I have found a number of such examples in the Nahuatl of Mexico, and I am persuaded that they are very usual in American tongues. Dr. Carl Abel has pointed out many in the ancient Coptic, and I doubt not they were characteristic of all primitive speech.
To explain their presence we must reflect on the nature of the human mind, and the ascertained laws of thought. One of these fundamental and necessary laws of thought, that usually called the second, was expressed by the older logicians in the phrase _Omnis determinatio est negatio_, and by their modern followers in the formula, “_A_ is not _not-A_;” in other words, a quality, an idea, an element of knowledge, can rise into cognition only by being limited by that which it is not. That by which it is limited is known in logic as its privative. In a work published some years ago I pointed out that this privative is not an independent thought, as some have maintained, but that the positive and its privative are really two aspects of the same thought.[347] This highly important distinction explains how in primitive speech, before the idea had risen into clear cognition, both it and its privative were expressed by the same sound; and when it did rise into such cognition, and then into expression, the original unity is exhibited by the identity of the radical. Thus it happens that from such an unexpected quarter as an analysis of Cree grammar do we obtain a confirmation of the starting point of the logic of Hegel in his proposition that the identity of the _Being_ and the _Not-being_ is the ultimate equation of thought.
The gradual development of grammar is strikingly illustrated in these languages. Their most prominent trait is what is called _incorporation_. Subject, verb, direct object and remote object, are all expressed in one word. Some have claimed that there are American languages of which this is not true; but I think I have shown in an essay published some time ago,[348] that this opinion arises from our insufficient knowledge of the alleged exceptions. At any rate, this incorporation was undoubtedly a trait of primitive speech in America and elsewhere. Primitive man, said Herder, was like a baby; he wanted to say all at once. He condensed his whole sentence into a single word. Archdeacon Hunter, in his _Lecture on the Cree Language_, gives as an example the scriptural phrase, “I shall have you for my disciples,” which, in that tongue, is expressed by one word.[349]