express abstract ideas, they rarely indicate the particular actions which would be capable of being suggested by any mimicry possible to the human voice.  I have selected at random from a list of roots their English equivalents, in order to show the character of the roots and to make clearer the difficulty of holding such views.  The abstract nature of the ideas, relating to actions and things which often have no attendant sound in nature, will indicate what I mean.  What possible sounds could mimic the sense of “to move, to shine, to gain, to flow, to burn, to blow, to live, to possess, to cover, to fall, to praise, to think”?  In fact the most abstract of all seem the most primitive for we find them most fruitful in combination to for other words.  I hope to show this clearly later on.  It is unnecessary to discuss the claims of the interjectional theory, as it is only a theory, and there are few roots for which we could infer even a remote origin of this nature.  The great objection to the theory that speech was originally a matter of convention and mutual agreement, is the scarcity of words among the roots which express the wants of primitive man.  As it is, a wisdom within or beyond the Aryan led him to construct in these roots with their abstract significance an ideal foundation from which a great language could be developed.  However as the exponents of rival theories have demolished each other’s arguments, without anyone having established a clear case for himself, it is not necessary here to do more than indicate these theories and how they may be met.

In putting forward a hypothesis more in accord with the doctrine of the spiritual origin of man, and in harmony with those occult ideas concerning speech already quoted, I stand in a rather unusual position, as I have to confess my ignorance of any of these primitive languages.  I am rather inclined however, to regard this on the whole as an advantage for the following reasons.  I think primitive man (the early Aryan) chose his words by a certain intuition which recognised an innate correspondence between the thought and the symbol.  Para passu with the growing complexity of civilization language lost it spiritual character, “it fell into matter,” to use H.P.  Blavatsky’s expression; as the conventional words necessary to define artificial products grew in number, in the memory of these words the spontaneity of speech was lost, and that faculty became atrophied which enable man to arrange with psychic rapidity ever new combinations of sounds to express emotion and thought.  Believing then that speech was originally intuitive, and that it only need introspection and a careful analysis of the sounds of the human voice, to recover the faculty and correspondences between these sounds and forces, colours, forms, etc., it will be seen why I do not regard my ignorance of these languages as altogether a drawback.  The correspondences necessarily had to be evolved out