A single illustration may serve to convey the force of this argument more fully than any abstract discussion of it. But I will introduce the illustration with an analogous case. The following well-established fact I quote from Geiger:—
“Man had language before he had tools.... On considering a word denoting an activity carried on with a tool, we shall invariably find that this was not its original meaning, but that it previously implied a similar activity requiring only the natural organs.... This fact of the activity with implements deriving its name from one more simple, ancient, and brute-like, is quite universal, and I do not know how otherwise to account for it but that the name is older than the activity with tools which it denotes at the present time—that, in fact, the word was already extant before men used any other organs but the native and natural ones.... The vestiges of his earliest conceptions still preserved in language proclaim it loudly and distinctly that man has developed from a state in which he had solely to rely on the aid of his organs—a state, therefore, in which he differed little in his habits from the brute creation, and with respect to the enjoyment of his existence, nay, to his preservation, depended almost entirely on whatever lucky chance presented to him.”[279]
Now, to this special illustration on the general principle of “fundamental metaphor” it will doubtless be said—Very interesting in itself; but, after all, it merely amounts to a philological proof that tools are younger than words; that men did not always possess tools; that tools were gradually invented; and that, when invented, they were named by a metaphorical application of words previously in use.—Well, if we are all agreed so far, I will proceed to adduce my illustration.
Judging from the now extensive literature which is opposed to evolutionary teaching in the case of man, I gather that the great majority of writers are quite as much impressed by the moral and religious aspects of human psychology as they are by the intellectual. Now, as already stated in the Preface, I reserve for a future volume a full consideration of these distinctively human faculties. In the present part of my work I am concerned exclusively with the question as to the origin of those powers of conceptual thought which, under any point of view, must be regarded as the necessary and antecedent condition to the possibility both of conscience and religion. Nevertheless, merely for the sake of supplying an illustration touching the point now before us, I may here forestall a little of what I shall hereafter have to present in detail touching the evidence that we have of the genesis of conscience. And this I will do by another quotation from the same philologist, seeing that he is an authority whom none of my opponents can afford to ignore.