left us, the evolution of mind also can be effectively studied in those products only which mind itself has left us. These mental products in their earliest form are always embodied in language, and it is in language, therefore, that we must study the problem of the origin, and of the successive stages in the growth of mind. The formation of general terms, of abstract notions, of propositions, and syllogisms, in fact all that we call the work of reason, must in future be studied in language, if in the science of thought we hope for the same results which have rewarded the labours of Darwin and of other careful students of the authentic records of nature. Every one of the numberless languages which cover the earth is a stratum in the growth of thought that has to be explored. Every word is a specimen, a record of human thought, that has to be analysed and interpreted.

Parallelism

and Nature.

I do not mean to say that these records can always be completely deciphered, or that there are between the no gaps in the evolution of thought which study of Mind for the present, at least, must be left as they are. But the same applies to the evolution of nature also, and yet it does not dishearten its students. Here too there remain many riddles and many breaks, and yet the general conviction that there was a continuous progress in nature from the lowest to the highest point, is not shaken thereby. In studying these two developments, that of nature and that of mind, we start from the same principles, and we aim at the same results. We ought therefore to follow the same method.

It is interesting to see how the parallelism of these Nâmarûpa. two developments has been anticipated, vaguely, it is true, by the earliest philosophers of

India. Thus we read in the Aitareya-âranyaka Upanishad, I. 4, 7, 'All this was undeveloped; it became developed by forms and names.' We have only to substitute species, i.e. eidos, for forms, and we have here the recognition of that very parallelism which I have tried to illustrate on the one side the development of objective nature by so-called species, on the other the development of subjective mind by names.

Was man ever

guage?

But if we mean to treat the problem of the origin of reason in the same spirit in which the evolutionist treats the problem of the without lanorigin of nature, we must not shrink from the question, whether there was a time when language and, therefore, reason did not yet exist. Now, if our first tenet is right, if language and reason are identical, or two names or two aspects only of one and the same thing, and if secondly we cannot doubt that language had an historical beginning, and represents the work of man carried on through many thousands of years, we cannot avoid the conclusion that, before those many thousands of years, there was a time when the first stone of the great temple of language was laid, and that before that time man was without language, and therefore without reason.

This sounds at first very alarming, but I see no escape from it. Other philosophers too, who reason fearlessly, have arrived at the same conclusion.

Physiologists, for instance, on comparing the oldest human skulls that have lately been dis- The mental covered, have pointed out that some of tubercle. them are without the mental or genial tubercle. This mental or genial tubercle has nothing to do with mens or genius, at least, not directly, but its name

is derived from mentum, chin, or yévus or yeveiás, chin. It is, in fact, a small bony projection or excrescence, in which the muscle of the tongue is inserted. In the skull, discovered in 1866 in the cave of La Naulette, in Belgium, and described by Professor de Mortillet, that mental tubercle is absent. In place of it there is a hollow, as with monkeys. Therefore Professor de Mortillet argues: 'Speech, or articulate language, is produced by movements of the tongue in certain ways. These movements are effected mainly by the action of the muscle inserted in the genial tubercle. The existence of this tubercle is therefore essential to the possession of language. Animals which have not the power of speech do not possess the genial tubercle. If, then, this tubercle is absent in the Naulette jawbone, it is because the man of Neanderthal, the "Chellean man," was incapable of articulate speech1.

Philosophers, too, have arrived at the same conclu

Geiger's

answer.

sion. Lazar Geiger, for instance, to whom the philosophy of language owes so much, expresses his conviction that although, as far as our observation reaches, man is always rational, yet he cannot always have been so.' 'Reason,' he says, 'does not date from all eternity, but, like everything else on earth, it had an origin, a beginning in time. Like the species of living beings, reason did not spring into existence suddenly, finished and in all its perfection, as it were by a kind of catastrophe, but it has had its own development. We have in language an inestimable and indispensable instrument for seeing this, nay, I believe that whatever plausible

1 See Horatio Hale, On the Origin of Languages, p. 31.

theories on the descent of man may have been started elsewhere, certainty and assurance can be obtained from language only.'

It seems impossible to break through this argument, nor do I wish to refute it, though I shall try to show that it requires an important modification. To take reason as something given, ready at hand whenever we want to apply it to the brute material supplied by the senses, this view, still held by Kant and by most of what may be called the classics among philosophers, is no longer possible in an age which has learnt to look upon the very Alps as the slow accumulation of infinitesimal atoms, and upon the most highly organised animals as the descendants of a Moneres.

Difference

between rationalis and rationabilis.

We must be careful, however, not to be carried away by the philosophical fashion of the day. When Geiger says that man was not always rational, he really means rationalis, but not rationabilis, and between these two the difference is immense 1. The non-rational cannot become rational, as little as the non-sentient can become sentient. How is it

1 Kant made the same distinction long ago, when in his Pragmatische Anthropologie, p. 652, he wrote: Man was not always an animal rationale, but only an animal rationabile; he became rational through his own exertion, and chiefly through the two organs of his fashioning hand and his social language.' Nay, Kant went even further, for he thinks it possible that 'under the influence of great evolutions of nature a new epoch may still follow in which the Orang-Outang and the Chimpanzee might develop their organs of walking, grasping, and speaking into the structure of man, and might develop an organ for the use of the understanding which should gradually become more perfect through social culture.' I do not understand such possibilities, and they hardly seem to lie within the sphere of practical philosophy.

possible,' Noiré writes, 'that from unconscious and nonsentient matter consciousness and sensation should shine forth, unless the inner quality, though in a dark and to us hardly perceptible manner, belonged before to those substances from which the first animal life, in its most elementary form, was developed1?' We are not concerned at present with the question of a possible transition from unconscious. meaning of and non-sentient to conscious and sentient qualitates matter (we saw that a Monon, in order to exist at all, must be self-conscious), but only with the development of a sentient into a rational being, or, as others would express it, from an animal into man.

The true

occultae.

And here it may possibly be objected that the inner quality, of which Noiré speaks, is only a new name for those qualitates occultae which are the terror of modern philosophy. But because modern philosophy has shown that such terms as occult qualities, innate ideas, faculties and instincts have been subjected to much abuse, it does not follow that these terms, musty with the crust of long-accumulated misconceptions, should be thrown away altogether, like broken toys. Every one of these terms, if only carefully defined, has a legitimate meaning, and if people would but try to see through the veil of language, they would find that at no time have the thoughts conveyed by these terms exercised a more powerful sway than at present, when evolution and potential energy are the watchwords of the ruling philosophy.

It would really take away one of the most important instruments of thought, if we were not

1 Der Ursprung der Sprache, p. 193.