rightly, while not excluding
the influence of _onomatopeia_, (or physical imitation,) he would attach
a far greater importance to metaphysical causes. He says admirably
well, "La liaison du sens et du mot n'est jamais _necessaire_, jamais
_arbitraire_; toujours elle est _motivee_." His theory amounts to this:
that the fresh perfection of the senses and the mental faculties made
the primitive man a poet.

The other theory seeks the origin of language in certain imitative
radicals out of which it has analogically and metaphorically developed
itself. This system has at least the merits of clearness and simplicity,
and of being to a certain extent capable of demonstration. Its
limitation in this last respect will depend upon that mental
constitution which divides men naturally into Platonists and
Aristotelians. It has never before received so thorough an exposition
or been tested by so wide a range of application as in Mr. Wedgwood's
volume, nor could it well be more fortunate in its advocate. Mr.
Wedgwood is thorough, scrupulous, and fair-minded.

It will be observed that neither theory brings any aid to the attempt
of Professor Max Mueller and others to demonstrate etymologically the
original unity of the human race. Mr. Wedgwood leaves this question
aside, as irrelevant to his purpose. M. Renan combats it at considerable
length. The logical consequence of admitting either theory would be that
the problem was simply indemonstrable.

At first sight, so imaginative a scheme as that of M. Renan is
singularly alluring; for, even when qualified by the sentence we have
quoted, we may attach such a meaning to the word _motivee_ as to find in
words the natural bodies of which the Platonic ideas are the soul and
spirit. We find in it a correlative illustration of that notion not
uncommon among primitive poets, and revived by the Cabalists, that
whoever knew the Word of a thing was master of the thing itself, and an
easy way of accounting for the innate fitness and necessity, the fore
ordination, which stamps the phrases of real poets. If, on the other
hand, we accept Mr. Wedgwood's system, we must consider speech, as
the theologians of the Middle Ages assumed of matter, to be only
_potentiated_ with life and soul, and shall find the phenomenon of
poetry as wonderful, if less mysterious, when we regard the fineness of
organization requisite to a perception of the remote analogies of sense
and thought, and the power, as of Solomo