Every mental phenomenon has its history, which can only be discovered by tracing it to its source; and as speech has undergone many phases, of which the earlier must have been very different from those now in existence, it is pardonable in the greatest philosophers of antiquity not to have known the intricacies of the human mind, which this changeable speech could alone interpret. The ancients knew their own times, but were ignorant of the preceding ones, in the same way they knew their own language only, and of this language only its contemporary form; and in the case of a word whose meaning was lost or of a foreign word, they sought its origin in an idiom with which they were familiar; in other words, not where it could be found. For a long time man only knew one kind of being, his own; and possessed one language only, that which expressed his own acts and his own states; the primitive men were sufficiently advanced to say: “let us dig,” “grind,” “they weave”; but if, at the beginning, concepts and speech arose from the consciousness of their own activity, how was the advance made when men desired to speak of the external objects of the world which they saw around them, and were conscious of not having made, and which consequently remained outside the sphere of their wills and of their experience? It is clear that these outward objects to be grasped and named, must have their part in the human activities for which names had already been found. When he saw the lightning tearing a hole in the field, or splitting the trunk of a tree, man could no longer say, “_We_ have dug this hole, _you_ have split the tree.” It was no longer _someone_, but _something_ that had dug and struck. Nothing seems more simple to us than after saying “_I dig_” to say also “_it digs_,” and yet it was a passing to a new world of thought, from the conscious feeling of our own activity to the intuition of the activity of an outward object; this mental act, though inevitable, was by no means an easy one; men realised that the world around was a reflex of themselves, the only light was the light from within. If men could measure, so could the moon; hence he was called the measurer of the sky, from the root _Mâ_, to measure; the moon was called _Mâs_, that which measures, its actual name in Sanscrit; in Latin, _mensis_; in Greek, _mêné_; English, _moon_; German, _Monat_; in Russian, _miésets_. Men who ran called themselves runners; also the rivers they named _sar_, running; and to designate the position of the river they added the suffix _it_, _sar-it_; literally, running here. Thus _sarit_ is river in Sanscrit; _Mâs_ and _sarit_ thus become complete, intelligible sentences. What we call lightning was originally, tearing, digging, bursting, sparkling; what we call storm and tempest were, grinding, smashing, bursting, blowing; if man could smash, so could the thunderbolt, hence it was called the smasher; and tempest and storm and