he great writer
who is the expression of his age, became impressed on the minds of
their countrymen, perhaps in the hour of some crisis of national
development--a migration, a conquest, or the like. The picture of the
word which was beginning to be lost, is now revived; the sound again
echoes to the sense; men find themselves capable not only of expressing
more feelings, and describing more objects, but of expressing and
describing them better. The world before the flood, that is to say, the
world of ten, twenty, a hundred thousand years ago, has passed away and
left no sign. But the best conception that we can form of it, though
imperfect and uncertain, is gained from the analogy of causes still in
action, some powerful and sudden, others working slowly in the course of
infinite ages. Something too may be allowed to 'the persistency of the
strongest,' to 'the survival of the fittest,' in this as in the other
realms of nature.

These are some of the reflections which the modern philosophy of
language suggests to us about the powers of the human mind and the
forces and influences by which the efforts of men to utter articulate
sounds were inspired. Yet in making these and similar generalizations
we may note also dangers to which we are exposed. (1) There is the
confusion of ideas with facts--of mere possibilities, and generalities,
and modes of conception with actual and definite knowledge. The words
'evolution,' 'birth,' 'law,' development,' 'instinct,' 'implicit,'
'explicit,' and the like, have a false clearness or comprehensiveness,
which adds nothing to our knowledge. The metaphor of a flower or a tree,
or some other work of nature or art, is often in like manner only a
pleasing picture. (2) There is the fallacy of resolving the languages
which we know into their parts, and then imagining that we can discover
the nature of language by reconstructing them. (3) There is the danger
of identifying language, not with thoughts but with ideas. (4) There is
the error of supposing that the analysis of grammar and logic has always
existed, or that their distinctions were familiar to Socrates and Plato.
(5) There is the fallacy of exaggerating, and also of diminishing the
interval which separates articulate from inarticulate language--the
cries of animals from the speech of man--the instincts of animals from
the reason of man. (6) There is the danger which besets all enquiries
into the early history of man--of interpreting the