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1. Had language been revealed, mankind at first would have been better situated than any of their posterity; and such a disposition is unlike the ordinary course of God’s just dealings.

2. So far from being “a pale image and feeble echo of splendours which have passed away from the scene of earth,” each human language bears in itself the most distinct traces of growth and progress—the marks of a regular development in accordance with definite laws—the successive traces of infancy, youth, maturity, and manhood. Though many existing languages, and even those of some savage nations are but “degraded and decaying fragments of nobler formations,” yet there are proofs as decisive that they rose to gradual perfection, as that they subsequently fell from perfection to decay.

3. If the spiritualist theory were true, it would be a most natural inference that the spiritual and abstract signification of roots is also the original one. But such an assumption (although it is made by Frederic Schlegel), “is contradicted by the history of every language of the world.”