Chapter 17

Facts daily presented to our observation afford equally simple reasons for the almost infinite diversification of language. It is invariably found that, wherever society is at once dense and refined, language tends to be uniform throughout the whole population, and to undergo few changes in the course of time. Wherever, on the contrary, we have a scattered and barbarous people, we have great diversities, and comparatively rapid alterations of language. Insomuch that, while English, French, and German are each spoken with little variation by many millions, there are islands in the Indian archipelago, probably not inhabited by one million, but in which there are hundreds of languages, as diverse as are English, French, and German. It is easy to see how this should be. There are peculiarities in the vocal organization of every person, tending to produce peculiarities of pronunciation; for example, it has been stated that each child in a family of six gave the monosyllable, fly, in a different manner, (eye, fy, ly, &c.) until, when the organs were more advanced, correct example induced the proper pronunciation of this and similar words. Such departures from orthoepy are only to be checked by the power of such example; but this is a power not always present, or not always of sufficient strength. The able and self-devoted Robert Moffat, in his work on South Africa, states, without the least regard to hypothesis, that amongst the people of the towns of that great region, “the purity and harmony of language is kept up by their pitchos or public meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and their constant intercourse. With the isolated villages of the desert it is far otherwise. They have no such meetings; they are compelled to traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions, fathers and mothers, and all who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, while others can just master a whole sentence, and those still farther advanced, romping and playing together, the children of nature, through the live-long day, _become habituated to a language of their own_. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect composed of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without rule, and _in the course of a generation the entire character of the language is changed_.” {317} I have been told, that in like manner the children of the Manchester factory workers, left for a great part of the day, in large assemblages, under the care of perhaps a single elderly person, and spending the time in amusements, are found to make a great deal of new language. I have seen children in other circumstances amuse themselves by concocting and throwing into the family circulation entirely new words; and I believe I am running little risk of contradiction when I say that there is scarcely a family, even amongst the middle classes of this country, who have not some peculiarities of pronunciation and syntax, which have originated amongst themselves, it is hardly possible to say how. All these things being considered, it is easy to understand how mankind have come at length to possess between three and four thousand languages, all different at least as much as French, German, and English, though, as has been shewn, the traces of a common origin are observable in them all.

What has been said on the question whether mankind were originally barbarous or civilized, will have prepared the reader for understanding how the arts and sciences, and the rudiments of civilization itself, took their rise amongst men. The only source of fallacious views on this subject is the so frequent observation of arts, sciences, and social modes, forms, and ideas, being not indigenous where we see them now flourishing, but known to have been derived elsewhere: thus Rome borrowed from Greece, Greece from Egypt, and Egypt itself, lost in the mists of historic antiquity, is now supposed to have obtained the light of knowledge from some still earlier scene of intellectual culture. This has caused to many a great difficulty in supposing a natural or spontaneous origin for civilization and the attendant arts. But, in the first place, several stages of derivation are no conclusive argument against there having been an originality at some earlier stage. In the second, such observers have not looked far enough, for, if they had, they could have seen various instances of civilizations which it is impossible, with any plausibility, to trace back to a common origin with others; such are those of China and America. They would also have seen civilization springing up, as it were, like oases amongst the arid plains of barbarism, as in the case of the Mandans. A still more attentive study of the subject would have shewn, amongst living men, the very psychological procedure on which the origination of civilization and the arts and sciences depended.

These things, like language, are simply the effects of the spontaneous working of certain mental faculties, each in relation to the things of the external world on which it was intended by creative Providence to be exercised. The monkeys themselves, without instruction from any quarter, learn to use sticks in fighting, and some build houses—an act which cannot in their case be considered as one of instinct, but of intelligence. Such being the case, there is no necessary difficulty in supposing how man, with his superior mental organization, (a brain five times heavier,) was able, in his primitive state, without instruction, to turn many things in nature to his use, and commence, in short, the circle of the domestic arts. He appears, in the most unfavourable circumstances, to be able to provide himself with some sort of dwelling, to make weapons, and to practise some simple kind of cookery. But, granting, it will be said, that he can go thus far, how does he ever proceed farther unprompted, seeing that many nations remain fixed for ever at this point, and seem unable to take one step in advance? It is perfectly true that there is such a fixation in many nations; but, on the other hand, all nations are not alike in mental organization, and another point has been established, that only when some favourable circumstances have settled a people in one place, do arts and social arrangements get leave to flourish. If we were to limit our view to humbly endowed nations, or the common class of minds in those called civilized, we should see absolutely no conceivable power for the origination of new ideas and devices. But let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. See a Pascal, reproducing the Alexandrian’s problems at fifteen; a Ferguson, making clocks from the suggestions of his own brain, while tending cattle on a Morayshire heath; a boy Lawrence, in an inn on the Bath road, producing, without a master, drawings which the educated could not but admire; or look at Solon and Confucius, devising sage laws, and breathing the accents of all but divine wisdom, for their barbarous fellow-countrymen, three thousand years ago—and the whole mystery is solved at once. Amongst the arrangements of Providence is one for the production of original, inventive, and aspiring minds, which, when circumstances are not decidedly unfavourable, strike out new ideas for the benefit of their fellow-creatures, or put upon them a lasting impress of their own superior sentiments. Nations, improved by these means, become in turn _foci_ for the diffusion of light over the adjacent regions of barbarism—their very passions helping to this end, for nothing can be more clear than that ambitious aggression has led to the civilization of many countries. Such is the process which seems to form the destined means for bringing mankind from the darkness of barbarism to the day of knowledge and mechanical and social improvement. Even the noble art of letters is but, as Dr. Adam Fergusson has remarked, “a natural produce of the human mind, which will rise spontaneously, wherever men are happily placed;” original alike amongst the ancient Egyptians and the dimly monumented Toltecans of Yucatan. “Banish,” says Dr. Gall, “music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, all the arts and sciences, and let your Homers, Raphaels, Michael Angelos, Glucks, and Canovas, be forgotten, yet let men of genius of every description spring up, and poetry, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, and all the arts and sciences will again shine out in all their glory. Twice within the records of history has the human race traversed the great circle of its entire destiny, and twice has the rudeness of barbarism been followed by a higher degree of refinement. It is a great mistake to suppose one people to have proceeded from another on account of their conformity of manners, customs, and arts. The swallow of Paris builds its nest like the swallow of Vienna, but does it thence follow that the former sprung from the latter? With the same causes we have the same effects; with the same organization we have the manifestation of the same powers.”

MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS.

IT has been one of the most agreeable tasks of modern science to trace the wonderfully exact adaptations of the organization of animals to the physical circumstances amidst which they are destined to live. From the mandibles of insects to the hand of man, all is seen to be in the most harmonious relation to the things of the outward world, thus clearly proving that _design_ presided in the creation of the whole—design again implying a designer, another word for a CREATOR.

It would be tiresome to present in this place even a selection of the proofs which have been adduced on this point. The Natural Theology of Paley, and the Bridgewater Treatises, place the subject in so clear a light, that the general postulate may be taken for granted. The physical constitution of animals is, then, to be regarded as in the nicest congruity and adaptation to the external world.

Less clear ideas have hitherto been entertained on the mental constitution of animals. The very nature of this constitution is not as yet generally known or held as ascertained. There is, indeed, a notion of old standing, that the mind is in some way connected with the brain; but the metaphysicians insist that it is, in reality, known only by its acts or effects, and they accordingly present the subject in a form which is unlike any other kind of science, for it does not so much as pretend to have nature for its basis. There is a general disinclination to regard mind in connexion with organization, from a fear that this must needs interfere with the cherished religious doctrine of the spirit of man, and lower him to the level of the brutes. A distinction is therefore drawn between our mental manifestations and those of the lower animals, the latter being comprehended under the term instinct, while ours are collectively described as mind, mind being again a received synonyme with soul, the immortal part of man. There is here a strange system of confusion and error, which it is most imprudent to regard as essential to religion, since candid investigations of nature tend to shew its untenableness. There is, in reality, nothing to prevent our regarding man as specially endowed with an immortal spirit, at the same time that his ordinary mental manifestations are looked upon as simple phenomena resulting from organization, those of the lower animals being phenomena absolutely the same in character, though developed within much narrower limits. {326}

What has chiefly tended to take mind, in the eyes of learned and unlearned, out of the range of nature, is its apparently irregular and wayward character. How different the manifestations in different beings! how unstable in all!—at one time so calm, at another so wild and impulsive! It seemed impossible that anything so subtle and aberrant could be part of a system, the main features of which are regularity and precision. But the irregularity of mental phenomena is only in appearance. When we give up the individual, and take the mass, we find as much uniformity of result as in any other class of natural phenomena. The irregularity is exactly of the same kind as that of the weather. No man can say what may be the weather of to-morrow; but the quantity of rain which falls in any particular place in any five years, is precisely the same as the quantity which falls in any other five years at the same place. Thus, while it is absolutely impossible to predict of any one Frenchman that during next year he will commit a crime, it is quite certain that about one in every six hundred and fifty of the French people will do so, because in past years the proportion has generally been about that amount, the tendencies to crime in relation to the temptations being everywhere invariable over a sufficiently wide range of time. So also, the number of persons taken in charge by the police in London for being drunk and disorderly on the streets, is, week by week, a nearly uniform quantity, shewing that the inclination to drink to excess is always in the mass about the same, regard being had to the existing temptations or stimulations to this vice. Even mistakes and oversights are of regular recurrence, for it is found in the post-offices of large cities, that the number of letters put in without addresses is year by year the same. Statistics has made out an equally distinct regularity in a wide range, with regard to many other things concerning the mind, and the doctrine founded upon it has lately produced a scheme which may well strike the ignorant with surprise. It was proposed to establish in London a society for ensuring the integrity of clerks, secretaries, collectors, and all such functionaries as are usually obliged to find security for money passing through their hands in the course of business. A gentleman of the highest character as an actuary spoke of the plan in the following terms:—“If a thousand bankers’ clerks were to club together to indemnify their securities, by the payment of one pound a year each, and if each had given security for 500_l._, it is obvious that two in each year might become defaulters to that amount, four to half the amount, and so on, without rendering the guarantee fund insolvent. If it be tolerably well ascertained that the instances of dishonesty (yearly) among such persons amount to one in five hundred, this club would continue to exist, subject to being in debt in a bad year, to an amount which it would be able to discharge in good ones. The only question necessary to be asked previous to the formation of such a club would be,—may it not be feared that the motive to resist dishonesty would be lessened by the existence of the club, or that ready-made rogues, by belonging to it, might find the means of obtaining situations which they would otherwise have been kept out of by the impossibility of obtaining security among those who know them? Suppose this be sufficiently answered by saying, that none but those who could bring satisfactory testimony to their previous good character should be allowed to join the club; that persons who may now hope that a deficiency on their parts will be made up and hushed up by the relative or friend who is security, will know very well that the club will have no motive to decline a prosecution, or to keep the secret, and so on. It then only remains to ask, whether the sum demanded for the guarantee is sufficient?” {331} The philosophical principle on which the scheme proceeds, seems to be simply this, that, amongst a given (large) number of persons of good character, there will be, within a year or other considerable space of time, a determinate number of instances in which moral principle and the terror of the consequences of guilt will be overcome by temptations of a determinate kind and amount, and thus occasion a certain periodical amount of loss which the association must make up.

This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem. It is hardly necessary to say, much less to argue, that mental action, being proved to be under law, passes at once into the category of natural things. Its old metaphysical character vanishes in a moment, and the distinction usually taken between physical and moral is annulled, as only an error in terms. This view agrees with what all observation teaches, that mental phenomena flow directly from the brain. They are seen to be dependent on naturally constituted and naturally conditioned organs, and thus obedient, like all other organic phenomena, to law. And how wondrous must the constitution of this apparatus be, which gives us consciousness of thought and of affection, which makes us familiar with the numberless things of earth, and enables us to rise in conception and communion to the councils of God himself! It is matter which forms the medium or instrument—a little mass which, decomposed, is but so much common dust; yet in its living constitution, designed, formed, and sustained by Almighty Wisdom, how admirable its character! how reflective of the unutterable depths of that Power by which it was so formed, and is so sustained!

In the mundane economy, mental action takes its place as a means of providing for the independent existence and the various relations of animals, each species being furnished according to its special necessities and the demands of its various relations. The nervous system—the more comprehensive term for its organic apparatus—is variously developed in different classes and species, and also in different individuals, the volume or mass bearing a general relation to the amount of power. In the mollusca and crustacea we see simply a ganglionic cord pervading the extent of the body, and sending out lateral filaments. In the vertebrata, we find a brain with a spinal cord, and branching lines of nervous tissue. {333} But here, as in the general structure of animals, the great principle of unity is observed. The brain of the vertebrata is merely an expansion of one of the ganglions of the nervous cord of the mollusca and crustacea. Or the corresponding ganglion of the mollusca and crustacea may be regarded as the rudiment of a brain; the superior organ thus appearing as only a farther development of the inferior. There are many facts which tend to prove that the action of this apparatus is of an electric nature, a modification of that surprising agent, which takes magnetism, heat, and light, as other subordinate forms, and of whose general scope in this great system of things we are only beginning to have a right conception. It has been found that simple electricity, artificially produced, and sent along the nerves of a dead body, excites muscular action. The brain of a newly-killed animal being taken out, and replaced by a substance which produces electric action, the operation of digestion, which had been interrupted by the death of the animal, was resumed, shewing the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery. Nor is this a very startling idea, when we reflect that electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be. It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless. Metal may be magnetized, or heated to seven hundred of Fahrenheit, without becoming the hundredth part of a grain heavier. And yet electricity is a real thing, an actual existence in nature, as witness the effects of heat and light in vegetation—the power of the galvanic current to re-assemble the particles of copper from a solution, and make them again into a solid plate—the rending force of the thunderbolt as it strikes the oak; see also how both heat and light observe the angle of incidence in reflection, as exactly as does the grossest stone thrown obliquely against a wall. So mental action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled by the Eternal through his laws. {335}