Though we know so little of Philo’s own life, his numerous extant writings give the füllest information as to his views of the universe and of life, and his religious and scientific aims, and so enable us adequately to estimate his position and importance in the history of thought. He is quite the most important representative of Hellenistic J udaism, and his writings give us the clearest view of what this development of Judaism was and aimed at. Since the time of Alexander many Jews had been led to settle beyond Palestine either with commercial objects or attracted by the privileges conferred by the diadochi on the inhabitants of the cities they founded. In the great towns of Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt there were Jewish communities many thousands strong, but the Jews were most numerous in Alexandria, where from its first foundation they formed a considerable part of the population. The development of Judaism in the diaspora differed in important points from that in Palestine, where, since the successful opposition of the Maccabee age to the Hellenization which Antiochus Epiphanes had sought to carry through by force, the attitude of the nation to Greek culture had been essentially negative. In the diaspora, on the other hand, the Jews had been deeply influenced by the Greeks; they soon more or less forgot their Semitic mother-tongue, and with the language of Hellas they appropriated much of Hellenic culture. They were deeply impressed by that irresistible force which was blending all races and nations into one great cosmopolitan unity, and so the Jews too on their dispersion became in speech and nationality Greeks, or rather “Hellenists.” Now the distinguishing character of Hellenism is not the absolute disappearance of the Oriental civilizations before that of Greece, but the combination of the two with a preponderance of the Greek demerit. So it was with the Jews, but in their case the old religion had much more persistence than in other Hellenistic circles, though in other respects they too yielded to the superior force of Greek civilization. This we must hold to have been the case not only in Alexandria but throughout the diaspora from the commencement of the Hellenistic period down to the later Roman empire. It was only after ancient civilization gave way before the barbarian immigrations and the rising force of Christianity that rabbinism became supreme even among the Jews of the diaspora. This Hellenistico-Judaic phase of culture is sometimes called “Alexandrian,” and the expression is justifiable if it only means that in Alexandria it attained its highest development and flourished most. For here the Jews began to busy themselves with Greek literature even under their clement rulers, the first Ptolemies, and here the law and other Scriptures were first translated into Greek; here the process of fusion began earliest and proceeded with greatest rapidity; here, therefore, also the Jews first engaged in a scientific study of Greek philosophy and transplanted that philosophy to the soil of Judaism. We read of a Jewish philosopher Aristobulus in the time of Ptolemy VI. Philometor, in the middle of the 2d century b.c., of whose philosophical commentary on the Pentateuch fragments have been preserved by Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius. So far as we can judge from these, his aim was to put upon the sacred text a sense which should appeal even to Greek readers, and in particular to get rid of all anthropomorphic utterances about God. Eusebius regards him as a Peripatetic. We may suppose that this philosophical line of thought had its representatives in Alexandria between the times of Aristobulus and Philo, but we are not acquainted with the names of any such. Philo certainly, to judge by his historical influence, was the greatest of all these Jewish philosophers, and in his case we can follow in detail the methods by which Greek culture was harmonized with Jewish faith. On one side he is quite a Greek, on the other quite a Jew. His language is formed on the best classical models, especially Plato. He knows and often cites the great Greek poets, particularly Homer and the tragedians, but his chief studies had been in Greek philosophy, and he speaks of Heraclitus, Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans in terms of the highest veneration. He had appropriated their doctrines so completely that he must himself be reckoned among the Greek philosophers; his system was eclectic, but the borrowed elements are combined into a new unity with so much originality that at the same time he may fairly be regarded as representing a philosophy of his own, which has for its characteristic feature the constant prominence of a fundamental religious idea. Philo’s closest affinities are with Plato, the later Pythagoreans, and the Stoics. Yet with all this Philo remained a Jew, and a great part of his writings is expressly directed to recommend Judaism to the respect and, if possible, the acceptance of the Greeks. He was not a stranger to the specifically Jewish culture that prevailed in Palestine; in Hebrew he was not proficient, but the numerous etymologies he gives show that he had made some study of that language. His method of exegesis is in point of form identical with that of the Palestinian scribes, and in point of matter coincidences are not absolutely rare. But above all his whole works prove on every page that he felt himself to be thoroughly a Jew, and desired to be nothing else. Jewish “philosophy” is to him the true and highest wisdom; the knowledge of God and of things divine and human which is contained in the Mosaic Scriptures is to him the deepest and the purest.

If now we ask wherein Philo’s Judaism consisted, we must answer that it lies mainly in the formal claim that the Jewish people, in virtue of the divine revelation given to Moses, possesses the true knowledge in things religious. Thoroughly Jewish is his recognition that the Mosaic Scriptures of the Pentateuch are of absolute divine authority, and that everything they contain is valuable and significant because divinely revealed. The other Jewish Scriptures are also recognized as prophetic, i.e., as the writings of inspired men, but he does not place them on the same line with the law, and he quotes them so seldom that we cannot determine the compass of his canon. The decisive and normative authority is to him the “holy laws” of Moses, and this not only in the sense that everything they contain is true but that all truth is contained in them. Everything that is right and good in the doctrines of the Greek philosophers had already been quite as well, or even better, taught by Moses. Thus, since Philo had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Greek philosophy, he actually finds in the Pentateuch everything which he had learned from the Greeks. From these premises he assumes as requiring no proof that the Greek philosophers must in some way have drawn from Moses,—a view indeed which is already expressed by Aristobulus. To carry out these presuppositions called for an exegetical method which seems very strange to us, that, namely, of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. The allegorical method had been practised before Philo’s date in the rabbinical schools of Palestine, and he himself expressly refers to its use by his predecessors, nor does he feel that any further justification is requisite. With its aid he discovers indications of the profoundest doctrines of philosophy in the simplest stories of the Pentateuch.

This merely formal principle of the absolute authority of Moses is really the one point in which Philo still holds to genuinely Jewish conceptions. In the whole substance of his philosophy the Jewish point of view is more or less completely modified—sometimes almost extinguished— by what he has learned from the Greeks. Comparatively speaking, he is most truly a Jew in his conception of God. The doctrine of monotheism, the stress laid on the absolute majesty and sovereignty of God above the world, the principle that He is to be worshipped without images, are all points in which Philo justly feels his superiority as a Jew over popular heathenism. But only over popular heathenism, for the Greek philosophers had long since arrived at least at a theoretical monotheism, and their influence on Philo is nowhere more .strongly seen than in the detailed development of his doctrine of God. The specifically Jewish tf.e., particularistic) conception of the election of Israel, the obligation of the Mosaic law, the future glory of the chosen nation, have almost disappeared; he is really a cosmopolitan and praises the Mosaic law just because he deems it cosmopolitan. The true sage who follows the law of Moses is the citizen not of a particular state but of the world. A certain attachment which Philo still manifests to the particularistic conceptions of his race is meant only “in majorem Judaeorum gloriam.” The Jewish people has received a certain preference from God, but only because it has the most virtuous ancestry and is itself distinguished for virtue. . The Mosaic law is binding, but only because it is the most righteous, humane, and rational of laws, and even its outward ceremonies always disclose rational ideas and aims. And lastly, outward prosperity is promised to the pious, even on earth, but the promise belongs to all who turn from idols to the true God. Thus, in the whole substance of his view of the universe, Philo occupies the standpoint of Greek philosophy rather than of national Judaism, and his philosophy of the world and of life can be completely set forth without any reference to conceptions specifically Jewish.

His doctrine of God starts from the idea that God is Being absolutely bare of quality. All quality in finite beings has limitation, and no limitation can be predicated of God, who is eternal, unchangeable, simple substance, free, self-sufficient, better than the good and the beautiful. To predicate any quality (ποιότης) of God would be to reduce Him to the sphere of finite existence. Of Him we can say only that He is, not what He is, and such purely negative predications as to His being appear to Philo, as to the later Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists, the only way of securing His absolute elevation above the world. At bottom, no doubt, the meaning of these negations is that God is the most perfect being·: and so, con versely, we are told that God contains all perfection, that He fills and encompasses all things with His being.

A consistent application of Philo’s abstract conception of God would exclude the possibility of any active relation of God to the world, and therefore of religion, for a Being absolutely without quality and movement cannot be conceived as actively concerned with the multiplicity of individual things. And so in fact Philo does teach that the absolute perfection, purity, and loftiness of God would be violated by direct contact with imperfect, impure, and finite things. But the possibility of a connexion between God and the world is reached through a distinction which forms the most important point in his theology and cosmology; the proper being of God is distinguished from the infinite multiplicity of divine Ideas or Forces: God himself is without quality, but He disposes of an infinite variety of divine Forces, through whose mediation an active relation of God to the world is brought about. In the details of his teaching as to these mediating entities Philo is guided partly by Plato and partly by the Stoics, but at the same time he makes use of the concrete religious conceptions of heathenism and Judaism. Following Plato, he first calls them Ideas or ideal patterns of all things; they are thoughts of God, yet possess a real existence, and were produced before the creation of the sensible world, of which they are the types. But, in distinction from Plato, Philo’s ideas are at the same time efficient causes or Forces (δwd∕zeιs), which bring unformed matter into order conformably to the patterns within themselves, and are in fact the media of all God’s activity in the world. This modification of the Platonic Ideas is due to Stoic influence, which appears also when Philo gives to the iδ∈αι or δwd∕z∈ιs the name of λόγοι, i.e., operative ideas,—parts, as it were, of the operative Reason. For, when Philo calls his mediating entities λόγοι, the sense designed is analogous to that of the Stoics when they call God the Logos, i.e., the Reason which operates in the world. But at the same time Philo maintains that the divine Forces are identical with the “daemons” of the Greeks, and the “angels” of the Jews, i.e., servants and messengers of God by means of which He communicates with the finite world. All this shows how uncertain was Philo’s conception of the nature of these mediating Forces. On the one hand, they are nothing else than Ideas of individual things conceived in the mind of God, and as such ought to have no other reality than that of immanent existence in God, and so Philo says expressly that the totality of Ideas, the κόσμος νοητός, is simply the Reason of God as Creator (θ∈ofi λόγο? ηόη κoσμoπoιovντoς). Yet, on the other hand, they are represented as hypostases distinct from God, individual entities existing independently and apart from Him. This vacillation, however, as Zeller and other recent writers have justly remarked, is necessarily involved in Philo’s premises, for, on the one hand, it is God who works in the world through His Ideas, and therefore they must be identical with God; but, on the other hand, God is not to come into direct contact with the world, and therefore the Forces through which He works must be distinct from Him. The same inevitable amphiboly dominates in what is taught as to the supreme Idea or Logos. Philo regards all individual Ideas as comprehended in one highest and most general Idea or Force—the unity of the individual Ideas— which he calls the Logos or Reason of God, and which is again regarded as operative Reason. The Logos, therefore, is the highest mediator between God and the world, the firstborn son of God, the archangel who is the vehicle of all revelation, and the high priest who stands before God on behalf of the world. Through him the world was created, and so he is identified with the creative Word of God in Genesis (the Greek λoγos meaning both “reason” and “word ”). Here again, we see, the philosopher is unable to escape from the difficulty that the Logos is at once the immanent Reason of God, and yet also an hypostasis standing between God and the world. The whole doctrine of this mediatorial hypostasis is a strange intertwining of very dissimilar threads; on one side the way was prepared for it by the older Jewish distinction between the Wisdom of God and God Himself, of which we find the beginnings even in the Old Testament (Job xxviii. 12 sq. ; Prov. viii., ix.), and the fuller development in the books of Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, the latter of which comes very near to Philo’s ideas if we substitute for the term “wisdom” that of (divine) “Reason.” In Greek philosophy, again, Philo, as we have seen, chiefly follows the Platonic doctrines of Ideas and the Soul of the World, and the Stoic doctrine of God as the λoγos or Reason operative in the world. In its Stoic form the latter doctrine was pantheistic, but Philo could adapt it to his purpose simply by drawing a sharper distinction between the Logos and the world.

Like his doctrine of God, Philo’s doctrine of the world and creation rests on the presupposition of an absolute metaphysical contrast between God and the world. The world can be ascribed to God only in so far as it is a cosmos or orderly world; its material substratum is not even indirectly referable to God. Matter (vλη, or, as the Stoics said, ουσία) is a second principle, but in itself an empty one, its essence being a mere negation of all true being. It is a lifeless, unmoved, shapeless mass, out of which God formed the actual world by means of the Logos and divine Forces. Strictly speaking, the world is only formed, not created, since matter did not originate with God.

Philo’s doctrine of man is also strictly dualistic, and is mainly derived from Plato. Man is a twofold being, with a higher and a lower origin. Of the pure souls which fill airy space, those nearest the earth are attracted by the sensible and descend into sensible bodies; these souls are the Godward side of man. But on his other side man is a creature of sense, and so has in him a fountain of sin and all evil. The body, therefore, is a prison, a coffin, or a grave for the soul which seeks to rise again to God. From this anthropology the principles of Philo’s ethics are derived, its highest maxim necessarily being deliverance from the world of sense and the mortification of all the impulses of sense. In carrying out this thought, as in many other details of his ethical teaching, Philo closely follows the Stoics. But he is separated from Stoical ethics by his strong religious interests, which carry him to very different views of the means and aim of ethical development. The Stoics cast man upon his own resources; Philo points him to the assistance of God, without whom man, a captive to sense, could never raise himself to walk in the ways of true wisdom and virtue. And as moral effort can bear fruit only with God’s help, so too God Himself is the goal of that effort. Even in this life the truly wise and virtuous is lifted above his sensible existence, and enjoys in ecstasy the vision of God, his own consciousness sinking and disappearing in the divine light. Beyond this ecstasy there lies but one further step, viz., entire liberation from the body of sense and the return of the soul to its original condition; it came from God and must rise to Him again. But natural death brings this consummation only to those who, while they lived on earth, kept themselves free from attachment to the things of sense; all others must at death pass into another body; transmigration of souls is in fact the necessary consequence of Philo’s premises, though he seldom speaks of it expressly.

Philo’s literary labours have a twofold object, being directed either to expound the true sense of the Mosaic law, i.e., the philosophy which we have just described, to his Jewish brethren, or to convince heathen readers of the excellence, the supreme purity and truth, of the Jewish religion whose holy records contain the deepest and most perfect philosophy, the best and most humane legislation. Thus as a literary figure Philo, in conformity with his education and views of life, stands between the Greeks and the Jews, seeking to gain the Jews for Hellenism and the Greeks for Judaism, yet always taking it for granted that his standpoint really is Jewish, and just on that account truly philosophical and cosmopolitan.

The titles of the numerous extant writings of Philo present at first sight a most confusing multiplicity. More than three-fourths of them, however, are really mere sections of a small number of larger works. Three such great works on the Pentateuch can be distinguished.

(I.) The smallest of these is the Ζητήματα καί λtiσεts (Quaestiones et solutiones), a short exposition of Genesis and Exodus, in the form of question and answer. The work is cited under this title by Eusebius (2f. B., ii. 18, 1, 5; Praep. Ev., vii. 13), and by later...

Philolaus was the first to propound the doctrine of the motion of the earth; some, however, attribute this doctrine to Pythagoras, but there is no evidence in support of their view. Philolaus supposed that the sphere of the fixed stars, the five planets, the sun, moon, and earth, all moved round the central fire, which he called the hearth of the universe, the house of Zeus, and the mother of the gods; but as these made up only nine revolving bodies he conceived, in accordance with his number-theory, a tenth, which he called counter-earth, αντιχθwν. He was the first who published a book on the Pythagorean doctrines, a treatise of which Plato made use in the composition of his Tirnaeus. This work of the Pythagorean, to which the mystical name Bακχαt is sometimes given, seems to have consisted of three books: (1) Hepì κόσμον, containing a general account of the origin and arrangement of the universe; (2) Hepì φvσεως, an exposition of the nature of numbers; (3) ∏qoi ψnχηs, o∏ the nature of the soul.

See Boeckh, Bhilolαos des Pythagoreers Lehren nebst den Bruchstücken seines Werkes (Berlin, 1819); also Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca ; Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy ; and Chaignet, Pythagore et la Philosophic Pythagoricienne,contenant les Fragments de Philolaüs et d’Architas (1873).

PHILOLOGY is the generally accepted comprehensive name for the study of the word; it designates that branch of knowledge which deals with human speech, and with all that speech discloses as to the nature and history of man. Philology has two principal divisions, corresponding to the two uses of “word” or “speech,” as signifying either what is said or the language in which it is said, as either the thought expressed—which, when recorded, takes the form of literature—or the instrumentality of its expression: these divisions are the literary and the linguistic. Not all study of literature, indeed, is philological: as when, for example, the records of the ancient Chinese are ransacked for notices of astronomical or meteorological phenomena, or the principles of geometry are learned from the text-book of a Greek sage; while, on the other hand, to study Ptolemy and Euclid for the history of the sciences represented by them is philological more than scientific. Again, the study of language itself has its literary side: as when the vocabulary of a community (say of the ancient Indo-Europeans or Aryans) is taken as a document from which to infer the range and grade of knowledge of its speakers, their circumstances, and their institutions. The two divisions thus do not admit of absolute distinction and separation, though for some time past tending toward greater independence. The literary is the older of the two; it even occupied until recently the whole field, since the scientific study of language itself has arisen only within the present century. Till then, literary philology included linguistic, as a merely subordinate and auxiliary part, the knowledge of a language being the necessary key to a knowledge of the literature written in that language. When, therefore, instead of studying each language by itself for the sake of its own literature, men began to compare one language with another, in order to bring to light their relationships, their structures, their histories, the name “comparative philology” naturally enough suggested itself and came into use for the new method; and this name, awkward and trivial though it may be, has become so firmly fixed in English usage that it can be only slowly, if at all, displaced. Continental usage (especially German) tends more strongly than English to restrict the name philology to its older office, and to employ for the recent branch of knowledge a specific term, like those that have gained more or less currency with us also: as glottic, glossology, linguistics, linguistic science, science of language, and the like. It is not a question of absolute propriety or correctness, since the word philology is in its nature wide enough to imply all language-study, of whatever kind; it is one, rather, of the convenient distinction of methods that have grown too independent and important to be any longer well included under a common name.

Philology, in all its departments, began and grew up as classical; the history of our civilization made the study of Greek and Latin long the exclusive, still longer the predominant and regulating, occupation of secular scholarship. The Hebrew and its literature were held apart, as something of a different order, as sacred. It was not imagined that any tongue to which culture and literature did not lend importance was worthy of serious attention from scholars. The first essays in comparison, likewise, were made upon the classical tongues, and were as erroneous in method and fertile in false conclusions as was to be expected, considering the narrowness of view and the controlling prejudices of those who made them; and the admission of Hebrew to the comparison only added to the confusion. The change which this century has seen has been a part of the general scientific movement of the age, which has brought about the establishment of so many new branches of knowledge, both historical and physical, by the abandonment of shackling prejudices, the freedom of inquiry, the recognition of the dignity of all knowledge, the wide-reaching assemblage of facts and their objective comparison, and the resulting constant improvement of method. Literary philology has had its full share of advantage from this movement; but linguistic philology has been actually created by it out of the crude observations and wild deductions of earlier times, as truly as chemistry out of alchemy, or geology out of diluvianism. It is unnecessary here to follow out the details of the development; but we may well refer to the decisive influence of one discovery, the decisive action of one scholar. It was the discovery of the special relationship of the Aryan or Indo-European languages, depending in great measure upon the introduction of the Sanskrit as a term in their comparison, and demonstrated and worked out by the German scholar Bopp, that founded the science of linguistic philology. While there is abundant room for further improvement, it yet appears that the grand features of philologie study, in all its departments, are now so distinctly drawn that no revolution of its methods, but only their modification in minor respects, is henceforth probable. How and for what purposes to investigate the literature of any people (philology in the more proper sense), combining the knowledge thus obtained with that derived from other sources; how to study and set forth the material and structure and combinations of a language (grammar), or of a body of related languages (comparative grammar); how to co-ordinate and interpret the general phenomena of language, as variously illustrated in the infinitely varying facts of different tongues, so as to exhibit its nature as a factor in human history, and its methods of life and growth (linguistic science),—these are what philology teaches. The first two subjects are mainly disposed of in this work in the various articles devoted to countries and races, with their literatures and dialects; the last was briefly touched upon in the article Anthropology, but requires fuller treatment here, along with a general view of the classification of languages, as thus far effected.

The study of language is a division of the general science of anthropology, and is akin to all the rest in respect of its objects and its methods. Man as we now see him is a twofold being: in part the child of nature, as to his capacities and desires, his endowments of mind and body; in part the creature of education, by training in the knowledge, the arts, the social conduct, of which his predecessors have gained possession. And the problem of anthropology is this: how natural man has become cultivated man; how a being thus endowed by nature should have begun and carried on the processes of acquisition which have brought him to his present state. The results of his predecessors’ labout , s are not transmuted for his benefit into natural instincts, in language or in anything else. The child of the most civilized race, if isolated and left wholly to his own resources, aided by neither the example nor the instruction of his fellows, would no more speak the speech of his ancestors than he would build their houses, fashion their clothes, practise any of their arts, inherit their knowledge or wealth. In fact, he would possess no language, no arts, no wealth, but would have to go to work to acquire them, by the same processes which began to win them for the first human beings. One advantage he would doubtless enjoy: the descendant of a cultivated race has an enhanced aptitude for the reception of cultivation; he is more cultivable; and this is an element that has to be allowed for in comparing present conditions with past, as influencing the rate of progress, but nothing more. In all other respects, it is man with the endowments which we now find him possessed of, but destitute of the gradually accumulated results of the exercise of his faculties, whose progress we have to explain. And it is, as a matter of necessity, by studying recent observable modes of acquisition, and transferring them, with due allowance for different circumstances, to the more primitive periods, that the question of first acquisition or origin is to be solved, for language as for tools, for arts, for family and social organization, and the rest. There is just as much, and just as little, reason for assuming miraculous interference and aid in one of these departments as in another. If men have been left to themselves to make and improve instruments, to form and perfect modes of social organization, by implanted powers directed by natural desires, and under the pressure of circumstances, then also to make and change the signs that constitute their speech. All expressions, as all instruments, are at present, and have been through the known past, made and changed by the men who use them; the same will have been the case in the unknown or prehistoric past. And we command now enough of the history of language, with the processes of its life and growth, to determine with confidence its mode of origin—within certain limits, as will appear below.

It is beyond all question, in the first place, that the desire of communication was the only force directly impelling men to the production of language. Man’s sociality, his disposition to band together with his fellows, for lower and for higher purposes, for mutual help and for sympathy, is one of his most fundamental characteristics. To understand those about one and to be understood by them is now, and must have been from the very beginning, a prime necessity of human existence; we cannot conceive of man, even in his most undeveloped state, as without the recognition of it. Communication is still the universally recognized office of speech, and to the immense majority of speakers the only one; the common man knows no other, and can only with difficulty and imperfectly be brought to see that there is any other · of the added distinctness and reach of mental action which the possession of such an instrumentality gives him, he is wholly unconscious: and it is obvious that what the comparatively cultivated being of to-day can hardly be made to realize, can never have acted upon the first men as a motive to action. It may perhaps be made a question which of the two uses of speech, communication or the facilitation of thought, is the higher; there can be no question, at any rate, that the former is the broader and the more fundamental. That the kind and degree of thinking which we do nowadays would be impossible without language-signs is true enough · but so also it would be impossible without written signs. That there was a time when men had to do what mental work they could without the help of writing, as an art not yet devised, we have no difficulty in realizing, because the art is of comparatively recent device, and there are still communities enough that are working without it; it is much harder to realize that there was a time when speaking also was an art not yet attained, and that men had to carry on their rude and rudimentary thinking without it. Writing too was devised for conscious purposes of communication only; its esoteric uses, like those of speech, were at first unsuspected, and incapable of acting as an inducement; they were not noticed until made experience of, and then only by those who look beneath the surface of things. There is no analogy closer and more instructive than this, between speech and writing. But analogies are abundant elsewhere in the history of human development. Everywhere it is the lower and more obvious inducements that are first effective, and that lead gradually to the possession of what serves and stimulates higher wants. All the arts and industries have grown out of men’s effort to get enough to eat and protection against cold and heat—just as language, with all its uses, out of men’s effort to communicate with their fellows. As a solitary man now would never form even the beginnings of speech, as one separated from society unlearns his speech by disuse and becomes virtually dumb, so early man, with all his powers, would never have acquired speech, save as to those powers was added sociality with the needs it brought. We might conceive of a solitary man as housing and dressing himself, devising rude tools, and thus lifting himself a step from wildness toward cultivation; but we cannot conceive of him as ever learning to talk. Recognition of the impulse to communication as the efficient cause of language-making is an element of primary importance in the theory of the origin of language. No one who either leaves it out of account or denies it will, however ingenious and entertaining his speculations, cast any real light on the earliest history of speech. To inquire under what peculiar circumstances, in connexion with what mode of individual or combined action, a first outburst of oral expression may have taken place, is, on the other hand, quite futile. The needed circumstances were always present when human beings were in one another’s society; there was an incessant drawing-on to attempts at mutual understanding which met with occasional, and then ever more frequent and complete success. There inheres in most reasoning upon this subject the rooted assumption, governing opinion even when not openly upheld or consciously made, that conceptions have real natural names, and that in a state of nature these will somehow break forth and reveal themselves under favouring circumstances. The falsity of such a view is shown by our whole further discussion.

The character of the motive force to speech determined the character of the beginnings of speech. That was first signified which was most capable of intelligible signification, not that which was first in order of importance, as judged by any standard which we can apply to it, or first in order of conceptional development. All attempts to determine the first spoken signs by asking what should have most impressed the mind of primitive man are and must be failures. It was the exigencies and possibilities of practical life, in conditions quite out of reach of our distinct conception, that prescribed the earliest signs of communication. So, by a true and instructive analogy, the beginnings of writing are rude depictions of visible objects; it is now thoroughly recognized that no alphabet, of whatever present character, can have originated in any other way; everything else is gradually arrived at from that—as, indeed, in the ingeniously shaping hands of man, from any central body of signs, though but of small extent, all else is attainable by processes of analogy and adaptation and transfer. Now what is it that is directly signifiable in the world about us? Evidently, the separate acts and qualities of sensible objects, and nothing else. In writing, or signification to the eye, the first element is the rude depiction of the outline of an object, or of that one of the sum of its characteristic qualities which the eye takes note of and the hand is capable of intelligibly reproducing; from that the mind understands the whole complex object itself, and then whatever further may in the circumstances of its use be suggested by it. So, for example, the picture of a tree signifies primarily a tree, then perhaps wood, something made of wood, and so on; that of a pair of outstretched wings signifies secondarily flight, then soaring, height, and whatever else these may lead to. No concrete thing is signifiable in its totality, or otherwise than by a facile analysis of its constituent qualities, and a selection of the one which is both sufficiently characteristic in itself and capable of being called up by a sign before the mind addressed.

And what quality shall be selected depends in great measure upon the instrumentality used for its signification. Of such instrumentalities, men are possessed of a considerable variety. We must leave out of account that of depiction, as just instanced, because its employment belongs to a much more advanced state of cultivation, and leads the way to the invention not of speech but of the analogous and auxiliary art of writing. There remain gesture, or changes of position of the various parts of the body, especially of the most mobile parts, the arms and hands; grimace, or the changes of expression of the features of the countenance (in strictness, a variety of the preceding); and utterance, or the production of audible sound. It cannot be doubted that, in the first stages of communicative expression, all these three were used together, each for the particular purposes which it was best calculated to serve. The nearest approach to such action that is now possible is when two persons, wholly ignorant of one another’s speech, meet and need to communicate— an imperfect correspondence, because each is trained to habits of expression, and works consciously, and with the advantage of long experience, towards making himself understood ; yet it is good for its main purpose. What they do, to reach mutual comprehension, is like what the first speechless men, unconsciously and infinitely more slowly, learned to do: face, hands, body, voice, are all put to use. It is altogether probable that gesture at first performed the principal part, even to such extent that the earliest human language may be said to have been a language of gesture-signs; indeed, there exist at the present day such gesture-languages, as those in use between roving tribes of different speech that from time to time meet one another (the most noted example is that of the gesture-language, of a very considerable degree of development, of the prairie tribes of American Indians); or such signs as are the natural resort of those who by deafness are cut off from ordinary spoken intercourse with their fellows. Yet there never can have been a stage or period in which all the three instrumentalities were not put to use together. In fact, they are still all used together; that is even now an ineffective speaking to which grimace and gesture (“action,” as Demosthenes called them) are not added as enforcers; and the lower the grade of development and culture of a language, the more important, even for intelligibility, is their addition. But voice has won to itself the chief and almost exclusive part in communication, insomuch that we call all communication “language” (i.e., “ tonguiness”) just as a race of mutes might call it “handiness,” and talk (by gesture) of a handiness of grimace. This is not in the least because of any closer connexion of the thinking apparatus with the muscles that act to produce audible sounds than with those that act to produce visible motions; not because there are natural uttered names for conceptions, any more than natural gestured names. It is simply a case of “survival of the fittest,” or analogous to the process by which iron has become the exclusive material of swords, and gold and silver of money: because, namely, experience has shown this to be the material best adapted to this special use. The advantages of voice are numerous and obvious. There is first its economy, as employing a mechanism that is available for little else, and leaving free for other purposes those indispensable instruments the hands. Then there is its superior perceptibleness: its nice differences impress themselves upon the sense at a distance at which visible motions become indistinct; they are not hidden by intervening objects; they allow the eyes of the listener as well as the hands of the speaker to be employed in other useful work; they are as plain in the dark as in the light; and they are able to catch and command the attention of one who is not to be reached in any other way. We might add as the third advantage a superior capability of variation and combination on the part of spoken sounds; but this is not to be insisted on, inasmuch as we hardly know what a gesture-language might have become if men’s ingenuity in expression had been expended through all time upon its elaboration; and the superiority, however real, can hardly have been obvious enough to serve as a motive: certainly, there are spoken languages now existing whose abundance of resources falls short of what is attainable by gesture. Oral utterance is the form which expression has inevitably taken, the sum of man’s endowments being what it is; but it would be a mistake to suppose that a necessity of any other kind is involved in their relation. The fundamental conditions of speech are man’s grade of intellectual power and his social instinct; these being given, his expression follows, availing itself of what means it finds best suited to its purpose; if voice had been wanting, it would have taken the next best. So, in certain well-known cases, a marked artistic gift, on the part of individuals deprived of the use of hands, has found means of...