SPEECH AND WRITING AS PROOFS OF INTELLIGENCE
There is yet another proof that the faculties of mankind at a very
early epoch were fully equal to those of our own time. There is
perhaps nothing more difficult in its nature, more utterly beyond the
mere lower animal, than the faculty of articulate speech possessed
by every race of mankind. We cannot but believe that its acquisition
was an extremely slow process, and that it is rendered possible by
special cerebral developments giving the necessary mental power for its
acquirement.
How long a process this would be, it is impossible to say, but it
would certainly have had to reach a high degree of perfection before
the equally difficult process of inventing a mode of writing could
have been brought to such perfection as to facilitate the further
development of the higher faculties through poetry on the one hand
and the preservation of facts and discoveries, as well as trains of
reasoning, on the other.
Now, I wish to call attention to the very important fact that the
origin and development of speech, and later, of writing, were
apparently almost simultaneous, and certainly quite independent of
each other, in countries not very distant apart. This is shown by the
radical diversity of the different groups of languages in Europe,
Eastern Asia and North Africa, and the equal diversity of Egyptian,
Assyrian, and Chinese writing. All other written characters are
believed to be derived from one or other of these, and it is known that
the forms and peculiarities of alphabetic characters have been greatly
modified by the various materials employed, such as wood and stone
slabs, clay, or wax; papyrus, paper or parchment; and whether engraved,
impressed or painted, whether written with a reed or quill pen, or with
a small brush.
But if intellectual man as a species of mammal had developed by the
preservation of variations of survival-value, we should expect to
find such an important faculty as speech to have originated in one
centre and to have spread rapidly over the world with only slight
modifications in isolated communities. The fundamental diversities
we find seem to accord better with the conception that when, as a
mere animal, his material organism had reached the required degree of
perfection, there occurred the spiritual influx which alone enabled
him to begin that course of intellectual and moral development, and
that marvellous power over the forces of Nature, in which speech and
writing, followed by printing, have been such important factors.
In order for man to develop speech he must have possessed a brain and
an intellect far above that of the brutes. As in the more fundamental
problem of the origin of life, it is admitted that organisation is a
product of life—not life of organisation—so we must believe that
speech was a product of a brain and an intellect sufficient for their
development. But such brain and intellect were not necessary for the
lower animals, which have reached their highest lines of development in
the dog, horse, elephant, and ape without making any definite approach
to the acquirement of such higher faculties.