
forms of the mind and not external to it, though Kant
might not hold his doctrine responsible for all that seems
to me to follow from it.  It would all be implied, however,
in Hegel's development of Kant's doctrine, if I do not
misunderstand Hegel.
  This rising above space and time, and enclosing them
within his own ubiquitous and omnipresent self, "a universal
here and now,' seems to be the basic difference between man
and the animals in their mental powers, when considered
in their objective characteristics and behaviour.  Other
differences follow naturally upon this one, since time and
space are the forms within which the whole world is con-
structed.  While a man, for example, sits within the walls
of his own study, 14 ft. by 12 ft. by 10 ft. in its actual
physical dimensions, and goes over the world-news page of
his daily paper, he reads one item from England, another
from Greece, another from Russia, another from Japan,
another from his own town ; one item from to-day, another
of five years ago, another of five hundred years ago, another
of five thousand ; but these various items, scattered through
leagues and years of actual space and time, are all equally
present, and within his mental possession, while his body
sits at home here and now in his own study.  All these
differentiated items which are obviously <1outside>1 his own
body in space and time are just as obviously---when we
think closely about it---and in the same literal sense <1within>1
his mind. When, for example, we make distinction in
time, say between 450 B.C. and A.D. 450, we are making
distinctions within the mind, not outside of it.  That is,
the mind, though focused and centred in a body in this
present time and space, holds all time and space within
 105
itself.  It is itself in a quite literal sense co-terminous with
space and time.  When the poet wrote :
  Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight,
  Make me a child again just for to-night,
he could not have expressed the longing for the physical
return of childhood did he not hold in his mind as a present
possession the mental counterpart of it.  It is the contrast
between the mental presence of the past time and the
absence of its physical counterpart that makes the point
in the song.
  It is difficult to realize actually this limitless range of the
human mind because the evidence from our senses is all
against it. We see our bodies and the bodies of one
another as local objects like any other objects confined
always to a particular time and space, and to say that the
mind, which comes to a focus of consciousness in this same
body, is not so confined but free of both time and space, or
rather holds time and space within itself, sounds like a fine
flourish of rhetoric rather than a plain statement of fact.
Fact it is, nevertheless; the fact which separates man from
his animal relatives, and which necessitates articulate lan-
guage for man while the animals remain without it.  Whether
we call this a difference of degree or kind is a matter of
agreement on the connotations of terms.  The two words,
however, as already pointed out, have served their day and
their inherent vagueness renders them quite useless in any
precise modern discussion of the subject.
CHAPTER VIII
  MAN
The termination of the world in a man appears to be the last
victory of intelligence. . . . The great Pan of old, who was clothed
in a leopard-skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the
firmament, his coat of stars---was but the representative of thee,
O rich and various Man ! thou palace of sight and sound, carry-
ing in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable
galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy
heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.  An
individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to
form and ripen. . . . Each individual soul is such, in virtue of
its being a power to translate the world into some particular
language of its own.---EMERSON, <1The Method of Nature.>1
  1.  <1The Emergence of Consciousness>1
IF we now relate this unique characteristic of man in a
definite and explicit way with the general Time-and-Space
picture which we have been drawing, we shall see plainly
the full significance of this last step---where mind in man
emerges to freedom from space and time, and encompasses
them in its grasp---in the unfolding life and mind of the
world.
  Recall again our working hypothesis, the organic unity
of the world from matter to man.  For aeons, if science
speaks truly, our earth, to human perception at least, stood
stark and naked, a mineral mass.  In the process of time
this seeming mineral mass clothed itself in life, in sensitivity,
in mind.  These later emergents, if the world is, as science
asserts, an organic whole, are not adventitious decorations
like tinsel on a Christmas tree, nor alien visitants extraneous
to reality.  They are the children of the earth who owe to
her creating and shaping energy their multivarious forms
and powers, physical and mental, and derive from her
directly and indirectly their hourly nourishment, all without
 107
design on their own part.  Life and mind which have
emerged to explicit activity in these later cycles of world
evolution must have been present as latent potentialities
when the earth seemed but a mineral mass; and purpose,
which is the explicit directing agency in all man's activity,
must have been, as it seems to us, the prime directing agency
of the whole evolutionary process, though emerging to
explicitness first in animal nature, especially man.  How
otherwise, for example, could the human organism, when
the hour for its awakening into consciousness came, find all
its numerous and minutest parts so finely co-ordinated and
articulated into a purposive agent for explicit design and
execution ?
  We deduce the purposiveness of the entire evolutionary
process from base to peak from the fact that purposiveness
explicitly emerges to view at the peak, and all the earlier or
lower stages seem to be adapted in an anticipatory way to
produce these purposive agents at the top and to co-
ordinate their inward and outward environment with a view
to their successful purposive activities.  If this hypothesis
be right, then the purposive shaping principle at work in
the world seems to have worked for an indefinite period of
its history in an embryonic fashion from within, in the
dark as it were, among the sensuous materials of the world,
fashioning and moulding these materials into the forms
necessary for the actualization of its own emerging life, but
all the while mute and unconscious of the process.  First,
the many differentiated inorganic structures, then upward
into the organic world through an ascending series of insen-
tient and sentient life, rising in each step to a higher freedom
and a more self-contained individuality.  Then, as a last
and crowning step,---so far at least as the earth goes at the
present time---this purposive shaping principle produces the
adequate individual organism man, by means of which she
emerges above the sense media of space and time, encom-
passes and holds these within her view, awakens to freedom
108
and consciousness and, turning back, as it were, upon her-
self, is confronted with the endlessly diversified forms of
all her own preconscious evolution.  Man is nature at the
highest point of her activity; and when we speak, in our
ordinary dualistic way, of man investigating nature in know-
ledge, we mean, if we are thinking philosophically at all,
that nature, emerging into self-consciousness at her apex
in man, is now busy exploring from that peak the lower
cycles of her own nature.  We can visualize the whole
picture more clearly, perhaps, through a simple symbolic
diagram than through a written description.
  Let the circle A represent the actualized world up to that
point where reason emerges to consciousness in man, and
the three zones represent the cycles of inorganic, plant, and
animal life, respectively.
Let the vertical lines re-
present the successive
generations of plant and
animal life as they pass
through the world, and
the rising line BC repre-
sent the general evolu-
tionary time-line of man's
life in the world up to
the point C where he
emerges to conscious-
ness. Previous to the
point C in the evolution time-line the world was a single
space-time world whose individualized forms were differ-
entiated and distributed in space, and moved forward as
an ever-vanishing series in time.  All its objects were en-
compassed in space and enveloped in time.  The genera-
tion of animals which were alive, for example, between
lines 10 and 11 had no sense of time previous to 10, nor
subsequent to 11, as we have already shown.
  But at the point C where man emerged to consciousness
 109
the mind of the world, centred now in the human organism,
broke through the enveloping mediums of both space and
time, and encompassed these within itself so as to hold the
whole world of space and time within its single view,  This
new expansion can be made very clear by a further illustra-
tion.  If we take our circle again, and remember the rising
                                   line BC symbolizes the
                                   evolutionary time-line of
                                   man's ancestry, up to
                                   the point C where world
                                   consciousness emerges in
                                   man, then this emergence
                                   to consciousness where
                                   the world turns back
                                   upon itself and encom-
                                   passes itself in a single
                                   view (unactualized, of
                                   course, at this point, but
                                   real) would be accurately
                                   symbolized by the lighter
lines radiating from C backwards  C-d, C-e, C-f, etc
over the whole space-time world.
  Now we have in a quite literal sense two worlds of space
and time; the <1actual>1 space-time world of material nature
represented by the horizontal and vertical lines, and the
<1ideal>1 space-time world of mind represented by the lines
radiating outward from C; and the two worlds are co-
terminous.
  2. <1A Duplicate World>1
Soon the human has a verbal substitute within himself theo-
retically for every object in the world.  <1There after he carries the>1
<1world around with him by means of this organization.>1  And he can
manipulate this world in the privacy of his room or when he lies
down on his bed in the dark.---J. B. WATSON, <1Behaviorism,>1
revised edition, 1930, p. 234.
  This new mental space-time world which emerges at C
110
in conscious reason is a duplicate or counterpart of the
actual space-time world of sense, so that the world which
was formerly a single sensuous world now becomes a dual
world.  On the one hand there is the material space-time
world of sensuous nature already highly actualized in all
sorts of inorganic and organic forms.  Previous to the
emergence of conscious reason in man this was the single
and only actualized world.  Now, on the other hand, there
emerges the mental space-time world of conscious reason,
individualized and focused in the brain of man, and con-
fronted in this its birth hour with that other already
elaborated space-time world of nature.  This new (inward)
mental space-time world which radiates from its centre in
man's physical organism stands as the awakened counter-
part of the actualized natural world.  This mental world,
as I am describing it here, corresponds, as said above, to
Kant's exposition of space and time where he showed that
these are forms of the mind---"an <1ideal>1 space and time,' as
he called it---that make possible our experience of objects
that appear external to one another in space, and in suc-
cession in time.  All our experience of the world arranges
itself in these two media.  I am assuming, however---what
Kant of course did not assume, and what may at first appear
from a philosophic point of view a rather naive assumption
---that there is a real or sensuous space-time world in which
physical objects actually exist independent of the perceiving
mind, and which was already highly actualized before the
birth of free and conscious mind with its ideal space-and-
time that came into being with it.  This ideal, non-sensuous,
mental space-time world is, as I have said, the conscious
duplicate or counterpart of the real, sensuous, material,
"inconscious' space-time world of nature.
  To illustrate concretely from common experience.  If
when planning a journey I should take an ordinary map,
eight by ten inches in size, of those parts of the world which
I plan to visit, that map would be an objective physical
 111
miniature of the ideal space-time world which I hold in my
mind.  Under the guidance of this ideal space-time world
which I hold in my mind I would locate on the miniature
physical map before me Algiers, Naples, Athens, Rome,
Paris, London; calculate, again with the guidance of the
ideal world of my mind, the number of actual miles of space
and hours of time that lay between me and each of these
places in turn, and in this way, in half an hour of actual time,
I should map out in the ideal space-time world of my own
mind the entire journey which would afterwards require
two months of actual time for physical actualization in the
actual space-time world of nature.  In that condensed time
of half an hour the journey would be completely visualized
in the mental space-time world.  Next morning I would set
out physically to make the journey in the actual space-time
world, and would travel mile by mile the five-thousand-odd
miles in actual space in two months of actual time.  The
point is that the space-time world of mind which I traversed
while my body sat for half an hour in a single point in
actual space in my study, is the mental counterpart of the
actual space-time world which I traverse afterwards in two
months of actual time.  With the birth of conscious reason,
as stated above, a second world emerges as the conscious
counterpart of the first, so that now we have a dual world.
  3.  <1The New Problem of Conscious Reason>1
  Plants are evidently for the sake of animals and animals for the
sake of man; thus Nature, which does nothing in vain, has done
all things for the sake of man, who is the crowning end, purpose,
or final cause towards which all has been tending.---ARISTOTLE.
  Round his mysterious Me, there lies, under all those wool-
rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom
of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with
them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a
Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of
Years.. . . Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities,
112
in the conflux of Eternities ?---CARLYLE, <1Surtor Resartus,>1 "Pure
Reason.'
  But man's new mental space-time world of conscious
reason is in this its birth-hour a mere potential world
without concrete filling or content; an empty world.  The
world of sensuous nature,
on the other hand, its
outward counterpart, is
already, in its own right,
as we might put it, a
highly differentiated and
organized world, an actual
cosmos.  The new pheno-
menon may again be made
visually clear by reverting
to our former diagram.
  Letting circle A again
represent first the actual







world of nature, the horizontal lines marking the zones of
inorganic and organic forms in the world, the vertical
lines marking their succession in time, the rising line BC the
evolutionary time processes to the point C where conscious
reason emerges, and the lighter lines radiating from C back-
 113
wards marking the new space-time world of conscious mind
as it radiates outward over the natural world as its conscious
counterpart.  Now if in imagination we turn this space-
time world of mind off the space-time world of nature so
that we can see it as it were in its own nature we shall have
Fig. 6, which would be a fairly accurate symbolic repre-
sentation of the situation at the dawn of conscious reason
at C.  Here the circle A marks the space-time world of
nature already highly actualized; A the new space-time
world of mind just born and entirely empty.
  The task set to man, then, on emerging into possession
of this new world of conscious mind, was to "intellect' the
world, to take mental possession of it, to transfer its types
one by one from the outward space-time world of nature
to the inner space-time world of mind, and to build them
up into a conscious system there in correspondence to this
actual outward system in external nature.  Or to restate
the situation from the evolution point of view, in the
awakened reason of man the world emerges into a new
cycle of its rising life, splits into two halves, an outer and an
inner, passes from inconscious to conscious activity, and
man emerges as the world-born conscious organism to bring
to actualization this new cycle of world development.  Or in
still more vitally organic phrase, new-born man <1is>1 the world
at that point where its reason comes to a focus, emerges to
consciousness, turns back upon itself, and is confronted
with the task of taking conscious possession of itself by
translating its actual physical types into their mental
counterparts, of exploring all the steps and stages of its pre-
conscious evolution.
  In this step, however, across the boundary from nature
into free mind, from the sensuous world to its supra-
sensuous counterpart, a problem rises that is new in the
world.  How can man, just come into possession of his
new conscious world, actually get started upon the task to
which he is called; the task of translating the actualized
114
space-time world of nature into the new-born space-time
world of mind?  His consciousness in this its birth-hour
is a mere potential, and as yet, quite empty world.  What
are the <1means>1 then, or the media, by which he can build up
within his empty reason an actual and organized structure
of differentiated forms, images, and ideas, that will reflect
in that inner ideal world the ordered outward system of the
actual world ?  That is the world-problem that emerges at
this point in its evolution.  It is an entirely new problem.
There is no such problem for the animals in the cycle of
nature beneath man.
CHAPTER IX
LANGUAGE
Nature gives no power in vain.  She not only gave to man the
power to invent language, but made the power his specific
characteristic and the dynamic principle of his destiny.  This
power came from her hand as a living principle. . . . Reason
was incapable of action without a word-symbol, and the first
moment of rationality must also have been the first beginning of
interior language. . . . Man feels with his mind and speaks
while he thinks; therefore, the development of language is as
natural to man as his nature.---HERDER, <1The Origin of Language,>1
1772.
  1.  <1The Birth of Language>1
OBVIOUSLY, what man required was a system of mental
symbols of some kind or other in the inner world of mind,
to represent the system of actual types in the outward world
of sense.  Each species or type of object in the outward
world of nature would require its corresponding symbol
in the inward world of mind. Without such mental
symbols no articulated advance could be made in that
process which we now speak of familiarly as the accumula-
tion of the knowledge of the world.  The advance could
be made only step by step, and each step would have to be
recorded, registered, and fixed by means of its symbol within
the rising mental fabric.  The discovery or creation of
adequate symbols of reason, then, was an obvious necessity
for man even to get definitely started at all upon the
elaboration or actualization of the world of mind.
  It was out of this necessity that the articulate and cumula-
tive language of man had its birth.  Language is just that
needed system of symbols which man has created for the
elaboration of that new space-time world of mind to which
he was called by the "World-Spirit' when the world emerged
 116
from the preconscious to the conscious cycle of its self-
development.
  Language, then, is a new phenomenon in the world,
brought into life at that point where the reason of the
world emerges from its inconscious state to its freed and
conscious life.  There is always a difficulty in coming to a
mutual understanding upon the connotation of words ; but
it becomes palpably clear when the subject is developed in
this way that to call the natural cries of animals language,
without some specific qualification of the word, is a sheer
confusion of all significant differences in reality and thought.
The animals, as yet at least, have no free space-time world
of mind whose detailed elaboration necessitates the symbols
which we call language, and until they have such a world
they can have no language in any exact connotation of the
word.
  2.  <1Characteristics of the New World of Language>1
  But the Intellect can raise,
  From airy words alone, a Pile that ne'er decay .
  WORDSWORTH,  <1Inscription at Coleorton,>1 1811.
  To come to a clear and exact understanding of the nature
of the new symbols which were required to elaborate the
new world of mind, it will be necessary to point out the
significant characteristics of this new mental world as dis-
tinguished from the natural world.
  (1) This new world of conscious mind is, first of all, not
a mere addition or expansion of the sensuous world of
nature.  In its elaboration there is nothing added to the
sum-total of the natural material world.
  (2)  Nor is it any mere modification of the natural world.
It involves no changes in that world.  It is, on the contrary,
a new and distinct world now come for the first time into
actual existence, an invisible supra-sensuous world rising
above and as a counterpart of the visible sensuous world.
 117
 (3) The natural world is in constant process of change,
a perpetual flux, as Heraclitus observed, a vanishing world
whose specific forms are continuously passing away.  The
mental, or spiritual, world, on the other hand, rises with a
cumulative movement into a fixed, non-vanishing structure.
It is St. Paul's contrast, if you like, between the visible and
invisible worlds, the "temporal' and the "eternal,' if we shift
the contrast from the realm of conduct to the realm of
knowledge. One is fleeting, the other enduring. From
the myriad forms of nature that are continually coming into
being and passing away, conscious reason extracts one by
one, as we might put it, the permanent types, and attaches
each to a permanent symbol, and in this way builds up in
its own inward world a structure of images and ideas that
reflects the natural world and approximates more and more
towards a complete counterpart of it. History, for
example, as it stands actualized at the present moment in
books, is the extracted and gathered-up transcript of a past,
and now vanished, series of sense-events in time; and the
non-sensuous, non-vanishing symbols of language have
accomplished the task.  <1Language introduced the element>1
<1of permanence into a vanishing world.>1  A symbolic diagram
will make the point clear, though it will only repeat in a
visualized form what we have already said in words.



 Let five horizontal lines represent roughly five classes of
organic life in their vanishing series in time; and an inde-
finite number of vertical lines mark the successive genera-
118
tions in this vanishing time-series; and the vertical line 13
represent the point where conscious reason emerged in man.
Then previous to the point at 13 there was no consciousness
of past or future beyond the birth and death dates of any
living organism.  The whole world could be described as a
constantly vanishing one, whose passing generations could
be truly represented by the clear-dividing vertical lines.  An
animal born at 7 and dying at 8 had no outlook in time on
either side beyond these limits.  Time confined him to this
short interval of his own life-span.
  But with the emergence to consciousness at 13 the enve-
lope of time is penetrated before and after.  Both time and
space are now encompassed in a single view.  Instead of
encompassing they are encompassed.  A mental world
emerges into being.  Man looks abroad from his physical
life-centre upon the objects of the natural world which are
now encompassed in his mental view, differentiates them
from one another, and gives to each natural object a mental
symbol to fix it in his new mental world.  While man in
his physical life in the natural world continues as formerly
in the vanishing time series, he transcribes, as he passes
along, type after type from the vanishing natural world into
his mental world, which increases in content and dimen-
sions, and does not pass away, so that this rising world can
no longer be represented by vertical lines dividing the
vanishing generations from each other, but by an increasing
spiral movement representing movement and permanence
as illustrated in Fig. 7.  In this single diagram, then, we can
see quite clearly the permanence of the world of mind as it
rises above and in contrast with the vanishing world of
sense.  There is no such actualized and articulated world
of mind in animal nature.  The spiral diagram represents
a new cycle in the evolution of the world.
  119
3.  <1Required Characteristics of Language>1
  And books are yours
Within whose silent chambers treasure lies
Preserved from age to age.
  WORDSWORTH,  <1The Excursion,>1 Book iv, 1814.
These, then, are the significant characteristics of the
world of free mind which man is called on to elaborate, and
the symbols of language required for its elaboration must
correspond to it in their nature.  Hence these language
symbols must be :
  (1) Supra-sensuous in import.  I say "in import' because
both <1sound and form,>1 the body of oral and written language
respectively, are made from sensuous elements.
  (2)  They must be fluid and cumulative on the one hand,
and at the same time fixed and permanent, since this is the
double nature of the mental world.
  (3) They must be explicitly differentiated from one
another, both in form and meaning, as the types of the
world which they translate are explicitly differentiated from
one another.
  (4) They must be representative of both space and time,
since they are to translate a world which is actualized in
space and time.
  (5) They must be in a real sense, and by some means or
other, freed from the sense limits of space and time as con-
scious mind is free.  They must, in other words, be liber-
ated from the vanishing nature of time, and from the rigid
fixity of space, since the mind holds both motion and per-
manence, time and space, in a constant union.  Where could
such symbols be found ?
120
4.  <1The Raw Material of Language>1
For strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which neverthe-
less is in continual restless flux, it is appointed that <1Sound,>1 to
appearance the most fleeting, should be the most continuing of
all things,-CARLYLE, <1Sartor Resartus,>1 "Pause,' 1830.
  It is obvious that the symbols for language could not be
obtained ready-made from the world of nature from which
man had just emerged, for everything here is in space and
time and subject to all their conditions.  Nor could they
be found in the new world of conscious mind into which
he had just emerged because this was as yet a mere potential
and quite empty world.  A third alternative remained.
The raw material for the symbols had to be obtained from
the space-and-time-bound world of nature since there was
no other source.  "Man,' said Herder, "cannot invent, but
only find and imitate.'  Awakened reason, therefore, had
first to discover the adequate sensuous raw material for lan-
guage from the natural world, and then had to transmute it
in some way into free supra-sensuous symbols in corre-
spondence with its own nature.  The discovery of the
adequate sensuous material in the actual space-time world
of nature, and the transmutation of this raw material into
the adequate supra-sensuous symbols of the newly emerged
space-time world of mind, was the unique task and the
unique achievement of conscious mind in man.  It was the
bridge to its new freedom, the key and instrument for the
elaboration of its new world.  The awakening of conscious
reason in man, and the invention of these supra-sensuous
symbols in the form of connotative language for the actuali-
zation of its new life, mark, as we have said, the emergence
of a new phenomenon in the evolution of the world.  To
confuse this, by our modern prejudice for some abstract
unity of the world, with any rudimentary resemblances of
it in the animal world, is to obscure a unique and funda-
mental difference in the ascending scale of existence.
  121
Where, then, in the sensuous world of nature was man
to find the adequate raw material for language?
  In nature, multitudinous as her forms are, there are only
two fundamental generic types, corresponding to the two
sense media, space and time.  <1Form,>1 or shape, is the natural
expression of space ; <1sound>1 is the natural and direct expres-
sion of time.  On the passive side the eye is the receiving
organ of the expressions of space, the ear of the expressions
of time.
  And now the question: Which of these two, the space-
forms of <1shape>1 or the time-forms of <1sound,>1 was to prove
the natural raw material of language?  Experience has
already answered the question, so far as the fact is con-
cerned.  All tribes and all nations of men on the earth have
made their language out of <1sound.>1  What is left us here,
then, is to discover the logical reason for the fact.
  Why has man universally used sound-speech addressing
itself to the ear rather than pictorial or gesture-speech
addressing itself to the eye?  Darwin, in his discussion of
the question, has given a very concise summary of the
reasons put forward for this fact.  (1) While the hands were
employed in gestural speech they could not be used for other
necessary work.  With vocal speech the hands are left free.
(2)  Oral speech is a more universal medium of communica-
tion.  It can be heard in the dark, or on the other side of
a wall, or while the person's back is turned; while sign-
speech requires light for the eye to see, and can only be
received when the eye is turned in that direction and no
object intervenes.  (3) Sound radiates from the speaker in
every direction in a way that gesture-speech does not.
  There are, however, other limitations of gesture-speech
which are more fundamental than those enumerated above.
If each gesture stood for an idea, or a word as we now have
it, we should require as many gestures as there are ideas.
But such a vast and ever-increasing multitude of distinguish-
able gestures or spatial shapes could not be made with the
122
hands.  Nor is there any way by which whole gestures, each
representing an idea as a word does at the present time,
could be broken up into elements as has been done with
written sound-speech in the alphabet. Distinguishable
gestures are each an unanalysable whole.  The deaf-mute,
of course, can be taught to represent the twenty-six sound
elements of the modern English alphabet by twenty-six
shapings of the fingers and hands, but each of these sound
elements is represented by a complete gesture, and not by
the element of a gesture; and for deaf-mutes we never
could have thought of reducing a gesture language to
twenty-six elements had not an artificial clue been given
from the twenty-six already differentiated elements of
sound-language.  (I am arbitrarily using the number twenty-
six merely because that is the number of letters in our own
English alphabet.)  Even when we have devised a gesture
language of twenty-six elements by twenty-six finger and
hand formations, each word in conversation has to be
spelled out by the separate letter-gestures, if we use
alphabetic elements, while in oral speech we have to utter
only single synthetic sounds where each sound includes an
indefinite number of alphabetical elements, as, for example,
in the word "crash,' where the whole synthetic sound "crash'
can be uttered as easily and in practically as short a time
as can any one of its five separate alphabetic elements.
  The sound-speech, on the other hand, was capable of
being broken up into elements because of the original
nature of the vocal organs.  These organs were shaped s o
as to produce, first of all, say, five distinguishable basic tones,
a, e, i, o, u (I am using the arbitrary number <1five>1 because
that is the number of our actual written vowel-symbols in
English), and then to modify these tones in twenty-one
distinguishable ways in their beginning, or ending, or some-
times in their continuance, by the lips, tongue, teeth, and
nose, as represented now by the consonants b, c, d, f, g, etc.
Now each one of these distinguishable tones, as also the
  123
distinguishable modifications in their beginnings, continu-
ance, or endings, were separable within the composite word-
sound, as, for example, b-a-d, though in oral speech we do
not explicitly separate them.  The enormous advantage of
this analysis into elements for the purpose of converting
sound-speech into visual speech is apparent at once,
since the whole thing can be done by twenty-six spatial
symbols.  From the nature of the hands no such simpli-
fication of gesture-speech would have been possible.  In
fact, it is quite impossible to think of any way in which
anything like a sufficient number of distinguishable gestures
could have been made to satisfy the requirements of lan-
guage at all, had not vocal language given us the key to the
method.
  But all these, important as they may be, are from a logical
point of view secondary reasons why sound was chosen rather
than gestures as the substance of human speech.  The
primary logical reason for the use of sound as the material
of speech is that the process of translating the world from
nature into mind is a <1time process,>1 it all passes through the
logic of thinking; and sound being the natural expression
of time becomes, <1ipso facto,>1 the direct and instinctive ex-
pression of the thought process.  Thinking being a time
process, a generating of a new world, and sound a time
expression, thought and oral expression become merely the
inward and outward sides of a single time-movement.
Modern psychology seems to be coming more and more to
the view that the brain movements in thinking, and the
movements of the vocal organs in speech, are inseparably
connected, the one being the outward expression of the
other. This is further evidence of the teleological co-
ordination of man's physiological structure prior to the
actual emergence of language.  Primitive man everywhere
apparently felt the causal connection between the two, and
acted on the impulse of his feeling in using sound in his very
first steps in language.  Even in silent thinking we are
124
conscious of a corresponding movement by the vocal organs
when we attend to it, though no audible sound issues from
the lips.  It might, of course, be countered here that this
connection between thinking and the vocal organs may be
due to long and close association of the two.  The evidence,
however, seems to point to a more fundamental connection.
5.  <1The Dual Power of Language through Conventionalization>1
  <1of Natural Sounds>1
  . . . manifesting one's thought by the voice with <1nouns>1 and
<1verbs,>1 imaging the opinion of the mind in the stream which flows
from the lips, as in a mirror.---PLATO, <1Theaetetus,>1 206.
  And now we come to a unique phase of the problem, and
one that, so far as I know, has been overlooked up to the
present time.  Natural sound can translate or express pure
time only.  It cannot, except in the vaguest kind of way,
translate or express to the mind objects or forms in space.
Instrumental music, as a pure time art built up of natural
sound, illustrates the point clearly.  In fact, one characteris-
tic of pure time as expressed directly by natural sound is its
Indefiniteness.  It is space, and objects in space, that give
objective definiteness to our world; though time, when
expressed indirectly by movement or change of position of
objects in space, takes on a certain borrowed definiteness
from tbe objects concerned, and from their characteristic
movements.  But pure time as expressed by natural sound
can have no objective definiteness at all.
  Now the question: How can sound, which in its natural
form can express time only, and addresses itself to the ear,
be made to translate a world of spatial objects as well,
which are clearly differentiated from one another, and
address themselves to the eye?  This could be done only
by the <1conventionalization>1 of natural sounds, by transmuting
<1sounds>1 into <1sound symbols,>1 so that while the natural sensuous
sound element still remains, as it must, a time expression,
the conventionalized sound symbol into which it is con-
  125
verted may express either time or space.  This is what has
actually been done in every human language.  For example,
in the expression "The dog barks,' the conventionalized
sound "dog,' though conveyed by sound to the ear, expresses
a space form, i.e. it raises a spatial image in the mind ; while
the conventionalized sound "barks' conveys a time ex-
pression.  Both of these words have the common sensuous
element of sound as their raw material, and each requires a
certain duration of time for its expression, as all sound does ;
but by definite shaping of this raw sound material, and by
investing the definite shape with a definite arbitrary or con-
ventional meaning, the two sounds have been differentiated
so as to express space and time with equal facility.  In lan-
guage, then, as we have it in human speech, the natural
sound element has been taken up into and practically dis-
appears from our consciousness in its significant symbolic
connotation. In other words, the natural sounds have
been completely transmuted into conventional sound-
symbols. This is what constitutes language, and has
enabled man to elaborate a complete space-time world of
mind which rises above the space-time world of nature, and
gradually approximates towards a complete mental counter-
part of it.
  6.  <1The Space-Time Structure of Language>1
  And Space and Time in concord suited,
  When Sounds to Symbols were transmuted.
  This, then, is the unique characteristic of language that,
while made out of the pure time expression of sound, it has
by conventionalization been converted into an adequate
space-time medium for translating a space-time world.  By
reverting to our illustration of the two circles representing
the two worlds of nature and mind, one can make clear, by
a well-selected example, the whole significant structure of
language in relation to the actual world of space and time.
126
Let the picture in A represent an actual scene in the world
of nature, then the language sentence in B will represent the
same scene as translated by language into the corresponding
world of mind.  Here you have an actual complex space-
time picture in the natural world transferred by language
into the mental world, and set up there in a space-time
synthesis in exact correspondence with the space-time
synthesis in the natural world.  The mental one is the
counterpart of the natural one.  Of the five connotative
words three, "grey,' "wolf,' "field,' are connotative of space,
or objects of space, but "not marking time,' as Aristotle puts
it <1(a)/neu Xro/nou>1, <1Poetics,>1 xx. 8).  Two of the three words,
"wolf' and "field,' the nouns, are the primary classificatory
names of objects in space, differentiating the genera (or
species), as the scientist would say; the third word, "grey,'
the adjective, is a secondary or sub-classificatory word
differentiating the species (or varieties) within the genus
(or species).
  The other two connotative words, "trots' and "slowly,'
connote time in the form of motion through space.  Of
these two words the first one, "trots,' the verb, connotes the
genus (or species) of motion, the second, "slowly,' the species
(or variety).
  128
Furthermore, "trots' not only expresses time by connoting
a species of motion, but by its inflected form it differentiates
time as <1apresent>1 time.  Aristotle's marking of this <1(Poetics,>1
xx) is concise and to the point.  "A verb is a composite
significant sound, marking time.  For "man" or "white"
does not express the idea of "when"; but "walks" or "has
walked" does connote time, present or past.'  He observed
the fact of which I have tried to give the philosophical expo-
sition. The remaining significant word in the sentence,
"across,' expresses the spatial relation between the object
and its spatial environment; also, to a less degree, a relation
in time, since it carries the suggestion of motion.  The weak
demonstratives "the' and "the' may be omitted in a dis-
cussion of the general structure of language.
  We have spoken above of the permanence of language in
the world of mind in contrast to the transitoriness of the
things of sense in the world of nature.  To illustrate this
distinction so as to complete the contrast, consider the same
dual scene set out in Fig. 8 above, say five minutes after-
wards, and we should find it thus:
Here the central object of interest, the wolf, has disappeared
from the sense picture of the natural world.  The corres-
ponding picture in the world of mind remains substantially
128
as it was, with only the time word, "trots,' altered by in-
flection to "trotted,' to indicate that its original counterpart
in the world of sense has disappeared, and belongs now to
a past time and to things that have vanished.
  This illustrates, as we have said, practically the whole
structure of language, and, omitting for the time the
abstract stratum of language as a later development which
does not modify the original structure, then of the four
connotative parts of speech, two, the noun and the adjec-
tive, connote objects in space, the other two, the verb and
the adverb, connote movements and sequence in time.  The
prepositions, originally prefixes or suffixes to connotative
words, are the means of expressing relations of space, time,
or cause. Conjunctions are used for synthesizing given
parts into a more complex whole.  The personal pronoun
stands for the new individualized world of mind in man, the
<1ego,>1 as against the world of nature.  That is virtually the
whole structure of language which was from the beginning
predetermined by the space-time structure of the worlds of
nature and mind, and by the problem of translating the
former into the latter, and setting it up there in a system
corresponding to its own nature.
  Language, however, is a conventional art; and while the
problem confronting all nations and races of people is
identical, each nation or race, working separately at it,
would be bound to make its special language symbols and
structure after its own fashion, so that the languages of the
world are as various in their external features as are the
peoples who made them.  Nevertheless in two ways they
are fundamentally the same; they are all made out of the
raw material of sound, and they are all designed to translate
a common world constructed in space and time.  Suppose
we take the natural scene of field and wolf given above, and
turn it into several languages of different structures.  We
should then see clearly both the great variety in special
features and the fundamental identity of language.
  129
             1    2   3     4      5      6     7    8
English (a) The grey wolf trots slowly across the field.
        (b) The grey wolf trotted slowly across the field.
             1      2       3      4       5      6    7      8
Greek  (a) <1o/ glauko\s luko\s tre/cei brade/ws dia\ tou^ a)grou^.>1
       (b) <1o/ g;auko\s luko\s e)/drame brade/ws dia\ tou^ a)grou^.>1
             2      3     6     8      5     4
Latin  (a) Ravus lupus trans campum lente currit.
       (b) Ravus lupus trans campum lente cucurrit.
             1   3    2    4        5          6    7  8
French  (a) Le loup gris trotte lentement a\ travers le champ.
        (b) Le loup gris trotta lentement a\ travers le champ.
              1     2   3     4      5      6    7   8
German  (a) Der graue Wolf lauft langsam durch den Feld.
        (b) Der graue Wolf lief  langsam durch den Feld.
             1     2   3    5      4       6    7   8
Chinese (a)
        (b)
  (N.B.---I have numbered the corresponding words in the
various languages to simplify the comparison.)
  These are sufficient to illustrate the common substructure-
of language and the individual variations of languages.  In
1830 the British and Foreign Bible Society published a
pamphlet of 166 pages, in which a single well-known verse
from the New Testament---"For God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believ-
eth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life'---
was rendered in 630 different languages and dialects.  It was
interesting to see the immense varieties in visual symbols
and syntactic devices, and the common substratum of lan-
guage structure, by which the same complex experience has
been translated into the world of mind by various peoples.
  It is true that in the abstract and complex development
of language in the later reflective stages of its history, the
130
fundamental space-time structure is often partially obscured
by the fact that one connotative part of speech may be
derived from another; but it is only obscured, never lost.
When a noun, for example, is derived from a generic verb
as in "running is strenuous exercise,' the noun "running' still
contains the time element of movement or change.  This
is true in all cases of derivation of one part of speech from
another.  The detailed consideration of these aspects of
language belongs, however, to another place than the
present treatise, to the science of language rather than the
philosophy.
  It should be noted also that while we have spoken here
of mind as the space-time counterpart of nature with the
task of building up within itself by the symbols of language
a mental space-time structure corresponding to the physical
space-time world which it intellects, that is not the whole
story of language.  The mind as a new cycle of world
evolution, though determined in its basic structure by the
cycle of objective nature below it, has characteristics of its
own which by introspection it can analyse and elaborate
and set out in language, so that the mind, the <1ego,>1 when
actualized in language is not only a reflex or counterpart
of the world of nature, but also of itself.  Psychology is
concerned with this aspect.  I have, however, confined
myself to the first aspect of language in the present treatment
for the sake of simplicity and clearness.
  For similar reasons I have omitted any discussion of the
copula, though that is the element of language and gram-
mar that constitutes the alpha and omega of logic.  The
copula is the instrument of definition by which the manifold
elements which exist in implicit differentiation and synthesis
in the natural world of sense are explicitly differentiated,
reunited, and brought to the explicit synthesis of thought.
But this multiform material upon which the copula is
employed in definition is first of all gathered from the world
of nature and arranged in the mind under the forms of
  131
space and time by means of concrete nouns and adjectives,
transitive and intransitive verbs, adverbs, and prepositions.
Given this primary material gathered and ordered from the
world of sense, the mind then proceeds to analyse and re-
synthesize its elements by means of the copula in the
various steps of logic, so that the copula may for the time
being be omitted from the discussion of the primary struc-
ture of language. It will find its place in the detailed
analysis of grammar when we come to the science of lan-
guage in another volume.
  To summarize then, at this point.  Man's problem was
to intellect the world; to translate the types from the world
of nature to the world of mind, and in this way elaborate
the world of mind.  It is the generation and evolution of
a new world.  This generation is a time process, and sound
as a time expression was the direct and natural medium by
means of which the generating process could be actualized.
By articulation and conventionalization man succeeded in
making sound express objects in space as well as sequence
in time, and in this way transmuted sound into an adequate
single vehicle for representing a space-time world.
          CHAPTER X
LANGUAGE AND THE NATURAL ARTS OF SPACE
          AND TlME
  "Behold at last the poet's sphere!
  But who,' I said, "suffices here ?
  For, ah! so much he has to do;
  Be painter and musician too!
         .        .       .       .
  No painter yet hath such a way,
  Nor no musician made, as they;
  And gather'd on immortal knolls
  Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.
  Beethoven,  Raphael,  cannot  reach
  The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach.'
               ARNOLD, <1Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoo%n.>1
NEVERTHELESS, the sensuous sound element <1does>1 remain as
the substratum of articulate language, and as language
issues from the lips it issues in the same time sequence as
does pure sound, for example, in music.  But here is the
unique difference which separates language fundamentally
from the other four arts.  As language issues from the lips,
the pure "timeness' of it, as we might say, is immediately
transmuted and absorbed in the conventionalized connota-
tion which is arbitrarily given to the differentiated sounds.
Hence in the thought-process of intellecting the world by
language the actual space-time world is translated first into
pure time, that is, into sound, but is immediately, in the very
act as it were, retranslated by the <1conventionalization>1 of
sound into its former space-time structure within the world
of mind.
  This transformation of natural sound from a pure time
expression into a space-time expression, by conventionaliza-
tion, which is the unique characteristic of language as the
instrument of conscious mind, has, as I have said, been
  133
overlooked, so far as I know, in the philosophical dis-
cussions of language.  Lessing was the first philosopher
who classified and expounded the arts upon the ground of
the two forms of sense, space, and time.  In his <1Laocoo%n,>1
where he elaborates the idea, he classified architecture,
sculpture, and painting as the space representative arts;
music and poetry as the time representatives.  The <1Laocoo%n>1
was published in 1766, 170 years ago, and the classification
worked out there has been generally accepted since that
time.  Robert Louis Stevenson follows this classification
without substantial modification in his essay on <1Style in>1
<1Literature,>1  1885.
  But the symbols of language in the dual function which
they perform are, as stated above, essentially different from
the media of the other arts.  Architecture, sculpture, and
painting all work in pure space media of form or colour, and
address their expressions to the sense of sight alone.  Their
representations are strictly limited by the nature of space,
and that in two ways.  First, a picture or a statue is a fixed,
immovable spatial image, representing only a single
moment of time.  It can have no movement, and hence
cannot express time at all, although it may suggest time
by the particular moment chosen, or by the symbolic
arrangement of the parts of a complex picture, as, for
example, Bo%cklin's "Vita Somnium Breve,' a picture in three
parts, childhood in the foreground, youth and romance in
the middle ground, and old age and death in the back-
ground.  But this is only a symbolic suggestion of the time
process of life, not an actual representation of it.
  Second, in proportion as it becomes great or unique as a
work of art, the Parthenon, for example, or the "Sistine
Madonna,' or the "David' of Michelangelo, it cannot be
duplicated, so that the individual piece of art remains an
individual physical thing, and is limited to one particular
place as any other physical object is.  We have to travel to
Athens or Dresden or Florence to see it.  It cannot for this
134
reason become an adequately expressive instrument of free
mind, whose unique characteristic is its ubiquitous and
omnipresent nature ; it occupies space and time as its natural
domain.
  Music, on the other hand, working in natural sound, is a
pure time expression without spatial dimensions, and is
limited by the nature of time, also in two ways.  First, as
a pure time expression it addresses itself to the ear alone,
and has no power of representing spatial objects that address
themselves to the eye.  Second, as a pure time expression
it is evanescent.  Uttered in one moment it is gone in the
next, as fleeting as time itself.
  These four arts, then, all working in natural sensuous
media, and addressing themselves directly to the sense
organs of sight or bearing respectively, are each limited to
the sense forms of either space or time.  They are not the
free symbols of representation, which the mind requires to
elaborate its own biform world.
  But with the symbols of language everything is different.
The natural sound elements out of which it is made have
been freed from their time limits by transmutation into
conventionalized symbols. Furthermore, by conven-
tionalization <1these symbols have been transferred from the>1
<1realm of the senses to the realm of the imagination.>1  This is
a vital point in the problem.  The fundamental difference
between the senses and the imagination is that the senses as
image faculties are restricted to their local environment in
space and time.  To make an impress on the senses the
actual objects or sounds must be within the range of the
sense organs of sight or hearing.
  The imagination, on the other hand, as an image faculty,
is freed from the sensuous space-time limits of the natural
world ; or in other words, the imagination is itself the supra-
sensuous space-time world of free mind, the potential realm
of all possible space-time mental images, and the symbols
of language address themselves directly <1through>1 the senses
   135
to this inward world.  The significant import of language
does not reside in the particular natural sound, shape,
colour, size, etc., of the particular set of spoken or written
words as they strike the ear or eye, as is the case with the
natural arts. The import resides in the conventional
meaning.  Hence the mind must first interpret the sound
which strikes the ear---"horse,' for example---and <1then>1 the
corresponding image rises in the imagination, but not for
the senses.  If, for example, I quote here the words from
Wordsworth, suggested by the statue of Newton at Cam-
bridge :
  Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
  The marble index of a mind for ever
  Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,
the actual form of the words that strike the eye--or ear if
orally quoted---has no natural resemblance whatever to
Newton, as had the marble statue.  But the conventional
connotation of the words carried <1through>1 the sense organs
of ear or eye to the imagination to which they are addressed,
and not to the senses, at once raises there the image of
Newton and the sleepless exploring activity of his mind.
To see the actual sculptured statue one must travel to
Cambridge, where it stands in its particular niche in space.
But in the three lines of poetry, by translating the image
from the natural art of sculpture to the conventional art of
language, Wordsworth has transferred the likeness from the
realm of sense to the realm of the imagination, and has thus
liberated it from the rigid marble and its fixed point in
space, and made it ubiquitous and omnipresent.
  Furthermore, the marble gave us only the space repre-
sentation of Newton, his physical appearance to the eye at
one particular moment of his life.  It gave us no time nor
motion. The printed poetry, though presented to the eye
in a fixed space-time pattern, gives us the time-movement
of his mind as well, 'for ever voyaging through strange seas













to this inward world.  The significant import of language
does not reside in the particular natural sound, shape,
colour, size, etc., of the particular set of spoken or written
words as they strike the ear or eye, as is the case with the
natural arts. The import resides in the conventional
meaning.  Hence the mind must first interpret the sound
which strikes the ear---"horse,' for example---and <1then>1 the
corresponding image rises in the imagination, but not for
the senses.  If, for example, I quote here the words from
Wordsworth, suggested by the statue of Newton at Cam-
bridge :
  Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
  The marble index of a mind for ever
  Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,
the actual form of the words that strike the eye---or ear if
orally quoted---has no natural resemblance whatever to
Newton, as had the marble statue.  But the conventional
connotation of the words carried <1through>1 the sense organs
of ear or eye to the imagination to which they are addressed,
and not to the senses, at once raises there the image of
Newton and the sleepless exploring activity of his mind.
To see the actual sculptured statue one must travel to
Cambridge, where it stands in its particular niche in space.
But in the three lines of poetry, by translating the image
from the natural art of sculpture to the conventional art of
language, Wordsworth has transferred the likeness from the
realm of sense to the realm of the imagination, and has thus
liberated it from the rigid marble and its fixed point in
space, and made it ubiquitous and omnipresent.
  Furthermore, the marble gave us only the space repre-
sentation of Newton, his physical appearance to the eye at
one particular moment of his life.  It gave us no time nor
motion.  The printed poetry, though presented to the eye
in a fixed space-time pattern, gives us the time-movement
of his mind as well, "for ever voyaging through strange seas
136
of thought, alone.'  Wordsworth did not get this time-idea
from the marble statue, but from his previous knowledge of
Newton; though with this previous knowledge in his mind
as he contemplated the statue in an unreflecting mental
attitude, he might himself have imagined that he saw it in
the marble.  As pointed out above, the symbols of language,
though originally made from the raw time-material of
sound, are changed by conventionalization into a space-
time medium so as to become the completely efficient
instrument for the elaboration of the space-time world of
free mind, whether presented to the mind through the ear
in the time-forms of oral speech; or through the eye in the
space-forms of written speech.  In referring to written
speech at this point, however, we are anticipating the
matter of our next chapter.
          CHAPTER XI
LAST STEP : TRANSLATION OF LANGUAGE FROM
        TIME TO SPACE
  Words are fleeting in pronunciation, but permanent when
written down.---BACON, <1Advancement of Learning.>1
  Statues of brass or marble will perish; and statues made in
imitation of them are not the same statues nor the same work-
manship, any more than a copy of a picture is the same picture.
But print and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and with
material of any kind, carve it in wood or engrave it on stone, the
thought is eternally and identically the same thought in every
case.  It has a capacity of unimpaired existence, unaffected by
change of matter, and is essentially distinct and of a nature
different from everything else that we know of or can conceive.
---THOMAS PAINE,  <1The Age of Reason.>1
AND now we come to the final step in the making of lan-
guage.  By the conventionalization of sound in oral speech,
which is the actual language, man accomplished two things.
First, he changed the vague suggestiveness of natural
sounds into perfectly defined, articulated, limited sound
symbols, that can be clearly differentiated from one another
by the ear, as "rat,' "cat.'  Second, by conventionalization
he transformed the pure time symbols into space-time
symbols, as in the sentence, "The bird sings,' where "bird'
is a representation of space, "sings' of time, though both are
carried from the lips of the speaker to the ear of the listener
upon the common substratum of sound, that is, time.
  But this conventionalization of sound in oral speech did
not completely solve the problem set to conscious reason, of
raising above the transient world of nature a permanent and
actual world of mind.  Oral language even when conven-
tionalized was still dependent upon the natural sound-
element out of which it was made, and consequently was
138
  LAST STEP: FROM TIME TO SPACE
still under the limitations of time.  It was evanescent; the
pure flux of Heraclitus.  As soon as the words were
sounded they vanished, and at once ceased to exist, and
when required again they had to be reproduced by the will
and vocal organs, only to disappear immediately once more.
There was no independent objective permanence at all in
oral language.  The only permanence was in the memory
of the living individual that could produce the language
again when required, and it had to be generated each time
it was required.  Without the presence of the living human
agent the thing had completely vanished.
  But the characteristic of the world of mind, as already
noted, is that it combines permanency with motion.  As
contrasted with the forward vanishing series in the natural
world, the world of mind advances by a cumulative move-
ment, translating type after type from the sensuous world
of nature into its own supra-sensuous world, and setting
them up there in a fixed non-vanishing structure.  A man
who writes his diary, transferring the vanishing incidents
of his life in the natural world into the non-vanishing
medium (language) of the world of mind, would illustrate
the point, though we are going ahead of the logic in illus-
trating it by written language at this stage.  Oral speech
alone, because of its continually vanishing nature, could not
accomplish this.  It could not escape the evanescence of
sound out of which it is made.  Consequently, in oral
speech there was no means of raising a fixed objective
structure that would preserve the vanishing time-sequence
of things and events in an ever-accumulating non-vanishing
present, as the nature of conscious developing reason
demands.  In the activity of reason as we see it elaborating
its own world to-day, in the written or printed symbols of
language, the significance of the natural world is being
steadily gleaned from its vanishing stream, and being stored
up in a non-vanishing continuously present world.  The
library of the British Museum would illustrate adequately
  139
this cumulative movement of reason, where the various
phases through which the world has passed in its previous
evolution, themselves now vanished in time, are preserved
in a permanent present, a pure world of mind though
stored in the sensuous material of paper and ink.  If we
think of what a university, say, would be without a single
book, and without blackboards or note-books, shut off
from a vanished and irrecoverable past, we should have
a picture of the limitations which time sets upon oral
speech alone as an instrument of conscious mind.
  To obtain the required permanence the time symbols
of oral speech had to be converted in some way or other
into space symbols, since space has that fixity which time
lacks. Hence all nations that made any considerable
advance in the elaboration of their mental world were led
by instinct and necessity to search for some kind of space
symbols, written speech as we now call it, that would
crystallize and hold the vanishing stream of oral speech.
  This, however, was a fundamentally difficult problem.
Language is made out of sounds, and how could a sound
be represented by a spatial picture?  Or more explicitly,
how could the fluent sound-symbols of actual oral language,
which are expressed in time alone, and are without visual
shape, be converted into non-fluent space-symbols, which
would give them permanence without at the same time
destroying the movement of time and thought? The
difficulty of this problem is evidenced by the fact that there
have been races of people who had developed a highly
perfected oral language, reaching backward over many
hundreds of years, who never succeeded in converting it
into a corresponding written language.  They were forced
by this barrier to remain in a vanishing present world,
isolated even from the most significant achievements in
their own past history, so that they could make no appreci-
able progress at all in what we call civilization.  The Cree
Indians, for example, who lived for untold generations
140
upon the plains of western Canada, had no written language
pri-or to  1841, yet their oral language was as highly developed
in its grammar and syntax as the English or any other
modern civilized language.  In  1841  the ingenious mis-
sionary, James Evans, invented for them a very simple
system of syllabic writing into which parts of the Bible
could be translated, and which is still extensively used
among them.
  The detailed account of the invention and perfecting of
written language would be a long story if it could be fully
told, and belongs to the science of language rather than to
the philosophy.  An attempt will be made to give what is
known about it in a separate treatise on the Evolution of
the Alphabet.  Here it will be necessary only to suggest
the main headings of the story.
  The written speech in modern languages is merely an
arbitrary and artificial spatial representation of the original
language of oral speech.  In the first steps of written
language, however, there was no real connection at all
between the written characters and the actual oral language.
In every known case, so far as the records have come down
to us, when man first felt the need of a written record to
preserve a present experience for a future time, or to trans-
mit it to someone at a distance from him in space, he began
by pictorial representations of natural objects that were
seen and known.  A bird was represented not by "b-i-r-d,'
but by a picture of a bird, an animal by the picture of an
animal, and so on.  From these first natural drawings or
pictographs man gradually moved forward to the next step,
the ideograph, where the visual objects by symbolic associa-
tions were used in very crude ways to represent thoughts
and actions and inner experiences.  But this mode of
written speech had still no connection at all with the real
language of oral speech.  Nor could it be called in any true
sense a written language corresponding to oral language.
It was at best but a lisping and fragmentary makeshift for
  141
language.  It was merely a spatial representation of spatial
things, and could give no organized synthesis at all of the
space-time world which man was already organizing effec-
tively in his oral speech.
  Finally, and perhaps in all cases by some lucky combina-
tion of accident and ingenious thinking, the exact details
of which are now lost in a long vanished and irrecoverable
past, the momentous step was taken, when the ideographs
became phonograms, that is, when the written characters
became representations, not of things that are seen, but of
sounds that are heard.  How, precisely, this last step was
taken, converting time into space, will perhaps never be
fully known. In this way, however, the actual sound-
symbols of oral language were translated into correspond-
ing space-symbols, which preserves them from the evanes-
cence of sound out of which oral language is made.
  The conversion of the sound-symbols of time into
corresponding form-symbols of space, which gave to lan-
guage an accumulating permanence without destroying or
altering its life and movement, was the consummation of
the long language-making process. It was the most
momentous and fruitful single achievement of the human
intellect, since it was the condition of all the cumulative
progress that man has since made in the world of free mind,
which is his peculiar sphere.
  In the development of the Aryan languages, the branch
to which our own language belongs, this union of time and
space symbols was accomplished in the evolution of the
alphabet, where the oral sounds of language were resolved
first into their twenty-six elements (I am again using
arbitrarily the number in our own English alphabet) of
vowels and consonants, and each one of these twenty-six
attached to a separate space symbol, so that language
became at one and the same time fluid and fixed; change
and permanence united in a single synthesis.  This actual
union of motion and permanence is a new phenomenon in
142
world evolution.  The oral language is still the actual lan-
guage, since it is the direct expression of the time movement
of thought.  The written language consists in the transfer-
ence of this sound-language to a spatial representation, to
preserve it from the evanescence of time.  But in the trans-
ference, while the time movement is arrested and crystal-
lized in space, it is not destroyed.  The natural time
sequence of the thought and the corresponding time-flow
of oral speech are preserved first of all in the linear arrange-
ment of the words on the spatial page.  Second, the con-
ventional connotation of the words themselves remains
the same as in oral speech, by means of which, as we have
already seen, language can express objects in space and
sequence in time with equal facility.
  The miracle---miracle, I mean, when compared with any-
thing to be found in the world in the pre-language stage of
its history---that has been accomplished here can be clearly
seen if we set out in written form three or four lines of
poetry where movement and action---time expression---are
the dominant quality.  These from Burns's <1Tam o' Shanter,>1
for example :
  As Tammie glowered, amazed and curious,
  The mirth and fun grew fast and furious;
  The piper loud and louder blew,
  The dancers quick and quicker flew,
  They reeled, they set, they crossed, they cleekit,
  Till ilka carlin swat and reekit.
As soon as the vanishing oral expression is turned into
writing, or print, it is arrested and becomes fixed and still;
but the movement of the piper and the dancers continues.
Though stilled in the spatial page the piper pipes on and
the dancers dance.  The actual dance ceased at midnight
a hundred and fifty-odd years ago, vanished in time from
the stage of the world.  The representation of it in oral
speech would have been as evanescent as time.  But as
soon as Burns turns it into ink, into visible symbols in space,
  143
the player plays and the dancers dance on for ever.  Turned
into print, the dance <1movement>1 becomes, in Browning's
phrase, an "eternal petrifaction.'  Or, in the abstract logic
of prose, written language is the crystallization of the
fluidity of time, while time still retains its movement and
fluidity even while standing fixed and motionless in space.
This, as it seems to me, is the unique characteristic of lan-
guage which marks it off from all other phenomena of the
world, the peculiar fusion of motion and permanence in a
single synthesis without destroying the nature of either, and
making language the completely adequate instrument of
free and conscious mind.
 144
       CHAPTER XII
   SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The termination of the world in a man appears to be the last
victory of the intelligence. . . . An individual man is a fruit
which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. . . . Each
individual soul is such, in virtue of its being a power to translate
the world into some particular language of its own.---EMERSON,
<1The Method of Nature,>1 1841.
  1.  <1Deductions of Logic>1
  Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ
of the latest of nature's experiments; but that stirring of con-
sciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its
symbolism.---EDDINGTON, <1Science and the Unseen World,>1 1929.
IT may be worth while now to summarize in a page or two
the view of world evolution as outlined above, a spiral
structure of which man's created language forms the final
story.  In this summary I adopt the organic hypothesis,
which assumes that mind is a basic and permanent element
in the world, self-determining and purposive in its nature,
and the directing agency in the evolutionary process
throughout its history.  While the acceptance or rejection
of this metaphysical hypothesis is not essential to the
acceptance or rejection of the scientific exposition of the
birth and structure of language given in the preceding pages,
the choice of one or other hypothesis does, of course, make
a rather complete difference in the diction and phraseology
chosen to set out the specific exposition.  To a mechanist
many of the terms which I have used may appear altogether
unwarranted or quite wrong.  So far as that is true I ask
his indulgence for the use of those terms and turns of
expression that are dependent upon and consonant with
the organic hypothesis, and grant him the right to sub-
  145
stitute his own terms, where necessary, from the opposite
hypothesis, but request only that he consider the specific
exposition of the birth and structure of language on its own
merits, without prejudice from the hypothesis with which I
have associated it.  I accept the organic hypothesis of a self-
directing and purposive activity in the world because it
seems the only coherent and logical view when one con-
siders all the evidence from matter to man.  A self-directing
and purposive activity appears everywhere in the plant
world, becomes more pronounced and obvious in the
animal world, and emerges to explicit activity in man.
Besides, the whole series in the rising scale of world forms
from matter to man are causally related to one another in
the relation of sustaining and sustained.  That the upper
part of the scale, the organic world, should manifest explicit
purposive and self-directing activity in all its growth, life,
and habits, seems more than mere presumptive evidence
that the inorganic base out of which it arose and upon
which it entirely depends for its life and all its purposive
activities is also a purposive structure, though the purposive-
ness is not as yet apparent to human perception.
  On this hypothesis, then, the life and mind of the world,
which in its time-evolution rises steadily, and in an appar-
ently unbroken ascending series, upward through the cycles
of insentient and sentient life, eventually comes to a focus
in the organism and mind of man, breaks through the
enveloping forms of space and time, and emerges into free
and conscious individualities. The world which was
formerly a single sensuous world, in rising into this new
cycle of its evolution breaks, in a manner, into two worlds.
The sensuous space-time world of nature is duplicated by
the supra-sensuous space-time world of mind, which
emerges now, radiating from individualized mind-points,
and holds all space and all time in its single view ; and turn-
ing back upon itself is confronted with the endlessly diversi-
fied forms of its own preconscious evolution.  The task set
146
  SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
then to the mind of the world, when it emerged to freedom
and consciousness in the organism of man, was the task of
entering into mental possession of the innumerable diversi-
fied forms of all the lower cycles of its own life-history.
This it could do only step by step, by translating the multi-
tudinous types of all its preconscious history one by one
into its own supra-sensuous world of free mind.  If there
is any reality in the theory of the organic unity of the world
and the natural evolution of its successive aspects in time,
then man <1is>1 the world at that point where it awakens to
consciousness and turns back upon itself to explore and
know its own nature; and this self-exploration, and the
growing record of its results in language, constitute a new
cycle in world evolution.
  To accomplish this task of elaborating a new supra-
sensuous world, patterned after the sensuous world of
nature, man, with his newly emerged conscious mind, had
to have for his new world-building material supra-sensuous
symbols, freed, in some way or other, from the sense-
limiting media of space and time.  Specifically, he required
time-symbols lifted above the evanescence of time, and
space-symbols released from the fixity of space.
  Starting with his own natural sounds, which as time-
expressions were the natural symbols for the time-process
of intellecting the world, but which in their natural state
could express time-manifestations only, man first trans-
muted these natural sounds into dcfinite and conventional-
ized sound-symbols, which could express manifestations of
space as well as of time, and in this way made the adequate
biform instrument for the translation of a biform world.
  Next, to preserve this sound-language from the evanes-
cence of time, man succeeded, after long experimentation,
in translating his sound-symbols into coriesponding space-
symbols so as to secure permanence, without, however,
destroying or altering the time-movement of oral speech.
By this translation and consequent amalgamation of the
  147
  THE NEW INVESTIGATION
symbols of time and space, so that the content could with-
out alteration be expressed in either of these sense-forms,
man gained for language that spaceless and timeless
character which corresponds to the nature of free and
conscious mind ; motion and rest, change and permanency,
fused in a single synthesis where each retains its own nature
while freed from its own limits.  The marriage of Heraclitus
and Parmenides.
  The other four arts, as pointed out above, each working
only in space or in time, are only half-transmuted, as we
might say, from nature to mind.  They are only half-
liberated from the sense limits of the natural world.  Lan-
guage by conventionalization and by amalgamation of the
forms of time and space is freed from the limits of both;
and in language, and in language alone, the mind has
attained its full freedom, has created an efficient instrument
for the elaboration of its new world.  Hence all the inter-
course of life is carried on in language as it alone expresses
freely the double world of space and time in which man
lives.
  When Keats wrote his <1Ode on a Grecian Urn>1 the rigid
spatial beauty of the marble, arrested and motionless for
centuries, was instantaneously liberated in the movement
of time, even though it now stands still as marble again in
the ink of the lines; motion and stillness in magic though
actual combination.  Keats was struck with the durability
of the marble as contrasted with the vanishing beauty of
natural life :
  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.
But to obtain this durability in marble all motion in time
was excluded, a single moment given in fixed isolation from
all before and after.  Language restores the motion and
life of time, and also invests the whole with a durability
outlasting the marble's.  By translating the beauty from
148
  SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
the natural marble to the conventional symbols in ink,
which may be mechanically reproduced and multiplied
<1ad infinitum>1 without loss of import, the beauty actually
becomes a thousand times more durable than marble.
A single accidental explosion could destroy the Parthenon.
What accident, short of a world cataclysm, could destroy
the <1Odyssey,>1 multiplied and distributed as it is over the
whole earth's surface?
  2.  <1The Perception of Poetry>1
  We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are
more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands.
For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred
years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during
which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been
decayed and demolished?  It is not possible to have the true
pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar; no, nor of the
kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals
cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth.
But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books,
exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual
renovation.  Neither are they fitly to be called images, because
they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others,
provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeed-
ing ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was thought so
noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to
place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation
of their fruits ; how much more are letters to be magnified, which,
as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so
distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inven-
tions, the one of the other!---BACON, <1Advancement of Learning,>1
  Since language attains its most precise and perfect ex-
pression in poetry it would not be unfitting to close a prose
dissertation on language by some lines from poets who
have thought and written about it.  By a lucky chance the
similarity and contrast between the natural arts and the
conventional art of language can be clearly set out by
setting side by side two sonnets by the two masters of their
respective arts, and of thought as well, in their century,
  149
Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It so happened that
Michelangelo died in the same year (1564) in which Shake-
speare was born, a fact which gives an additional fortuitous
interest to the comparison.  Shakespeare was not a pro-
fessional dialectician like Plato ; at least, so far as we know,
he did not practise the dialectic art.  But he has a dis-
concerting habit of arriving at the last syllogism in a
dialectical series without the labour of the intervening steps ;
so that when the logician has worked his slow way through
a long dialectical process, and has arrived at the last
syllogism which is to set out the consummating truth which
he has been following, he unexpectedly meets Shakespeare
at the end casually handing to him the same truth in a quite
off-hand manner, as though he had incidentally picked it
up by the wayside.  I chanced upon his sonnet on Language
in the dim recesses of memory after the foregoing treatise
was completed.
  Shakespeare was cognizant of the unique character of
language in the world, and particularly of the power of
arresting and preserving the vanishing things of the world
of sense. Poets and philosophers had already reflected
upon the durability of the natural plastic arts when con-
trasted with the fragile organic forms of nature ; particularly
sculpture, where the forms of beauty were "wrought in hard
mountain marble.'  Of this time-resisting characteristic of
the plastic arts Michelangelo has given us perhaps the most
impressive image in his sonnet on <1The Artist and his Work,>1
addressed to the beautiful and gifted Lady Vittoria Colonna,
the friend of his later years.  Part of the impress of his
lines is due no doubt to the weight of evidence we feel
behind them in Michelangelo's own works in sculpture.
  How can that be, lady, which all men learn
  ay long experience ?  Shapes that seem alive
  Wrought in hard mountain marble, will survive
  Their maker, whom the years to dust return!
  Thus to effect cause yields.  Art hath her tum,
150
And triumphs over Nature.  I, who strive
With sculpture, know this well; her wonders live
In spite of time and death, those tyrants stern.
So I can give long life to both of us
In either way, by colour or by stone,
Making the semblance of thy face and mine.
Centuries hence when both are buried, thus
Thy beauty and my sadness shall be shown,
And men shall say, "For her 'twas wise to pine.'
But even the "hard mountain marble,' though in per-
manence far surpassing all natural forms of beauty, is not
eternally immune from the effects of time.  In the end it is
only a matter of relative durability.  Given a sufficient
period of time, and time will change and wear down thc
marble also. This is what Shakespeare saw (as Horace
had seen before him, though not in quite the same altruistic
fashion), that nothing in nature nor even in the plastic arts
can eventually escape the never-ceasing detrition of time ;
that written language alone, because it is a conventional
and not a natural art, addressing itself to the imagination,
and not to the senses, and capable, therefore, of being
illimitably reproduced without loss or modification of the
substance of beauty which it transmits, written language
alone has the unique power of transcending time and change,
and of becoming thus the adequate instrument for elaborat-
ing that inward, supra-sensuous, non-vanishing world of
mind in which man "lives and moves and has his being.'
  Com' esser, donna, puo\ quel ch' alcun vede
  Per lunga sperienza, che piu\ dura
  L'immagin viva in pietra alpestra e dura
  Che 'l suo fattor, che gli anni in cener riede
  La causa all' effetto incline e cede,
  Onde dall' arte e\ vinta la natura.
  Io 'l so, che 'l provo in la bella scultura;
  Ch' all' opra il tempo e morte non tien fede.
  Dunque posso ambo noi darlunga vita
  In qual sia modo, o di colore o sasso,
  Di noi sembrando l'uno e l' altro volto:
  Si che mill' anni dopo la partita
  Quanto e voi bella fusti, e quant' io lasso
  Si vega, e com' amarvi io non fui stolto.
   151
Shakespeare perceived this clearly, and taking up the
question where Michelangelo and the others had left it, he
gave us in a single sonnet the most memorable statement
that I know of this aspect of language, a statement where
the lucidity of thought is made still more lucid by the
"beauty imperishable' of the expression.
  Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
  But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
  How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
  Whose action is no stronger than a flower ?
  0, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
  Aga\inst the wreckful siege of battering days,
  When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
  Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays ?
  0 fearful meditation!  Where, alack,
  Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid ?
  Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back ?
  Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid ?
  0, none, unless this miracle have might,
  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
  It would be hard to improve upon the clear logical image
which Shakespeare has given us here of the unique character
of language as a phenomenon among other phenomena of
the world---its immunity from time and change, its silent
and successful resistance to the "wreckful siege of battering
days,' to which all other forms in the world both of nature
and of the natural arts must soon or late succumb.
  EPILOGUE
THE POET'S MONUMENT
  "Non omnis moriar'
I'VE raised a monument outlasting bronze,
  O'ertopping pyramids of kings of old,
Which neither wearing rains nor tearing winds
  Shall e'er demolish, nor the years untold,
Successive rolling, nor the flight of ages.
  Not all of me shall die: an ample shred
Shall 'scape the Goddess of the Tomb.  Still fresh
  My fame in time to come shall grow and spread
While still the Pontiff climbs the Capitol,
  The Vestal virgin silent with him led.
I, born where rages Aufidus in torrent,
  Where Daunus, scant of water, rules the fate
Of rustic folk, from humble station prince,
  So men shall tell how I, from low estate,
Became a man of mark and showed the way
  To wed the music of the Aeolian lays
To Latin measures . . . O Melpomene,
  Take to thyself and wear the pride and praise
Thy works have fairly earned, and, of thy grace,
  Set on my hair a crown of Delphic bays.
  HORACE, Book iii, Ode xx.
  Translation by A. F. Murison.
<1(For those who prefer Horace in his own tongue.)>1
  AD MELPOMENEN
  Exegi monumentum aere perennius,
  Regalique situ pyramidum altius ;
  Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
  Possit diruere, aut imumerabilis
  Annorum series et fuga temporum.
   153
  EPILOGUE
Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
Vitabit Libitinam : usque ego postera
Crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex.
Dicar, qui violens obstrepit Aufidus
Et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
Regnavit populorum, ex humili potens
Princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
Deluxisse Modos.  Sume superbiam
Quaesitam meritis, et mihi Delphica
Lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.