t even to
know each other, when they happened to meet again. I must further
observe that the child having all his wants to explain, and
consequently more things to say to his mother, than the mother can
have to say to him, it is he that must be at the chief expense of
invention, and the language he makes use of must be in a great measure
his own work; this makes the number of languages equal to that of the
individuals who are to speak them; and this multiplicity of languages
is further increased by their roving and vagabond kind of life, which
allows no idiom time enough to acquire any consistency; for to say
that the mother would have dictated to the child the words he must
employ to ask her this thing and that, may well enough explain in what
manner languages, already formed, are taught, but it does not show us
in what manner they are first formed.

Let us suppose this first difficulty conquered: Let us for a moment
consider ourselves at this side of the immense space, which must have
separated the pure state of nature from that in which languages became
necessary, and let us, after allowing such necessity, examine how
languages could begin to be established. A new difficulty this, still
more stubborn than the preceding; for if men stood in need of speech
to learn to think, they must have stood in still greater need of the
art of thinking to invent that of speaking; and though we could
conceive how the sounds of the voice came to be taken for the
conventional interpreters of our ideas we should not be the nearer
knowing who could have been the interpreters of this convention for
such ideas, as, in consequence of their not having any sensible
objects, could not be made manifest by gesture or voice; so that we
can scarce form any tolerable conjectures concerning the birth of this
art of communicating our thoughts, and establishing a correspondence
between minds: a sublime art which, though so remote from its origin,
philosophers still behold at such a prodigious distance from its
perfection, that I never met with one of them bold enough to affirm it
would ever arrive there, though the revolutions necessarily produced
by time were suspended in its favour; though prejudice could be
banished from, or would be at least content to sit silent in the
presence of our academies, and though these societies should
consecrate themselves, entirely and during whole ages, to the study of
this intricate object.

The first language o