and metaphysics became a science only after it had ceased to be sound."

There is therefore, according to Condillac, a natural method which is the soul of language and science. If we followed it properly, it would lead us infallibly to truth. This method he calls "analysis." In his first work, he contented himself with saying that analysis consists merely in combining and separating our ideas in order to make different comparisons and thus to discover their mutual relation and the new ideas to which they may give rise. This analysis is "the secret of discoveries" because it always takes us back to the origin of things. "It consists," he says again, "in tracing our ideas back to their origin, and in studying their development."

We see even by these definitions, that in Condillac's analysis thought is not opposed to synthesis as decomposition is to compo sition. It comprehends both processes; there is no reasoning which is not a succession of compositions and decompositions, and the two operations are inseparable. Yet the distinction between analysis and synthesis subsists in Condillac, but in a special sense. To proceed analytically, in his view, is to start from the simple, the primitive, and the particular, proceeding with the help of observation and experience, and reproducing the "development" of things. To proceed synthetically is to start from general and abstract principles, aiming thence to deduce the particular and the concrete, -an ambitious and faulty method which has too often led metaphysicians astray.

If our minds were powerful enough to perceive distinctly, at one glance, a collection of objects or all the qualities of an object and the connexions between these, we should have no need of analysis. Our knowledge would be intuitive and perfect from the first. But it is not so; we first have collective impressions, and in order to transform these into knowledge we must decompose them. We therefore consider one after another the objects which form part of a whole, and compare them in order to judge of their mutual connexion. When we have thus become acquainted with their respective positions, we observe in succession all those that fill the intervals; we compare each of them with the nearest principal object and thus we determine its position. In this way we make out all the objects, the form and situation of which we have discovered, and take them all in at one glance. The order assigned to them in our mind is no longer successive, it has become simul

taneous.

It is the order in which the objects really are situated, and we perceive them all at once distinctly; whence this specific definition of analysis: "To analyze is simply to observe in successive order the qualities of an object, in order to assign to them in the mind the simultaneous order in which they exist."

But there are many ways of conceiving this successive order that leads to a view, both simultaneous and distinct, of the relations between objects; can it be said that any one of these many is the pre-eminently analytical order? "The whole difficulty,” says Condillac, "consists in finding how to begin in order to apprehend ideas in their most essential connexion with one another. I assert that the only combination by which this is to be found is the one which is in accordance with the very genesis of things. We must start from the first idea which must have produced all others." The analytical order is the genetic order. If we knew a sufficient number of facts, and had studied them closely enough, systems would in some sort be self made, as facts would group themselves of their own accord in such an order as to explain one another in succession. We should then find that in every system there is a first fact, which is the beginning of it, and which for this reason might be called the principle, for principle and beginning are two words which have originally the same meaning. Any system. which does not thus exactly reproduce the order of the evolution and composition of facts, any system resting on general and abstract principles is arbitrary, and consequently false. The logical order of science coincides with the order in which phenomena are produced in the course of time. In one word, in this empirical conception of analysis the mind is methodically made subordinate to things. It is in things that order is inherent, and the function. of the mind consists in reflecting back this order as faithfully as possible, and in being, to use Bacon's expression, a perfect mirror.

The stumbling-block to empiricism of this kind is generally to be found in mathematics and metaphysics. As regards mathematics, Condillac got out of the difficulty by reducing every demonstration to a succession of equivalent propositions "the identity of which is obvious," and is more easily perceived when we use algebraical signs. Nor was metaphysics embarrassing to Condillac, no doubt because he took but little care to make it fit in with the rest of his system. He proves dogmatically the existence of God from the necessity of a first cause and from the existence of final causes. We again meet in him the argument of the watch and the watchmaker, which Voltaire thought decisive. Without knowing the

essence of the soul and of the body, Condillac knows that they are two distinct substances. "The body may be defined as an extended substance, and the soul as a sentient substance. It is sufficient to consider entension and sensation as two incompatible properties, to be convinced that the substance of the soul and that of the body are too widely different substances. Locke was wrong in declaring that it will perhaps be forever impossible for us to know whether God has not endowed some heap of matter shaped in a certain way with the faculty of thinking. For the subject that thinks must be one. Now a heap of matter is not one; it is a multitude. The soul thus being a different substance from the body, we cannot understand how the latter would act upon it. The body can be only an occasional cause. We must therefore acknowledge that the senses are but the occasional source of our knowledge. Free access is thus left for idealism.

There is no reason why we should question Condillac's sincerity as regards his spiritualistic metaphysics; but the very fact of its occupying so small a place in his system, and being so closely connected with it, is characteristic. It means that psychology was beginning to live an independent life and trying to rely solely on observation and experience. Locke had shown the way; Condillac advanced farther. True, his solutions are still far from perfect. He gives bad definitions of the terms he uses, and commentators in our days are not of one mind as to what he understands by "sensation," "perception," and "nature." No doubt, when he tries to analyze facts, to discover their origin, and to trace back their genesis, he most often construes them with the aid of factors in themselves very complex. Nevertheless he has a precise conception of empirical psychology, and attempts to study the especial share of each of the senses in our knowledge, to analyze habit and instinct, to define the function of the association of ideas, and, in short, to discover the genesis of psychological phenomena. All these points were to be taken up again later on, in accordance with a more prudent and safer method; but at last the questions had been raised, and often with remarkable clearness and pertinency, so that the influence of Condillac upon French thought was longlived and persistent, and it would not be impossible to find traces of it in what is taught today in our schools.

THE EVOLUTION OF SPEECH.'

BY PROF. TH. RIBOT.

2

N passing from the origin of speech to the study of its development, we enter upon firmer ground. Although this development has not occurred uniformly in every race, and the linguistswho are here our guides-do not always agree in fixing its phases, it is nevertheless the surest indication of the march of the human mind in its self-analysis in passing from extreme confusion to deliberate differentiation; while the materials are sufficiently abundant to admit of an objective study of intellectual psychogenesis, based upon language.

This attempt has nothing in common with the "general or philosophical grammar" of the beginning of this century. The Idealogues who founded this had the pretension, while taking language as their basis, to analyse the fundamental categories of intelligence substance, quality, action, relation. A laudable enterprise, but one which, by reason of the method employed, could only be abortive. Knowing only the classical or modern languages, the products of a long civilisation, they had no suspicion of the embryonic phases; accordingly, they made a theoretical construction, the work of logicians rather than of psychologists. Any positive genetic investigation was inaccessible to them; they were. lacking in material, and in instruments. If by a comparison borrowed from geology, the adult languages are assimilated to the Quaternary layer; the Tertiary, Secondary, and Primary strata will correspond with certain idioms of iess and less complexity which themselves contain the fossils of psychology. These lower forms the semi-organised or savage languages which are a hundred times more numerous than the civilised languages are now familiar to us; hence there is an immense field for research and 1 Translated from the French by Frances A. Welby. 2 See the April Open Court.

comparison. This retrogression to the primitive leads to a point that several linguists have designated by a term borrowed from biology: it is the protoplasmic state "without functions of grammatical categories" (Hermann Paul). How is it that speech issued from this undifferentiated state, and constituted little by little its organs and functions? This question is interesting to the linguist on certain sides, to the psychologist on others. For us it consists in seeking how the human mind, through long groping, conquered and perfected its instrument of analysis.

I. At the outset of this evolution, which we are to follow step by step, we find the hypothesis of a primitive period, the so-called roots, and it is worth our while to pause over this a little. Roots -whatever may be our opinion as to their origin-are in effect general terms. But in what sense?

Chinese consists of 500 monosyllables which, thanks to varieties of intonation, sufficed for the construction of the spoken language; Hebrew, according to Renan, has about 500 roots; for Sanskrit there is no agreement. According to a bold hypothesis of Max Müller, it is reducible to 121, perhaps less, and "these few seeds have produced the enormous intellectual vegetation that has covered the soil of India from the most distant antiquity to the present day.1 Whatever their number may be, the question for us reduces itself into knowing their primitive intellectual content, their psychological value. Here we are confronted by two very different theses. For one camp, roots are a reality; for the other, they are the simple residuum of analysis.

"Roots are the phonetic types produced by a force inherent in the human mind; they were created by nature," etc., etc. Thus speaks Max Müller. Whitney, who is rarely of the same mind, says, notwithstanding, that all the Indo-European languages are descended from one primitive, monosyllabic language, "that our ancestors talked with one another in simple syllables indicative of ideas of prime importance, but wanting all designation of their relations."

In the other camp it is sustained that roots are the result of learned analysis, but that there is nothing to prove that they really existed (Sayce); that they are reconstructed by comparison and generalisation; that, e. g., in the Aryan languages, roots bear much the same relation to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin words as Platonic ideas to the objects of the real world" (Bréal). It has been calculated that the number of articulate sounds which the 1 This list may be found in The Science of Thought, p. 406.