II. The study of languages is connected, on the one hand, to the physiology of the human race, but more immediately still to the study of the varieties of the human mind, of which they are in some measure the organ. They can by this means assist also in classifying mankind into natural groups. But where the study of languages affects more especially the anthropologist,[202] is when it touches on the origin of the varieties of language, and of the primitive state (either intellectual or social) of the speaking man: when it endeavours to fathom the past each day farther back,--each day nearer to the _origin_. Thus bound together, the two sciences ought to have the same destiny; philology has had its monogenists and its polygenists. The first have been obliged to give way, overpowered by the number and the superiority of their opponents. They are done for; and the field remains free to the latter, who affirm, through their studies, the multiplied origin of human language, leaving the consequences to be deduced, or deducing them themselves.[203] One sole declaration will suffice us, that of the history of Semitic idioms. “If the planets, whose physical nature seems to be analogous to that of the earth,” says M. Renan,[204] “are peopled with beings organised like ourselves, we may presume that the history and the language of those planets does not differ more from our own than does the history and language of the Chinese.” It is impossible to establish by a clearer and more striking image the individuality of the different families of language, not one of which owes its origin to its neighbours, and which have, probably, never been in one another’s presence, except when they had already been formed, bringing with them their own characteristics, their fundamental and profound type, as unalterable by contact as is the physical type of the men who spoke them. These, in presence of others, may have been able to alter their traditions, their remembrances, their words, but these were never more than simple _loans_; we may be certain that these men were strangers one to the other on the day when they uttered their first words in their cradles. We must limit ourselves merely to recording the result, which is, that each system of language is absolutely irreducible to others, both by its basis and its form; all born in human thought, it is true, but this thought following at each point a particular path, so that each of these systems, as M. Renan has said, only abuts on the others by the community of the aim it is intended to reach.