Seeing that my psychological opponents have laid so much stress upon the substantive verb as this is used by the Romance languages in formal predication, I will here devote a paragraph to its special consideration from a philological point of view. It will be remembered that I have already pointed out the fallacy which these opponents have followed in confounding the substantive verb, as thus used, with the copula—it being a mere accident of the Romance languages that the two are phonetically identified. Nevertheless, even after this fallacy has been pointed out to them, my opponents may seek to take refuge in the substantive verb itself: forced to acknowledge that it has nothing especially to do with predication, they may still endeavour to represent that elsewhere, or in itself, it represents a high order of conceptual thought. This, of course, I allow; and if, as my opponents assume, the substantive verb belonged to early, not to say primitive modes of speech, I should further allow that it raises a formidable difficulty in the otherwise even path of evolutionary explanation. But, as a matter of fact, these writers are no less mistaken about the primitive nature of the substantive verb itself, than they are upon the function which it accidentally discharges in copulation.[246] In order to prove this, or to show that the substantive verb is really very far from primitive, I will furnish a few extracts from the writings of philological authorities upon the subject. “Whatever our _a priori_ estimate of the power of the verb-substantive may be, its origin is traced by philology to very humble and material sources. The Hebrew verbs חחמוה (_houa_) or הוה (_haia_) may very probably be derived from an onomatopœia of respiration. The verb _kama_, which has the same sense, means primitively ‘to stand out,’ and the verb _koum_, ‘to stand,’ passes into the sense of ‘being.’ In Sanskrit, _as-mi_ (from which all the verbs-substantives in the Indo-European languages are derived, as [Greek: eimi], _sum_, am; Zend _ahmi_; Lithuanic, _esmi_, Icelandic, _em_, &c.) is, properly speaking, no verbal root, but ‘a formation on the demonstrative pronoun _sa_, the idea meant to be conveyed being simply that of local presence.’ And of the two other roots used for the same purpose, namely, _bhu_ ([Greek: phuô], _fui_, &c.) and _sthâ_ (_stare_, &c.), the first is probably an imitation of breathing, and the second notoriously a physical verb, meaning ‘to stand up.’ May we not, then, ask with Bunsen, ‘What is _to be_ in all languages but the spiritualization of _walking_ or _standing_ or _eating_?’”[247]