Appendix 6. - (155)
[Applying names]
Captain Cook's observation, which Dugald Stewart puts forward in favour of Smith's view, serves - rather remarkably - to prove the opposite. While on the one hand it confirms the view I am putting forward, on the other, it offers an example of the vast difference there is between using facts and using them properly.
Smith and Stewart claim that the savage was the first to form proper nouns, which he then converted into common nouns by applying them to a number of similar things. These nouns, applied to many similar things, took the place of species and genus. This, according to Smith and Stewart, is the process by which human beings come to form genera and species.
Captain Cook thus described his landing on the small island of Wateeoo on his voyage from New Zealand to the Friendly Islands.
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The inhabitants were afraid to come near our cows and horses, nor did they form the least conception of their nature. But the sheep and goats did not surpass the limits of their ideas; for they gave us to understand that they knew them to be birds. |
He adds:
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It will appear rather incredible, that human ignorance could ever make such a strange mistake, there being not the most distant similitude between a sheep or goat, and any winged animal. But these people seem to know nothing of the existence of any other land animals, besides hogs, dogs and birds. Our sheep and goats, they could see, were very different creatures from the first two, and therefore, they inferred that they must belong to the latter class, in which they knew that there is a considerable variety of species. |
Personally, I think it more likely that Cook, who did not speak the language of the islanders well, misunderstood them. Indeed, I am convinced that the islanders, who were certainly endowed with their five senses, had in fact seen that the rams and goats looked more like pigs and dogs than birds.
However, as Mr. Stewart has no difficulty believing this account, I merely observe that the story in no way proves the transition from proper to common nouns; rather, the story mentions only common nouns. The islanders possessed the names of the species but not the names of the individuals, and applied them to those individuals which were either comprised in the species signified by those names or could somehow be reduced to that species. Applying a common noun to a number of individuals does not extend its meaning. However, even if we were prepared to imagine that the islanders did extend the significance of the word birds, the extension would be from a less extended to a more extended species, and thus be from species to species, not from individual to species. This final transition is the real difficulty: it is not solved by Cook's account.
Moreover, when a word is accepted in common parlance as referring to a species of things, and the same term is then used to indicate an object not contained in that species, it is more correct to say that the person using the word is mistaken over its meaning or over the judgment he makes about the object to which he applies the word, than to say that the term has been given added meaning. If I see a camel and call it a horse, I have made a mistake about the species of animal or about the meaning of the word horse. The word has not and cannot be given greater meaning until it is received into common speech.