Ebook The Origin and Philosophy of Language

"The evolution of variety from unity," says Geiger, "seems to be the great fundamental law of all development of nature and of mind. This law, in language also, leads us back to a very insignificant germ, to a primitive sound, which expressed the sole and infinitely limited subject-matter that man first took notice of or beheld with interest, and out of which the whole wealth of language, nay - I am unhesitatingly convinced - of all languages, through untold millenniums, has been slowly unfolded."

The great merit of L. Geiger - who was unfortunately too early lost to sciences - is that of having shown how human reason and language were originally contained in one and the same germ; that we cannot say that reason created language, but that the contrary is true, that reason was gradually matured and strengthened through the instrumentality of the representative signs of sensory perception that, accordingly, the word was beyond question the element first in point of time, and that more universal, more correct, more clear, and more conscious ideas were first attained and formed through words, and after a long course of development led through words to the present state of mature rational thought.