hey are
reflected, present at every moment to the individual, and yet having
a sort of eternal or universal nature. When we analyze our own mental
processes, we find words everywhere in every degree of clearness and
consistency, fading away in dreams and more like pictures, rapidly
succeeding one another in our waking thoughts, attaining a greater
distinctness and consecutiveness in speech, and a greater still
in writing, taking the place of one another when we try to become
emancipated from their influence. For in all processes of the mind which
are conscious we are talking to ourselves; the attempt to think without
words is a mere illusion,--they are always reappearing when we fix our
thoughts. And speech is not a separate faculty, but the expression of
all our faculties, to which all our other powers of expression, signs,
looks, gestures, lend their aid, of which the instrument is not the
tongue only, but more than half the human frame.

The minds of men are sometimes carried on to think of their lives and
of their actions as links in a chain of causes and effects going back to
the beginning of time. A few have seemed to lose the sense of their own
individuality in the universal cause or nature. In like manner we might
think of the words which we daily use, as derived from the first speech
of man, and of all the languages in the world, as the expressions or
varieties of a single force or life of language of which the thoughts
of men are the accident. Such a conception enables us to grasp the
power and wonder of languages, and is very natural to the scientific
philologist. For he, like the metaphysician, believes in the reality of
that which absorbs his own mind. Nor do we deny the enormous influence
which language has exercised over thought. Fixed words, like fixed
ideas, have often governed the world. But in such representations we
attribute to language too much the nature of a cause, and too little
of an effect,--too much of an absolute, too little of a relative
character,--too much of an ideal, too little of a matter-of-fact
existence.

Or again, we may frame a single abstract notion of language of which all
existent languages may be supposed to be the perversion. But we must
not conceive that this logical figment had ever a real existence, or
is anything more than an effort of the mind to give unity to infinitely
various phenomena. There is no abstract language 'in rerum natura,'
any more than there is an abstr