Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

x] The Olympians are individualized 471
Again, and still more instructively, we have among the Apache
Indians and the British Columbian tribes a collective as well as a
selective singular. The collective singular denotes the person as
a member of the group. Thus if the question be asked 'Who will
help?' the answer would be the collective 'I,' that is 'I for one' or
'I among others.' But if the question be 'Who is the mother of
this child?' the answer will be the selective '1/ that is I and
nobody else.
Now 'this sharp distinction occurs,' Mr Payne 1 and
observes, 'with a
frequency which indicates it as answering to a substantial need of daily life.
The Apache Indians for example, one of the wildest peoples in America,
would scarcely have invented and rigorously preserved this idiom unless it
were indispensable to their intercourse :
the same may be said of the
British Columbian tribes in whose languages it is even more conspicuous.
The collective, it should be noted, is the ordinary form, and the selective the
exception.''
No more interesting illustration could be adduced of the sense
of solidarity naturally pervading the food-group and of the weak
sense of individuality in separate members.
It will be apparent whither the argument is tending. Nowa-days
we think of the plural number in language as made up
of a number of singular units, as a complexity rather than a
simplicity. That is because we reason back from a segregation
already accomplished and that seems to us instinctive. But the
facts of language show that the plural and all other forms of
number in grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I'
but by selection and gradual exclusion from an original collective
'we.' This 'we' represents the aggregate personality of the food-
group, and therefore includes the undifferentiated 'I' of the speaker
of the time being 2 . The procedure is from synthesis to analysis,
from the group to the individual.
Dr Tylor, the great exponent of Animism, sees in the conception
of the human soul 'the very fons et origo* of the conception of
spirit and deity in general':
'Spiritual beings,' he says, 'are modelled by man on his primary conception
4 .'
of his own human soul
1 History of the New World, vs.. p. 188.
2 Mr Payne, from whom (op. cit. vol. n. p. 186) I borrow this interesting
observation, adds, ' to borrow terms from the philosophy of Quantity, if thought
and language are regarded as two related variables, the " I " does not represent their
prime ratio but their ultimate one.' I am no mathematician but
illustration in case it may be significant.
1 append the
3 Primitive Culture 3
, n. 247.
4 Op. cit. n. p. 184.