Chapter V: Cities and Peoples (2)

He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin by putting aside all the philologist’s apparatus and observe how a hunter speaks to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He listens, tense, to the sound of the word, but shakes his head--this kind of man-speech he does not understand. Then he makes one or two sentences to indicate _his_ idea; he stands still and barks, which in his language is a sentence containing the question: “Is that what Master means?” Then, still in dog language, he expresses his pleasure at finding that he was right. In just the same way two men who do not really possess a single word in common seek to understand one another. When a country parson explains something to a peasant-woman, he looks at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic mode of expression. The locutions of to-day, without exception, are capable of comprehension only in association with other modes of speech--adequate by themselves they are not, and never have been.

If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds a vocal expression--he barks--and finally an expression of attitude--he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the obtuse one who has not yet learned to talk.

Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master, he suddenly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of the human. Something deeply mysterious is happening here--the immediate contact of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of waking-consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the dog has become a “judge” of men, looking his opposite straight in the eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.

Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word, and the grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary meanings of the words he or she is using--that is, the sound-forms in this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words. Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it do all the work without assistance from tone- and gesture-language. Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in the form of punctuation.

It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses language in general with human word-language--and that not merely theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the vast profusion of speech-modes of different kinds that are in common use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole, is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone (an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the “origin of human speech,” the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the problem. Verbal speech--for that is what is meant--never had origins at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain stage in man’s history, must not deceive us as to its position in the history of free-moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly ought not to begin with man.

But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic existences are _in plurality_ is a matter of simple self-evidence. To speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there, still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly and livingly sensible, of a “we,” and reaching out to one another for linkages of waking-consciousness.

Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the plant-state--i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition, procreation, defence, attack--one side of it regularly consists in getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is a definite _will to receive impression_; this we call orientation. But, besides, there exists from the beginning a _will to produce impression in the other_--what we call expression--and with that, at once, we have _speaking as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness_. Since then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world-languages of high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.

But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear. The waking-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is one’s first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious connexion with him. The “thou” is deliverance from the fear of the being-alone. _The discovery of the Thou_, the sense of another self resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien, is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon animals _are_. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny world of a water-droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the discovery of the Thou, and _with it that of the I_ has been taking place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness, and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an expression-_speech_.

It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great speech-groups. Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims purely at effects upon him, while communication-speech regards him as a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive impressions with one’s own feeling of their significance, and it is on this that the effect of the highest form of human expression-speech, art, depends.[179] To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation, postulates that the Other’s feeling of significances is the same as one’s own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of all expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the elementary unit of all communication-technique--including, therefore, at the highest level, human speech.

Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea. Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and strict ornament--which in the beginning coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle of the expression--but also the solemn ceremonial--whose web of formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the family[180]--and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a _uniform_ significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the “mode” in our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest’s robes, orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and Montezuma--not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this _is_ religion.

The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are concerned) three outstanding signs--picture, sound, and gesture, which in the script-speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.

In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the _detachment of speaking from speech_. Of all processes in the history of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a _definite stock of signs offers itself_ for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated _from their significance_. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended; it is _not an organism, but a system_, which possesses its own _causal_ logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two beings.

This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it is associated. _The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school._ This is fully developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the artist, the “well-brought-up” human being. And from this point each community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its language--i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists--as his _personal_ Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic--in a lifelong process of education and training _for_ this life. And consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of its own exigences--whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This _maestria_ extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours, with the fugues of Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias,[181] we have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.

Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a set language can hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire waking-consciousness through such forms--of which there is no longer a sensed process of formation _ad hoc_, but which are just simply there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the word--lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and feeling within the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first, to feel the _known_ speech-medium and, secondly, to understand the intention put into it on _this_ occasion. Consequently the kernel of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge. Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to learn. “Understanding” is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the _negative_ ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally valid--the ideals of Church and School.

But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking. The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning--from the outset we feel that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to say something, the words “fail” one (_versagen_, mis-say); that one does not “express oneself aright” and in fact says something other than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art--which is widespread even amongst animals (e.g., cats)--of “using words to conceal thoughts.” One says not everything, one says something quite different, one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The red-backed shrike (_Lanius collurio_) imitates the strophes of small song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-known hunter’s dodge, but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it, just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language of every religion, every art, every society--we need only refer to the ideas expressed by the words “hypocrite,” “orthodox,” “heretic,” the English “cant,” the secondary senses of “diplomat,” “Jesuit,” “actor,” the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day, in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the eye untruth in every imaginable form.

In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an intellectual art of _playing_ with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the Romantics--by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.

_Finally, speech and truth exclude one another._[182] And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical “judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance--and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic--that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom _one_ language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”

The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.

V

Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater consequences than that which in its present state we call “word.” It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an “origin” of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a zero-point for speech generally. A precise beginning is inconceivable for the latter because it is compresent with and contained in the essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presupposes many fully developed kinds of communication-speech and constitutes only one element--though in the end the dominant element--of a slow and quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however diametrically opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of Jespersen[183] that they investigate speaking in words as if it were something new and self-contained, which inevitably leads them into a radically false psychology. In reality verbal language is a very late phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom borne by one of the ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.

In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which are much more primary than the language of the word, and with which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present-day word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us has very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny within the history of the whole. There is not one sense-perception that would be wholly irrelevant to an adequate history of the use of words. Further, we must distinguish very strictly between vocal and verbal languages; the former is familiar even to the simpler genera of animals, the latter is in certain characters--individual characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that--a radically different thing. For every animal voice-language, further, expression-motives (a roar of anger) and communication-signs (a cry of warning) can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may be said of the earliest words. But was it, then, as an expression- or as a communication-language that verbal language _arose_? Was it in quite primitive conditions, independent, more or less, of any and every visual language such as picture and gesture? To such questions we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the pre-forms of the “word,” properly so called, were. Naïve indeed is the philology which uses what we of to-day call “primitive” languages (in reality, incomplete pictures of very _late_ language-conditions) as premisses for conclusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is in them an already established, highly developed, and self-evident means--i.e., precisely what anything “originally” is _not_.

There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the future word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of the animal world was that which I call “name”--a vocal image serving to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming became a numen.[184] It is unnecessary to speculate as to how the first names came to be--no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least _point d’appui_ here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological factor--if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they would affect--not even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul[185]), but _a profound spiritual change_. With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures together in the longing to prove each other’s reality and proximity--then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. The Name grazes the _meaning_ of consciousness and the _source_ of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression- and communication-language, man names _that which is enigmatic_. It is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly, reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it. _With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man._ It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with the Name religion in the proper sense, _definite_ religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious _thought_. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very significant idiom, that we “reflect on,” “think _over_,” something. With the understanding of things-named the formation of a _higher_ world, _above_ all sensational existence, is begun--“higher” both according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.

These first names we have to think of as quite separate and individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed sound- and gesture-language, the richness of which we can no longer imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to the word-languages, and their further developments have been in dependent connexion therewith.[186] One thing, however, was assured when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of communication-technique--the pre-eminence of the eye over the other sense-organs. Man’s awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated space, his depth-experience[187] was a radiation outward towards light-sources and light-resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a middle point in the light. “Visible” or “invisible” was the alternative which governed the state of understanding in which the first names arose. Were the first _numina_, perhaps, things of the light-world that were felt, heard, observed in their effects, _but not seen_? No doubt the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-point in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly and powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses the properties of position and duration in space, was--in the midst of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and subject!--very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in the memory, for what we now call “memory” is the capacity of storing for the understanding, by means of the name, _the named_. Over the realm of understood visuals (_Sehdinge_) supervenes a more intellectual realm of namings, which shares with it the logical property of being purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions (which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E’we languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and near, passive and active.[188] Later these relics of gesture-language pass completely into the word-form,[189] as we see clearly, for example, in the Greek μακρός and μικρός and the _u_-sounds of Egyptian designations of suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites which, starting from these antithetical word-pairs, constitutes the foundation of all inorganic logic, and turns every scientific discovery of truths into a movement of conceptual contraries, of which the most universal instance is that of an old view and a new one being contrasted as “error” and “truth.”

The second great turning-point was the use of _grammar_. Besides the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection--which is a thinking in word-relations that follows from the perception of things for which word-labels exist--became the decisive characteristic of man’s waking-consciousness. The question whether the communication-languages already contained effective “sentences” before the appearance of the genuine “name” is a difficult one. The sentence, in the _present_ acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but nevertheless it postulates the _prior_ existence of the name. Sentences as conceptual relations become possible only with the intellectual change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further that within the highly developed wordless languages one character or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use, was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon foundations of far older construction, and for its further development is _not_ dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny.

It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group of individual _names_ was transformed into a system of words, whose character was given, not by their proper, but by their grammatical significance. The name made its appearance as something novel and entirely self-contained. But word-species arose as elements of the sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking-consciousness streamed in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demanding to be labelled and represented in it, until finally even “all” became, in one shape or another, a word and available for the thought-process.

Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element--we speak in sentences and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent, but never successful. According to F. N. Finck, word-formation is an analytical and sentence-formation a synthetical activity of the mind, the first preceding the second. It is demonstrable that the same actuality received as impression is variously understood, and words, therefore, are definable from very different points of view.[190] But according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal expression of a _thought_, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connexion of several _ideas_ in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible to settle the nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is simply that we call the relatively largest mechanical units employed “sentences” and the relatively smallest “words.” Over this range extends the validity of grammatical _laws_. But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but _pulse_. Thus a race-character is involved, _a priori_, in the way in which the matter to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, _the blood_, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the _mechanical_ relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins--usages, custom, the _physiognomy_ of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English “_th_” is pronounced--a race-trait of the land. Only that which lies between these limits is the “language,” properly so called, which has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the _race_. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German. The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form of sentence and word.

Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension. Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field, his word is something like this: “living, one, big, old, female, outside, _human_”; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single, clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.[191] There are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.

The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages. The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more precise, consists in this, that through word-sounds we awaken significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of the word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form not only light-things and light-relations, but also thought-things and thought-relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech. Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even, but verb-signs never.

The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated space[192] become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe _types_ of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. “Falling stone” is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved and then isolate falling as one _kind_ of movement from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof--sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not “see” the distinction, we “know” it. The difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself--namely, singularity of occurrence--is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but in the verb _something inorganic has been put in place of something organic_. The fact that we live--namely, that we at this instant perceive something--becomes eventually a _property_ of the something perceived. In terms of word-thought, the perceived endures--“is.” Thus, finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension, Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic thought arises.

And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness. This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation. Subtle thinking--“splitting hairs,” as it is called--is conversing with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.[193]

Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history. However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists only in the heads of individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned _a priori_ by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean--apart, again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments and not aims in themselves. And this _ignorabimus_ is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers--who are personalities--and not systems--which are mutable--that have taken effect upon life.

VI

So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages. In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless communication-languages, the first names--units in a new sort of understanding. The world awakens _as a secret_, and religious thought begins. In the second stage, a complete communication-speech is gradually transformed into grammatical values. The gesture becomes the sentence, and the sentence transforms the names into words. Further, the sentence becomes the great school of understanding _vis-à-vis_ sensation, and an increasingly subtle significance-feeling for abstract relations within the mechanism of the sentence evokes an immense profusion of inflexions, which attach themselves especially to the substantive and the verb, the space-word and the time-word. This is the blossoming time of grammar, the period of which we may probably (though under all reserves) take as the two millennia preceding the birth of the Egyptian and Babylonian Culture. The third stage is marked by a rapid decay of inflexions and a simultaneous replacement of grammar by syntax. The intellectualization of man’s waking-consciousness has now proceeded so far that he no longer needs the sense-props of inflexion and, discarding the old luxuriance of word-forms, communicates freely and surely by means of the faintest nuances of idiom (particles, position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the understanding has attained supremacy over the waking-consciousness, and to-day it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions of sensible-verbal machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the intellect. Minds and not senses are making the contact.

In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place in the biological plane[194] and therefore belongs to _man as a type_, the history of the higher Cultures now intervenes with an entirely new speech, the speech of the distance--writing--an invention of such inward forcefulness that again there is a sudden decisive turn in the destinies of the word-languages.

The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary languages called _eme-sal_ (women’s language). The written language of China--which _vis-à-vis_ the vernaculars of the Chinese world has long formed a language apart--is, even in the oldest known texts, so entirely inflexionless that only recent research has established that it ever had inflexions at all.[195] The Indogermanic system is known to us only in a state of complete break-down. Of the Case in Old Vedic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later retained only fragments.[196] From Alexander the Great’s time the dual disappeared from the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages, although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable--the Germanic from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock--modify in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose--say of Tacitus or Mommsen--“back”[197] into some very ancient language rich in inflexions does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the signs--abbreviated, but replete with meaning--merely as the counters in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech-communion understand. This is why to a west-European, the sacred Chinese texts must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds good also for the primary words of every other Culture-language--the Greek λογός and ἀρχή, the Sanskrit _Atman_ and _Braman_--indications of the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in the Culture can comprehend.

The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to imagine “humanity” in the form of scattered and quite small troops, lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them, but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first brought the waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface. So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race hall-mark of the grand Number.

Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence, but only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of these _authentic_ primitive languages and their structure and sound we know nothing. As far as our backward look takes us, we see only complete and developed linguistic systems, used by everyone, learned by every child, as something perfectly natural. And we find it more than difficult to imagine that once upon a time things may have been different, that perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such strange and enigmatic language--an awe like that which in historic times has been and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication, verbal language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously preserved class-secret. We have a thousand examples--the diplomats with their French, the scholars with their Latin, the priests with their Sanskrit--to suggest that there may have been such a tendency. It is part of the thoroughbred’s pride to be able to speak to one another in a way that outsiders cannot understand--a language for everybody is a vernacular. To be “on conversational terms with” someone is a privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in talking with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true bourgeois pride. It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is just as normal for children to learn to write as to learn to walk--in all earlier Cultures it was a rare accomplishment, to which few could aspire. And I am convinced that it was just so once with verbal language.

The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture-language of the North Indians,[198] which became necessary because the rapidity of changes in the tribal dialects made intertribal understanding impossible otherwise. Compare, too, the Latin of the recently discovered Forum inscription[199] (about 500) with the Latin of Plautus (about 200) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50). If we assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state of 1200 B.C., then even that of 2000 may have differed from it far more completely than any Indogermanic philologists working by _a posteriori_ methods can even surmise.[200] But _allegro_ changes to _lento_ in the moment when script, the language of duration, intervenes and ties down and immobilizes the systems at entirely different age-levels. This is what makes this evolution so opaque to research; all that we possess is remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Babylonian linguistic world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the oldest Indogermanic relics are _copies_, of which the linguistic state is much younger than the contents.

Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies of the different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to the intellect, the second to things and places. Only grammatical systems are subject to natural inward change. The use of words, on the contrary, psychologically presupposes that, although the expression may change, inner mechanical structure is maintained (and all the more firmly) as being the basis on which denomination essentially rests. _The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families._ The words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another. It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic) research that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All specialist vocabularies--the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman, seaman, savant--are in reality _only stocks of words_, and can be used within any and every grammatical system. The semi-Classical vocabulary of chemistry, the French of diplomacy, and the English of the racecourse have become naturalized in all modern languages alike. We may talk of “alien” words, but the same could have been said at some time or other of most of the “roots,” so-called, in all the old languages. All names adhere to the things that they denote, and share their history. In Greek the names for metals are of alien provenance; words like ταῦρος, χιτῶν, οἶνος are Semitic. Indian numerals are found in the Hittite texts of Boghaz Keüi,[201] and the contexts in which they occur are technical expressions which came into the country with horse-breeding. Latin administrative terms invaded the Greek East,[202] German invaded Petrine Russia in multitudes, Arabic words permeate the vocabulary of Western mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy. The Normans, themselves Germanic, inundated English with French words. Banking, in German-speaking regions, is full of Italian expressions,[203] and similarly and to a far greater extent masses of designations relating to agriculture and cattle-breeding, to metals and weapons, and in general to all transactions of handicraft, barter, and intertribal law, must have migrated from one language to another, just as geographical nomenclature always passed into the proper vocabulary of the dominant language, with the result that Greek contains numerous Carian and German Celtic place-names. It is no exaggeration to say that the more widely an Indogermanic word is distributed, the _younger_ it is, the more likely it is to be an “alien” word. It is precisely the very oldest names that are hoarded as private possessions. Latin and Greek have only quite young words in common. Or do “telephone,” “gas,” “automobile,” belong to the word-stock of the “primitive” people? Suppose, for the sake of argument that three-fourths of the Aryan “primitive” words came from the Egyptian or the Babylonian vocabularies of the third millennium; we should not find a trace of the fact in Sanskrit after a thousand years of unwritten development, for even in German thousands of Latin loan-words have long ago become completely unrecognizable. The ending “-ette” in “Henriette” is Etruscan--how many genuine Aryan and genuine Semitic endings, notwithstanding their thoroughly alien origin, defy us to prove them intruders? What is the explanation of the astounding similarity of many words in the Australian and the Indogermanic languages?

The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the most intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth to-day, but did it really exist at all in 2000 as a specific grammatical edifice? As is well known, a single initial form for Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as probable. The oldest Indian texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (probably) before 1200, the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian personal and divine names occur in Syria and Palestine,[204] simultaneously with the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates.[205] May it be that about 1600 these land-Vikings, these first _Reiter_--men grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the Centaur-legend--established themselves more or less everywhere in the Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bringing with them the speech and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryan-speaking regions without any necessity for “migrations” of a “primitive” folk. After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their states in the East--and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with Mitanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before.

Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a language that is lost? The Romanic language-family about A.D. 1600 dominated all the seas. About 400 B.C. the “original” language on the Tiber possessed a domain of little more than a thousand square miles. It is certain that the geographical picture of the grammatical families at about 4000 was still very variegated. The Semitic-Hamitic-Aryan group (_if_ it ever did form a unit) can hardly have been of much importance at that time. We stumble at every turn upon the relics of old speech-families--Etruscan, Basque, Sumerian, Ligurian, the ancient tongues of Asia Minor, and others--that in their day must have belonged to very extensive systems. In the archives of Boghaz-Keüi eight new languages have so far been identified, all of them in use about the year 1000. With the then prevailing tempo of modification, Aryan may in 2000 have formed a unit with languages that we should never dream of associating with it.

VII

Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the relations of man’s waking-consciousness, in that it _liberates it from the tyranny of the present_. Picture-languages which portray objects are far older, older probably than any words; but here the picture is no longer an immediate denotation of some sight-object, but primarily the sign of a word--i.e., something already abstract from sensation. It is the first and only example of a language that demands, without itself providing, the necessary preparatory training.

Script, therefore, presupposes a fully developed grammar, since the activity of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that of speaking and hearing. Reading consists in scanning a script-image _with a feeling of the significances of corresponding word-sounds_; what script contains is not signs for things, but signs for other signs. The grammatical sense must be enlarged by instantaneous comprehension.