Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/145

III.] affects the vocabulary of general and daily use, learned by every child, used in the common intercourse of life, goes on in a covert and unacknowledged manner; it is almost insensibly slow in its progress; it is the effect of a gradual accumulation of knowledge and quickening of insight; it is wrought out, as it were, item by item, from the mass of the already subsisting resources of expression: the mind, familiar with a certain use of a term, sees and improves a possibility of its extension, or modification, or nicer definition; old ideas, long put side by side and compared, prompt a new one; deductions hitherto unperceived are drawn from premises already known; a distinction is sharpened; a conception is invested with novel associations; experience suggests a new complex of ideas as calling for conjoint expression. Speech is the work of the mind coming to a clearer consciousness of its own conceptions and of their combinations and relations, and is at the same time the means by which that clearer consciousness is attained; and hence, it works its own progress; its use teaches its improvement; practice in the manipulation of ideas as represented by words leads the way to their more adroit and effective management. A vocabulary, even while undergoing no extension in substantial content of words and forms, may grow indefinitely in expressiveness, becoming filled up with new senses, its words and phrases made pregnant with deeper and more varied significance. It may do so, and it will, if there lie in the nature and circumstances of the people who speak it a capacity for such growth. The speech of a community is the reflex of its average and collective capacity, because, as we have already seen, the community alone is able to make and change language; nothing can become a part of the common treasure of expression which is not generally apprehended, approved, and accepted. It is not true, as is sometimes taught or implied, that a genius or commanding intellect, arising among a people, can impress a marked effect upon its language—least of all, in the earlier stages of linguistic development, or a‘mid ruder and more primitive conditions of culture. No individual can affect speech directly except by separate items of change in respect