It is not easy to understand Humboldt’s theory of the evolution of the personal pronouns. In his various essays he seems to offer conflicting statements. In one of his later papers, he argues that the origin of such subjective nominals is often, perhaps generally, locative. By comparing the personal pronouns with the adverbs of place in a series of languages, he showed that their demonstrative antedated their personal meaning.[12-*] With regard to their relative development, he says, in his celebrated “Introduction”: “The first person expresses the individuality of the speaker, who is in immediate contact with external nature, and must distinguish himself from it in his speech. But in the ‘I’ the ‘Thou’ is assumed; and from the antithesis thus formed is developed the third person.”[12-†] But in his “Notice of the Japanese Grammar of Father Oyanguren,” published in 1826, he points out that infants begin by speaking of themselves in the third person, showing that this comes first in the order of knowledge. It is followed by the second person, which separates one object from others; but as it does so by putting it in conscious antithesis to the speaker, it finally develops the “I.”[12-‡] The latter is unquestionably the correct statement so far as the history of language is concerned and the progress of knowledge. I can know myself only through knowing others. The explanation which reconciles these theories is that the one refers to the order of thought, or logical precedence, the other to the order of expression. Professor Ferrier, in his “Institutes of Metaphysics,” has established with much acuteness the thesis that, “What is first in the order of nature is last in the order of knowledge,” and this is an instance of that philosophical principle. § 7. FORMAL AND MATERIAL ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE. A fundamental distinction in philosophic grammar is that which divides the _formal_ from the _material_ element of speech. This division arises from the original double nature of each radical, as expressing both Being and Action. On the one hand, Action involves Relation; it assumes an object and a subject, an agent, a direction of effort, a result of effort; usually also limitations of effort, time and space, and qualifications as to the manner of the effort. In other words, Action is capable of increase or decrease both in extension and intension. On the other hand, Being is a conception of fixed conditions, and is capable of few or no modifications. The _formal_ elements of a language are those which express Action, or the relation of the ideas; they make up the affixes of conjugations and declensions, the inflections of words; they indicate the parts of speech, the so-called “grammatical categories,” found in developed tongues. The _material_ elements are the roots or stems expressing the naked ideas, the conceptions of existence apart from relation.