ORIGIN OF ABSTRACT TERMS.

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orders of ideas could not have both been in the mind at the same time; that is certain. Had they been so present we should have had two separate orders of words devoid of etymological connection. Therefore either the moral idea was taken from the physical one, or the physical from the moral. Have we any hesitation in deciding which process actually took place? 1

But somehow a deeper than a purely physical sense has come in time to attach itself to all and each of these words. By whatever process-and the process differs somewhat in each individual case-straight has come to mean right, heap, truth, measure, think, and so forth; the ethical meaning has grown over the physical meaning, and in many places hidden it altogether. And as this gradual development is not arbitrary, nor one to be illustrated by a few examples only, but a continuous change parallel with the growth of human speech, it must express a certain faculty or tendency in human thought. This faculty had we learnt fully to understand, we should know much. We should have gained the key to that which is most essential in our nature, the capacity of abstract thought and of moral sense.

Having formed a certain elementary language of root sounds, man desired to communicate to his neighbour ideas to which he found no correspondence in external nature. How was he to act then? He was now brought to the verge of perhaps the greatest step which has ever

I find a writer upon mythology saying that 'the adherents of the theory of primitive fetichism, primeval barbarism, and the like, when hard pressed by the evidence which shows the simplicity and the purity of the religious views of archaic man, are wont to take refuge in "boundless time," where indeed they are perfectly safe from our pursuit' . . . . and that of primitive man we know little, but dogmatise much,' the writer quoting as a proof of such dogmatism assertions by Ludwig Noiré and others of less repute, and ending such assertions in the absence of evidence are of course valueless' (The Religion and Mythology of the Aryans of Northern Europe, by R. Brown, F.S.A.) Certainly all assertions are valueless in the absence of evidence. But is there, in the history of the development of words, no evidence on the question of the development of human thought?

been taken by the human mind. To have hit upon the notion of making certain sounds, which should convey the idea of external things-this was much; but much more is it if he can contrive to convey the ideas which are passing in his own mind. Exactly how this was done we cannot know; no doubt it was a development which proceeded by very slow degrees. Sometimes the internal idea might be conveyed as the simple expression of some outward object, just as the name of some dreaded animal might come to be used for fear, or else for the same feeling men might employ some of its outward expressions, trembling and the like. But, as for the expression of most internal ideas, it seems pretty clear that there was in the mind of primitive man some subtle and necessary connection between them and external phenomena. For the same reason which obliged the first words to have physical meanings-the necessity for a consensus or agreement in their use-must operate still, in determining the transfer from physical to metaphysical uses. It could be no fanciful connection which associated certain mental ideas-virtue, right-with physical roots, and but for the fact that there was the connection in the human mind no words for mental or moral conceptions would ever have been invented.

The deaf and dumb, when they desire to express a good man, do so by moving the hands forward in a straight line; the wicked man they express by motion in a crooked line. This sign is recognised as one of those which are spontaneous and common to human nature. It is with them no acquired metaphorical association between right and straight, but a spontaneous association of ideas. An example such as this seems for a moment to lift the veil from before the history of man's development in thought.

The habit of confounding and involving the two orders of ideas, the physical and the moral, was general only in primitive stages of thought, but survivals of the same

SIGNIFICANCE OF GREAT' AND 'HIGH.'

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habit are found among us, and even these are hard to explain. Great and high, low and base are used, and so far back as we can trace language have been used, in such a double sense. One hardly sees how there can be any pleasure to the moral feelings gained from taking a longer rather than a shorter time in moving over a given surface or up to a given point; and no more than this is implied. in the words great, high used in their literal meaning. What is there more moral in motion upwards than in motion downwards? Yet it can scarcely be maintained that it is an accidental association of ideas which makes high imply good, and low evil, in face of the peculiar attribute of man that he alone among the animals can look upward, and that he has always chosen an upward gaze for his attitude of prayer and worship.

It is impossible to do more than note these one or two examples of a process which goes on throughout the whole range of human development, a process which, to sum it in gross, is nothing less than the recognition of a something behind the material world which man learned the first to know. It is true that with the knowledge of good comes the knowledge of evil, and words for good and high imply words for evil and base. But still it is throughout a growth of the moral capacities of man. Between the perfect conception of the moral abstraction and the condition of mind in which no moral idea has yet been thought of there is a vast interval, which the human faculty of development has slowly over-bridged. It is the history of the transition from one state to another, which I would call the Early History of Belief.

In the conception of right, for example, we have, after its first meaning 'stretched,' the secondary and partly moral one of fit and suitable. Few would be inclined to question the assertion that right had once this meaning and no higher one. Yet when man has got so far as this he has scarcely yet attained a complete moral sense. What moral feeling mingles with his use of the word

applies only to particular occasions. He has no thought of a general law. Still he may have moral ideas. Though he calls it unsuitable to injure his neighbour or to desert his tribe, he deems it so in obedience to an instinct of clanship teaching him to love his kind. Or again, to come to matters more directly relating to religion, though the savage worships a visible physical object, a tree, a river, or a mountain, he may do so in obedience to an instinct of admiration for what is great and high, and in dim recognition of moral greatness and height. We have in Sanskrit a root ri, and in the sister language, the Zend, the root ĕrě, from which we may argue back to a lost proto-Aryan 1 word which meant (at first) motion, but more especially motion upwards, such as we understand from the same root when it appears in the Latin orire. But that same root ri comes to mean in the Sanskrit to move, to excite, to raise ; and finally it enters into the word arya, which means, as an adjective, excellent, beloved, and as a substantive master, lord. As soon, then, as a word, which originally meant movement only, comes to be used especially in the sense of movement upwards, the moral meaning begins to develope therefrom: it absorbs into itself gradually the idea of quite internal emotions, excitement, elevation, and comes at last to mean noble, beloved. Is not such an example as this the chronicle and brief abstract of the growth of human thought?

Now transfer this method of thought from words to things, and we have the first and most important chapter in the history of Belief. I have said that Belief covers the range of things which are believed to exist; but it is

1 The word Aryan is commonly used as a designation for the forgotten ancestors of us and of the whole Indo-European family. The use is not quite a correct one, for Aryan has never to our knowledge been applied save to the Eastern (Indo-Persic) division of the race. We have every reason to believe, however, that our ancestors once called themselves Aryas or by some word closely akin to that one. Proto-Aryas, proto-Aryan, are the most scientific terms we can find, but it will often be convenient to use the shorter words Aryas, Aryan in the same sense.

THE CAPACITY FOR WORSHIP.

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something beside the recognition of what exists in outward sensation. It is the answering voice of human consciousness, or conscience, to the call of this something behind. The call is from the outward beauty; the response is from inward seeing, or the sense of moral beauty. Without the inward development the human mind would be incapable of even the outward pleasure of beauty, and without the outward call, without the influence of the charm or wonder or the terror of nature, man would never have acquired the capacity for discerning a something beyond nature. It is this capacity which I call Belief, and the more we consider it, the more clearly we shall see that it is essentially the capacity for worship. For what I have only called the recognition of a something behind the physical object is, in reality, a worship of the something (or Some One) behind it. Primitive man has a belief in the great thing, the tree, river, mountain, or what not. This belief is an affection of the mind, very different from the simple sense that the thing is physically broad and high. Along with the physical sensation goes a subtler inward feeling, a sense not easily measurable as physical sensations are, but still discoverable. We know it to be there by the answer which the material sensation has called out of man's heart, and which makes itself audibly known in his worship.

Perhaps, therefore, if we were pressed for a single and concise definition of that human faculty called belief, which we have taken for our study here, we could hardly find a better one than this, that it is the capacity for worship.' For if you will consider the nature of man you will find that with him it always has been and still is true, that that thing in all his inward or outward world which he sees worthy of worship, is essentially the thing in which he believes; and conversely that he who worships nothing believes in nothing. Wherefore it has been truly said that 'the man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder and worship,' though he hold all the results of scientific knowledge in his single head, 'is but a Pair of

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