power to separate the indistinct cognition into its parts. M. Renan, in short, has made a very strange confusion of analytic style of expression with mental analysis: all expression of relations, whether by means that we call synthetic or analytic, is the result and evidence of analysis; and his own thesis respecting the complexity in obscurity of unpractised and uninstructed thought, brings us directly to a recognition of the radical stage of Indo-European language as the necessary historical basis of its inflective development.
This development, it may be remarked in conclusion, has been gradual and steadily progressive, being governed in both its synthetic and analytic phases by the same causes which universally regulate linguistic growth, and which have been here repeatedly set forth or referred to: namely, on the one hand, the traditional influence of the stores of expression already worked out and handed down, consisting in the education given by them to thought, and the constraining force exerted by their analogies; and, on the other hand, the changing character and capacity, the varying circumstances and needs, of the community of speakers, during the different periods of their history. It has experienced no grand revolution, no sudden shift of direction, no pervading change of tendency. There is no cleft, as is sometimes assumed, parting ancient tongues from modern, justifying the recognition of different forces, the admission of different possibilities, in the one and in the other. Nor are we to regard the energies of a community as absorbed in the work of language-making more at one period than at another. Language-making is always done unconsciously and by the way, as it were: it is one of the incidents of social life, an accompaniment and result of intellectual activity, not an end toward which effort is directed, nor a task in whose performance is expended force which might have been otherwise employed. The doctrine that a race first constructs its language, and then, and not till then, is ready to commence its historic career, is as purely fanciful as anything in the whole great chapter of à priori theorizings about speech. No living language ever ceases to be constructed, or is less rapidly built upon in ages of historic activity: only the style
