242 CHAPTER XX. THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. No being on earth but man needs language because no other requires teaching, but the very structure of his mind demands instruction in order to its complete development, and therefore he requires to be taught language. No other creature is capable of mental improvement; no other has a mind to improve. And no being incapable of perceiving the unuttered reason, the latent mental and moral capacity of man, could have informed the intellect or inspired the conscience of man. And as He who imparted the power to learn truth could alone impart the truth to be learnt, so He alone could devise the appropriate means of conveying thought from one mind to another by the ready channel of the ear in the utterance of articulate sounds. He who made the mind of man thus to be awakened, could alone so accommodate that mind as to teach the first man to think while teaching him to speak. The same love that provides in the parent a teacher of words and thoughts to the child, was required to act in the same direct manner towards the first human being, who was truly the son of God. Is any degree of accommodation to such a being as a newly-created man unbecoming in the Almighty? To teach man as only he could be taught -that is, just as a child is taught by a parent--were no condescension in the Omnipotent, but only consistency; for He it is who speaks in the heart of every loving parent. He cannot condescend in the vulgar sense, because He is the same in the least as in the greatest; there is no minimus in maximo to Him; atoms are as much His care as worlds; and it the first man could have no other teacher God taught him. Is not the spirit of man made on purpose to receive God's thoughts in words as those of love? And can love condescend? No, because it is love, and must accomplish whatever is needed to reveal itself; and what is that but the revelation of the Eternal Reason to the responsive created reason by all means which the condition of man may render necessary? Language was as much required to meet the first man's necessities as a thinking and social being, as food for his bodily sustenance. Words and meanings are the food for the rational soul, and who could supply them to that soul at first but the soul's Creator? The gift of language is implied in man's possession of a capacity to receive it; but language is not a gift in the same sense as the capacity for language. A language is not made by one being to be bestowed at once upon another. The spirit, will, and intellect must be trained progressively, as if by lesson on lesson, to receive it. There must be sympathy between the giver and receiver, a correspondence between the teacher and the taught, an active energy put forth towards the acquisition. Intuition and innate faculty for language could not originate language, they could only employ it when provided. That man's mind might obtain ideas concerning use and beauty, order, plan, purpose, the feeling of the good as one with the true, a personal presence and a voice were required to educate it to the full appreciation of its own powers. The teacher of the first man possessed the power of inspiring the ideas or thoughts he desired to convey while in the act of uttering their vocal signs, or they would have fallen on the ear without significance; and as surely as the Maker of the mind is the author of thoughts, He also fitted thoughts with words and fixed them in the memory of our great forefather as uttered powers. The only obstacle to the belief of the statement informing us that God himself taught man in a human manner, is the difficulty of conceiving the fact. The same difficulty is experienced in receiving any truth with which we are not familiar. It is, however, as easy to conceive the Divinity directly operating in a human manner towards a human being, as to conceive the creation of that being. All truths and facts of existence in respect to their origination are equally removed from the sphere of our conception, and we receive them as facts and truths, not because we can understand how they became such, but only because we can no otherwise account for their existence than as the results of Divine operation. That man was from the first taught to speak is more consonant with our apprehension of the nature and necessity of the occasion than any of the theories propounded by those who reject the narrative on which we ground our belief that man was instructed directly by his Maker. There are three theories on the subject, but all rather more difficult to conceive as truth than the statement which asserts the presence and voice of God, evinced in a human manner, as the efficient causes and means of man's instruction. We have first the theory that human beings were produced not only in ones and twos, but in multitudes as speechless as brutes, a theory which, by the by, does not account for speech at all, except as a lucky accident of dumb endeavour. The next theory supposes an intuitive inspiration to speak, as a matter of course, even before language was needed. The third theory accounts for words by man's sympathy with outward nature that has no words. 1. An example of the mute origin of language is that of the Rev. Dunbar Heath, M.A., F.R.S.L., F.A.S.L., who explains the peopling of Europe and the rise of tongues by supposing that European apes at one period abounded, and that these were the fathers of European men, who were at first dumb, but who at length 'gasped after articulation' and got it. He says: 'I confine myself to the accepting and explaining known and knowable phenomena. It is known that anthropoids existed throughout Europe. It is knowable that they became mute men. It is knowable that those mutes gasped after articulation, and in a few spots attained to it. Those who did so at one particular spot, I call Aryans, whether that spot was in Asia or in the submerged continent of Atlantis.'* Those who would know the knowable and learn how red apes became mute men and then gasped after articulation, may possibly discover the modus operandi in the article referred to; or, if they fail, they may blame the blood of the red apes still meandering through their dull brains, for the theory is expounded in a manner quite appropriate to the theory itself, with more of the knowable than the known, and perhaps more of the knowing than the knowable. 2. The intuition theory is practically expressed by Milton, who, however, writes rather as the poet than the philosopher, and seems in this matter, as in several others, to have misread the narrative on which he ostensibly founds his poem. He thus makes Adam reply to the inquisitive angel who wished to be informed how he happened to be such a good conversationalist : to speak I tried and forthwith spoke; My tongue obey'd, and readily I named Whate'er I saw Why the first man should thus exercise his talents in naming what he saw when names were of no use to anyone is not very evident, even poetically speaking. Such a meaningless exuberance of talk only reminds us of certain unknown tongues, too unreasonable to be attributed to inspiration as a Divine gift. To utter articulate sounds as a mere play of the speaking faculty * Anthropological Review, No. xiii. p. 36. |