Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/425

XI.] been erected, grander, more beautiful, and more important to our race than any other work whatever of its producing. There are races yet living whose scanty needs and inferior capacities have given them inferior forms of speech, as there are races which have not striven after, or been able to contrive, any but the rudest raiment, the meanest shelter. But the child now born among us is dressed in the products of every continent and every clime, and housed, it may be, in an edifice whose rules of construction have come down from Egypt and Greece, through generations of architects and craftsmen; as he is also taught to express himself in words and forms far older than the pyramids, and elaborated by a countless succession of thinkers and speakers.

This comparison might profitably be drawn out in yet fuller detail, but I forbear to urge it farther, or to call attention to any other of the aspects in which it may be made to cast light upon the development of speech. Enough has been said, as I hope, to make plain that the assumption of miraculous intervention, of superhuman agency, in the first production of speech, is, so far as linguistic science is concerned, wholly gratuitous, called for by nothing which is brought to light by our study of language and of its relations to the nature and history of man.

It is next of primary and fundamental importance that we make clear to ourselves what is the force directly and immediately impelling to the production of speech. Speech, we know, is composed of external audible signs for internal acts, for conceptions—for ideas, taking that word in its most general sense. But why create such signs? The doctrine, now, is by no means uncommon, that thought seeks expression by an internal impulse; that it is even driven to expression by an inward necessity; that it cannot be thought at all without incorporation in speech; that it tends to utterance as the fully matured embryo tends to burst its envelop, and to come forth into independent life. This doctrine is, in my view, altogether erroneous: I am unable to see upon what it is founded, if not upon arbitrary assumption, combined with a thorough misapprehension of the relation between thought and its expression. It is manifestly