He accepted the discoveries in the learning language software
old language and literature of India as final: he saw the significance of these discoveries as regards philology, and grouped the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany under the name afterward so universally accepted—Indo-Germanic. It now began to be felt more and more, even among the most devoted churchmen, that the old theological dogmas regarding the origin of language, as held "always, everywhere, and by all," were wrong, and that Lucretius and sturdy old Gregory of Nyssa might be right. But this was not the only wreck. During ages the great men in the Church had been calling upon the world to admire the amazing exploit of Adam in naming the animals which Jehovah had brought before him, and to accept the history of language in the light of this exploit. The early fathers, the mediaeval doctors, the great divines of the Reformation period, Catholic and Protestant, had united in this universal chorus. Clement of Alexandria declared Adam’s naming of the animals proof of a prophetic gift. St. John Chrysostom insisted that it was an evidence of consummate intelligence. Eusebius held that the phrase "That was the name thereof" implied that each name embodied the real character and description of the animal concerned. This view was echoed by a multitude of divines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Typical among these was the great Dr. South, who, in his sermon on The State of Man before the Fall, declared that "Adam came into the world a philosopher, which sufficiently appears by his writing the nature of things upon their names." In the chorus of modern English divines there appeared one of eminence who declared against this theory: Dr. Shuckford, chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty George II, in the preface to his work on The Creation and Fall of Man, pronounced the whole theory "romantic and irrational." He goes on to say: "The original of our speaking was from God; not that God put into Adam’s mouth the very sounds which he designed he should use as the names of things; but God made Adam with the powers of a man; he had the use of an understanding to form notions in his mind Rosetta Stone Greek
of the things about him, and he had the power to utter sounds which should be to himself the names of things according as he might think fit to call them." This echo of Gregory of Nyssa was for many years of little avail. Historians of philosophy still began with Adam, because only a philosopher could have named all created things. There was, indeed, one difficulty which had much troubled some theologians: this was, that fishes were not specially mentioned among the animals brought by Jehovah before Adam for naming. To meet this difficulty there was much argument, and some theologians laid stress on the difficulty of bringing fishes from the sea to the Garden of Eden to receive their names; but naturally other theologians replied that the almighty power which created the fishes could have easily brought them into the garden, one by one, even from the uttermost parts of the sea. This point, therefore, seems to have been left in abeyance.[418] [418] For the danger of "the little system of the history of the world," see Sayce, as above. On Dugald Stewart’s contention, see Max Muller, Lectures on Language, pp. 167, 168. For Sir William Jones, see his Works, London, 1807, vol. i, p. 199. For Schlegel, see Max Muller, as above. For an enormous list of great theologians, from the fathers down, who dwelt on the divine inspiration and wonderful gifts of Adam on this subject, see Canon Farrar, Language and Languages. The citation from Clement of Alexandria is Strom.. i, p. 335. See also Chrysostom, Hom. XIV in Genesin; also Eusebius, Praep. Evang. XI, p. 6. For the two quotations given above from Shuckford, see The Creation and Fall of Man, London, 1763, preface, p. lxxxiii; also his Sacred and Profane History of the World, 1753; revised edition by Wheeler, London, 1858. For the argument regarding the difficulty of bringing the fishes to be named into the Garden of Eden, see Massey, Origin and Progress of Letters, London, 1763, pp. 14-19. It had continued, then, the universal belief in the Church that the names of all created things, except possibly fishes, were given by Adam and in Hebrew; but all this theory was whelmed in ruin when it was found that there were other and indeed earlier names for the same animals than those in the Hebrew language; and especially was this enforced on thinking men when the Egyptian discoveries began to reveal the picturesRosetta Stone Italian
of animals with their names in hieroglyphics at a period earlier than that agreed on by all the sacred chronologists as the date of the Creation.
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