Lecture VI

Now the connotations of a name in ancient times were not such as are associated with a name to-day. Indeed, the giving of names in ancient times is a subject that would now require very special study, for what modern philology has to say about it is often sheer nonsense. In the past it would have been impossible to conceive that names could be attached to beings or things in the purely external way that is customary nowadays. A name was once a reality connected essentially with the being who received it, and it was intended to express in sound or tone the inner nature of that being. The name was meant to be an echo of the being in the tone. (Our modern age has no inkling whatever of what this implies; if it had, books such as Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache could never have been written. This book contains a masterly review of modern research, of all scholarly treatises recently written on the subject of language, but makes no mention of its intrinsic character in antiquity.) In those times when the faculty of memory was different, a name did not apply merely to an individual human being in his personal lifetime but extended to all that was strung together through the memory; therefore the same name was in use as long as this retrospective experience endured. The name ‘Noah’, for example, did not signify a single individual; it signified what, in the first place, an individual remembered of his own life and then, beyond his birth, of the life of his father, of his grandfather and so on, as long as the thread of memory continued. The same name was used for the succession of individuals whom the thread of memory connected. Therefore names such as ‘Adam’, ‘Seth’, ‘Enoch’, comprised as many personalities as were united through memory. Thus when it is said that the name of some individual belonging to times of antiquity was ‘Enoch’, we may understand it to mean that a new thread of memory has come into existence in an individual who was the son of someone bearing a different name; the memory of the former individual did not carry back into that of his predecessors. The new thread of memory is not severed, however, with the death of the first individual to bear the name of 'Enoch' but continues through the generations until again a new thread of memory appears, and, with it, a new name which will be•;used until the new thread is broken. Thus when ‘Adam’ is referred to, the one name designates several successive personalities in the sequence of generations.