It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that
language would then be an _accident_ of human nature; and, this being
the case, that we certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken so
low as not to possess it; even as there is almost no human art or
invention so obvious, and as it seems to us so indispensable, but there
are those who have fallen below its knowledge and its exercise. But
with language it is not so. There have never yet been found human
beings, not the most degraded horde of South African bushmen, or Papuan
cannibals, who did not employ this means of intercourse with one
another. But the more decisive objection to this view of the matter is,
that it hangs together with, and is indeed an essential part of, that
theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of Genesis,
and every notice of our actual experience--the 'urang-utang theory,' as
it has been so happily termed--that, I mean, according to which the
primitive condition of man was the savage one, and the savage himself
the seed out of which in due time the civilized man was unfolded;
whereas, in fact, so far from being this living seed, he might more
justly be considered as a dead withered leaf, torn violently away from
the great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything
nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered leaf to
unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the child
with the latent capabilities of manhood, he is himself rather the man
prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.

But the truer answer to the inquiry how language arose, is this: God
gave man language, just as He gave him reason, and just because He gave
him reason; for what is man's _word_ but his reason, coming forth that
it may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the same
that the Greek language has one word for them both. He gave it to him,