panegyric: Words (by them meaning all sorts of signs) are so necessary, instead of being (when duly used or in their own nature) prejudicial to the advancement of knowledge, or an hindrance to knowledge, that without them there could in mathematiques themselves be no demonstration.'

It seems to me that most modern philosophers are just in the same state of haziness with regard to the relation between thought and language as Berkeley was; only they are not quite so honest towards themselves. The Bishop, for instance, in another passage of his Common-place Book (vol. iv. p. 429), after having satisfied himself that it would be absurd to use words for recording our thoughts to ourselves or in some private meditations,' interpellates himself by adding the following note, 'Is discursive thought, then, independent of language?' He forgot that he had given the answer himself, namely, that it was not and that it could not be.

Process of naming.

Suppose we see the same colour in snow, milk, chalk, and linen. We cannot single it out, take it away or abstract it from the different sensuous objects in which it occurs, unless we have a sign or handle to do it with, and that sign, for all the ordinary purposes of thinking, is a word, such as white. Until that word is there, we may have different sensations, but no concepts, not even percepts, in the true sense of the word. It is the electric spark of the word which changes something common to various sensations into a percept, as, afterwards, it changes something common to various percepts into a concept,

and something common to various concepts into a higher concept.

But whence came that electric spark? Where did men find that sign to signify many things; and did not that sign already, in order to be applicable to different perceptions, require something of a comprehensive or conceptual character?

Origin of concepts.

Yes, it did. And here lies the punctum saliens of the whole philosophy of language. Long before the question was asked, how man came in possession of words, there was the old question, how man came in possession of concepts. Nearly all philosophers drew the line of demarcation between man and beast at concepts. Up to concepts the two seemed alike.

Then the question arose, How did man alone go beyond percepts and arrive at concepts?

The usual answer was that man possessed some peculiar gift or faculty which enabled him to form concepts, and to comprehend the manifold as one. Even now many philosophers are satisfied with that mythology. But this answer is no answer at all. We might as well say that man began to write because he had the faculty of writing. We want to know what forced man to form concepts, whether he liked it or not. Why should he not have been satisfied with what the senses gave him, with seeing this, with hearing that? Why should he have gone beyond the single images and looked for the general? He might have been very happy in the world of sensations, perceptions, and images. Why should he ever have left it?

What we call the roots of language betray the secret. Almost all of them express, as we saw, the common acts of man. Now before man is conscious as yet of any object, as an object, he cannot help being conscious of his own acts, and as these acts are mostly repeated and continuous acts, he becomes conscious, without any new effort, of his many or repeated acts as one. Here lies the genesis of the most primitive and, I may add, the first inevitable concepts they consist in our consciousness of our own repeated acts as one continuous action. To rub, for instance, was not only to rub once, and then again, and then again, but it was the continuous act of rubbing, afterwards of smoothing, softening, appeasing; and thus the root, meaning originally to rub, came in time to mean to appease the anger of the gods. There is an uninterrupted chain or development between our saying, Oh God, have mercy! and our earliest ancestors' saying, Be rubbed down, be smooth, be softened, ye gods!

Former theories.

It will now perhaps become clear why the three old theories of the origin of language and thought, the Pooh-pooh theory, the Bow-wow theory, and the Yo-heho theory, completely fail to explain what has to be explained, namely, how conceptual words arose. Cuckoo would be an imitation of the sound of the cuckoo, bow-wow of the barking of the dog, poohpooh of our contempt, yo-heho of our labour; but with all this we should never get out of the enchanted circle of mere sensuous knowledge. We want conceptual sounds. How can we get them?

Now here the advantage of what I shall call in future the Synergastic theory will at once become evident. If, as we know, people in a primitive state accompany most of their common acts by sounds, then the clamor concomitans of these acts is not the sign of a single act, but the inseparable accompaniment of our consciousness of our many repeated acts as one action. Here we see the first dawn of conceptual thought. If this is once clearly perceived, it will likewise be perceived that the difference between this theory of the origin of conceptual language and the old onomatopoetic theories is not one of degree, but of kind, and marks a greater advance in the Science of Language than the Copernican theory did in the Science of Astronomy. Here lies Noiré's real merit. He was the first who saw that the natural genesis of concepts was to be found in the consciousness of our acts. I was able to give the proof of it by showing that nearly all roots in Sanskrit were expressive of our acts. Those who do not see the difficulties which have to be explained when we ask for the origin of our conceptual roots, may consider the old Pooh-pooh and Bow-wow theories quite sufficient. To the true philosopher the Synergastic theory is the only one which approaches or touches the hem of the problem that has to be solved, namely, how concepts arose, and how concepts were expressed.

One question only we are unable to answer, namely, why the clamor concomitans of the different acts of men, the consciousness of which constituted their first concepts, should have been exactly what it was. Why

in crushing they should have uttered MAR, in carrying VAH, in stretching TAN, in scattering STAR, is beyond our ken. All we can say is that the possibilities in uttering and still more in fixing these sounds were almost unlimited, and that though we may imagine that we perceive some reasonableness in some of them, we very soon come to the end of such speculations.

Who does not imagine that there is some similarity between the root VÂ, to blow, and the sound of our own breathing, or, if we adopt the mimetic theory, the sound of the wind? But if that is so with VA, what shall we say to DHAM, to blow, and SVAS, to breathe? That there should be in some cases some vague similarity between the sound of a root and the sound produced by the work which it accompanies is intelligible, and so far the speculations on the supposed inherent meaning of certain letters, which begin as early as Plato's Cratylos, are not without some value. Possibly, if we could go back to an earlier stage in the formation of roots, his speculations might seem still better founded. But we must here too learn to be satisfied with what is within the reach of historical knowledge, or, if we must needs stretch our powers of vision beyond, follow the example of Plato and not assume too serious a countenance.

A few quotations from Plato will serve to make my meaning clear.

Now the letter R,' he says, 'appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently used the letter 1 Cratylos, p. 426.