th in thought is the common failure to
realize that language is not identical with its auditory symbolism. The
auditory symbolism may be replaced, point for point, by a motor or by a
visual symbolism (many people can read, for instance, in a purely visual
sense, that is, without the intermediating link of an inner flow of the
auditory images that correspond to the printed or written words) or by
still other, more subtle and elusive, types of transfer that are not so
easy to define. Hence the contention that one thinks without language
merely because he is not aware of a coexisting auditory imagery is very
far indeed from being a valid one. One may go so far as to suspect that
the symbolic expression of thought may in some cases run along outside
the fringe of the conscious mind, so that the feeling of a free,
nonlinguistic stream of thought is for minds of a certain type a
relatively, but only a relatively, justified one. Psycho-physically,
this would mean that the auditory or equivalent visual or motor centers
in the brain, together with the appropriate paths of association, that
are the cerebral equivalent of speech, are touched off so lightly during
the process of thought as not to rise into consciousness at all. This
would be a limiting case--thought riding lightly on the submerged crests
of speech, instead of jogging along with it, hand in hand. The modern
psychology has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the
unconscious mind. It is therefore easier to understand at the present
time than it would have been twenty years ago that the most rarefied
thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious
linguistic symbolism.

One word more as to the relation between language and thought. The point
of view that we have developed does not by any means preclude the
possibility of the growth of speech being in a high degree dependent on
the development of thought. We may assume that language arose
pre-rationally--just how and on what precise level of mental activity we
do not know--but we must not imagine that a highly developed system of
speech symbols worked itself out before the genesis of distinct concepts
and of thinking, the handling of concepts. We must rather imagine that
thought processes set in, as a kind of psychic overflow, almost at the
beginning of linguistic expression; further, that the concept, once
defined, necessarily reacted on the life of its linguistic symbol,
encouraging further