Darwin and Modern Science Part 42

So far then man, through the processes of his thinking, has provided himself with a supersensuous world, the world of sense-delusion, of smoke and cloud, of dream and phantom, of imagination, of name and number and image. The natural course would now seem to be that this supersensuous world should develop into the religious world as we know it, that out of a vague animism with ghosts of ancestors, demons, and the like, there should develop in due order momentary G.o.ds (Augenblicks-Gotter), tribal G.o.ds, polytheism, and finally a pure monotheism.

This course of development is usually a.s.sumed, but it is not I think quite what really happens. The supersensuous world as we have got it so far is too theoretic to be complete material of religion. It is indeed only one factor, or rather it is as it were a lifeless body that waits for a living spirit to possess and inform it. Had the theoretic factor remained uninformed it would eventually have separated off into its const.i.tuent elements of error and truth, the error dying down as a belated metaphysic, the truth developing into a correct and scientific psychology of the subjective. But man has ritual as well as mythology; that is, he feels and acts as well as thinks; nay more he probably feels and acts long before he definitely thinks. This contradicts all our preconceived notions of theology. Man, we imagine, believes in a G.o.d or G.o.ds and then wors.h.i.+ps. The real order seems to be that, in a sense presently to be explained, he wors.h.i.+ps, he feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his confused thinking, he develops a G.o.d. We pa.s.s therefore to our second factor in religion:--ritual.

The word "ritual" brings to our modern minds the notion of a church with a priesthood and organised services. Instinctively we think of a congregation meeting to confess sins, to receive absolution, to pray, to praise, to listen to sermons, and possibly to partake of sacraments.

Were we to examine these fully developed phenomena we should hardly get further in the a.n.a.lysis of our religious conceptions than the notion of a highly anthropomorphic G.o.d approached by purely human methods of personal entreaty and adulation.

Further, when we first come to the study of primitive religions we expect a priori to find the same elements, though in a ruder form. We expect to see "The heathen in his blindness bow down to wood and stone,"

but the facts that actually confront us are startlingly dissimilar.

Bowing down to wood and stone is an occupation that exists mainly in the minds of hymn-writers. The real savage is more actively engaged. Instead of asking a G.o.d to do what he wants done, he does it or tries to do it himself; instead of prayers he utters spells. In a word he is busy practising magic, and above all he is strenuously engaged in dancing magical dances. When the savage wants rain or wind or suns.h.i.+ne, he does not go to church; he summons his tribe and they dance a rain-dance or wind-dance or sun-dance. When a savage goes to war we must not picture his wife on her knees at home praying for the absent; instead we must picture her dancing the whole night long; not for mere joy of heart or to pa.s.s the weary hours; she is dancing his war-dance to bring him victory.

Magic is nowadays condemned alike by science and by religion; it is both useless and impious. It is obsolete, and only practised by malign sorcerers in obscure holes and corners. Undoubtedly magic is neither religion nor science, but in all probability it is the spiritual protoplasm from which religion and science ultimately differentiated.

As such the doctrine of evolution bids us scan it closely. Magic may be malign and private; nowadays it is apt to be both. But in early days magic was as much for good as for evil; it was publicly practised for the common weal.

The gist of magic comes out most clearly in magical dances. We think of dancing as a light form of recreation, practised by the young from sheer joie de vivre and unsuitable for the mature. But among the Tarahumares (Carl Lumholtz, "Unknown Mexico", page 330, London, 1903.) in Mexico the word for dancing, nolavoa, means "to work." Old men will reproach young men saying "Why do you not go to work?" meaning why do you not dance instead of only looking on. The chief religious sin of which the Tarahumare is conscious is that he has not danced enough and not made enough tesvino, his cereal intoxicant.

Dancing then is to the savage WORKING, DOING, and the dance is in its origin an imitation or perhaps rather an intensification of processes of work. (Karl Bucher, "Arbeit und Rhythmus", Leipzig (3rd edition), 1902, pa.s.sim.) Repet.i.tion, regular and frequent, const.i.tutes rhythm and rhythm heightens the sense of will power in action. Rhythmical action may even, as seen in the dances of Dervishes, produce a condition of ecstasy.

Ecstasy among primitive peoples is a condition much valued; it is often, though not always, enhanced by the use of intoxicants. Psychologically the savage starts from the sense of his own will power, he stimulates it by every means at his command. Feeling his will strongly and knowing nothing of natural law he recognises no limits to his own power; he feels himself a magician, a G.o.d; he does not pray, he WILLS. Moreover he wills collectively (The subject of collective hallucination as an element in magic has been fully worked out by MM. Hubert and Mauss.

"Theorie generale de la Magie", In "L'Annee Sociologique", 1902--3, page 140.), reinforced by the will and action of his whole tribe. Truly of him it may be said "La vie deborde l'intelligence, l'intelligence c'est un retreciss.e.m.e.nt." (Henri Bergson, "L'Evolution Creatrice", page 50.)

The magical extension and heightening of personality come out very clearly in what are rather unfortunately known as MIMETIC dances. Animal dances occur very frequently among primitive peoples. The dancers dress up as birds, beasts, or fishes, and reproduce the characteristic movements and habits of the animals impersonated. (So characteristic is this impersonation in magical dancing that among the Mexicans the word for magic, navali, means "disguise." K. Th. Preuss, "Archiv f.

Religionswissenschaft", 1906, page 97.) A very common animal dance is the frog-dance. When it rains the frogs croak. If you desire rain you dress up like a frog and croak and jump. We think of such a performance as a conscious imitation. The man, we think, is more or less LIKE a frog. That is not how primitive man thinks; indeed, he scarcely thinks at all; what HE wants done the frog can do by croaking and jumping, so he croaks and jumps and, for all he can, BECOMES a frog. "L'intelligence animale JOUE sans doute les representations plutot qu'elle ne les pense." (Bergson, "L'Evolution Creatrice", page 205.)

We shall best understand this primitive state of mind if we study the child "born in sin." If a child is "playing at lions" he does not IMITATE a lion, i.e. he does not consciously try to be a thing more or less like a lion, he BECOMES one. His reaction, his terror, is the same as if the real lion were there. It is this childlike power of utter impersonation, of BEING the thing we act or even see acted, this extension and intensification of our own personality that lives deep down in all of us and is the very seat and secret of our joy in the drama.

A child's mind is indeed throughout the best clue to the understanding of savage magic. A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone. His att.i.tude towards other recalcitrant wills is "they simply must." Let even a grown man be intoxicated, be in love, or subject to an intense excitement, the limitations of personality again fall away. Like the omnipotent child he is again a G.o.d, and to him all things are possible.

Only when he is old and weary does he cease to command fate.

The Iroquois (Hewitt, "American Anthropologist", IV. I. page 32, 1902, N.S.) of North America have a word, orenda, the meaning of which is easier to describe than to define, but it seems to express the very soul of magic. This orenda is your power to do things, your force, sometimes almost your personality. A man who hunts well has much and good orenda; the shy bird who escapes his snares has a fine orenda. The orenda of the rabbit controls the snow and fixes the depth to which it will fall. When a storm is brewing the magician is said to be making its orenda. When you yourself are in a rage, great is your orenda. The notes of birds are utterances of their orenda. When the maize is ripening, the Iroquois know it is the sun's heat that ripens it, but they know more; it is the cigala makes the sun to s.h.i.+ne and he does it by chirping, by uttering his orenda. This orenda is sometimes very like the Greek thumos, your bodily life, your vigour, your pa.s.sion, your power, the virtue that is in you to feel and do. This notion of orenda, a sort of pan-vitalism, is more fluid than animism, and probably precedes it. It is the projection of man's inner experience, vague and una.n.a.lysed, into the outer world.

The mana of the Melanesians (Codrington, "The Melanesians", pages 118, 119, 192, Oxford, 1891.) is somewhat more specialised--all men do not possess mana--but substantially it is the same idea. Mana is not only a force, it is also an action, a quality, a state, at once a substantive, an adjective, and a verb. It is very closely neighboured by the idea of sanct.i.ty. Things that have mana are tabu. Like orenda it manifests itself in noises, but specially mysterious ones, it is mana that is rustling in the trees. Mana is highly contagious, it can pa.s.s from a holy stone to a man or even to his shadow if it cross the stone. "All Melanesian religion," Dr Codrington says, "consists in getting mana for oneself or getting it used for one's benefit." (Codrington, "The Melanesians", page 120, Oxford, 1891.)

Specially instructive is a word in use among the Omaka (See Prof.

Haddon, "Magic and Fetis.h.i.+sm", page 60, London, 1906. Dr Vierkandt ("Globus", July, 1907, page 41) thinks that "Fernzauber" is a later development from Nahzauber.), wazhin-dhedhe, "directive energy, to send." This word means roughly what we should call telepathy, sending out your thought or will-power to influence another and affect his action. Here we seem to get light on what has always been a puzzle, the belief in magic exercised at a distance. For the savage will, distance is practically non-existent, his intense desire feels itself as non-spatial. (This notion of mana, orenda, wazhin-dhedhe and the like lives on among civilised peoples in such words as the Vedic brahman in the neuter, familiar to us in its masculine form Brahman. The neuter, brahman, means magic power of a rite, a rite itself, formula, charm, also first principle, essence of the universe. It is own cousin to the Greek dunamis and phusis. See MM. Hubert et Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", page 117, in "L'Annee Sociologique", VII.)

Through the examination of primitive ritual we have at last got at one tangible, substantial factor in religion, a real live experience, the sense, that is, of will, desire, power actually experienced in person by the individual, and by him projected, extended into the rest of the world.

At this stage it may fairly be asked, though the question cannot with any certainty be answered, "at what point in the evolution of man does this religious experience come in?"

So long as an organism reacts immediately to outside stimulus, with a certainty and conformity that is almost chemical, there is, it would seem, no place, no possibility for magical experience. But when the germ appears of an intellect that can foresee an end not immediately realised, or rather when a desire arises that we feel and recognise as not satisfied, then comes in the sense of will and the impulse magically to intensify that will. The animal it would seem is preserved by instinct from drawing into his horizon things which do not immediately subserve the conservation of his species. But the moment man's life-power began to make on the outside world demands not immediately and inevitably realised in action (I owe this observation to Dr K. Th.

Preuss. He writes ("Archiv f. Relig." 1906, page 98), "Die Betonung des Willens in den Zauberakten ist der richtige Kern. In der Tat muss der Mensch den Willen haben, sich selbst und seiner Umgebung besondere Fahigkeiten zuzuschreiben, und den Willen hat er, sobald sein Verstand ihn befahigt, EINE UBER DEN INSTINKT HINAUSGEHEN DER FURSORGE fur sich zu zeigen. SO LANGE IHN DER INSTINKT ALLEIN LEITET, KONNEN ZAUBERHANDLUNGEN NICHT ENSTEHEN." For more detailed a.n.a.lysis of the origin of magic, see Dr Preuss "Ursprung der Religion und Kunst", "Globus", Lx.x.xVI. and Lx.x.xVII.), then a door was opened to magic, and in the train of magic followed errors innumerable, but also religion, philosophy, science and art.

The world of mana, orenda, brahman is a world of feeling, desiring, willing, acting. What element of thinking there may be in it is not yet differentiated out. But we have already seen that a supersensuous world of thought grew up very early in answer to other needs, a world of sense-illusions, shadows, dreams, souls, ghosts, ancestors, names, numbers, images, a world only wanting as it were the impulse of mana to live as a religion. Which of the two worlds, the world of thinking or the world of doing, developed first it is probably idle to inquire. (If external stimuli leave on organisms a trace or record such as is known as an Engram, this physical basis of memory and hence of thought is almost coincident with reaction of the most elementary kind. See Mr Francis Darwin's Presidential Address to the British a.s.sociation, Dublin, 1908, page 8, and again Bergson places memory at the very root of conscious existence, see "L'Evolution Creatrice", page 18, "le fond meme de notre existence consciente est memoire, c'est a dire prolongation du pa.s.see dans le present," and again "la duree mord dans le temps et y laisse l'enpreint de son dent," and again, "l'Evolution implique une continuation reelle du pa.s.see par le present.")

It is more important to ask, Why do these two worlds join? Because, it would seem, mana, the egomaniac or megalomaniac element, cannot get satisfied with real things, and therefore goes eagerly out to a false world, the supersensuous other-world whose growth we have sketched. This junction of the two is fact, not fancy. Among all primitive peoples dead men, ghosts, spirits of all kinds, become the chosen vehicle of mana.

Even to this day it is sometimes urged that religion, i.e. belief in the immortality of the soul, is true "because it satisfies the deepest craving of human nature." The two worlds, of mana and magic on the one hand, of ghosts and other-world on the other, combine so easily because they have the same laws, or rather the same comparative absence of law.

As in the world of dreams and ghosts, so in the world of mana, s.p.a.ce and time offer no obstacles; with magic all things are possible. In the one world what you imagine is real; in the other what you desire is ipso facto accomplished. Both worlds are egocentric, megalomaniac, filled to the full with unbridled human will and desire.

We are all of us born in sin, in that sin which is to science "the seventh and deadliest," anthropomorphism, we are egocentric, ego-projective. Hence necessarily we make our G.o.ds in our own image.

Anthropomorphism is often spoken of in books on religion and mythology as if it were a last climax, a splendid final achievement in religious thought. First, we are told, we have the lifeless object as G.o.d (fetichism), then the plant or animal (phytomorphism, theriomorphism), and last G.o.d is incarnate in the human form divine. This way of putting things is misleading. Anthropomorphism lies at the very beginning of our consciousness. Man's first achievement in thought is to realise that there is anything at all not himself, any object to his subject. When he has achieved however dimly this distinction, still for long, for very long he can only think of those other things in terms of himself; plants and animals are people with ways of their own, stronger or weaker than himself but to all intents and purposes human.

Again the child helps us to understand our own primitive selves. To children animals are always people. You promise to take a child for a drive. The child comes up beaming with a furry bear in her arms. You say the bear cannot go. The child bursts into tears. You think it is because the child cannot endure to be separated from a toy. It is no such thing.

It is the intolerable hurt done to the bear's human heart--a hurt not to be healed by any proffer of buns. He wanted to go, but he was a shy, proud bear, and he would not say so.

The relation of magic to religion has been much disputed. According to one school religion develops out of magic, according to another, though they ultimately blend, they are at the outset diametrically opposed, magic being a sort of rudimentary and mistaken science (This view held by Dr Frazer is fully set forth in his "Golden Bough" (2nd edition), pages 73-79, London, 1900. It is criticised by Mr R.R. Marett in "From Spell to Prayer", "Folk-Lore" XI. 1900, page 132, also very fully by MM. Hubert and Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in "L'Annee Sociologique", VII. page 1, with Mr Marett's view and with that of MM.

Hubert and Mauss I am in substantial agreement.), religion having to do from the outset with spirits.

But, setting controversy aside, at the present stage of our inquiry their relation becomes, I think, fairly clear. Magic is, if my view (This view as explained above is, I believe, my own most serious contribution to the subject. In thinking it out I was much helped by Prof. Gilbert Murray.) be correct, the active element which informs a supersensuous world fas.h.i.+oned to meet other needs. This blend of theory and practice it is convenient to call religion. In practice the transition from magic to religion, from Spell to Prayer, has always been found easy. So long as mana remains impersonal you order it about; when it is personified and bulks to the shape of an overgrown man, you drop the imperative and cringe before it. "My will be done" is magic, "Thy Will be done" is the last word in religion. The moral discipline involved in the second is momentous, the intellectual advance not striking.

I have spoken of magical ritual as though it were the informing life-spirit without which religion was left as an empty sh.e.l.l. Yet the word ritual does not, as normally used, convey to our minds this notion of intense vitalism. Rather we a.s.sociate ritual with something cut and dried, a matter of prescribed form and monotonous repet.i.tion. The a.s.sociation is correct; ritual tends to become less and less informed by the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck ("Die Nachahmung und ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologie und Volkerkunde", Leipzig, 1904.) in his brilliant monograph on "Imitation" has laid stress on the almost boundless influence of the imitation of one man by another in the evolution of civilisation. Imitation is one of the chief spurs to action. Imitation begets custom, custom begets sanct.i.ty. At first all custom is sacred. To the savage it is as much a religious duty to tattoo himself as to sacrifice to his G.o.ds. But certain customs naturally survive, because they are really useful; they actually have good effects, and so need no social sanction. Others are really useless; but man is too conservative and imitative to abandon them. These become ritual. Custom is cautious, but la vie est aleatoire. (Bergson, op. cit.

page 143.)

Dr Beck's remarks on ritual are I think profoundly true and suggestive, but with this reservation--they are true of ritual only when uninformed by personal experience. The very elements in ritual on which Dr Beck lays such stress, imitation, repet.i.tion, uniformity and social collectivity, have been found by the experience of all time to have a twofold influence--they inhibit the intellect, they stimulate and suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance. The Church of Rome knows what she is about when she prescribes the telling of the rosary. Mystery-cults and sacraments, the lineal descendants of magic, all contain rites charged with suggestion, with symbols, with gestures, with half-understood formularies, with all the apparatus of appeal to emotion and will--the more unintelligible they are the better they serve their purpose of inhibiting thought. Thus ritual deadens the intellect and stimulates will, desire, emotion. "Les operations magiques... sont le resultat d'une science et d'une habitude qui exaltent la volonte humaine au-dessus de ses limites habituelles." (Eliphas Levi, "Dogme et Rituel de la haute Magie", II. page 32, Paris, 1861, and "A defence of Magic", by Evelyn Underhill, "Fortnightly Review", 1907.) It is this personal EXPERIENCE, this exaltation, this sense of immediate, non-intellectual revelation, of mystical oneness with all things, that again and again rehabilitates a ritual otherwise moribund.

To resume. The outcome of our examination of ORIGINES seems to be that religious phenomena result from two delusive processes--a delusion of the non-critical intellect, a delusion of the over-confident will. Is religion then entirely a delusion? I think not. (I am deeply conscious that what I say here is a merely personal opinion or sentiment, unsupported and perhaps unsupportable by reason, and very possibly quite worthless, but for fear of misunderstanding I prefer to state it.) Every dogma religion has. .h.i.therto produced is probably false, but for all that the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of apprehending some things and these of enormous importance. It may also be that the contents of this mystical apprehension cannot be put into language without being falsified and misstated, that they have rather to be felt and lived than uttered and intellectually a.n.a.lysed, and thus do not properly fall under the category of true or false, in the sense in which these words are applied to propositions; yet they may be something for which "true" is our nearest existing word and are often, if not necessary at least highly advantageous to life. That is why man through a series of more or less grossly anthropomorphic mythologies and theologies with their concomitant rituals tries to restate them.

Meantime we need not despair. Serious psychology is yet young and has only just joined hands with physiology. Religious students are still hampered by mediaevalisms such as Body and Soul, and by the perhaps scarcely less mythological segregations of Intellect, Emotion, Will. But new facts (See the "Proceedings" of the Society for Psychical Research, London, pa.s.sim, and especially Vols. VII.-XV. For a valuable collection of the phenomena of mysticism, see William James, "Varieties of Religious Experience", Edinburgh, 1901-2.) are acc.u.mulating, facts about the formation and flux of personality, and the relations between the conscious and the sub-conscious. Any moment some great imagination may leap out into the dark, touch the secret places of life, lay bare the cardinal mystery of the marriage of the spatial with the non-spatial. It is, I venture to think, towards the apprehension of such mysteries, not by reason only, but by man's whole personality, that the religious spirit in the course of its evolution through ancient magic and modern mysticism is ever blindly yet persistently moving.

Be this as it may, it is by thinking of religion in the light of evolution, not as a revelation given, not as a realite faite but as a process, and it is so only, I think, that we attain to a spirit of real patience and tolerance. We have ourselves perhaps learnt laboriously something of the working of natural law, something of the limitations of our human will, and we have therefore renounced the practice of magic.

Yet we are bidden by those in high places to pray "Sanctify this water to the mystical was.h.i.+ng away of sin." Mystical in this connection spells magical, and we have no place for a G.o.d-magician: the prayer is to us unmeaning, irreverent. Or again, after much toil we have ceased, or hope we have ceased, to think anthropomorphically. Yet we are invited to offer formal thanks to G.o.d for a meal of flesh whose sanct.i.ty is the last survival of that sacrifice of bulls and goats he has renounced.

Such a ritual confuses our intellect and fails to stir our emotion. But to others this ritual, magical or anthropomorphic as it is, is charged with emotional impulse, and others, a still larger number, think that they act by reason when really they are hypnotised by suggestion and tradition; their fathers did this or that and at all costs they must do it. It was good that primitive man in his youth should bear the yoke of conservative custom; from each man's neck that yoke will fall, when and because he has outgrown it. Science teaches us to await that moment with her own inward and abiding patience. Such a patience, such a gentleness we may well seek to practise in the spirit and in the memory of Darwin.

XXVI. EVOLUTION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. By P. Giles, M.A., LL.D.

(Aberdeen),

Reader in Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge.

In no study has the historical method had a more salutary influence than in the Science of Language. Even the earliest records show that the meaning of the names of persons, places, and common objects was then, as it has always been since, a matter of interest to mankind. And in every age the common man has regarded himself as competent without special training to explain by inspection (if one may use a mathematical phrase) the meaning of any words that attracted his attention. Out of this amateur etymologising has sprung a great amount of false history, a kind of historical mythology invented to explain familiar names. A single example will ill.u.s.trate the tendency. According to the local legend the ancestor of the Earl of Erroll--a husbandman who stayed the flight of his countrymen in the battle of Luncarty and won the victory over the Danes by the help of the yoke of his oxen--exhausted with the fray uttered the exclamation "Hoch heigh!" The grateful king about to enn.o.ble the victorious ploughman at once replied:

"Hoch heigh! said ye And Hay shall ye be."

The Norman origin of the name Hay is well-known, and the battle of Luncarty long preceded the appearance of Normans in Scotland, but the legend nevertheless persists.

Though the earliest European treatise on philological questions which is now extant--the "Cratylus" of Plato,--as might be expected from its authors.h.i.+p, contains some acute thinking and some shrewd guesses, yet the work as a whole is infantine in its handling of language, and it has been doubted whether Plato was more than half serious in some of the suggestions which he puts forward. (For an account of the "Cratylus"

with references to other literature see Sandys' "History of Cla.s.sical Scholars.h.i.+p", I. page 92 ff., Cambridge, 1903.) In the hands of the Romans things were worse even than they had been in the hands of Plato and his Greek successors. The lack of success on the part of Varro and later Roman writers may have been partly due to the fact that, from the etymological point of view, Latin is a much more difficult language than Greek; it is by no means so closely connected with Greek as the ancients imagined, and they had no knowledge of the Celtic languages from which, on some sides at least, much greater light on the history of the Latin language might have been obtained. Roman civilisation was a late development compared with Greek, and its records dating earlier than 300 B.C.--a period when the best of Greek literature was already in existence--are very few and scanty. Varro it is true was much more of an antiquary than Plato, but his extant works seem to show that he was rather a "dungeon of learning" than an original thinker.

A scientific knowledge of language can be obtained only by comparison of different languages of the same family and the contrasting of their characteristics with those of another family or other families. It never occurred to the Greeks that any foreign language was worthy of serious study. Herodotus and other travellers and antiquaries indeed picked up individual words from various languages, either as being necessary in communication with the inhabitants of the countries where they sojourned, or because of some point which interested them personally.

Plato and others noticed the similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek, but no systematic comparison seems ever to have been inst.i.tuted.

In the Middle Ages the treatment of language was in a sense more historical. The Middle Ages started with the hypothesis, derived from the book of Genesis, that in the early world all men were of one language and of one speech. Though on the same authority they believed that the plain of s.h.i.+nar has seen that confusion of tongues whence sprang all the languages upon earth, they seem to have considered that the words of each separate language were nevertheless derived from this original tongue. And as Hebrew was the language of the Chosen People, it was naturally a.s.sumed that this original tongue was Hebrew. Hence we find Dante declaring in his treatise on the Vulgar Tongue (Dante "de Vulgari Eloquio", I. 4.) that the first word man uttered in Paradise must have been "El," the Hebrew name of his Maker, while as a result of the fall of Adam, the first utterance of every child now born into this world of sin and misery is "heu," Alas! After the splendidly engraved bronze plates containing, as we now know, ritual regulations for certain cults, were discovered in 1444 at the town of Gubbio, in Umbria, they were declared, by some authorities, to be written in excellent Hebrew.

The study of them has been the fascination and the despair of many a philologist. Thanks to the devoted labours of numerous scholars, mainly in the last sixty years, the general drift of these inscriptions is now known. They are the only important records of the ancient Umbrian language, which was related closely to that of the Samnites and, though not so closely, to that of the Romans on the other side of the Apennines. Yet less than twenty years ago a book was published in Germany, which boasts itself the home of Comparative Philology, wherein the German origin of the Umbrian language was no less solemnly demonstrated than had been its Celtic origin by Sir William Betham in 1842.

It is good that the study of language should be historical, but the first requisite is that the history should be sound. How little had been learnt of the true history of language a century ago may be seen from a little book by Stephen Weston first published in 1802 and several times reprinted, where accidental a.s.sonance is considered sufficient to establish connection. Is there not a word "bad" in English and a word "bad" in Persian which mean the same thing? Clearly therefore Persian and English must be connected. The conclusion is true, but it is drawn from erroneous premises. As stated, this ident.i.ty has no more value than the similar a.s.sonance between the English "cover" and the Hebrew "kophar", where the history of "cover" as coming through French from a Latin "co-operire" was even in 1802 well-known to many. To this day, in spite of recent elaborate attempts (Most recently in H. Moller's "Semitisch und Indogermanisch", Erster Teil, Kopenhagen, 1907.) to establish connection between the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic families of languages, there is no satisfactory evidence of such relation between these families. This is not to deny the possibility of such a connection at a very early period; it is merely to say that through the lapse of long ages all trustworthy record of such relations.h.i.+p, if it ever existed, has been, so far as present knowledge extends, obliterated.

But while Stephen Weston was publis.h.i.+ng, with much public approval, his collection of amusing similarities between languages--similarities which proved nothing--the key to the historical study of at least one family of languages had already been found by a learned Englishman in a distant land. In 1783 Sir William Jones had been sent out as a judge in the supreme court of judicature in Bengal. While still a young man at Oxford he was noted as a linguist; his reputation as a Persian scholar had preceded him to the East. In the intervals of his professional duties he made a careful study of the language which was held sacred by the natives of the country in which he was living. He was mainly instrumental in establis.h.i.+ng a society for the investigation of language and related subjects. He was himself the first president of the society, and in the "third anniversary discourse" delivered on February 2, 1786, he made the following observations: "The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the GREEK, more copious than the LATIN, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this was the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia." ("Asiatic Researches", I. page 422, "Works of Sir W. Jones", I. page 26, London, 1799.)

No such epoch-making discovery was probably ever announced with less flourish of trumpets. Though Sir William Jones lived for eight years more and delivered other anniversary discourses, he added nothing of importance to this utterance. He had neither the time nor the health that was needed for the prosecution of so arduous an undertaking.