e idea, which in
practice it nevertheless very sufficiently presents to us. I hope
presently to make it clear to you how and why it should do so. The word
is incomplete in the first place, because it omits all reference to the
ideas which words, speech or language are intended to convey, and there
can be no true word without its actually or potentially conveying an
idea. Secondly, it makes no allusion to the person or persons to whom
the ideas are to be conveyed. Language is not language unless it not
only expresses fairly definite and coherent ideas, but unless it also
conveys these ideas to some other living intelligent being, either man or
brute, that can understand them. We may speak to a dog or horse, but not
to a stone. If we make pretence of doing so we are in reality only
talking to ourselves. The person or animal spoken to is half the
battle--a half, moreover, which is essential to there being any battle at
all. It takes two people to say a thing--a sayee as well as a sayer. The
one is as essential to any true saying as the other. A. may have spoken,
but if B. has not heard, there has been nothing said, and he must speak
again. True, the belief on A.'s part that he had a _bona fide_ sayee in
B., saves his speech qua him, but it has been barren and left no fertile
issue. It has failed to fulfil the conditions of true speech, which
involve not only that A. should speak, but also that B. should hear.
True, again, we often speak of loose, incoherent, indefinite language;
but by doing so we imply, and rightly, that we are calling that language
which is not true language at all. People, again, sometimes talk to
themselves without intending that any other person should hear them, but
this is not well done, and does harm to those who practise it. It is
abnormal, whereas our concern is with normal and essential
characteristics; we may, therefore, neglect both delirious babblings, and
the cases in which a person is regarding him or herself, as it were, from
outside, and treating himself as though he were some one else.

Inquiring, then, what are the essentials, the presence of which
constitutes language, while their absence negatives it altogether, we
find that Professor Max Muller restricts them to the use of grammatical
articulate words that we can write or speak, and denies that anything can
be called language unless it can be written or spoken in articulate words
and sentences. He also denies that we ca