Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/427

XI.] thought. Again, let one who had grown up even to manhood among his fellows, in full and free communication with them, be long separated from them and forced to live in solitude, and he would unlearn his native speech by degrees through mere disuse, and be found at last unable to converse at all, or otherwise than lamely, until he had recovered by new practice his former facility of expression. While a Swiss Family Robinson keep up their language, and enrich it with names for all the new and strange places and products with which their novel circumstances bring them in contact, a Robinson Crusoe almost loses his for lack of a companion with whom to employ it. We need not, however, rely for this conclusion upon imaginary cases alone. It is a well-known fact that children who are deprived of hearing even at the age of four or five years, after they have learned to speak readily and well, and who are thus cut off from vocal communication with those about them, usually forget all they had learned, and become as mute as if they had never acquired the power of clothing their thoughts in words. The internal impulse to expression is there, but it is impotent to develop itself and produce speech: exclusion from the ordinary intercourse of man with man not only thwarts its progress, but renders it unable to maintain itself upon the stage at which it had already arrived.

Language, then, is the spoken means whereby thought is communicated, and it is only that. Language is not thought, nor is thought language; nor is there a mysterious and indissoluble connection between the two, as there is between soul and body, so that the one cannot exist and manifest itself without the other. There can hardly be a greater and more pernicious error, in linguistics or in metaphysics, than the doctrine that language and thought are identical. It is, unfortunately, an error often committed, both by linguists and by metaphysicians. "Man speaks because he thinks" is the dictum out of which more than one scholar has proceeded to develop his system of linguistic philosophy. The assertion, indeed, is not only true, but a truism; no one can presume to claim that man would speak if he did not think: but no fair logical process can derive any momentous