such
involuntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of
feeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which
determines their material character, so that laughter, for instance,
becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as
well have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is
concerned.

In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and
superficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point
of view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying
impulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the
budding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the
perfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably
continues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have
known physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden
complexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they
become recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by
the ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature;
through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is
extended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for
its expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and
becomes an omen of that thought's continuance, repetition, and
improvement. Thought's rational function consists, as we then perceive,
in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by
expressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate
state of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions.
Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought
drew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and
self-assured.

A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a
wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a
disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of
will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute
moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a
fellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the
desire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in
the mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of
its cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy,
whi