American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1873-02-22
Was Your Grandfather q Monkey!

Max Mueller, one OF the ablest of living
linguists, in a lecture recently delivered
at Liverpool, i'm which he addressed him
which deals with the possibility of the
higher animals acquiring the faculty O
articulate speech, says most emphatically
mop
Materialism, he said, is everywhere in
the ascendant, while Idealism is almost
become term of reprOach. In this rid
die of mind and matter the world is the
theater of a struggle for the primacy o.
mind over matter. But when the evOlu
| tionists contend that the development Of
| the mind of man out of the mind of an
animal is a mere question of time the pro
fessOr felt inclined to treat the idea with
Impotence. Animals must be animals Sc
long as they lack the faculty of abstract
ing general ideas.
This question of the descent of man
may be called the controversy of the nine
teenth century, and requires the whole
knowledge of the century to answer ii
adequately. The lecturer, combining him.
self to the evolution theory as it affects
language, essayed to show that between
the language of animals and the language
of man there is no natural bridge, and
that to account for human language such
as we possess would require a faculty OF
which no trace has ever been discovered
in lower animals. If, as Mr.. Darwin begs
us to assume, there were series of de-
velopments graduating insensibly from
apes to man, it would of course be impos-
sible to fix definite point where the ape
ended and the man began; but he asks us
to assume that which does not exist and
without evidence to support this, of which
there is none, the theory remains only a
theory. Indeed, said the professor, when
ever the distance between two points in
the chain of development seems too great,
we are told again and again that we must
only imagine large number of intermit-
ted beings representing gradatiOns insen-
sibly sloping up or sloping down, in Or
der to remove all difficulty. Sol is in the
case between the monkey and man.
This point was illustrated most Apo
Sitely by reference to the HindoO notion
that man is descended from the spirit of
the Creator, through a series of links now
tenths God and One-tenth man, the sec
ond being eight-tenths God and two-tenths
man, and so on till man becomes ten
tenths man, and ceased to be of the es-
sence of the Great Spirit. Mr.. Darwin's
fallacy, he said, turks in the very word
development" for the admission of
this insensible graduation through series
only the difference between the ape and
the man, but likewise the difference be-
tween peat and coal, between black and
white, between high and low-in fact, it
would do away with the possibility of all
definite knowledge. Mr.. Darwin admits
that articulate language is peculiar to man,
but contends that animals have, in low
er stage of development, the identical fac
ulties necessary to the invention of artic-
ulate expressions. TO this he replied that
no development of mental faculties has
ever enabled any animal to connect one
single definite idea with one single def
mite word.
He gave various illustrations of the es-
sential difference between the expression
of emotions and the expression of ideas
or abstract conceptions, and argued at
length as to the impossibility of mere
emotional signs and sounds developing
into articulate speech; and he ridiculed
the notion that the materials of language
being given, all the rest was mere ques-
ton of time, natural graduation frsm the
neigh of the horse to the poetry of Goethe.
Man and animals possess emotional lam
guage in common, because man is an ami
NAL but animals do not possess rational
language, because they are not man. The
distinction between emotional and ration
al language, so far from being fanciful and
artificial, is radical, as proved by various
evidence, especially by the testimony of
pathology in reference to certain brain
traced back to roots, and every root has
the sign of general conception or alb
stract idea of which the animal mind is
incapable. Mr.. Darwin has said there
are savage languages which contain no
abstract terms but the names for COM
mon objects, such as father, mother,
brother, &C., are abstract terms. and I'M
less Mr.. Darwin is prepared to produce a
language containing no such names, his
statements, said the lecturer, fall to the
ground as the result of a misconception
of the real nature of a general idea as dis
tinguished from an emotion. This phase
of the controversy lies within the profess
sor's peculiar domain, and he was able to
entertain his audience with technical Illus
trations that in ordinary hands must have
proved tedious, but i'm the hands of the
most accomplished linguist of the day
proved a source of wonder and amuse-
ment to his hearers. He concluded as he
had begun, by maintaining that language
tI,af , hot ov,I