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Show 474 THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUAL AND SPECIES. [June 17, clearly see in what distinctively human language really consists. us then suppose a man and a brute to be standing under an oak-tree which begins to fall. The falling tree will produce similar effects upon the senses of both man and brute; both will instinctively fly from the danger, and both may cry out from alarm, and both, by their cries or gestures, may give rise to similar feelings of alarm in other men or brutes. Such language, whether vocal or of gesture, is emotional language only; but the man may do what the brute cannot do : he may emit the vocal sounds, " That oak is falling," and these words are the expression and embodiment of three universal abstract ideas:- 1. The word "oak" is a conventional sign for the idea "oak," and is a universal, abstract term applicable to every actual or possible oak. It denotes no single subsisting thing, but a whole group of things. 2. The word "is" denotes the most important of all abstract ideas-the idea of existence, or being. It is an idea (expressed in every human tongue) which we must possess in order to perform any intellectual act. It is an idea which, though not itself at first adverted to, makes all other ideas intelligible to us, as light, though itself unseen, renders everything else visible to us. 3. The word " falling " is a term denoting an abstract quality, and is evidently of very wide application, namely, to everything which may fall. Yet the idea itself is one single idea. Thus all human language (apart from mere emotional manifestations) necessarily implies and gives expression to a number of abstract ideas. It is impossible for a savage to speak the simplest sentence without having formed such ideas for himself. Is it then for a moment possible to suppose that any man deliberately invented language ? Vocal and gesture signs are essentially conventional, and require comprehension on the part of those addressed as well as on the part of those who use them. Analogous considerations apply to the first beginnings of literature, art, science, and politics, which could not therefore have been consciously and deliberately invented. The evolutions of these lofty forms of human activity are those cases of highest and most complex instinctive human actions before referred to1, which can no more be due to "lapsed intelligence" than they can be accounted for by mere compound reflex action. To do more, however, than thus briefly to refer to these matters would be to wander beyond the proper scope of this paper. Its aim is but to call attention to the close correlation which exists between the various orders of vital activity which have been now referred to, and to throw out the suggestion that it is rather in "Instinct" than in any other of these various forms of activity, that the best and most apposite type of the whole group is to be found. Such I believe to be the case, whether it may or may not be expedient to devise some different generic term to denote the whole group of such correlated activities. 1 See ante, p. 46f>, the first line. |