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 fashioned 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 shell. Yet the word ritual does not, as normally used, convey to our minds this notion of intense vitalism. Rather we associate ritual with something cut and dried, a matter of prescribed form and monotonous repetition. The association 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 sanctity. At first all custom is sacred. To the savage it is as much a religious duty to tattoo himself as to sacrifice to his gods. 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, repetition, 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 hitherto 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 analysed, 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, passim, 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 accumulating, 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 washing away of sin." Mystical in this connection spells magical, and we have no place for a god-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 God for a meal of flesh whose sanctity 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 illustrate 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 ennoble 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 authorship, 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 Classical Scholarship", 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 instituted.

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 Shinar 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 assumed 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 assonance 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 identity has no more value than the similar assonance 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 relationship, if it ever existed, has been, so far as present knowledge extends, obliterated.

But while Stephen Weston was publishing, 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 establishing 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.

But the good seed did not fall upon stony ground. The news was speedily conveyed to Europe. By a happy chance, the sudden renewal of war between France and England in 1803 gave Friedrich Schlegel the opportunity of learning Sanscrit from Alexander Hamilton, an Englishman who, like many others, was confined in Paris during the long struggle with Napoleon. The influence of Schlegel was not altogether for good in the history of this research, but he was inspiring. Not upon him but upon Franz Bopp, a struggling German student who spent some time in Paris and London a dozen years later, fell the mantle of Sir William Jones. In Bopp's Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic languages which appeared in 1833, three- quarters of a century ago, the foundations of Comparative Philology were laid. Since that day the literature of the subject has grown till it is almost, if not altogether, beyond the power of any single man to cope with it. But long as the discourse may be, it is but the elaboration of the text that Sir William Jones supplied.

With the publication of Bopp's Comparative Grammar the historical study of language was put upon a stable footing. Needless to say much remained to be done, much still remains to be done. More than once there has been danger of the study following erroneous paths. Its terminology and its point of view have in some degree changed. But nothing can shake the truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the first suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's Comparative Grammar began to be published nine years before the first draft of Darwin's treatise on the Origin of Species was put on paper in 1842.

It is not therefore on the history of Comparative Philology in general that the ideas of Darwin have had most influence. Unfortunately, as Jowett has said in the introduction to his translation of Plato's "Republic", most men live in a corner. The specialisation of knowledge has many advantages, but it has also disadvantages, none worse perhaps than that it tends to narrow the specialist's horizon and to make it more difficult for one worker to follow the advances that are being made by workers in other departments. No longer is it possible as in earlier days for an intellectual prophet to survey from a Pisgah height all the Promised Land. And the case of linguistic research has been specially hard. This study has, if the metaphor may be allowed, a very extended frontier. On one side it touches the domain of literature, on other sides it is conterminous with history, with ethnology and anthropology, with physiology in so far as language is the production of the brain and tissues of a living being, with physics in questions of pitch and stress accent, with mental science in so far as the principles of similarity, contrast, and contiguity affect the forms and the meanings of words through association of ideas. The territory of linguistic study is immense, and it has much to supply which might be useful to the neighbours who border on that territory. But they have not regarded her even with that interest which is called benevolent because it is not actively maleficent. As Horne Tooke remarked a century ago, Locke had found a whole philosophy in language. What have the philosophers done for language since? The disciples of Kant and of Wilhelm von Humboldt supplied her plentifully with the sour grapes of metaphysics; otherwise her neighbours have left her severely alone save for an occasional "Ausflug," on which it was clear they had sadly lost their bearings. Some articles in Psychological Journals, Wundt's great work on "Volkerpsychologie" (Erster Band: "Die Sprache", Leipzig, 1900. New edition, 1904. This work has been fertile in producing both opponents and supporters. Delbruck, "Grundfragen der Sprachforschung", Strassburg, 1901, with a rejoinder by Wundt, "Sprachgeschichte" and "Sprachpsychologie", Leipzig, 1901; L. Sutterlin, "Das Wesen der Sprachgebilde", Heidelberg, 1902; von Rozwadowski, "Wortbildung und Wortbedeutung", Heidelberg, 1904; O. Dittrich, "Grundzuge der Sprachpsychologie", Halle, 1904, Ch. A. Sechehaye, "Programme et methodes de la linguistique theorique", Paris, 1908.), and Mauthner's brilliantly written "Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache" (In three parts: (i) "Sprache und Psychologie, (ii) "Zur Sprachwissenschaft", both Stuttgart 1901, (iii) "Zur Grammatic und Logik" (with index to all three volumes), Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902.) give some reason to hope that, on one side at least, the future may be better than the past.

Where Charles Darwin's special studies came in contact with the Science of Language was over the problem of the origin and development of language. It is curious to observe that, where so many fields of linguistic research have still to be reclaimed--many as yet can hardly be said to be mapped out,--the least accessible field of all--that of the Origin of Language-- has never wanted assiduous tillers. Unfortunately it is a field beyond most others where it may be said that

"Wilding oats and luckless darnel grow."

If Comparative Philology is to work to purpose here, it must be on results derived from careful study of individual languages and groups of languages. But as yet the group which Sir William Jones first mapped out and which Bopp organised is the only one where much has been achieved. Investigation of the Semitic group, in some respects of no less moment in the history of civilisation and religion, where perhaps the labour of comparison is not so difficult, as the languages differ less among themselves, has for some reason strangely lagged behind. Some years ago in the "American Journal of Philology" Paul Haupt pointed out that if advance was to be made, it must be made according to the principles which had guided the investigation of the Indo-Germanic languages to success, and at last a Comparative Grammar of an elaborate kind is in progress also for the Semitic languages. (Brockelmann, "Vergleichende Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen", Berlin, 1907 ff. Brockelmann and Zimmern had earlier produced two small hand- books. The only large work was William Wright's "Lectures on the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages", Cambridge, 1890.) For the great group which includes Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and many languages of northern Asia, a beginning, but only a beginning has been made. It may be presumed from the great discoveries which are in progress in Turkestan that presently much more will be achieved in this field. But for a certain utterance to be given by Comparative Philology on the question of the origin of language it is necessary that not merely for these languages but also for those in other quarters of the globe, the facts should be collected, sifted and tabulated. England rules an empire which contains a greater variety of languages by far than were ever held under one sway before. The Government of India is engaged in producing, under the editorship of Dr Grierson, a linguistic survey of India, a remarkable undertaking and, so far as it has gone, a remarkable achievement. Is it too much to ask that, with the support of the self-governing colonies, a similar survey should be undertaken for the whole of the British Empire?

Notwithstanding the great number of books that have been written on the origin of language in the last three and twenty centuries, the results of the investigation which can be described as certain are very meagre. The question originally raised was whether language came into being thesei or phusei, by convention or by nature. The first alternative, in its baldest form at least, has passed from out the field of controversy. No one now claims that names were given to living things or objects or activities by formal agreement among the members of an early community, or that the first father of mankind passed in review every living thing and gave it its name. Even if the record of Adam's action were to be taken literally there would still remain the question, whence had he this power? Did he develop it himself or was it a miraculous gift with which he was endowed at his creation? If the latter, then as Wundt says ("Volkerpsychologie", I. 2, page 585.), "the miracle of language is subsumed in the miracle of creation." If Adam developed language of himself, we are carried over to the alternative origin of phusei. On this hypothesis we must assume that the natural growth which modern theories of development regard as the painful progress of multitudinous generations was contracted into the experience of a single individual.