creations of the 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