to be — no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least point d'appui here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological factor — if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they would affect — not even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul[1]), but a profound spiritual change. With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures together in the longing to prove each other's reality and proximity — then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. The Name grazes the meaning of consciousness and the source of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression- and communication-language, man names that which is enigmatic. It is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly, reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it. With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with the Name religion in the proper sense, definite religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious thought. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very significant idiom, that we "reflect on," "think over" something. With the understanding of things-named the formation of a higher world, above all sensational existence, is begun — "higher" both according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.
These first names we have to think of as quite separate and individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed sound- and gesture-language, the richness of which we can no longer imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to the word-languages, and their further developments
- ↑ Sentence-like complexes of sound are known also to the dog. When the Australian dingo reverted from domestication to the wild state, he reverted also from the house-dog's bark to the wolf's howl — a phenomenon that indicates a transition to very much simpler sound-signs, but has nothing to do with "words."
