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The transformation, then, of intuitions into ideas, by the freedom and activity of the human intelligence, constitutes the essence of a word, although the speaker may be as unconscious of the process as he is of the organic mechanisms which give utterance to his thoughts.

I. ‘As for the conditions under which articulate language first appeared, M. Steinthal represents them as follows. At the origin of humanity the soul and the body were in such mutual dependence that all the emotions[73] of the soul had their echo in the body, principally in the organs of the respiration and the voice. This sympathy of soul and body, still found in the infant and the savage, was intimate and fruitful in the primitive man; each intuition awoke in him an accent or a sound.’ This was the first step; and in this fact lies the germ of truth contained in the doctrines of the analogists;[74] since there must have been some reason in the nature of things, why certain impressions or feelings were connected with certain sounds rather than with certain others. We may be totally unable to point out this connection in many cases, and even while recognising a natural relation between certain sounds of the human voice and certain material phenomena, we may deny the very possibility of such a relation between a spiritual phenomenon and its physical sign. And yet we feel a strong repugnance at allowing caprice or chance to have any considerable share in the origin of language. It can, at least, be fairly argued that there is nothing purely arbitrary in the work of the divine Demiurgus.