because he could not be man, that is, a social being, without it. Yet
this must not be taken to affirm that man started at the first
furnished with a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were with
his first dictionary and first grammar ready-made to his hands. He did
not thus begin the world _with names_, but _with the power of naming_:
for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as
one of us teaches a parrot, from without; but gave him a capacity, and
then evoked the capacity which He gave. Here, as in everything else
that concerns the primitive constitution, the great original institutes,
of humanity, our best and truest lights are to be gotten from the study
of the first three chapters of Genesis; and you will observe that there
it is not God who imposed the first names on the creatures, but Adam--
Adam, however, at the direct suggestion of his Creator. _He_ brought
them all, we are told, to Adam, 'to see what he would call them; and
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name
thereof' (Gen. ii. 19). Here we have the clearest intimation of the
origin, at once divine and human, of speech; while yet neither is so
brought forward as to exclude or obscure the other.

And so far we may concede a limited amount of right to those who have
held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of
embodying thought in words. I believe that we should conceive the
actual case most truly, if we conceived this power of naming things and
expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being,
one of the divine capabilities with which he was created: but one (and
in this differing from those which have produced in various people
various arts of life) which could not remain dormant in him, for man
could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud
and blossom out from within him at every solicitation from the world
without and from his fellow-man; as each object to be named appeared