system. They have
been followed in this respect by the late Mr. Charles Darwin, and by the
greatly more influential part of our modern biologists, who hold that
whatever loss of dignity we may incur through being proved to be of
humble origin, is compensated by the credit we may claim for having
advanced ourselves to such a high pitch of civilisation; this bids us
expect still further progress, and glorifies our descendants more than it
abases our ancestors. But to whichever view we may incline on
sentimental grounds the fact remains that, while Charles Darwin declared
language to form no impassable barrier between man and the lower animals,
Professor Max Muller calls it the Rubicon which no brute dare cross, and
deduces hence the conclusion that man cannot have descended from an
unknown but certainly speechless ape.

It may perhaps be expected that I should begin a lecture on the relations
between thought and language with some definition of both these things;
but thought, as Sir William Grove said of motion, is a phenomenon "so
obvious to simple apprehension, that to define it would make it more
obscure." {17} Definitions are useful where things are new to us, but
they are superfluous about those that are already familiar, and
mischievous, so far as they are possible at all, in respect of all those
things that enter so profoundly and intimately into our being that in
them we must either live or bear no life. To vivisect the more vital
processes of thought is to suspend, if not to destroy them; for thought
can think about everything more healthily and easily than about itself.
It is like its instrument the brain, which knows nothing of any injuries
inflicted upon itself. As regards what is new to us, a definition will
sometimes dilute a difficulty, and help us to swallow that which might
choke us undiluted; but to define when we have once well swallowed is to
unsettle, rather than settle, our digestion. Definitions, again, are
like steps cut in a steep slope of ice, or shells thrown on to a greasy
pavement; they give us foothold, and enable us to advance, but when we
are at our journey's end we want them no longer. Again, they are useful
as mental fluxes, and as helping us to fuse new ideas with our older
ones. They present us with some tags and ends of ideas that we have
already mastered, on to which we can hitch our new ones; but to multiply
them in respect of such a matter as thought, is like scratching the b