Man in the abstract has been studied for long years. Max Müller contemplates this abstraction in the Aryan man; this has not previously been attempted. Certainly we Aryans of to-day differ greatly from our first parents, but not _in toto_; the ties which connect us have not been severed, and he it is--our Aryan ancestor--who will help us to understand how we are verily the children of our fathers. FOOTNOTES: [23] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 18. [24] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 19. [25] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. pp. 18-20. [26] _Chips from, a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 17. [27] _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 52. CHAPTER III THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE It is possible to distinguish in ourselves four things: sensation, perception, conception, and the signs by means of which we designate objects, that is their names; these enable us to separate the one from the other. We must not imagine that these four exist as separate entities, “no words are possible without concepts, no concepts without percepts, no percepts without sensations.”[28]--_Science of Thought_, p. 2. These four constituent elements of thought are merely four different phases in the growth of what we call our mind. I employ these terms because they are in use in philosophical language; there are also many others constantly on the lips of philosophers, some of them newly coined. This is greatly to be regretted, as much of our confusion of thought arises from this superabundance of philosophical terms. If such words as impression, sensation, perception, intuition, presentation, conception, soul, reason, and many others could for a time be banished from our philosophical dictionaries, and some only readmitted after they had undergone a thorough purification and were made to return to their primitive signification, an immense service would have been rendered to mental science; as every writer defines them as he will, or uses them without definition; and he seems to imagine that because there are so many words, there must also be so many variations, “Because in the German language there are two words: _verstand_ and _vernunft_, both originally expressing the same thing, the greatest efforts have been made to show that there is something to be called _verstand_, totally different from what is called _vernunft_; and as there is a _vernunft_ by the side of a _verstand_ in German, English philosophers have been most anxious to introduce the same distinction between understanding and reason into English”;[29] and “because we have a name for impression, and another for sensations, we are led to imagine that impressions do actually exist by the side of sensations. But what was originally meant by impression was not something beside sensation, but rather one side of sensation, namely, the passive side, which may be spoken of by itself, but which in every real sensation is inseparable from its active side.”[30]