els, lip movements required to articulate certain
consonants, and numerous others) are localized in the motor tract
precisely as are all other impulses to special motor activities. In the
same way control is lodged in the visual tract of the brain over all
those processes of visual recognition involved in reading. Naturally the
particular points or clusters of points of localization in the several
tracts that refer to any element of language are connected in the brain
by paths of association, so that the outward, or psycho-physical, aspect
of language, is of a vast network of associated localizations in the
brain and lower nervous tracts, the auditory localizations being without
doubt the most fundamental of all for speech. However, a speechsound
localized in the brain, even when associated with the particular
movements of the "speech organs" that are required to produce it, is
very far from being an element of language. It must be further
associated with some element or group of elements of experience, say a
visual image or a class of visual images or a feeling of relation,
before it has even rudimentary linguistic significance. This "element"
of experience is the content or "meaning" of the linguistic unit; the
associated auditory, motor, and other cerebral processes that lie
immediately back of the act of speaking and the act of hearing speech
are merely a complicated symbol of or signal for these "meanings," of
which more anon. We see therefore at once that language as such is not
and cannot be definitely localized, for it consists of a peculiar
symbolic relation--physiologically an arbitrary one--between all
possible elements of consciousness on the one hand and certain selected
elements localized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and
nervous tracts on the other. If language can be said to be definitely
"localized" in the brain, it is only in that general and rather useless
sense in which all aspects of consciousness, all human interest and
activity, may be said to be "in the brain." Hence, we have no recourse
but to accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's
psychic or "spiritual" constitution. We cannot define it as an entity in
psycho-physical terms alone, however much the psycho-physical basis is
essential to its functioning in the individual.

From the physiologist's or psychologist's point of view we may seem to
be making an unwarrantable abstraction in desiring to handle the sub