rrowing the words of Huxley, "man has slowly accumulated and organised
the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every
individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised as upon a
mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured
from his grosser nature by reflecting here and there a ray from the
infinite source of truth." Thought in all the higher mental processes could
not be carried on at all without the aid of language.
Written language probably originated in an analytical process analogous to
the language of gesture. Like that, it: (1) isolates terms; (2) arranges
them in a certain order; (3) translates thoughts in a crude and somewhat
vague form. A curious example of this may be found in Max Mueller's "Chips
from a German Workshop," XIV.: "The aborigines of the Caroline Islands sent
a letter to a Spanish captain as follows: A man with extended arms, sign of
greeting; below to the left, the objects they have to barter--five big
shells, seven little ones, three others of different forms; to the right,
drawing of the objects they wanted in exchange--three large fish-hooks,
four small ones, two axes, two pieces of iron."
Language of graphic signs and spoken language have progressed together, and
simultaneously supported each other in the development of the higher mental
faculties that differentiate the savage from the brute and the civilised
human being from the savage. In spoken language, at any rate, it is not the
vocal instrument that has been changed, but the organ of mind with its
innate and invisible molecular potentialities, the result of racial and
ancestral experiences in past ages. Completely developed languages when
studied from the point of view of their evolution are stamped with the
print of an unconscious labour that has been fashioning them for centuries.
A little consideration and reflection upon words which have been coined in
our own time shows that language offers an abstract and brief chronicle of
social psychology.
Articulate language has converted the vocal instrument into the chief agent
of the will, but the brain in the process of time has developed by the
movements of the lips, tongue, jaw, and soft palate a kinaesthetic[A] sense
of articulate speech, which has been integrated and associated in the mind
with rhythmical modulated sounds conveyed to the brain by the auditory
nerves. There has thus been a reciprocal simultaneity in th
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