language without reason. Surely when two practised
pugilists are fighting, parrying each other's blows, and watching keenly
for an unguarded point, they are thinking and reasoning very subtly the
whole time, without doing so in words. The machination of their
thoughts, as well as its expression, is actual--I mean, effectuated and
expressed by action and deed, not words. They are unaware of any logical
sequence of thought that they could follow in words as passing through
their minds at all. They may perhaps think consciously in words now and
again, but such thought will be intermittent, and the main part of the
fighting will be done without any internal concomitance of articulated
phrases. Yet we cannot doubt that their action, however much we may
disapprove of it, is guided by intelligence and reason; nor should we
doubt that a reasoning process of the same character goes on in the minds
of two dogs or fighting-cocks when they are striving to master their
opponents.

Do we think in words, again, when we wind up our watches, put on our
clothes, or eat our breakfasts? If we do, it is generally about
something else. We do these things almost as much without the help of
words as we wink or yawn, or perform any of those other actions that we
call reflex, as it would almost seem because they are done without
reflection. They are not, however, the less reasonable because wordless.

Even when we think we are thinking in words, we do so only in half
measure. A running accompaniment of words no doubt frequently attends
our thoughts; but, unless we are writing or speaking, this accompaniment
is of the vaguest and most fitful kind, as we often find out when we try
to write down or say what we are thinking about, though we have a fairly
definite notion of it, or fancy that we have one, all the time. The
thought is not steadily and coherently governed by and moulded in words,
nor does it steadily govern them. Words and thought interact upon and
help one another, as any other mechanical appliances interact on and help
the invention that first hit upon them; but reason or thought, for the
most part, flies along over the heads of words, working its own
mysterious way in paths that are beyond our ken, though whether some of
our departmental personalities are as unconscious of what is passing, as
that central government is which we alone dub with the name of "we" or
"us," is a point on which I will not now touch.

I cannot t