THEORIES OF THE ANCIENTS.

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It is, then, the province of language to find for the activity of our mind, utterance through our organs of speech, to reflect the inner picture (idea) on the outward world by means of sound. It will, therefore, be perfect in proportion as it expresses all spiritual life, not only in abbreviations and fragments, as a groan or a laugh would do, but fully and completely, and as it follows thought instantly, never lagging behind its heaven-born companion. This is, of course, beyond its power: as the body is unable, the flesh too weak, to follow all the impulses and desires of our immortal soul, so the bodily word renders but imperfectly the imponderable thought, and rests content with making it tangible and intelligible to others.

The immediate and first connection between thought and word is still a hidden secret. Efforts have, it is true, frequently been made to fathom the mysteries of the birth of language, shrouded, as they are, in the same sacred veil which seems to envelop the first stage of all organic life. The germ of plants is not more securely hid in the dark bosom of the earth, before its tender green blade rises joyously to the light of heaven, than the word of man until its first accents fall from his lips. To trace language to its birth has, therefore, so far been a fruitless attempt. We smile at Psammetichus of Egypt,* and his curious discovery that Phrygian was the primitive language of mankind, because two children which he had ordered to be isolated from man, and to be fed by goats, uttered as their first sound the word, bekos, which happened to be the Phrygian for bread-and a tolerable imitation of the bleating of goats, be

*Herod. ii. 2. Comp. Fragm. Hist. Graec. I. 22, 23.

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sides. Whilst the Greeks were wisely content, under Plato's guidance, to ascribe the origin of language to divine inspiration, the less elevated views of Roman philosophers saw in it little more than the effect of chance, convenience or necessity. More refined, perhaps, though equally unsatisfactory, are the beautiful but fantastic visions of J. J. Rousseau, who ascribes the origin of language to the influence of the passions, and, of course, first and foremost to love. If this were true, the grammarians of Port Royal slily insinuated,--the world might have had a mysterious, secret language, like ancient Egypt, only that here the young, boys and girls, would have been the teachers, and the old the pupils.

Lord Monboddo, whose pride it was to have discovered that men were monkeys, has, of course, his theory on language also; but as he was more skilful in detecting "ends" than beginnings, his doctrine is simply absurd. Nor can we believe that the well-earned fame of Murray has ever been attributed to his great discovery, that nine sounds, expressive of various kinds of strokes-ag, bag, dwag, gwag, lag, mag, nag, rag and scragformed the foundation of all languages!

The materialist philosophers of our day who have attempted to solve this problem, are disposed to see in words originally mere interjections. They consider language, therefore, as the result of a successful imitation of outward sounds, and believe, with the ancients, that Palamedes, at the siege of Troy, learnt his four new letters from the cranes that passed him on their way to warmer climes! They attach, of course, the greatest importance to so-called onomatopoemata, words repeating the impression made upon the ear, as: bang, boom, hiss, pop, buzz,

whirr, gush and gasp; and with profound reverence quote old Roman words of the kind, as cachinnare, hinnire, pipulum, grunnire, coaxare, crocire, cuculus, ululare, &c. Their views. have led to extravagant notions and the wildest sport with apparent connections between the meaning of words and the letters with which they are written. But interjections are sounds, and remain sounds only, the involuntary expression of inwardly felt sensations, like hunger and thirst, pleasure or pain -such, in fact, as violent excitement causes even animals to utter. They are, therefore, unarticulated, purely animal sounds, the echo of a blind instinct within, and, in all cases, the result of mere passiveness under the influence of such instinctive impulses from within, or of unexpected phenomena in the outer world. These sounds, which have actually furnished us with a certain class of words, would, no doubt, amply repay more careful study by explaining the peculiar system of vocalization in many languages, and might throw much light upon such peculiarities as the five musical notes of the Chinese which give as many meanings to the same word, or the strange intonation prevailing in some islands of the Pacific. But they cannot explain the creation of words; for unarticulated sounds are not words, which, to be words, must originate in a conscious effort. of mind, and thus bear the unmistakable mark of deliberate intent and special purpose.

The spiritualists, on the other hand, following Kant on most slippery, speculative ground, assume little less than a constant miracle, by which the mind-born idea becomes-in a still mysterious manner-articulated sound. If, as Bunsen admirably sums up, one school cannot take the step from matter to

thought the other fails to explain the instantaneous change of thought into matter. This only Kant says clearly and truly, that ideas are embodied in words, and that the divine mind granted to man creates and fashions these words by a mysterious power. Mysterious it ever has been, and still is, even to the most learned of our scholars. Bopp, when speaking of the history of language, says simply: "The mystery of roots we leave untouched;" and Frederick Schlegel had just written, in the MS. of his Philosophy of Language, the word "but," when he died, leaving us a doubt as the only legacy from the vast stores of his erudition.

And yet it is this very power, mysterious though it be, which we must know before we can form even a speculative view of the general principles by which language is formed. Human power it evidently is not, or we would know at least one instance of the creation of a language in historical times. But we search in vain through the annals of the human race for the least record of a newly-formed tongue, and never yet has a language been found that is not already at or even beyond the stage of perfect grammatical organization. In vain do we examine the languages of the most barbarous nations of the earth -even in the lowest and most imperfect idioms we find, according to Humboldt, already all that is necessary for complete use at present and a future development. Hence the opinion shared by the highest authorities, that the circle of original languages was closed before the dawn of history, and that there was assigned a certain epoch to the appearance of idioms, as there were others given in geology and zoology to other forms and created objects.

LANGUAGE A GIFT OF THE CREATOR.

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If human power, alone, cannot produce or create a language, reason alone is as little able to do it. For, however direct an manation of the Divine Creator we may consider our intellectual faculties, stil thought exists only in words, and reason and language must, therefore, be coexistent. Animals do not speak, because they cannot think, and are, therefore, in the poet's lauguage, both "mutum" and "turpe pecus;" with the Greeks, Móyos was word as well as reason; so "ratio" to the Romans. Eastern nations express the same idea by a kind of proverbial saying: "Speak and thou art." The child-" infans," one who cannot speak begins to speak as it begins to think, and words increase as thinking improves, in both cases, not by adding, but by multiplying thoughts and words; and thus men who think profoundly, sages, poets and orators, have also the greatest control over language.

It remains, therefore, only to assume that speech is a faculty, planted in the inmost nature of man, and connected with him as intimately as the reasoning faculties of his mind or the perceptive faculties of his senses. Faculties, however, man cannot give himself; they are gifts granted only by the Almighty. The power of expressing thoughts by sounds, which we call speech, would thus appear to be, more or less, the work of inspirationat least an immediate gift to man, not to be analyzed nor explained. The word is, surely, not less truly a work of God's hand, than the leaf, the pebble or the insect. If the latter are His handiwork through the formative process of natural law or of animal life, the word is created by Him through those higher laws which regulate our intellectual and moral life. It is thus that language appears as the never-ceasing labor of the