aster 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 think, then, that Professor Max Muller's contention that
thought and language are identical--and he has repeatedly affirmed
this--will ever be generally accepted. Thought is no more identical
with language than feeling is identical with the nervous system.
True, we can no more feel without a nervous system than we can
discern certain minute organisms without a microscope. Destroy the
nervous system, and we destroy feeling. Destroy the microscope, and
we can no longer see the animalcules; but our sight of the
animalcules is not the microscope, though it is effectuated by means
of the microscope, and our feeling is not the nervous system, though
the nervous system is the instrument that enables us to feel.

The nervous system is a device which living beings have gradually
perfected--I believe I may say quite truly--through the will and
power which they have derived from a fountain-head, the existence of
which we can infer, but which we can never a