e infinitive was the only tense, and as to
adjectives, great difficulties must have attended the development of
the idea that represents them, since every adjective is an abstract
word, and abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation.

At first they gave every object a peculiar name, without any regard to
its genus or species, things which these first institutors of language
were in no condition to distinguish; and every individual presented
itself solitary to their minds, as it stands in the table of nature.
If they called one oak A, they called another oak B: so that their
dictionary must have been more extensive in proportion as their
knowledge of things was more confined. It could not but be a very
difficult task to get rid of so diffuse and embarrassing a
nomenclature; as in order to marshal the several beings under common
and generic denominations, it was necessary to be first acquainted
with their properties, and their differences; to be stocked with
observations and definitions, that is to say, to understand natural
history and metaphysics, advantages which the men of these times could
not have enjoyed.

Besides, general ideas cannot be conveyed to the mind without the
assistance of words, nor can the understanding seize them without the
assistance of propositions. This is one of the reasons, why mere
animals cannot form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility
which depends on such an operation. When a monkey leaves without the
least hesitation one nut for another, are we to think he has any
general idea of that kind of fruit, and that he compares these two
individual bodies with his archetype notion of them? No, certainly;
but the sight of one of these nuts calls back to his memory the
sensations which he has received from the other; and his eyes,
modified after some certain manner, give notice to his palate of the
modification it is in its turn going to receive. Every general idea is
purely intellectual; let the imagination tamper ever so little with
it, it immediately becomes a particular idea. Endeavour to represent
to yourself the image of a tree in general, you never will be able to
do it; in spite of all your efforts it will appear big or little, thin
or tufted, of a bright or a deep colour; and were you master to see
nothing in it, but what can be seen in every tree, such a picture
would no longer resemble any tree. Beings perfectly abstract are
perceivable in the same manner, or are