ng is
classification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever
we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it by means of
our general ideas.

At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the
first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there
we see the true genesis of language. Analyze any word you like and you
will find that it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to
whom the name belongs. What is the meaning of moon? The measurer. What
is the meaning of sun? The begetter. What is the meaning of earth? The
ploughed.

If the serpent is called in Sanskrit _sarpa_, it is because it was
conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the
root _srip_.

An ancient word for man was the Sanskrit _marta_, the Greek _brotos_,
the Latin _mortalis_. _Marta_ means "he who dies," and it is remarkable
that, where everything else was changing, fading, and dying, this should
have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man.

There were many more names for man, as there were many names for all
things in ancient languages. Any feature that struck the observing mind
as peculiarly characteristic could be made to furnish a new name. In
common Sanskrit dictionaries we find 5 words for hand, 11 for light, 15
for cloud, 20 for moon, 26 for snake, 33 for slaughter, 35 for fire, 37
for sun. The sun might be called the bright, the warm, the golden, the
preserver, the destroyer, the wolf, the lion, the heavenly eye, the
father of light and life. Hence that superabundance of synonyms in
ancient dialects, and hence that struggle for life carried on among
these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less
fertile, the less happy words, and ended in the triumph of _one_ as the
recognized and proper name for every object in every language. On a very
small scale this process of natural selection, or, as it would better be
called, elimination, may still be watched even in modern languages, that
is to say, even in languages so old and stricken in years as English and
French. What it was at the first burst of dialects we can only gather
from such isolated cases as when von Hammer counts 5,744 words all
relating to the camel.

The fact that every word is originally a predicate--that names, though
signs of individual conceptions, are all, without exception, derived
from general ideas--is one of the most important discoveries i