The great majority of linguists in Canada today belong to only the second academic generation of linguists in Canadian universities. Members of the first generation are, of course, still active—in some cases more active than the younger members of their departments. They are characterized, roughly, as founding members of the Canadian Linguistic Association, or as members of long standing. They are also characterized in a few cases as having been the teachers of junior members of the profession, although this is less often the case than it is in other disciplines, partly because there have been very few graduate programs in Linguistics until recently, and partly because there has been little demand for linguists trained in the specialty of the first generation anyway, which is almost unanimously dialect geography, and partly because there has been a decided tendency toward hiring non-Canadians in the social sciences to fill positions in Canadian universities. Now, with the increase in graduate programs in Linguistics, the more diverse specializations, and the national consciousness that Canadian universities can also be served by Canadians, the third generation of linguists will increasingly be selected from the students of the present academic generation, which is how academic generations have been gauged in other cultures for centuries.

When Kant in his investigation of the nature and validity of human knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) undertook an examination of the nature of Space and Time as the starting point in the discussion, he struck the path which all fruitful philosophical investigation has followed since. Since Space and Time are the two ‘forms’ within which the whole system of life and nature unfolds itself to the human mind, and are at the same time the ‘warp and woof on which man elaborates his mental sense-picture of the world, an examination of these two sense-forms should be the self-evident starting point in any true cosmic philosophy. Yet it seems to have taken something more than a century for the full significance of Kant’s method to sink into the general philosophical consciousness, and it is only in our own time that its fruits have begun to mature. What strikes one in the philosophical writings of the present century, whether starting from mathematics, or science, or pure speculation, is the common assumption in all of them that some exposition of Space and Time must form the foundation of any adequate treatment of the nature of the world, the human mind, and the structure of human knowledge. The title of Professor Alexander’s book, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), is symbolic of the modern point of view.

What is now usually known as the ‘external divine-origin theory’ of language—a misnomer which arose from erroneous theological expositions of the narrative given in the early chapters of Genesis—has still an interest for the modern student; first, because of the prolonged influence which it has had upon language theory in the Western world; and second, because of certain significant facts regarding language which an understanding reader still finds in that old story of language origin, to say nothing of the poetic attractiveness of the story itself.

During the middle ages, and up to the middle of the eighteenth century, the theologians’ mutilated version of the Genesis account of language origin, the divine-origin theory as it came to be called, was the theory held by Christian Europe. In the eighteenth century, however, the question of the probability of a natural rather than a supernatural origin of language began to stir in men’s minds. Rousseau’s essay on the Origin of Languages, about 1750, might be taken as the historical landmark which stands between the old and new points of view. This essay is in itself disappointing to one who is acquainted with Rousseau’s other works. His mental interests were practical rather than speculative, and he had no real convictions about the question of language as he had about education, society, and government. He was interested in language, and the changes in language, in relation to the practical needs of the people in social and national groups, and in diverse climatic conditions, rather than in the origin of language itself as an instrument of human reason. As a consequence his essay on the Origin of Languages—not ‘Language’—is hardly more than a series of disconnected reflections upon various aspects of languages, including a discussion of the relation of language to melody and harmony in music which occupies about one-third of the essay.

In Being’s floods, in Action’s storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of living.
’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave the living Robe of Deity.

GOETHE, Song of the Earth-Spirit, Faust, 1774.

If pressed for an exact date of the true beginning of the scientific investigation of language, one would naturally think of the date of the publication of Johann Gottfried Herder’s prize essay on the Origin of Language, 1772. In passing from Rousseau’s essay to Herder’s—although they are separated by only twenty-two years, and by the distance between Paris and Strassburg—we step clearly over the threshold from medievalism into the new world of free philosophical investigation, into an atmosphere as clear as that in which Plato and Aristotle worked. Herder’s essay on language is the starting point for all the scientific work that has since been done on that subject, and has thus a very important historical significance in addition to its permanent scientific value. Its full significance, however, can be fully appreciated only in relation to the general scientific and philosophic thought of the time, and it will be necessary to digress for a few pages to describe the intellectual atmosphere in which Herder worked in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Germany.

My purpose in this book is not to compare languages as in linguistic science, or to trace their concrete development as in language history; but to describe the problem which gave birth to language, to show the place of language in the general scheme of world evolution, and to point out its basic structure in relation to the two forms of sense, Space and Time. I have dealt at some length with Herder and his time because that period was the beginning of the modern movement in language investigation in which we are still engaged. For the next hundred years, from Herder’s essay in 1772 to Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871, I can only touch some of the peaks in the development of linguistic theory and science, that, in their combined results, have prepared the way for the present inquiry, and that may help to give the perspective necessary to set the fabric of language clearly in its place among the other phenomena of the world. If this mode of treatment should appear to the language specialist as in some degree wanting in the ‘hard factualness’ of language, the explanation is that the inclusion of such factual material would not contribute to the investigation in hand. If one can make clear the world-problem which called language into existence, and show the structure which language was destined to assume in order to answer this problem, then the way should be better prepared and the impulse quickened for tracing man’s first steps and subsequent windings in the actual making of language.

The investigation of language, as pointed out in the last chapter, had been carried on for a hundred years in the belief that language was a unique characteristic of man, and did not extend to the animal world beneath him. But with the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871 the whole problem of language was suddenly expanded into a much wider region. Darwin, in that book, distinctly challenged the human boundaries that had been set to language as being artificial and arbitrary, and extended the problem over into the animal world, maintaining that the difference between the language of man and the cries of animals was not a difference in kind, as had been formerly thought, but a difference in degree only, a difference in definiteness of connotation and distinctness of articulation. This difference in language followed naturally, he maintained, upon the difference in degree of their mental development.

What, then, is the difference between the central unifying faculty of reason in man, out of which language arose, and the corresponding central faculty in the animals, which expresses itself in a few natural cries; and how in our present state of knowledge can this difference be distinctly brought into view and described in a concrete way? This is a complex question, and can be best answered for our purpose by breaking it into four parts.

The Prime, that willed ere wareness was,
Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thought its laws.

THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts.

Question one. What were the nature and characteristics of the world in its three main divisions of matter, plant life, and animal life, before it emerged to its fourth main division in the explicitly conscious life of man? The answer to this question carries us backward in time to a period so remote from the present that no answer would be at all possible were it not that in his emergence to consciousness man rose above the time-stream of sense, and by the help of language has been able to recover and reconstruct the otherwise irrecoverable past. While the actual sense-facts which constituted the natural environment contemporary with man’s emergence have long since vanished in the stream of change, we know now, from our knowledge of the past and present, that in any piece of virgin timber or park land of to-day we should have, substantially and typically, the same natural environment from which man emerged thousands of years ago. We should have, first of all, the same inorganic world of fixed geographic relations and definite structures: sun, moon, stars, clouds, winds, waters, soil, rocks, etc.; second, the differentiated forms of organic insentient life: grass, flowers, shrubs, trees, etc.; third, the various forms of sentient life: fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals; all these multitudinous forms, inorganic and organic, differentiated from each other and united with each other in a complete network of space, time, and causal relations.

Both the mechanistic and the organic hypotheses agree that in the world as it stands at present we find not only matter, but also life, mind, and purpose. The mechanistic hypothesis, however, as I understand it, holds that this earth was originally a purely inorganic world without life, mind, or purpose, governed by purely mechanical laws alone; and that at some point of time in the relatively recent past, life got started upon the surface of this mechanical world by some kind of ‘biological accident,’ and having got started in ‘one or more primordial forms’ it then set out on a course of evolution impelled by a strong reproductive impulse, presumably co-accidental with life itself; and with a strong tendency to reproduce or repeat the type, coupled with a lesser tendency to slight variations and an occasional tendency to a great variation, it gradually differentiated its ‘one or more primordial forms’ into many genera and species of life, each species or genus then moving forward towards greater and greater perfection under the operation of ‘natural selection,’ until we have the multi-variegated organic world as we find it to-day.

The organic hypothesis holds that the world was at no time of its evolution a merely purposeless mechanical world, in which matter was prior to mind in the time order. The real original world was already and always a world of matter, life, mind, and purpose, actual or latent. Matter on this hypothesis is regarded not as an independent substance in its own right, but as the means or material through which the life and mind of the world works itself out from its potential to its actual destiny. The life-force, or mind-force, or whatever we may call it in its earlier stages, works within the sensuous material of the world, and gradually shapes and moulds this material first into what we now call inorganic formations, and then, in the ripeness of time and environment, into those organic forms in which the lifeprinciple rises into recognizable living shapes, and emerges into actual objective existence.

The entire phenomenon of the organic world divides itself by its external behaviour into three well-defined classes, plant life, animal life, and man, each class with new and original characteristics of its own. To trace and mark these new characteristics as they emerge in their time-evolution upwards through plant and animal life to where the life-and-mind of the world eventually emerges from its unfreed and inconscious activity to its freed and conscious activity in the life and mind of man, is our next step.

Since these animal cries have purposive significance similar to that of language, in what respect do they differ from language? I shall try to give a definite answer to this question.

First, they are inarticulate while language is articulate. And what precisely does ‘inarticulate’ mean? It means (1) that these cries are not explicitly articulated sounds with clear-edged beginnings, middles, and endings, as are the word-sounds ‘h-a-p’ and ‘h-o-p,’ or ‘d-i-g’ and ‘d-i-p,’ so that one sound can be clearly and definitely differentiated from another; and (2), as a corollary to this, the sounds have no conventional meanings; that is, they are not invested each with an arbitrary and definite connptation quite apart from any natural sound-suggestion which they may have, so that one sound stands exclusively for one thing, another sound for another thing, as do the words of language like ‘wolf and ‘bear.’ In other words, the animals’ cries are natural cries as distinguished from the conventionalized sounds which we call words, and they have the characteristic vagueness or indefiniteness of significance which all natural sounds have. In this respect of natural vagueness of significance the cries of animals resemble the mechanical sounds in nature, though differing from these in expressing purpose.

In the preceding pages we have given a descriptive outline of the Space-Time picture of the life and mind of the world as it has emerged by successive steps towards freedom and individuality, up to and including animal life and intelligence. But there is as yet no language; and, from all that we can discover, no power nor problem in the animal nature which would bring language into existence. There seems to be some barrier that holds the animal’s mind back from that realm of free mind into which man has entered, where language first emerges. What is the barrier? Can it be intellectually grasped and described? These are the two questions.

What, then, is the barrier between the animals and man, that excludes the animals from man’s mental world? It is the barrier primarily of Space and Time. This, I think, can be made clear.

First, consider Time. It is clear, to begin with, that the dog holds in his memory, at least in some dim way, the time-span, or the time experiences, within the physical duration of his own life. The dog will go to-day where he found food yesterday. Darwin’s dog recognized him after an absence of five years and two days. Odysseus’s dog, Argus, according to Homer, recognized his master, even through his beggar’s disguise, after an absence of twenty years. There is no doubt that the dog has memory of this kind, which shows that he has some grasp of time within his own life-span. Whether it is conscious memory with an explicit measurement of a stretch of time between a point in past time and the present moment, as is the case with man’s memory, is extremely doubtful. It seems to be rather a recognition of the master’s identity, or sameness, through a succession of experiences, each of which is for the dog a present experience without any explicit differentiation of time into past and present.

If we now relate this unique characteristic of man in a definite and explicit way with the general Time-and-Space picture which we have been drawing, we shall see plainly the full significance of this last step—where mind in man emerges to freedom from space and time, and encompasses them in its grasp—in the unfolding life and mind of the world.

Recall again our working hypothesis, the organic unity of the world from matter to man. For aeons, if science speaks truly, our earth, to human perception at least, stood stark and naked, a mineral mass. In the process of time this seeming mineral mass clothed itself in life, in sensitivity, in mind. These later emergents, if the world is, as science asserts, an organic whole, are not adventitious decorations like tinsel on a Christmas tree, nor alien visitants extraneous to reality. They are the children of the earth who owe to her creating and shaping energy their multivarious forms and powers, physical and mental, and derive from her directly and indirectly their hourly nourishment, all without design on their own part.

Obviously, what man required was a system of mental symbols of some kind or other in the inner world of mind, to represent the system of actual types in the outward world of sense. Each species or type of object in the outward world of nature would require its corresponding symbol in the inward world of mind. Without such mental symbols no articulated advance could be made in that process which we now speak of familiarly as the accumulation of the knowledge of the world. The advance could be made only step by step, and each step would have to be recorded, registered, and fixed by means of its symbol within the rising mental fabric. The discovery or creation of adequate symbols of reason, then, was an obvious necessity for man even to get definitely started at all upon the elaboration or actualization of the world of mind.

‘Behold at last the poet’s sphere!
But who,’ I said, ‘suffices here?
For, ah! so much he has to do;
Be painter and musician too!
. . . .
No painter yet hath such a way,
Nor no musician made, as they;
And gather’d on immortal knolls
Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.
Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach
The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach.’

ARNOLD, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön.

Nevertheless, the sensuous sound element does remain as the substratum of articulate language, and as language issues from the lips it issues in the same time sequence as does pure sound, for example, in music. But here is the unique difference which separates language fundamentally from the other four arts. As language issues from the lips, the pure ‘timeness’ of it, as we might say, is immediately transmuted and absorbed in the conventionalized connotation which is arbitrarily given to the differentiated sounds. Hence in the thought-process of intellecting the world by language the actual space-time world is translated first into pure time, that is, into sound, but is immediately, in the very act as it were, retranslated by the conventionalization of sound into its former space-time structure within the world of mind.