From the fact that sentence-words played so all-important a part in the origin of speech, and that in order to do so they essentially depended on the co-operation of gestures with which they were accompanied, so that in the resulting “complex of sound and gesture the sound had no meaning apart from the gesture;” from these now well-established facts, we may gain some additional light on a question previously considered—namely, the extent to which primitive words were “abstract” or “concrete,” “particular” or “general,” and, therefore, “receptual” or “conceptual.” According to Professor Max Müller, “the science of language has proved by irrefragable evidence that human thought, in the true sense of that word—that is, human language—did not proceed from the concrete to the abstract, but from the abstract to the concrete. Roots, the elements out of which all language has been constructed, are abstract, never concrete; and it is by predicating these abstract concepts of this or that, by localizing them here or there, in fact by applying the category of οὐϚία or substance, to the roots, that the first foundation of our language and our thought were laid.”[265] Here, to begin with, there is an inherent contradiction. When it is said that the roots in question already presented abstract concepts, it becomes a contradiction to add that “the first foundations of language and thought were laid by applying the category of substance to the roots.” For, if these roots already presented abstract concepts, they already presented the distinctive feature of human “thought,” whose “foundations,” therefore, must have been “laid” somewhere further back in the history of mankind. But, besides this inherent contradiction, we have here an emphatic re-statement of the two radical errors which I previously mentioned, and which everywhere mar the philosophical value of Professor Max Müller’s work. The first is his tacit assumption that the roots of Aryan speech represent the original elements of articulate language. The second is that, upon the basis of this assumption, the science of language has proved, by irrefragable evidence, that human thought proceeded from the abstract to the concrete—or, in other words, that it sprang into being Minerva-like, already equipped with the divine inheritance of conceptual wisdom. Now, in entertaining this theory, Professor Max Müller is not only in direct conflict with all his philological brethren, but likewise, as we have previously seen, often compelled to be irreconcilably inconsistent with himself.[266] Moreover, as we have likewise seen, his assumption as to the aboriginal nature of Aryan roots, on which his transcendental doctrine rests, is intrinsically absurd, and thus does not really require the united voice of professed philologists for its condemnation. Therefore, what the science of language _does_ prove “by irrefragable evidence” is, _not_ that these roots of the Aryan branch of language are the aboriginal