indeed, have been raised to protest against the theory of
language being originally invented by man. But they, in their zeal to
vindicate the divine origin of language, seem to have been carried away so
far as to run counter to the express statements of the Bible. For in the
Bible it is not the Creator who gives names to all things, but Adam. "Out
of the ground," we read, "the Lord God formed every beast of the field,
and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would
call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof."(14) But with the exception of this small class of
philosophers, more orthodox even than the Bible,(15) the generally
received opinion on the origin of language is that which was held by
_Locke_, which was powerfully advocated by _Adam Smith_ in his Essay on
the Origin of Language, appended to his Treatise on Moral Sentiments, and
which was adopted with slight modifications by _Dugald Stewart_. According
to them, man must have lived for a time in a state of mutism, his only
means of communication consisting in gestures of the body, and in the
changes of countenance, till at last, when ideas multiplied that could no
longer be pointed at with the fingers, "they found it necessary to invent
artificial signs of which the meaning was fixed by mutual agreement." We
need not dwell on minor differences of opinion as to the exact process by
which this artificial language is supposed to have been formed. Adam Smith
would wish us to believe that the first artificial words were _verbs_.
Nouns, he thinks, were of less urgent necessity because things could be
pointed at or imitated, whereas mere actions, such as are expressed by
verbs, could not. He therefore supposes that when people saw a wolf
coming, they pointed at him, and simply cried out, "He comes." Dugald
Stewart, on the contrary, thinks that the first artificial words were
nouns, and that the verbs were supplied by gesture; that, therefore, when
people saw a wolf coming, they did not cry "He comes," but "Wolf, Wolf,"
leaving the rest to be imagined.(16)

But whether the verb or the noun was the first to be invented is of little
importance; nor is it possible for us, at the very beginning of our
inquiry into the nature of language, to enter upon a minute examination of
a theory which represents language as a work of human art, and as
established by mutual agreement as a medium of communication. While f