a very solid body of historical facts, leaving their impress on every succeeding generation. There never was a break in the history of the human mind. This silent faith which supported the great thinkers of the last century, has in our time become a reality, and has been confirmed by the best students in nearly every branch of historical as well as of physical research. We should never forget the almost prophetic spirit with which such men as Herder in the field of history, and Oken and Lamarck in the field of nature, clung to that faith and foresaw the triumphs of the days in which we are living. What impeded their progress was the scarcity of materials, while we begin to suffer from a superabundance of them. We may be surprised when we see philosophers of great eminence during that not very distant period satisfied with treating language either as a divine gift, or as the final outcome of the coughing and sneezing, the roaring and sighing of human beings, nay of the grunting of certain animals. It is extraordinary that in their zeal for orthodoxy these men should have forgotten the very words of the Old Testament, that

Whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' All such hallucinations have now become impossible, though their

ghost may return from time to time. After the discovery of Sanskrit, and of the roots of Sanskrit, so carefully collected by Pânini and other grammarians, we know as a matter of fact, or as a real fact of history, that the bulk of words used by Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Slaves, and Celts, and by ourselves, were derived from radical elements consisting each of a few consonants and vowels, and, what is most important, expressive of general ideas. What enormous quantities of words can be reduced to one germ, what enormous distances of time can be spanned by the Science of Language, and what light has been thrown by that science on the historical beginnings of words and thoughts is best seen when we watch the complete restoration of the broken bridges which once connected such words as talent, Atlantic, oblation, tolerate, level, and niveau with one and the same root TAL, to lift, by no means a very primitive root1; or again, when we see how such words as fire, pity, pure, to count, deputy, to purge, and to purify, had all their life-spring from one and the same source. What such a discovery means will be understood when we remember that every word in Sanskrit, one of the richest of the Aryan

1 Science of Thought, p. 626; No. 47, tir, tur, tul, &c.

languages, has more or less successfully been traced back by native grammarians to one of these roots. The number of them, according to Indian authorities, exceeds 1,000, but can, no doubt, be very considerably reduced. The number of general ideas expressed by them amounts to no more than 121', and even that number admits of reduction. How far the consequences of these new discoveries affect every part of philosophy, will be seen at once, when we remember that no animal has yet been discovered in the whole world being in possession of a language, meaning by language words that were made of roots expressive of general ideas. It is language, thus understood, as built up on roots and on general ideas, not on groans or sighs or grunts, that has hitherto placed, and will place for all time, an impassable barrier between animal and man, and has opened entirely new vistas to the believers in evolution, whether in historical or pre-historical times.

For it must not be forgotten that these roots and their derivatives are not mere guesses or theories, but hard facts, quite as hard as the chipped flints dug out from the gravel beds of the river Somme, and deposited by Boucher de Perthes in the Library of the Institut de

1 Science of Thought, p. 622.

France, where I saw the members of the various academies shaking their heads at them in the year 1845, and I confess looked incredulously at them myself. It is now generally admitted that these flints, with their clear traces of the handiwork of man, were deposited in the gravel when the river flowed fifty or a hundred feet higher than it does at present. Our Aryan roots, however, are so little chipped, that is, exhibit so few definite signs of human workmanship, that they might more truly be likened to the stones found on the North Downs of Kent by Mr. Harrison which tell us nothing by their shape but that at one time they must have been used by human hands. Whatever may be the date assigned to these stones, and to the flint-makers, they must have been preceded by a race of root- or word-makers, unless we suppose that man was in possession of reason before he was in possession of language or of words as the exponents of general ideas, however primitive and imperfect. Language, we have learnt, was impossible without Reason, and so was Reason, even that small amount of it which went towards the choosing and chipping of flints, without Language. When I said that Language and Reason were identical, I no doubt expressed myself badly,

but no one could have failed to see that what I meant was that the two are inseparable, for no two things in this world can ever be identical. They are as inseparable as the bark and the stem of a living tree, as the concave and the convex, as the angle and the two lines which enclose it. They are held together by that intimate relation for which Hindu philosophers alone have invented a special term, viz. Samavâya.

And if a historical and comparative study of language has revealed to us the true growth of the human mind as realised in language, from its fossil period onward to the days of Shakespeare, it has taught us at the same time that this so-called growth or development of language was the work of myriads of human beings, building up the foundations of the temples and palaces in which we are living and moving, and even now building up new coral islands of words and thoughts for future generations to live on.

Theories as monstrous as those that were held in the last century on the origin and the growth of language were held at the same time on the origin and growth of mythology. Some discovered in it more or less defaced survivals of a primeval revelation once granted to the whole human race; others treated it boldly as