My purpose in this book is not to compare languages as in linguistic science, or to trace their concrete development as in language history; but to describe the problem which gave birth to language, to show the place of language in the general scheme of world evolution, and to point out its basic structure in relation to the two forms of sense, Space and Time. I have dealt at some length with Herder and his time because that period was the beginning of the modern movement in language investigation in which we are still engaged. For the next hundred years, from Herder’s essay in 1772 to Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871, I can only touch some of the peaks in the development of linguistic theory and science, that, in their combined results, have prepared the way for the present inquiry, and that may help to give the perspective necessary to set the fabric of language clearly in its place among the other phenomena of the world. If this mode of treatment should appear to the language specialist as in some degree wanting in the ‘hard factualness’ of language, the explanation is that the inclusion of such factual material would not contribute to the investigation in hand. If one can make clear the world-problem which called language into existence, and show the structure which language was destined to assume in order to answer this problem, then the way should be better prepared and the impulse quickened for tracing man’s first steps and subsequent windings in the actual making of language.

The investigation of language, as pointed out in the last chapter, had been carried on for a hundred years in the belief that language was a unique characteristic of man, and did not extend to the animal world beneath him. But with the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871 the whole problem of language was suddenly expanded into a much wider region. Darwin, in that book, distinctly challenged the human boundaries that had been set to language as being artificial and arbitrary, and extended the problem over into the animal world, maintaining that the difference between the language of man and the cries of animals was not a difference in kind, as had been formerly thought, but a difference in degree only, a difference in definiteness of connotation and distinctness of articulation. This difference in language followed naturally, he maintained, upon the difference in degree of their mental development.

What, then, is the difference between the central unifying faculty of reason in man, out of which language arose, and the corresponding central faculty in the animals, which expresses itself in a few natural cries; and how in our present state of knowledge can this difference be distinctly brought into view and described in a concrete way? This is a complex question, and can be best answered for our purpose by breaking it into four parts.

The Prime, that willed ere wareness was,
Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws.

THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts.

Question one. What were the nature and characteristics of the world in its three main divisions of matter, plant life, and animal life, before it emerged to its fourth main division in the explicitly conscious life of man? The answer to this question carries us backward in time to a period so remote from the present that no answer would be at all possible were it not that in his emergence to consciousness man rose above the time-stream of sense, and by the help of language has been able to recover and reconstruct the otherwise irrecoverable past. While the actual sense-facts which constituted the natural environment contemporary with man’s emergence have long since vanished in the stream of change, we know now, from our knowledge of the past and present, that in any piece of virgin timber or park land of to-day we should have, substantially and typically, the same natural environment from which man emerged thousands of years ago. We should have, first of all, the same inorganic world of fixed geographic relations and definite structures: sun, moon, stars, clouds, winds, waters, soil, rocks, etc.; second, the differentiated forms of organic insentient life: grass, flowers, shrubs, trees, etc.; third, the various forms of sentient life: fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals; all these multitudinous forms, inorganic and organic, differentiated from each other and united with each other in a complete network of space, time, and causal relations.

Both the mechanistic and the organic hypotheses agree that in the world as it stands at present we find not only matter, but also life, mind, and purpose. The mechanistic hypothesis, however, as I understand it, holds that this earth was originally a purely inorganic world without life, mind, or purpose, governed by purely mechanical laws alone; and that at some point of time in the relatively recent past, life got started upon the surface of this mechanical world by some kind of ‘biological accident,’ and having got started in ‘one or more primordial forms’ it then set out on a course of evolution impelled by a strong reproductive impulse, presumably co-accidental with life itself; and with a strong tendency to reproduce or repeat the type, coupled with a lesser tendency to slight variations and an occasional tendency to a great variation, it gradually differentiated its ‘one or more primordial forms’ into many genera and species of life, each species or genus then moving forward towards greater and greater perfection under the operation of ‘natural selection,’ until we have the multi-variegated organic world as we find it to-day.

The organic hypothesis holds that the world was at no time of its evolution a merely purposeless mechanical world, in which matter was prior to mind in the time order. The real original world was already and always a world of matter, life, mind, and purpose, actual or latent. Matter on this hypothesis is regarded not as an independent substance in its own right, but as the means or material through which the life and mind of the world works itself out from its potential to its actual destiny. The life-force, or mind-force, or whatever we may call it in its earlier stages, works within the sensuous material of the world, and gradually shapes and moulds this material first into what we now call inorganic formations, and then, in the ripeness of time and environment, into those organic forms in which the lifeprinciple rises into recognizable living shapes, and emerges into actual objective existence.

The entire phenomenon of the organic world divides itself by its external behaviour into three well-defined classes, plant life, animal life, and man, each class with new and original characteristics of its own. To trace and mark these new characteristics as they emerge in their time-evolution upwards through plant and animal life to where the life-and-mind of the world eventually emerges from its unfreed and inconscious activity to its freed and conscious activity in the life and mind of man, is our next step.