; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so
very protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact
determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what
might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like
"go-hunting-kill-bear") without reference to individual personalities
and relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like
"I" and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up into "parts
of speech" and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If
true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal
language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals,
preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in
the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and
relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in
grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection
and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According
to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, or
in any particular race or section of the human family, must have been
equally slow and hesitating; and it would be easy to imagine, as just
said, that there may have been a very long and 'golden' period at its
beginning, before the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher
forms.

(1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their
simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we
should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not
differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase
and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.

(2) See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's
Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World called
America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness
is associated with the break-up of the holophrase.

(3) Themis, p. 471.

All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are
notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we
take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (homo
primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000
or 40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of
the Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and
inscriptions of the Aurignacian a