Chapter 7

In this instrumentality, which has been of such extraordinary value to man, the lower animals are strikingly deficient. They are not quite devoid of vocal language, though it is doubtful if any of the sounds made by them have a much higher linguistic office than that of the interjection. But emotional sounds, to which these belong, are not destitute of value in conveying intelligence. They embrace cries of warning, appeals to affection, demands for help, calls for food supplies, threats, and other indications of passion, fear, or feeling. And the significance of these vocal sounds to animals may often be higher than we suppose. That is, they may not be limited to the vague character of the interjection, but may occasionally convey a specific meaning, indicative of some object or some action. In other words, they may advance from the interjection toward the noun or the verb, and approach in value the verbal root, a sound which embraces a complete proposition. Thus a cry of warning may be so modulated as to indicate to the hearer, "Beware, a lion is coming!" or to convey some other specific warning. We know that accent or tone plays a great part in Chinese speech, the most primitive of existing forms, a variation in tone quite changing the meaning of words. The same may be the case with the sounds uttered by animals to a much greater extent than we suppose.

We know this to be the case with some of the birds. The common fowl of our poultry yards has a variety of distinct calls, each understood by its mates, while special modulations of some call or cry are not uncommon among birds. The mammalia are not fluent in vocal powers, their range of tones being limited, yet they certainly convey definite information to one another. Recent observers have come to the conclusion that the apes do, to a certain extent, talk with one another. The experiments to prove this have not been very satisfactory, yet they seem to indicate that the woodland cries of the apes possess a certain range of definite meaning.

We are utterly ignorant of what powers of speech the man-ape possessed. It must, in its developed state as a land-dwelling, wandering, and hunting biped, have needed a wider range of utterance than during its arboreal residence. It was exposed to new dangers, new exigencies of life affected it, and its old cries very probably gained new meanings, or new cries were developed to meet new perils or conditions. In this way a few root words may have been gained, rising above the value of the interjection, and expressing some degree of definite meaning, though still at the bottom of the scale of language, the first stepping stones from the vague cry toward the significant word.

Between this stage and that of human language an immense gap supervenes, a broad abyss which it seems at first sight impossible to bridge. As the facts stand, however, it has been largely bridged by man himself. Side by side with the highly intricate languages which now exist, are various primitive forms of speech which take us far back toward the origin of human language. So advanced a people as the Chinese speak a language practically composed of root words, the higher forms of expression being attained by simple devices in the combination of these primitive word forms. The same may be said, in a measure, of ancient Egyptian speech. We can conceive of an early state of affairs in which these devices of word compounding were not yet employed, and in which each word existed as a separate expression, unmodified by association with any other word. Among the savage races of the earth very crude forms of language often exist, the methods of associating words into sentences being of the simplest character, though few surpass the Chinese in simplicity of system.

But all this represents an advanced stage of language evolution, a development of thought and its instrument which has taken thousands of years to complete. We cannot fairly judge from it what the speech of primitive man may have been, for in every case there has been a long process of development; aided, no doubt, in many cases, by educative influences acting from the more advanced upon the speech of the less advanced races.

If we seek to analyze any of these languages, the most intricate as well as the least advanced, we find ourselves in most instances able to isolate the root word as the basic element of speech. From this simple form all the more developed forms seem to have arisen. Take away their combining devices, and the root words fall apart like so many beads of speech, each with a defined significance of its own and fully capable of existing by itself. The Aryan and the Chinese especially offer themselves to this analytic method. Strip off the suffixes and affixes from Aryan words, get down to the germinal forms from which these words have grown, isolate these germs of speech, and we find ourselves in a language of root forms, each of which has grown vague and wide in significance as the modifying elements that limited its meaning have been removed. In the Chinese the problem is a much simpler one. We need simply to take the existing words out of their place in the sentence and let them stand alone, and we have root words at first hand. We may go through the whole range of human speech and, with more or less difficulty, arrive at a similar result. In short, the evidence seems conclusive that the language of mankind began in the use of isolated words of vague and broad significance, and that all the subsequent development of language consisted in the combination of these words, with a modification and limitation of their meaning, the families of speech differing principally in the method of combination devised.

It must, indeed, be said that in isolating the root forms of modern languages we reach conditions still far removed from those of primitive speech. These roots are in a measure packed with meaning. Time has added to their significance, and they lack the simplicity they probably once possessed. In particular, they have gained ideal senses, entered in a measure into that broad language of the mind which has been gradually added to the language of outer nature. The recognition of the existence of mind and thought doubtless came somewhat late in human development. Man long knew only his body and the world that surrounded it. Step by step only did he discover his mind. And when it became necessary to speak of mental conditions, no new language was invented, but old words were broadened to cover the new conditions. The mind is analogous to the body in its operations, ideas are analogues of things, and it was usually necessary only to add to the physical significance of words the corresponding ideal significance. In this way a secondary language slowly grew up, underlying and subtending the primary language, until the words invented to express the world of things were employed to include as vast a world of thoughts.

In getting down, then, to the language of primitive man we are obliged to divest the root forms of speech of all this ideal significance, and confine them to their physical meanings. In dealing with the languages of the least advanced existing tribes of mankind, indeed, little of this is requisite. The language of the mind with them has not yet begun its growth or is in its first simple stages. Only half the work of the evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from which they emerged.

It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an abstract significance that human language owes much of its high development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind, savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is indicated in their modes of speech. Thus a native of the Society Islands, while able to say "dog's tail," "sheep's tail," etc., has no separate word for tail. He cannot abstract the general term from its immediate relations. In the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty different words to express striking with various objects, as with thick or thin wood, a club, the fist, the palm, etc., but he has no word for "striking" as an isolated thought. We find the same deficiency in the speech of the American Indians. A Cherokee, for instance, has no word for "washing," but can express the different kinds of washing by no less than thirteen distinct words.

All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolution of language, one in which every word had its immediate and local application, while in each word a whole story was told. The power of dividing thought into its separate elements was not yet possessed. As thought progressed men got from the idea of "dog" to that of "dog's tail." They could not think of the part without the whole. Then they reached a word for "dog's tail wags." But the idea of "wags" as an abstract motion was beyond their powers of thought. They could not think of action, but only of some object in action. The language of the American Indians was an immediate derivation from this mode of word formation, every proposition, however intricate it might be, constituting a single word, whose component parts could not be used separately. The mode of speech here indicated is one form of development of the root. Other forms are the compounding of the Chinese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the Aryan and the Semitic, all pointing directly back to the root form as their unit of growth.

The inference to be drawn from all this is that the language of primitive man consisted of isolated words, sounds which may originally have been mere cries or calls, but which gradually gained some definiteness of meaning, as signifying some of the varied conditions of the outer world. This is the conclusion to which philologists have now very generally come. The recognition that language consists of root words, variously modified and combined, leads back irresistibly to a period in which those roots had not yet begun to be modified and combined. The roots are the hard, persistent things in human speech. Grammatical expedients are the net in which these roots have been caught and confined. Free them from the net, and it falls to pieces, while the roots remain intact, the solid and persistent primitive germs of speech.

Yet in isolating root language as the basis of grammatical language we go far toward closing the gap between animal and human speech. It is still, doubtless, of considerable width, yet the distinction is no longer one of kind, but is simply one of degree. Primitive man had a much greater scope of language than is possessed by any of the lower animals, and the vocal sounds used had a clearer and more definite significance; but their nature was the same. They doubtless began in calls and cries like those in use by animals, and though these had increased in number and gained more distinct meanings, the difference in character was not great. In short, the analytic method employed by modern philologists has gone far to remove the supposed vast distinction between brute and human speech, and has traced back the language of man to a stage in which it is nearly related in character to the language of animals. The distinction has been brought down to one of degree, scarcely one of kind. A direct and simple process of evolution was alone needed to produce it, and through that evolution man undoubtedly passed in his progress upward from his ancestral stage.

The language of the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them. The infant begins its vocal utterances with simple cries; only at a later age does it begin to articulate. If we may judge from the development of language in the child, man began to speak with the use of sounds native to the vocal organs, and progressed by a process of imitation, endeavoring to reproduce the sounds heard around him: the voices of animals, the sounds of nature, etc. This tendency to imitate is not peculiar to man. It exists in many birds, and in some attains a marked development. The mocking bird, for instance, has an extraordinary flexibility of the vocal organs and power of imitating the voices of other birds. The parrot and some other birds go farther in this direction, being capable of using articulate language and clearly repeating words used by man.

None of the mammalia possess this facility. It is not found in the apes, and probably was not possessed by the ancestor of man. But it is not difficult to believe that in the efforts of the latter to gain a greater variety of vocal utterance, its organs of speech became more flexible, and in time it gained the power of articulation.

There are races of existing men whose powers of language seem still in the transition stage between articulate and inarticulate speech. This seems the case with the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa, whose vocal utterances consist largely of a series of peculiar clicks that are certainly not articulate speech, though on the road toward it. The Pygmies of the Central African forests seem similarly to occupy an intermediate position in the development of language. Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak of their utterance as being inarticulate in sound. It appears to be a sort of link between articulate and inarticulate speech. In short, the great abyss which was of old thought to lie between the languages of man and the lower animals has largely vanished through the labors of philologists, and we can trace stepping-stones over every portion of the wide gap. The language of man has not alone been evidently a product of evolution, but also one of development from the vocal utterances of the lower animals; and the man-ape, in its slow and long progress from brute into man, seems to have gradually developed that noble instrument of articulate speech which has had so much to do with subsequent human progress.

VIII

HOW THE CHASM WAS BRIDGED

In his bodily formation the man-ape differed little from man. The differences which existed were probably of a minor character, no greater than could readily exist within the limits of a species. If this assertion be questioned, it seems sufficient to call attention to the recent researches into the anatomy of the anthropoid apes, which differ in species, if not in genera, from man, yet are closely similar to him in all their main features of organization. Even in the brain, to whose great development man owes his superiority, the only marked difference is in size. Structurally, the distinctions are unimportant. If, then, these distant relatives so closely resemble man in physical frame, his immediate relative in the line of descent must have approached him still more closely in organization. After this ancestor had become a true, surface-dwelling biped, the differences in structure were probably so slight that physically the two forms were in effect identical. The man-ape was, as there is reason to believe, considerably smaller than man, perhaps about equal in size and stature to the chimpanzee, but that does not constitute a specific difference. There may have been some differences in the skeletal and muscular structure. The vocal organs, for instance, probably differed, the evolution of language in man being accompanied with certain changes in the larynx. The skull was certainly much more ape-like. Yet variations of this kind, due to differences in mode of life, are minor in importance, and may easily come within the limits of a species. While the great features of organization remain intact, small changes, due to new exigencies of life, may take place without affecting the zooelogical position of an animal. The most striking difference between man-ape and man, that of the development of the brain to two or three times its size and weight, is similarly unessential in classification while the brain remains unchanged in structure. That it has remained unchanged we may safely deduce from the close similarity between the brain of man and those of the existing anthropoid apes. The cause of the increase in size is so evident that it need only be referred to. Since the era of the man-ape, almost the whole sum of the forces of development have been centred in the mental powers of this animal, with the result that the brain has grown in size and functional capacity, while the remainder of the body has remained practically unchanged.

That man as an animal has descended from the lower life realm, none who are familiar with the facts of science now think of denying. This has attained to the scientist, and to many non-scientists, the level of a self-evident proposition. But that man as a thinking being has descended from the lower animals is a different matter, concerning which opinion is by no means in unison. Even among scientists some degree of difference of opinion exists, and such a radical evolutionist as Alfred Russell Wallace finds here a yawning gap in the line of descent, and is inclined to look upon the intellect of man as a direct gift from the realm of spirits. His explanation, it is true, is more difficult than the problem itself. There are no facts to sustain it, and even if he were not able to see how man's mind could be developed by natural selection, it is a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ to call in the angels to bridge the chasm.

Romanes has dealt with the subject from a different and more scientific point of view, and seems to have succeeded in showing that man's intellect at its lowest level is not different in kind from the brute intellect at its highest level. Controversy on this subject is too apt to be based on the difference between the intellect of the brute and that of enlightened man, in disregard of the great mental gap which exists between the latter and the thought powers of the lowest savage. In the preceding section an effort was made to show how crude and imperfect must have been the language of primitive man. Its imperfection was a fair gauge of that of his powers of thought. His intellect stood at a very low level, seemingly no further above that of the highest apes than it was below that of enlightened man.

In fact, enormous as is the interval between the mind of the brute and that of the man of modern civilization, the whole long line of mental development can be traced, with the exception of a comparatively small interval. This is the gap between the intellect of the anthropoid ape and that of primitive man, the one important last chapter in the story of mental evolution. Supernaturalism, driven from its strongholds of the past, has taken its last stand upon this broken link, claiming that here the line of descent fails, and that the gap could not have been filled without a direct inflow of intellect from the world of spirits or an immediate act of creation from the Deity.

This view of the case is not likely to be accepted as final. Science has bridged so many gaps in the kingdom of nature that it is not likely to retire baffled from this one, but will continue its investigations in place of accepting conclusions that have not the standing even of hypothesis, since they are unsupported by a single known fact. At first sight, indeed, the facts which bear upon this question seem stubborn things to explain by the evolution theory. The gap in intellect between the highest apes and the lowest man is a considerable one, which no existing ape seems likely ever to cross. However the anthropoid apes gained their degree of mental ability, it does not appear to be on the increase. They are in a state of mental stagnation and may have remained so for millions of years. Something similar, indeed, can be said of the lowest savages. They also are mentally stagnant. The indications are that for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years in the past their intellectual progress has been almost nothing. Yet it is beyond reasonable question that the advanced thinker of to-day has evolved from an ancestor as low in the mental scale as this savage, probably much lower; and this renders it very conceivable that a similar process of evolution covered the interval between the ape intellect and that of primitive man.

Somewhere, at some time in the far past, the mental stagnation of man was broken, and the development of the mind began its long progression toward enlightenment. This was not in the localities in which the lower savages are now found, the equatorial forests of Africa and South America and other realms of savage life, the change in all probability taking place elsewhere, under new and severe exigencies of life. Similarly we have much justification in saying that somewhere, at some time, the mental stagnation of the ape was broken, and the long development of the mind from ape to man began. This did not take place in the instances of the existing anthropoids, and, as in the analogous case of civilized man, its influencing cause must be looked for in exigencies of existence acting upon some form different in character and habitat from these apes.

The existing anthropoid apes may justly be compared in condition with the existing low savages. In both cases a satisfactory adaptation to their situation has been gained. These apes are still arboreal and frugivorous, as their remote ancestors were. They have for ages been in a state of close adaptation to their life conditions, and the influences of development have been largely wanting. Such evolution as took place must have been extremely slow. In like manner the lowest savages live in intimate relations with the conditions surrounding them. All problems of food-getting, habitation, climate, etc., have long since been solved, and in the tropical forests in which so many of them dwell they are in thorough accord with the situation. Mentally, therefore, they are practically at a standstill and have remained so for thousands of years. The two cases are parallel ones. We can safely say that the later development of man took place in other situations and under other conditions. We may fairly say the same in regard to the ape. Vigorous influences must have been brought to bear upon the ancestor of man as the instigating causes of its mental development into man; and similarly vigorous influences must have been brought to bear upon primitive man to set in train his mental development into intellectual man. And the general character of these influences in both cases may readily be pointed out. An extraordinary development has taken place in the human intellect within a few thousands, or tens of thousands, of years, yielding the difference which exists between the cultivated man of to-day and the debased savage who probably preceded him, and whose counterpart still exists. This has undoubtedly been due to influences of the highest potency. If we can show that influences of equal potency acted upon man's ancestor, we shall have done much toward indicating how the ape brain may have grown into the brain of man.

In both cases the main agency was in all probability that of conflict. Both ape and man, as we take it, developed through some form of warfare. In the former case it was warfare with the animal kingdom; in the latter it was warfare with the conditions of nature and with hostile man. Each of these has been potent in its effects, and to each we owe the completion of a great stage in the evolution of man.