to admit of our thinking that we actually see
the objects themselves, but definitely enough for us to be able to
recognise the idea or object of which we are thinking, and to connect it
with any other idea, object, or sign that we may think appropriate?

Here we have touched on the second essential element of language. We
laid it down, that its essence lay in the communication of an idea from
one intelligent being to another; but no ideas can be communicated at all
except by the aid of conventions to which both parties have agreed to
attach an identical meaning. The agreement may be very informal, and may
pass so unconsciously from one generation to another that its existence
can only be recognised by the aid of much introspection, but it will be
always there. A sayer, a sayee, and a convention, no matter what, agreed
upon between them as inseparably attached to the idea which it is
intended to convey--these comprise all the essentials of language. Where
these are present there is language; where any of them are wanting there
is no language. It is not necessary for the sayee to be able to speak
and become a sayer. If he comprehends the sayer--that is to say, if he
attaches the same meaning to a certain symbol as the sayer does--if he is
a party to the bargain whereby it is agreed upon by both that any given
symbol shall be attached invariably to a certain idea, so that in virtue
of the principle of associated ideas the symbol shall never be present
without immediately carrying the idea along with it, then all the
essentials of language are complied with, and there has been true speech
though never a word was spoken.

The lower animals, therefore, many of them, possess a part of our own
language, though they cannot speak it, and hence do not possess it so
fully as we do. They cannot say "bread," "meat," or "water," but there
are many that readily learn what ideas they ought to attach to these
symbols when they are presented to them. It is idle to say that a cat
does not know what the cat's-meat man means when he says "meat." The cat
knows just as well, neither better nor worse than the cat's-meat man
does, and a great deal better than I myself understand much that is said
by some very clever people at Oxford or Cambridge. There is more true
employment of language, more _bona fide_ currency of speech, between a
sayer and a sayee who understand each other, though neither of them can
speak a word, than between a s