learnt of course a rudimentary, half-articulate language, the cry
or song or speech which was the expression of what we now call human
thoughts and feelings. We may still remark how much greater and more
natural the exercise of the power is in the use of language than in any
other process or action of the human mind.

ii. Imitation provided the first material of language: but it was
'without form and void.' During how many years or hundreds or thousands
of years the imitative or half-articulate stage continued there is no
possibility of determining. But we may reasonably conjecture that there
was a time when the vocal utterance of man was intermediate between
what we now call language and the cry of a bird or animal. Speech before
language was a rudis indigestaque materies, not yet distributed into
words and sentences, in which the cry of fear or joy mingled with more
definite sounds recognized by custom as the expressions of things or
events. It was the principle of analogy which introduced into this
'indigesta moles' order and measure. It was Anaxagoras' omou panta
chremata, eita nous elthon diekosmese: the light of reason lighted up
all things and at once began to arrange them. In every sentence, in
every word and every termination of a word, this power of forming
relations to one another was contained. There was a proportion of sound
to sound, of meaning to meaning, of meaning to sound. The cases and
numbers of nouns, the persons, tenses, numbers of verbs, were generally
on the same or nearly the same pattern and had the same meaning. The
sounds by which they were expressed were rough-hewn at first; after
a while they grew more refined--the natural laws of euphony began to
affect them. The rules of syntax are likewise based upon analogy. Time
has an analogy with space, arithmetic with geometry. Not only in musical
notes, but in the quantity, quality, accent, rhythm of human speech,
trivial or serious, there is a law of proportion. As in things of
beauty, as in all nature, in the composition as well as in the motion
of all things, there is a similarity of relations by which they are held
together.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the analogies of language are
always uniform: there may be often a choice between several, and
sometimes one and sometimes another will prevail. In Greek there are
three declensions of nouns; the forms of cases in one of them may
intrude upon another. Similarly verbs in -omega and -