Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of DiscussionsSpencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
Yet another way in which language in general advances from the homogeneous
to the heterogeneous, is in the multiplication of languages. Whether as Max
Mueller and Bunsen think, all languages have grown from one stock, or
whether, as some philologists say, they have grown from two or more stocks,
it is clear that since large families of languages, as the Indo-European,
are of one parentage, they have become distinct through a process of
continuous divergence. The same diffusion over the Earth's surface which
has led to the differentiation of the race, has simultaneously led to a
differentiation of their speech: a truth which we see further illustrated
in each nation by the peculiarities of dialect found in several districts.
Thus the progress of Language conforms to the general law, alike in the
evolution of languages, in the evolution of families of words, and in the
evolution of parts of speech.
On passing from spoken to written language, we come upon several classes of
facts, all having similar implications. Written language is connate with
Painting and Sculpture; and at first all three are appendages of
Architecture, and have a direct connection with the primary form of all
Government--the theocratic. Merely noting by the way the fact that sundry
wild races, as for example the Australians and the tribes of South Africa,
are given to depicting personages and events upon the walls of caves, which
are probably regarded as sacred places, let us pass to the case of the
Egyptians. Among them, as also among the Assyrians, we find mural paintings
used to decorate the temple of the god and the palace of the king (which
were, indeed, originally identical); and as such they were governmental
appliances in the same sense that state-pageants and religious feasts were.
Further, they were governmental appliances in virtue of representing the
worship of the god, the triumphs of the god-king, the submission of his
subjects, and the punishment of the rebellious. And yet again they were
governmental, as being the products of an art reverenced by the people as a
sacred mystery. From the habitual use of this pictorial representation
there naturally grew up the but slightly-modified practice of
picture-writing--a practice which was found still extant among the Mexicans
at the time they were discovered. By abbreviations analogous to those still
going on in our own written and spoken language, the most familiar of these
pictured figures were successively simplified; and ultimately there grew up
a system of symbols, most of which had but a distant resemblance to the
things for which they stood. The inference that the hieroglyphics of the
Egyptians were thus produced, is confirmed by the fact that the
picture-writing of the Mexicans was found to have given birth to a like
family of ideographic forms; and, among them, as among the Egyptians, these
had been partially differentiated into the _kuriological_ or imitative, and
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