Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater consequences than that which in its present state we call “word.” It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an “origin” of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a zero-point for speech generally. A precise beginning is inconceivable for the latter because it is compresent with and contained in the essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presupposes many fully developed kinds of communication-speech and constitutes only one element--though in the end the dominant element--of a slow and quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however diametrically opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of Jespersen[183] that they investigate speaking in words as if it were something new and self-contained, which inevitably leads them into a radically false psychology. In reality verbal language is a very late phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom borne by one of the ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.

In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which are much more primary than the language of the word, and with which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present-day word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us has very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny within the history of the whole. There is not one sense-perception that would be wholly irrelevant to an adequate history of the use of words. Further, we must distinguish very strictly between vocal and verbal languages; the former is familiar even to the simpler genera of animals, the latter is in certain characters--individual characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that--a radically different thing. For every animal voice-language, further, expression-motives (a roar of anger) and communication-signs (a cry of warning) can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may be said of the earliest words. But was it, then, as an expression- or as a communication-language that verbal language _arose_? Was it in quite primitive conditions, independent, more or less, of any and every visual language such as picture and gesture? To such questions we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the pre-forms of the “word,” properly so called, were. Naïve indeed is the philology which uses what we of to-day call “primitive” languages (in reality, incomplete pictures of very _late_ language-conditions) as premisses for conclusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is in them an already established, highly developed, and self-evident means--i.e., precisely what anything “originally” is _not_.

There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the future word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of the animal world was that which I call “name”--a vocal image serving to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming became a numen.[184] It is unnecessary to speculate as to how the first names came to be--no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least _point d’appui_ here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological factor--if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they would affect--not even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul[185]), but _a profound spiritual change_. With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures together in the longing to prove each other’s reality and proximity--then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. The Name grazes the _meaning_ of consciousness and the _source_ of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression- and communication-language, man names _that which is enigmatic_. It is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly, reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it. _With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man._ It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with the Name religion in the proper sense, _definite_ religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious _thought_. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very significant idiom, that we “reflect on,” “think _over_,” something. With the understanding of things-named the formation of a _higher_ world, _above_ all sensational existence, is begun--“higher” both according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.

These first names we have to think of as quite separate and individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed sound- and gesture-language, the richness of which we can no longer imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to the word-languages, and their further developments have been in dependent connexion therewith.[186] One thing, however, was assured when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of communication-technique--the pre-eminence of the eye over the other sense-organs. Man’s awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated space, his depth-experience[187] was a radiation outward towards light-sources and light-resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a middle point in the light. “Visible” or “invisible” was the alternative which governed the state of understanding in which the first names arose. Were the first _numina_, perhaps, things of the light-world that were felt, heard, observed in their effects, _but not seen_? No doubt the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-point in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly and powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses the properties of position and duration in space, was--in the midst of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and subject!--very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in the memory, for what we now call “memory” is the capacity of storing for the understanding, by means of the name, _the named_. Over the realm of understood visuals (_Sehdinge_) supervenes a more intellectual realm of namings, which shares with it the logical property of being purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions (which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E’we languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and near, passive and active.[188] Later these relics of gesture-language pass completely into the word-form,[189] as we see clearly, for example, in the Greek μακρός and μικρός and the _u_-sounds of Egyptian designations of suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites which, starting from these antithetical word-pairs, constitutes the foundation of all inorganic logic, and turns every scientific discovery of truths into a movement of conceptual contraries, of which the most universal instance is that of an old view and a new one being contrasted as “error” and “truth.”

The second great turning-point was the use of _grammar_. Besides the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection--which is a thinking in word-relations that follows from the perception of things for which word-labels exist--became the decisive characteristic of man’s waking-consciousness. The question whether the communication-languages already contained effective “sentences” before the appearance of the genuine “name” is a difficult one. The sentence, in the _present_ acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but nevertheless it postulates the _prior_ existence of the name. Sentences as conceptual relations become possible only with the intellectual change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further that within the highly developed wordless languages one character or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use, was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon foundations of far older construction, and for its further development is _not_ dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny.

It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group of individual _names_ was transformed into a system of words, whose character was given, not by their proper, but by their grammatical significance. The name made its appearance as something novel and entirely self-contained. But word-species arose as elements of the sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking-consciousness streamed in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demanding to be labelled and represented in it, until finally even “all” became, in one shape or another, a word and available for the thought-process.

Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element--we speak in sentences and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent, but never successful. According to F. N. Finck, word-formation is an analytical and sentence-formation a synthetical activity of the mind, the first preceding the second. It is demonstrable that the same actuality received as impression is variously understood, and words, therefore, are definable from very different points of view.[190] But according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal expression of a _thought_, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connexion of several _ideas_ in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible to settle the nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is simply that we call the relatively largest mechanical units employed “sentences” and the relatively smallest “words.” Over this range extends the validity of grammatical _laws_. But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but _pulse_. Thus a race-character is involved, _a priori_, in the way in which the matter to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, _the blood_, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the _mechanical_ relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins--usages, custom, the _physiognomy_ of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English “_th_” is pronounced--a race-trait of the land. Only that which lies between these limits is the “language,” properly so called, which has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the _race_. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German. The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form of sentence and word.

Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension. Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field, his word is something like this: “living, one, big, old, female, outside, _human_”; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single, clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.[191] There are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.

The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages. The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more precise, consists in this, that through word-sounds we awaken significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of the word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form not only light-things and light-relations, but also thought-things and thought-relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech. Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even, but verb-signs never.

The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated space[192] become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe _types_ of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. “Falling stone” is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved and then isolate falling as one _kind_ of movement from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof--sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not “see” the distinction, we “know” it. The difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself--namely, singularity of occurrence--is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but in the verb _something inorganic has been put in place of something organic_. The fact that we live--namely, that we at this instant perceive something--becomes eventually a _property_ of the something perceived. In terms of word-thought, the perceived endures--“is.” Thus, finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension, Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic thought arises.

And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness. This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation. Subtle thinking--“splitting hairs,” as it is called--is conversing with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.[193]

Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history. However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists only in the heads of individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned _a priori_ by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean--apart, again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments and not aims in themselves. And this _ignorabimus_ is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers--who are personalities--and not systems--which are mutable--that have taken effect upon life.