past by the present,
and of substituting the definite and intelligible for the true but dim
outline which is the horizon of human knowledge.

The greatest light is thrown upon the nature of language by analogy. We
have the analogy of the cries of animals, of the songs of birds ('man,
like the nightingale, is a singing bird, but is ever binding up thoughts
with musical notes'), of music, of children learning to speak, of
barbarous nations in which the linguistic instinct is still undecayed,
of ourselves learning to think and speak a new language, of the deaf and
dumb who have words without sounds, of the various disorders of speech;
and we have the after-growth of mythology, which, like language, is an
unconscious creation of the human mind. We can observe the social and
collective instincts of animals, and may remark how, when domesticated,
they have the power of understanding but not of speaking, while on the
other hand, some birds which are comparatively devoid of intelligence,
make a nearer approach to articulate speech. We may note how in the
animals there is a want of that sympathy with one another which appears
to be the soul of language. We can compare the use of speech with other
mental and bodily operations; for speech too is a kind of gesture, and
in the child or savage accompanied with gesture. We may observe that
the child learns to speak, as he learns to walk or to eat, by a natural
impulse; yet in either case not without a power of imitation which
is also natural to him--he is taught to read, but he breaks forth
spontaneously in speech. We can trace the impulse to bind together the
world in ideas beginning in the first efforts to speak and culminating
in philosophy. But there remains an element which cannot be explained,
or even adequately described. We can understand how man creates or
constructs consciously and by design; and see, if we do not understand,
how nature, by a law, calls into being an organised structure. But the
intermediate organism which stands between man and nature, which is the
work of mind yet unconscious, and in which mind and matter seem to meet,
and mind unperceived to herself is really limited by all other minds, is
neither understood nor seen by us, and is with reluctance admitted to be
a fact.

Language is an aspect of man, of nature, and of nations, the
transfiguration of the world in thought, the meeting-point of the
physical and mental sciences, and also the mirror in which t