Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/125

Rh thoughts of his mind. That is, the parrot has the physical organs and imitative faculty but not the intellectual capacity for speaking. Nor does the mere fact that they talk raise the Sing-sing and parrot, for example, from the rank of brute creatures. Birds and beasts having an inferior organisation cannot develope their nature at all points. They may in some respects shew good moral qualities, the germs of which are in them at birth by heavenly appointment, but they do not advance in moral and intellectual culture. The crow has filial piety and the wild duck is true to its mate; the fox does not forget the place of his birth, and the ant helps all of its kin. But does a crow bury his mother or a fox give way to his elders? Do the wild ducks wait for the go-between before they pair, and have the ants any form of worship? The parrot and the starling may talk but they have no sense of the fitness of time and place, and so are no better than other birds. A featherless biped, as a native writer says, may speak, but without li (禮) he is not man. It is this sense of order and of doing what is right and becoming in the family and in society, and the code of obligations thence resulting, this li which lifts man above the other creatures. Some of these can indeed produce articulate utterances, after having learned them, by imitation, as an infant learns its first words by imitating its mother. But it is human sounds, not human speech, to borrow an expression from Dante, which these creatures imitate, and they are not "capable