The consideration that it is only those words which were successful in the struggle for existence that can have become the progenitors of subsequent language—and therefore the only words that have been handed down to us as roots—has a still more important bearing upon another of Professor Max Müller’s generalizations. From the fact that all his 121 Sanskrit roots are expressive of “general” ideas (by which term he of course includes what I call generic ideas), he concludes that from its very earliest origin speech must have been thus expressive of general ideas; or, in other words, that human language could not have begun by the naming of particulars: from the first it must have been concerned with the naming of “notions.” Now, of course, if any vestige of real evidence could be adduced to show that this “must have been” the case, most of the foregoing chapters of the present work would not have been written. For the whole object of these chapters has been to show, that on psychological grounds it is abundantly intelligible how the conceptual stage of ideation may have been gradually evolved from the receptual—the power of forming general, or truly conceptual ideas, from the power of forming particular and generic ideas. But if it could be shown—or even rendered in any degree presumable—that this distinctly human power of forming truly general ideas arose _de novo_ with the first birth of articulate speech, assuredly my whole analysis would be destroyed: the human mind would be shown to present a quality different in origin—and, therefore, in kind—from all the lower orders of intelligence: the law of continuity would be interrupted at the terminal phase: an impassable gulf would be fixed between the brute and the man. As a matter of fact, however, there is not only no vestige of any such proof or even presumption; but, as we shall see in our two following chapters, there is uniform and overwhelming proof of precisely the opposite doctrine—proof, indeed, so uniform and overwhelming that it has long ago induced all other philologists to accept this opposite doctrine as one of the axioms of their science. Leaving, however, this proof to be adduced in its proper place, I have now merely to point out the futility of the evidence on which Professor Max Müller relies.