Chapter VI: Darwin

Extract

In this year falls the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Charles Darwin—one of those rare individuals who have altered the main trend of thought and inaugurated a new attitude and a new outlook in human affairs.—JULIAN HUXLEY, Contemporary Review, October 1932.

Language has justly been considered as one of the chief distinctions between man and the lower animals. But man, as a highly competent judge, Archbishop Whately, remarks, ‘is not the only animal that can make use of language to express what is passing in his mind, and can understand, more or less, what is so expressed by another.’—DARWIN, Descent of Man, Chap. III.

The investigation of language, as pointed out in the last chapter, had been carried on for a hundred years in the belief that language was a unique characteristic of man, and did not extend to the animal world beneath him. But with the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871 the whole problem of language was suddenly expanded into a much wider region. Darwin, in that book, distinctly challenged the human boundaries that had been set to language as being artificial and arbitrary, and extended the problem over into the animal world, maintaining that the difference between the language of man and the cries of animals was not a difference in kind, as had been formerly thought, but a difference in degree only, a difference in definiteness of connotation and distinctness of articulation. This difference in language followed naturally, he maintained, upon the difference in degree of their mental development.