As the Hindoo grammarians asserted that all roots contain the representation of various forms of activity, it behoved our philologists to investigate this and discover their meaning. Professor Noiré thought that the consciousness that men had of their own acts must have formed the origin of the primitive concepts of the human mind, and found expression in signs or words. Max Müller shows us[39] that all the Sanscrit roots express a concept or consciousness of the repeated acts, the acts with which man in his infancy would be most familiar. But it must be noted that the concepts or signs are not of single acts, but the realisation of repeated acts; to dig was not to put a spade into the ground once, it is the action of digging continuously; to sharpen was not to pass one flint over another once, it was the continual action of sharpening. The consciousness of accomplishing these repeated acts as if one act, became the first germ of conceptual thought. During this initial phase of thought, when the first consciousness of his own repeated acts awoke in man and assumed a conceptual character, will, act and knowledge were as yet one and undivided, and the whole of his conscious knowledge was subjective, exclusively concerned with his own voluntary act. We possess the genealogy of a large number of Aryan roots, and we find on examination that the activity which formed their basis was at the beginning always a creative activity, since it called into life conceptions which up to that time had not existed. Nothing is more interesting than researches into the origin of the growth of human thought, when carried out not according to the systems of certain philologists of our day, but historically, after the fashion of the Indian trapper, who notes on the sand every imprint of the footsteps of him whom he pursues. For the present I will content myself by bringing forward in illustration three primary roots. _Vê_ (_Vâ_), which is, to weave; _Mar_, to crush; and _Khan_, to dig. _Vê_ (_Vâ_), _Mar_, and _Khan_ are thus verbs.