Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/35

I.] for instance, doubtless made us early understand what was meant by cry, strike, push, kick, bite, and other names for misdeeds incident to even the best-regulated childhood. How long our own mental states might have remained a confused and indistinct chaos to our unassisted reflection, we do not know; but we were soon helped to single out and recognize by appropriate appellations certain ones among them: for example, a warm feeling of gratification and attachment we were made to signify by the expression love; an inferior degree of the same feeling by like; and their opposite by hate. Long before any process of analysis and combination carried on within ourselves would have given us the distinct conceptions of true and false, of good and naughty, they were carefully set before us, and their due apprehension was enforced by faithful admonition, or by something yet more serious. And not only were we thus assisted to an intelligent recognition of ourselves and the world immediately about us, but knowledge began at once to be communicated to us respecting things beyond our reach. The appellations of hosts of objects, of places, of beings, which we had not seen, and perhaps have not even yet seen, we learned by hearing or by reading, and direct instruction enabled us to attach to them some characteristic idea, more or less complete and adequate. Thus, we had not to cross the ocean, and to coast about and traverse a certain island beyond it, in order to know that there is a country England, and to hold it apart, by specific attributes, from other countries of which we obtained like knowledge by like means.

But enough of this illustration. It is already sufficiently clear that the acquisition of language was one of the steps of our earliest education. We did not make our own tongue, or any part of it; we neither selected the objects, acts, mental states, relations, which should be separately designated, nor devised their distinctive designations. We simply received and appropriated, as well as we could, whatever our instructors were pleased to set before us. Independence of the general usages of speech was neither encouraged nor tolerated in us; nor did we feel tempted toward independence. Our object was to communicate with those among